The American "Relos": in the global economy, the new reality is moving to a new job in a new city-every two or three years.

• Author: Kilborn, Peter T.

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Excerpt from Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class, by Peter T. Kilborn (Times Books, 2009).

The Web pages of twelve global companies--Boeing, Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, ExxonMobil, Fluor, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, McDonald's, and Procter & Gamble--listed 315 executives on their rosters of top officers in 2008.

Fifty-one were women, but with some striking exceptions, most had remained in one place. One hundred twenty-six of the 315, or 40 percent, were hard-core, serial Relos--people who had been moved at least four times. Five had been moved ten or more times. Caterpillar had moved fifteen of its top thirty-three officers five or more times.

Of the companies' American Relos, most made their first move from home to state universities, mainly those of Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Illinois. A small minority--fewer than twenty-five--went to elite private schools, those of the Ivy League and its cousins such as Stanford and Duke. After employers started to help paying the freight, however, about one in four went on to get master's degrees in business administration, about half of them from the business schools of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Once on the job with global companies, rookie Relos can expect to be moved and promoted. In the mid-2000s, the global public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller listed appointments of new chief executives among Fortune magazine's thousand largest U.S. companies--all sorts, not just those engaged in foreign commerce. Three or four decades ago, most would have been William Whyte's loyal Organization Man who rose through the ranks in one place like New York, Pittsburgh, or Detroit. But of those appointed in 2005 and 2006, Burson-Marsteller's list showed a third who had worked in four or more locations.

It is easy to see what drives companies navigating the global economy to rear Relos. In but fourteen years, from 1990 to 2004, all countries' combined domestic economies--the value of everything bought and sold from Samsung TVs to P&G's Crest toothpaste to Boeing 777s-leaped from $23 trillion to $57 trillion. In 1999, the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal said airlines carried 17 million tons of freight in world trade. By 2010, the organization predicts they will be carrying 31 million tons. The United...