Abstract
At the beginning of the 1930s, professions had developed to the point where personnel directors could use the professional/nonprofessional distinction as a legitimate organizing principle in the construction of job ladders. The distinction existed at two levels. First, the personnel office recognized a distinction between the job tasks of professionals and non-professionals. Second, this distinction justified the requirement that applicants for professional positions have the appropriate university-level degree. Beginning in the 1930s, the question of whether office work should be similarly organized was debated in a serious way within the federal government. Later, in the years following World War II, the Civil Service Commission, working with federal agencies, constructed a system of job ladders for office work that increasingly resembled the tiered structure the government had created in the 1920s for scientific work.
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© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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DiPrete, T.A. (1989). The Development of a Tiered Personnel System in the Federal Government. In: The Bureaucratic Labor Market. Springer Studies in Work and Industry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0849-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0849-0_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-0851-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-0849-0
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