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Career Choice and

Development from a

Sociological Perspective

Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, Jeylan T. Mortimer

Sociologists are interested in career choice and development
primarily because of their consequences for socioeconomic inequal-
ity and mobility. Occupation is a strong determinant of a person’s
status within the community, earnings, wealth, and style of life. To
the extent that young people follow the same or similar occupations
as their parents, the inequalities linked to work will be perpetuated
from one generation to the next. Thus sociological interest in occu-
pational choice initially focused on mechanisms of intergenerational
mobility—what came to be called the process of stratification.
Initial work examined the linkage between fathers’ and sons’
occupations. Blau and Duncan (1967) identified educational at-
tainment as a pivotal mediating variable, explaining the linkage of
fathers’ education and occupation and sons’ occupational destina-
tions. Subsequent studies in the status attainment tradition have
investigated the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, community
size, and features of the family of origin, such as its intact character,
the number of siblings, and birth order, influence the process of
stratification (see Kerckhoff, 1995b, for a review). Over time, the
complexity of the attainment process was increasingly recognized.
For example, because of discrimination in the labor market, oppor-
tunities are not the same for men and women, whites and minori-
ties, and these must be taken into account in models that purport
to represent the attainment process.

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