The Bureaucratic Labor Market: The Case of the Federal Civil Service

A description of the jobs in a labor force, an "occupational" description of it, is an abstraction for describing the flow of concrete work that goes through one or more employing organizations; the flow of work proba­ bly changes at a higher speed than the system for abstracting a descrip­ tion of its occupations and jobs. A career system is an abstraction for describing the flow of workers through a system of occupations or jobs, and thus is doubly removed from the flow of work. The feder...