Trajectories to the top: organizational careers and status among elite professionals

Abstract This paper explains how corporate and organizational professionals reach top positions, emphasizing organizational careers—the history of organizational experiences throughout an individual’s work life—as a key status dynamic. Trajectories to the top traverse not only in-house career ladders but operate across multiple status orders, specifically as exchanges between hierarchical status (rank within an organization) and organizational status (rank of an organization in the field). I theorize three ideal-type trajectories to the top: fidelity (hierarchical status accumulation in high-status organizations), conversion (trading organizational for hierarchical status), and regulatory capital (exploiting regulatory knowledge and networks for high-status positions). Analysing a novel database of elite careers in the global tax field—a domain marked by corporate and organizational professionalism—I find evidence for the centrality of these three trajectories, with their distribution marked by both general and field-specific dynamics, notably the power of the Big Four firms and the distinctive importance of regulatory experience. Conceptually, the study extends research on contemporary knowledge-based professionals by specifying and showing how status dynamics vary across career pathways and fields; methodologically, it advances a personnel-flow-based measure of organizational status that is applicable across heterogeneous fields.