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• Mergers and Mobility: The Origins of Career Migration at Lloyds Bank , Katherine Stovel and Michael Savage
  Though organizationally driven geographic mobility is a distinguishing feature of modern careers, accounts of its origin are murky. We consider how the tension between local and central control of an expanding organization produced a new employment norm organized around geographic transfer. Drawing on various theories of organization, we show how a merger wave exposed competing institutional logics and triggered the elaboration of the modern, mobile, bureaucratic career. We argue that against a norm of stable and lifetime employment, geographic transfer of staff from one location to another resolved intra-organizational conflicts associated with integrating a firm during and after a period of rapid growth through merger. Using organizational data and employment records, we model the association between organizational merger and the introduction of career-migration among employees at Lloyds Bank over a forty-five year period. We find that early in the merger wave, employees of recently acquired banks were much more likely to move than were employees of original Lloyds branches, and that the structure of moves was not symmetric across types of branches. While mobile men from original Lloyds branches were disproportionately moved into newly absorbed branches, the reverse was not true. In fact, the pattern of mobility suggests that agency problems associated with the loyalties of newly acquired workers dominated early experiments with lateral transfers. As the merger wave matured, geographic mobility became a general feature of all bank workers’ careers. We discuss the implications of this pattern of mobility for organizations, career structures, and stratification systems more generally.
• Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks , Peter Bearman, James Moody, and Katherine Stovel. (2004. AJS 110:44-91)
  This article describes the structure of the adolescent romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents residing in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. Precise images and measures of network structure are derived from reports of relationships that occurred over a period of 18 months between 1993 and 1995. The study offers a comparison of the structural characteristics of the observed network to simulated networks conditioned on the distribution of ties; the observed structure reveals networks characterized by longer contact chains and fewer cycles than expected. This article identifies the micromechanisms that generate networks with structural features similar to the observed network. Implications for disease transmission dynamics and social policy are explored.