This thesis studies the combination of an actor's course of life with a field-specific career. The career is seen runs through a social room assuming an objective shape. It also runs through a field characterized by the competition for positions and resources.

The field is of a relatively stable character and is closely attached to the social room. Emphasis is laid on the municipal commissioner career and the local political field. Becoming a municipal commissioner is not a matter of a superficial change in the work situation, but of acquiring and embodying a field-specific manner and perspective.

Municipal commissioners are confronted with a range of paradoxes. The paradoxes are manifested in a structure of expectation, which permeates the entire field, and which is directed towards the position of commissioner. The expectation structure of the field creates the conditions for the commissioner career as a whole and consequently defines its framework.

Within this framework the overall patterns emerge as a funnel-like process during which the career tapers off successively. Commissioners develop attitudes and actions to deal with the expectations and with the paradoxes involved. These actions and attitudes evolve through a field-specific career.

This dissertation focuses the sociopsychological mechanisms involved in the career. These mechanisms include the way social meaning is externalized, objectified and internalized. Social meaning guides the actors and their interaction. Meanings are fundamental to a given social order by forming an essential part of the field-specific attitude embodied by the actor. The adhesive glue of the career consists of social meanings, which form the basis of the sociopsychological profile of the career. The aim of the study is to explain social meanings in career development in the local political field.

The social meanings show what guides the handling of paradoxes and the linking of the actor's life and career. The field-specific meanings also reflect the expectation structures that define the career and its phases. By explaining the social meanings of the career it also becomes apparent in what way the life an actor is phased with the field-specific career.