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Career Patterns in the U.S. Army Officer Corps

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Abstract

In order to examine the careers of high attaining personnel in a large organizational labor market, variation in 5,114 U.S. Army officer careers is shown to be reducible to a small number of career rhythms with similar speeds in attainment of promotions and credentials. Early promotion to captain, early awarding of a temporary higher rank during war, and career entry close to the onset of war are consistently associated with “star” careers. This finding suggests that career outcomes are driven by temporal proximity to exogenous events like wars and cumulative advantage processes in which benefits accrue to early achievements.

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Notes

  1. The term “rank” is often used synonymously with “grade.” To clarify its use, it should be clear that each grade represents a gradation in authority in a chain in command, while a rank refers to the “relation of one such grade to another, and within a grade the relation of one individual to another, with respect to seniority” (Wheeler and Kinney 1954, 761). This article will use the standard abbreviations for officer ranks as follows: second lieutenant (2LT), first lieutenant (1LT), captain (CPT), major (MAJ), lieutenant colonel (LTC), colonel (COL), brigadier general (BG), major general (MG), lieutenant general (LTG), and general (GEN).

  2. Table 6 in the appendix reports the substitution costs assigned to all transitions. Note, however, that when the original data were collected, years of graduation for schools like the Artillery Staff School and the Infantry and Cavalry School were recorded separately from entries for re-founded versions of those schools, like the Army Staff School. Historical sources verified that it made sense to combine these into a single code for “staff school.” This will account for the separate “staff 1” and “staff 2” designations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center on Organizational Innovation, Columbia University, Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Victor P. Corona

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  1. Victor P. Corona
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Correspondence to Victor P. Corona.

Additional information

The article benefited from incisive comments offered by Fabien Accominotti, Peter Bearman, William Dobak, Anette Fasang, Shin-Kap Han, David Stark, Balázs Vedres, and Harrison White, as well as the help of James Tobias at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. All views expressed herein are entirely the author’s responsibility.

Appendix

Appendix

 

Table 6 Substitution cost matrices *
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Corona, V.P. Career Patterns in the U.S. Army Officer Corps. Public Organiz Rev 11, 109–134 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-010-0114-7

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