AGE AND DURATION EFFECTS ON CAREER CONTINGENCIES

This study will analyse the structure of careers in a large bureaucracy in the insurance and finance sector. The formulation employed involves focusing on certain critical decisions in the evolution of individual work careers, what we term career contingencies. The contingencies of interest are (1) positions at entry into the corporation, (2)promotions, and (3) departure from the organization. In addressing these issues we take a life course perspective to the employment relation. Each of these contingencies will be specified as a function of one or more of the temporal variables--age, seniority, and duration in a position--as well as of terms for education, prior experience, race and sex. The objective of the study will be to determine the relative importance of these variables, and the shapes of their effects, with respect to each contingency. The career contingencies, themselves, will be viewed against a backdrop of labor market structure. For example, age may be a more relevant consideration in promotion decisions in low grades than in high ones, in clerical work than in management. To understand the interaction between position in the organization and the effects of the three temporal variables, we will construct a relatively detailed description of the sturcture of the firm as a human resource system. Using this information on organizational features and movement possibilities, we will investigate patterns in the effects of the temporal variables on the career contingencies. The methodologies employed will be polytomous logit regression and the regression models from survival analysis. The data consist of approximately 40,000 employee histories from the personnel records of the firm. This study is expected to contribute to our understanding of the details of careers, and how opportunity in the workplace is structured for individuals of different ages.