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119© The Author(s) 2017 J. Glückler et al. (eds.), Knowledge and Networks, Knowledge and Space 11, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45023-0_7 Chapter 7 Organized Mobility and Relational Turnover as Context for Social Mechanisms: A Dynamic Invariant at the Heart of Stability from Movement Emmanuel Lazega Movements following paths that Harrison White (1970) calls “vacancy chains” (p. 17) can be seen as forms of rotation across systems of places that are often socially organized circuits.1 White calls such movements “mobility in loops” (p. 380). From his structural perspective, not all loops or systems of places are nec- essarily visible to the actors involved, or even to managers of organizations who track, measure, and sometimes steer other people’s careers. Internal or external labor markets were the first contexts White (1970) identified for such circuits. These loops are also the daily focus of attention of lay citizens and professional observers alike, representing revolving doors for a wide range of actors. That group includes high-status people between the business world and government—from investment banks to the Treasury, for example. It is composed partly of workers subjected to employment “flexibility” and struggling step by step to make the necessary moves a reality while keeping limbos between jobs as short as possible. It also encom- passes managers rotating their employees and themselves from one service to the other in the company, as with associates assigned to different partners and clients of the firm in successive and heterogeneous task forces. It consists, too, of directors moving from one corporate board to the other in a closed chain, and of sales repre- sentatives participating each year in dozens of recurrent and similar trade fairs of their industry (Brailly, Favre, Chatellet, & Lazega, 2015). Many analogous circuits 1 The term place is used here in a general sense to refer to a location that can be occupied by an individual in any formally organized circuit, which can be geographical, organizational, or both. It is to be distinguished from the term position (White, Boorman, & Breiger, 1976)—a set of struc- turally equivalent actors called a “social niche” (Lazega, 2001, p. 25) when the ties between actors in the position are dense. A position makes sense in a system of positions (or niches) that differs from, though always combined and coevolving with, the system of places (Lazega, 2013). Space (contiguity) and network (connectivity), for example, are both different and related. E. Lazega (*) Department of Sociology at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Centre for the Sociology of Organizations, 19 rue Amélie, 75007 Paris, France e-mail: emmanuel.lazega@sciencespo.fr