Civil Society Elite Career Trajectories

The paper analyzes the career trajectories of civil society elites in Sweden. While career trajectories of elite groups in business (Ellersgaard et al., 2012), politics (Rothman, 2001), and science (Rossier et al., 2017) are well-studied, studies of careers of civil society elites remain underexplored. This paper uses career data on Swedish elite individuals with ties to influential civil society organizations in order to find prevalent sector-level career clusters and describe them socio-demographically. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework is applied in order to analyze the role of field-internal and field-external resources in civil society elite trajectories, the degree and kind of social reproduction at play in different trajectories, as well as the symbolic dimensions of civil society positions. The analysis builds on a dataset consisting of career data from 208 individuals with ties to central Swedish civil society organizations represented in the Swedish Who’s Who (Vem är det) 1997 and 2007 editions. The criterium for inclusion is whether the individual has mentioned a tie in their biography to one of the top-50 civil society organizations. The organizations have been found using an elite score developed in the Civil Society Elites project at Lund University. All organizations in the individuals’ careers are coded according to sector (civil society, state, law, politics, education and science, culture, business, religion, or military). The data is analyzed using the R-package TraMineR to perform a sequence analysis. Five distinct career patterns are found, each dominated by either civil society, business, state, culture, or education and science. The paper describes each of the clusters’ socio-demographic composition in terms of class background (father’s occupation), educational level, age, gender, place of birth and place of residence. Based on the findings in the analysis, the paper discusses closure mechanisms and dynamics in civil society elite careers. The discussion revolves around 1) credentialism and diploma democracy in civil society (Bovens and Wille, 2017), 2), field-internal vs. field-external recruitment patterns, 3) the social reproduction of elite in and through civil society, and 4) civil society positions as a career builder or a career consecration. Through its focus on civil society elite career trajectories, the study contributes to the fields of civil society research, interest group research, and elite research.