Working paper 2019 nr 12. This paper analyses career paths and career considerations among policy professionals in Sweden. It builds on a longitudinal data set in which the professionals’ careers are m

“Out of the Golden Cage: PR and the career opportunities of policy professionals”, Politics & Policy Vol 44 (1), 2016, pp 56-73. This paper focuses on a specific category of political actors – “pol

A lost generation? A study of long-term influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on business students and their career networks

What impact did the pandemic have on business students' social networks, and how will it impact their career possibilities?

This project will examine how companies' elite social networks are formed and developed over time by studying how men and women network at a business school in Finland.

Few women reach top positions in the corporate world, despite increased gender equality. This project examines gender differences in social networks at the Stockholm School of Economics.

How are environments of violent extremism organized? How do people move between these, in and out of these and what do their criminal careers look like?

In: Delinquency and Drift Revisited: The Criminology of David Matza and Beyond. Advances in Criminological Theory Vol. 21, eds. Thomas G. Blomberg, Frank T. Cullen, Cheryl Johnson & Christoffer Ca

Optimism trap or optimism springboard? Aspirations, educational trajectories, and early careers of youth with foreign-born parents

Young people in immigrant families have a markedly higher educational and occupational aspirations than others. This optimism has been regarded as something positive, but it seems it can also lead to a higher degree of failure. This project will take a closer look at the outcomes.

Johan Westerman

Johan Westerman is a researcher who obtained his PhD in sociology from the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) in 2020. His dissertation, entitled Motives Matter, investigated the intrinsic mo

Venue: Institutet för framtidsstudier, Holländargatan 13, 4th floor, Stockholm, or online.Research seminar with Johanna Rickne, professor of Economics at SOFI, Stockholm University.Register hereAbstracPrior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians’ careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office. We reject the potential explanations that workers lack political ambition, public service motivation, honesty, or voter support. And while workers’ average high school grades and cognitive test scores are lower, this cannot explain their large promotion disadvantage, a situation that we label a class ceiling. Organizational ties to blue-collar unions help workers advance, but only to lower-level positions in left-leaning parties. We conclude that efforts to improve workers’ numerical representation should apply throughout the career ladder and focus on intra-party processes.