Since the mid- to late-nineteenth century individuals' occupational careers are assumed to have become more successful. However, the micro and macro influences on individuals' careers haven't been clearly specified nor understood, especially in a long term perspective. First, we will describe (patterns of) occupational careers in order to test the claims of increasing success. Second, we will study the impact of individual characteristics (e.g. social origin, marital status) and macro societal conditions (i.e. bureaucratization, meriocratization) on careers in the 19th and 20th century. Different data sources will be analyzed to shed light on careers in contexts. First, we will make use of existing data, the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) and second, additional data will be collected, e.g. job advertisements in historical newspapers.

Supervisors: Ineke Maas (UU), Marco van Leeuwen (UU), Henk Flap (UU)