This book contains 15 essays that explore career patterns over the last 150 years in Europe and the Americas. Initial versions of most of the papers were presented at the 2001 Luxembourg Conference on Employment Security and Career Mobility in Historical Perspective and at the 2002 International Economic History Association Congress. The essays cover seven countries—in order of appearance, England, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Sweden, Germany, and Italy—with emphasis on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book begins with an excellent introduction by the editors that sets out the primary questions: what is a career in a modern historical sense and what are the key historical influences on the modern career. The authors focus attention on industrialization, the emergence of bureaucratic management structures, internal labor markets, unionization, education, migration, and discrimination by race, sex, and religion. Also by way of introduction, Laura Owen's overview of skill formation and job attachment models from the labor literature and Ineke Maas's summary of event history analysis from the sociology literature provide clear theoretical frameworks for the analysis that follows.

The remaining 12 essays tackle the primary task of the volume; they apply detailed, individual-level longitudinal data to the historical analysis of the career, defined as a life history of education, training, jobs and job mobility, and nonmarket work. Five essays examine the creation of the formal and informal structures that exerted a strong influence on the development of careers after 1840. The authors emphasize unionization and the rise of bureaucratic management structure and well-defined internal job ladders. Particularly noteworthy is the study by Andrew Miles and Mike Savage of careers at three large British employers from 1840 through 1940. They demonstrate the clear usefulness of longitudinal data by using observations on individuals over time to measure the effect of formal career structures on job mobility. They observe decreasing upward mobility and conclude that the evidence favors a model of social closure and strengthening class barriers over a model of human capital formation. This illustrates an important characteristic of the book as a whole: its heavy reliance on the theory and methods of sociology. This book is at least as much a work of sociology as of economics. Also noteworthy is Mary MacKinnon's analysis of unions and labor organization in the mechanical shops of the Canadian Pacific Railway early in the twentieth century. MacKinnon offers an effective blend of historical narrative and micro-level empirical analysis. She uses information on 9,000 CPR employees to illuminate important elements of the large 1908 railway strike, for example that popular reports of weak strike discipline were factually incorrect. If there is a weakness to this approach, it is only that MacKinnon does not make full use of it. As her attention turns to subsequent periods of unrest and a second great strike, she moves away from using the data to inform the narrative.

Two studies analyze the influence of gender on careers. Alison Kay presents a promising first look at self-employment as an alternate career strategy for middle-class women in nineteenth-century London. Insurance company and census manuscript data may indicate that a wider range of nondomestic occupational and career choice existed for middle-class English women than has often been thought. Small-business ownership offered particular flexibility. Unfortunately, the sample size is so small that representativeness of the data is a real concern. Pat Thane uses rich data that track female graduates of Cambridge University throughout the twentieth century to tell a fascinating and complex story of career patterns for highly educated women. It is an often frustrating story of good but decidedly second-best opportunities and of a labor market in which employment offerings lagged behind the educational offerings of the universities.

Finally, five essays examine the effect of industrialization and economic modernization on career patterns. The study by Maas and Marco H. D. van Leeuwen provides perhaps the book's clearest demonstration of the indispensability of micro-level panel data in studying certain aspects of historical career development. They observe career events at five-year intervals for an entire population of men in a rapidly modernizing agricultural province of Sweden. They show that whereas modernization increased job mobility, it was almost entirely of a lateral nature as agricultural workers took unskilled positions in the sawmills. This pattern is not surprising, though the absence of greater chances for upward mobility after industrialization is less predictable a priori. John Brown and Gerhard Neumeier complement this picture with their careful empirical and econometric analysis of the key role that job shopping played in the career formation of migrants to Munich around the turn of the century. David Mitch uses meticulously constructed data on agricultural workers in Norfolk to show that work in even this traditional sector demonstrated some career aspects, such as strong recruitment from within and increasing employment stability and job tenure over time.

Scholars interested in labor mobility and the historical development of labor markets since the nineteenth century will find much of interest in this book. Sociologists should be as interested as economists. The book contains virtually no econometrics, which while perhaps welcoming a broad audience also fails to take full advantage of the many rich sources employed. One of the book's weaknesses that stands in contrast to its obvious strengths is that nearly all of the essays, whether by choice or due to data limitations, do not take full advantage of the theoretical or statistical richness of the models presented in the introductory section by Owen and Maas. Also, the focus of each essay taken individually is quite narrow (for example, workers at a few companies in one place). Although a narrow focus provides detailed information, it sacrifices breadth, which the authors duly acknowledge.

Overall, the studies contained in this volume represent an important and useful effort to apply micro-level longitudinal data to the study of career formation and job mobility across a wide range of times and places. They demonstrate an important methodological advance, deliver new empirical results, and suggest many fruitful directions for continuing work.