There is little treatment in the literature of social standardization, the process through which a social unit decreases and narrows its range of social diversity. This paper examines the standardization of an organizational career. The backgrounds and career experiences of 884 elites in a metropolitan police department (1870–1947) appear to move from relatively differentiated to relatively standardized. These data are used to test a hypothesis taken from the literature:The greater the potential disruption of an organization because of elite turnover, the more bureaucratized elite careers will become, and thus the more standardized elite backgrounds and career sequences will be. Results from 6 different measures of background and career sequence show that standardization, contrary to the hypothesis, occurred in response to bureaucratization, but not to rapid turnover.