Organizational Change in the American Foreign Service, 1925-1965: The Utility of Cohort Analysis

The paper demonstrates the utility of a demographic perspective for the study of organizational reproduction and change; it develops three propositions for the application of cohort analysis to the study of organizational political economy. An analytic perspective on bureaucratic career systems is developed to help account for the response of the American Foreign Service and its elite Officer Corps to the major changes in the international environment during and after World War II. First, organizational lag is traced to the difficulty of changing the demographic composition of the Foreign Service through the maturation of junior officer cohorts. Second, the progress of individual careers (and their organizational consequences) is conceptualized as a function of the relative sizes and locations of entering cohorts. Finally, the importance of control over cohort succession is seen through an examination of the complex patterns of cohort transformation (promotions) during the postwar years. Analysis of the data reveals a variety of practices which buffer the Foreign Service from pressures for rapid transformation. The summary identifies conditions under which studies in the political economy of organizational reproduction and change will benefitfrom the examination of cohort processes.