Tangled motivations: pathways to costly careers

How do organizations recruit top talent to costly careers, and how do recruits' experiences vary along gender, racial, and class lines? This article introduces a framework of tangled motivations to highlight the multiple, intertwined reasons people pursue careers that demand substantial personal investments and risks, and how these reasons become further entangled within organizational settings. Contrary to studies that separate intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, I argue that motivations are tangled because individuals develop avenues for action that address both personal aspirations and practical needs. Drawing on three years of immersive ethnography and over 100 interviews at the United States Military Academy Preparatory School at West Point, I demonstrate that recruits enter officer training to achieve aspirational identities and material security. These motives are further woven together as the organization strategically amplifies educational, financial, and identity-based reasons to pursue officership. In this way, people with diverse backgrounds and motivations embark on different but coordinated trajectories toward the same career. More broadly, a framework of tangled motivations sheds new light on dynamics in organizational recruitment and retention, with attention to inequalities and entanglement over time.