On quantifying career success of Joseon Dynasty’s bureaucrats

Abstract

There have been many attempts to investigate the characteristics of career success in a variety of disciplines. However, the nature of career success of bureaucrats is still not well known. It is difficult to find metrics to quantify career success of bureaucrats and to integrate fragmented data. However, the Joseon Dynasty enacted ranks of bureaucrats and made it possible to build a quantifiable database by leaving massive and accurate historical data that can be used to understand its career records. In the early 2000s, the original texts of Bangmok and the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty were digitized and it became possible to analyze data using them. In this study, we propose a methodology to quantify career success via historical data as a preliminary work toward a more generalized model. We show how to clean, process, and integrate historical data. We also propose the concept of Gross lifelong career success (GLCS), which represents the total amount of career success of a bureaucrat during a lifetime. We introduce results, preliminary analysis and a regression model for GLCS based on this data.