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The purpose of this explorative study is to investigate through the lens of gender the role of career shocks in career advancement experiences in academia. By taking a contextual approach, this study increases understanding of the role of the academic career script as a potential boundary for career shock implications.

The authors studied career advancement experiences of a cohort of 75 men and women associate professors in the Netherlands via biographical interviews and conducted theoretically informed inductive analysis.

The analysis revealed the ambiguities and contradictions in the role of most career shocks in career advancement experiences. Failure to fit the majority of career shocks into the “rigid” academic career script generates discretionary latitude in handling shocks. These shocks pose unique barriers – and to a lesser extent unique benefits – to women's perceived opportunities for career advancement.

Academic organizations should focus on cultivating more inclusive work environments with respect to career shocks. The 75 diverse biographies offer leverage to challenge traditional notions of academic career advancement.

This paper extends “structure and agency” literature on career building by showing how career shock implications are inherently contextual in the academic setting. Gendered support provisions for handling career shocks offer a novel explanation for the numerical minority of women in academic leadership.

Governments face many complex problems that require collective solutions involving multiple actors who often disagree both on the nature of the problem and on the necessary solution (Rittel & Webber, 1973). The difficulties are often exacerbated because actors tend to have insufficient or incorrect knowledge of the problems at hand.

The purpose of this article is to study the overall development of public sector industrial relations in The Netherlands.

The paper reviews the main literature on the topic and relevant policy texts. There are interviews with key individuals referenced and utilised.

Although the direction of change in Dutch public sector employment relations is towards private sector norms, it is unclear whether this will lead to a complete withering away of the traditional characteristics of public sector employment relations.

It is a general overview of key developments.

It is relevant for a discussion of the general trends and dynamic of public sector industrial relations in The Netherlands.

This article manages to take an overview of developments and point to the uncertain nature of a new market approach.

The purpose of this paper is to map and understand work-family state support for the self-employed compared to employees across European countries.

To map state work-family support policies for the self-employed, an overview of public childcare, maternity, paternity, and parental leave arrangements across European countries is created based on databases, local government web sites, and local experts’ country notes. Secondary data analyses are conducted in order to compare support for the self-employed to support for employees and across countries. Differences across countries are analysed from a welfare state regime perspective, which explicates assumptions about the role of the government in providing work-family state support and which is often used in research on work-family support for employees.

Results show that, in general, the self-employed receive less work-family state support than employees or none at all. The extensiveness of work-family state support varies widely across European countries. Patterns of welfare states regimes, which explain variation in work-family support for employees, can also be found in the context of self-employment.

Findings result in practical suggestions for policy makers at the European and national level to monitor policy compliance considering maternity leave for the self-employed, to increase childcare support, and to rethink the European Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan.

Work-family state support for the growing number of self-employed has never been mapped before, although this is a very topical issue for (European) policy makers. This paper offers a starting point to contextualise and understand the way self-employed experience the work-family interface in different country contexts.

Multifaceted issues such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration or labour market integration require integrated approaches in their steering. Governments are looking for instruments that can address the boundary-spanning nature of many social problems. In their quest to achieve valued social outcomes, they struggle with their new role, and the inadequacy of both market working and government-led central agency. After three decades of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms, the strengths and weaknesses of this philosophy have become widely apparent. Fragmentation is a prominent observation in many evaluations of the NPM approach. The fragmentation of both policy and implementation lead to unsatisfactory public outcomes and a heightened experience of a loss of control on the part of policymakers. Achieving valued and sustainable outcomes requires collaboration between government departments, private actors, non-profit organisations, and citizens and requires tools that integrate the lessons of NPM with the new necessities of coordinated public governance. The public administration literature has in recent years been concerned with the ‘what's next?’ question, and many alternatives to NPM have been proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public cultural organizations use ambidextrous design to balance exploitation and exploration given their organizational structure that mainly stimulates exploitation.

The authors use an abductive methodology and, perform an in-depth comparative case study. The data sample consists of two Belgian public cultural centers located in the Flemish area. In all, 21 semi-structured interviews where analyzed using Nvivo.

Results show, first, that although both cases have the same formal organization chart, their informal structure differs. Second, both cases have a different point of view toward exploitation and exploration. Third, no “pure” ambidextrous designs were found. Finally, the paper formulates theoretical propositions for ambidexterity and public sector research.

Limitations of this paper are threefold. First, the authors only compared two cases, so generalization of the findings is limited. Second, although the authors managed to make contributions to ambidexterity and public sector research, theory building is not finished. Finally, researchers have to improve empirical evidence focusing on which design elements lead toward ambidextrous public organizations.

This paper makes a threefold contribution to ambidexterity literature and public sector research. First, the focus on public sector organizations is a rarely taken approach in ambidexterity research. Second, the specific use of ambidextrous design attributes to the limited public sector research that has focused on ambidexterity. Third, the focus on small organizations with limited resources is a rarely taken focus in ambidexterity and public sector research.