Mergers and Mobility: Organizational Growth and the Origins of Career Migration at Lloyds Bank

Though organizationally driven geographic mobility is a distinguishing feature of modern careers, accounts of its origin are murky. Drawing on various theories of organization, the authors show how a merger wave exposed competing institutional logics and triggered the elaboration of the modern, mobile, bureaucratic career. Using organizational data and employment records, the authors model the association between organizational merger and the introduction of career‐migration among employees at Lloyds Bank over a 45‐year period. The pattern of mobility they find 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. The implications of this pattern of mobility for organizations, career structures, and stratification systems more generally are examined.