The central concepts in social science, as Burns (1953, 654) writes, ”suffer[s] from confusion and ambiguity ….” Career is a context-burdened concept that varies in referent by usage and tacit assumptions. Lexicographically, the word has something to do with a path or direction and with careening. A career, stripped to bare minimum features, is a series of positions, or stages, a life course held over time by a social actor—an organization, group, or a person. The central feature of the work career in modern industrialized society is that it is the active link between an individual’s paid work life and the contours of the division of labor.
The term is often applied to the accomplishments of those in high-status jobs, such as professors, actors, and athletes, but analytically it serves as well to illuminate the work trajectory of a burglar as well as a baker, a caretaker as well as a curate, a diver as well as a diplomat. Movements occur within and across occupational careers. Occupational mobility has both a vertical dimension, as measured by individuals’ movement between or within occupations, and horizontal movement within an organization, occupational category, or grouping of similar occupations. Occupations as entities also have careers and movements, as exemplified by the changed status of policing as a career in the past thirty-five years. Careers are not merely individual pursuits or choices, they are much shaped by gender, ethnicity, and the market in which the career is enacted (industry, service, the professions, pink, blue, or white collar). While the American ideal of freedom is occupational choice, this is rarely the case.
Let us consider policing as a career. Historically, it has been seen as a stable, blue collar manual job with good pay and benefits and early retirement potential. There are many ways to study police careers. It has been assumed in criminal justice and sociology arenas that biogenetic, attitude-based, and social psychological studies predicated on innate matters or personality have little use for studying the dynamics of police careers. Police do not differ in their measured attitudes and personalities from others of similar class origins. Social psychological studies are not very revealing of differences among officers in career achievements. Autobiographies and biographies, perhaps the most engaging of subjective career studies, while they are notoriously rich in elaborated fabrications and tessellations on opportunities won and lost, are of marginal utility. They present at best an imagined career. The perspective one adopts alters what is seen.
Certainly, the occupational life course may be felt or experienced quite differently, depending on the point of origin or other social features that shape the career of a person. This felt or experienced career, an idea that hinges on emotional gains and losses, feelings of empowerment or obloquy, may sharply contrast with the stark realities of an objective charting of positions held, salaries paid, and achievements registered. As Wilensky (1958) has shown dramatically, disorderly careers and downward mobility have profound social and psychological consequences. These social changes produce social psychological costs.
Another systematic approach is to see career as a diachronic matter, something that unfolds over time. This unfolding can be charted chronologically as a series of points on a figure showing positions held, or as a series of turning points. These points indicate the trajectory of groups of people by age, gender, ethnicity, or social origins. The Chicago school of sociology has emphasized the study of the natural history of occupations, including recruitment, socialization, identification and commitment, shifts in work place and role, firing, termination, and retirement (Becker 1979; Hughes 1958). An alternative and contrasting framework for studying careers sees them at one point in time, a synchronic view. In this case, the correlates of career achievements are contrasted for a given sample, or samples.
The study of police careers has not yielded a rich harvest of insights. It has in large part been ignored as a facet of the work and its politics. This is true for several interrelated reasons. Policing is a traditional occupation and the police organization is a quasi-military structure that places the vast majority of its practitioners at the front lines, on the streets, and at the same rank throughout their careers. This pattern is reinforced by powerful unions that defend seniority as a basis for advantage and suppress merit and competition as the basis for salaries and the conditions of work.
The organization is roiled from time to time by three forces that alter this bottom-heavy, single-rank stasis: (1) reciprocated loyalty to those above in the organization and sponsorship that increases chances of promotion or assignment to political niches that attract ambitious officers (the chief’s office, internal affairs), and special squads in current favor in the organization (the gang squad, SWAT teams); (2) political career-shattering moves; (3) movement, permitted in some states, into specialized roles in other police organizations that allows ”leap-frogging” over others regardless of seniority.
The politics that have sustained this local career pattern have never been challenged in the United States, but alternative schemes were adopted in India and tried for a time in the United Kingdom after World War II. The United Kingdom experimented for some years with a plan called the Trenchard scheme, after a British brigadier. This plan permitted officers to enter as inspectors (lieutenants) or ”gazetted officers,” thus by-passing the ranks of constable and sergeant. It was abandoned, although various efforts to create a ”fast track” or accelerated plans for those aspiring to officer rank remain in place, facilitated by the National Police College at Bramshill.
These schemes have never affected more than a handful of officers. Only chiefs in very large American cities or British constabularies, typically very visible and active media figures, operate in a national or rarely in an international career system. While they may move from a top position in one city to another or from the second-in-command spot to the top command spot in another organization, there is no systematic scheme for developing and training police officers beyond the academy or the odd certification scheme. Police careers are profoundly local.
There is presently no full study of police careers using a large sample study, nor a full one of the subjective aspects of police careers. There are classic and important studies carried out on urban police recruits, following them through their training and a year or so into the job (Van Maanen 1975; Fielding 1986; Chan 2004), but these works focus on changes in attitudes and practices, not on the sequences of positions or ranks held. There are no studies of the career lines of federal officers, even the most important and prestigious forces such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and what is now called homeland security as a result of the consolidation of customs and immigration, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard.
There are no full studies of state police careers (there are forty-nine state police forces). Chiefs’ biographies have been very informative, albeit a bit self-aggrandizing, while only two studies have focused on the careers of chief constables (Wall 1998, Reiner 1991). These men have achieved very high rank in a small number of organizations (fifty-three in the United Kingdom since the late 1960s). The studies do suggest some basic facts about them. They are on the one hand exceptional and on the other, nonexceptional, when compared to other police officers of their era with respect to class origins, modest initial ambitions, sponsorship and protection by those ”above” them, and their definition and understanding of what the job requires. In this respect, they are not unlike the physicians studied by Oswald Hall (1948,1949) more than fifty years ago.
The published research on police careers is thus an unsatisfying mosaic that does not produce a definitive picture of the dynamics, diachronic matters, nor the correlates of achieving a given rank, role (a particular short-term task force or assignment), or organizational position (one not based on rank, but a niche such as a computer repair man or a driver for the chief’s office). However, several generalizations can be offered abut police careers. Very few officers experience upward rank-based mobility. Most types of mobility are horizontal. These are moves into niches, favored positions within the organization that are dependent more on skill than upon rank or that maximize some sorts of rewards (overtime, time off, prestige). The rewards sought vary by the location. Transfers from one district or position to another are sought for any and all of the following: convenience; workload variation (either more or less work); action or finding a niche conforming to a person’s special skills or interests (research, laboratories, property room, shooting range); political advantage because assignment to certain squads, for example, homicide or SWAT, are fast tracks or essential to achieving higher rank; a sinecure in which little or no police work is required. In some ways, running a policing career is a kind of bargain since it can facilitate another parallel career such as repair work, construction, security in hotels, or dealing in real estate or insurance or various forms of nonrank reward (perks such as overtime, comp time, or assignment to paying police work via private contracts from sports franchises and contractors).
For top command exit strategies, typically the postretirement job, this parallel career involves cultivating private security firms or local politics (a striking number of ex-chiefs have become big-city mayors). In general, however, it can be said that prestige in the job flows to those serving in specialized units, investigative work, especially homicide, and positions most associated with crime control and crime suppression. The learned skills of policing are not transferable to other occupations or occupational clusters.
