Search results

Contemporary careers research suggests that individuals are more likely to be proactive about their careers when they possess an internal, rather than an external locus of control (LOC). The purpose of this paper is to adopt the view that individuals can be both external and proactive depending on whether or not they possess an incremental implicit theory.

Self-administered surveys were completed by 127 employed individuals in Nigeria. These surveys were used to gather information on individuals’ external LOC, protean and boundaryless career orientations and implicit theory beliefs.

Results indicated partial support for positive relationships between external LOC and contemporary career orientations and that an incremental implicit theory can have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between an external LOC belief in chance and the values-driven protean career orientation.

The study was based on a cross-sectional study in one time period and all information was self-report.

The results suggest that HR managers that operate in global environments should consider the importance of individual implicit theory and on career orientations and take a broader view of the role of internal and external LOC.

The study questions whether predominant perspectives of the relationship between proactive career orientations and internal LOC applies to contexts where external LOC predominate.

This study is unique in the examination of positive relationships between implicit theory, external LOC and contemporary career orientations. Furthermore, the study examines these relationships in an unstable and unpredictable work environment context, Nigeria, where such positive relationships are highly necessary to improve the career self-management of individuals.

This study investigates the relationship between “new career” profiles (Briscoe and Hall, 2006) and two sets of career factors: agency (i.e. career commitment, self-efficacy, and work locus of control), and career attitudes (i.e. salience and satisfaction). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to understand whether career profiles are a valuable way to understand careers in the modern career era, and if so, which profiles exist, and what differences exist across the profiles.

The participants in this study were 1,987 managers and professionals, recruited from a large database of potential respondents. Cluster analysis determined which profiles were apparent among the participants through a two-step clustering procedure using the Bayesian information criterion algorithm. The authors then compared the clusters using analysis of variance (ANOVA) with cluster membership as the independent variable and the career agency and attitude variables and age as the dependent variables.

Cluster analysis of the protean and boundaryless career attitudes of 1,987 respondents identified three career profiles: Trapped/Lost, Protean Career Architects, and Solid Citizens. ANOVA confirmed that people indicative of the three profiles differed significantly on all study variables. The findings suggest that the three different career profiles predict important differences in career variables and outcomes that are relevant to individual progression and growth needs and may be a valuable way to study contemporary careers. In particular, the person-centred approach acknowledges that the protean and boundaryless career concepts are related though distinct concepts that can be combined to show that individuals vary in the degree to which their career orientations are consistent with contemporary career constructs.

The authors have demonstrated that career profiles are a meaningful way to categorize career actors on the basis of their career orientation, as well as their scores on a host of important career variables. Although the study benefits from a large sample and a valid measure of career profiles, it does have some limitations. First, the authors relied on self-reported data gathered on a single survey questionnaire. Furthermore, because the study is cross-sectional, the authors cannot examine the long-term impact of career profile on outcomes such as career satisfaction or if career profiles are enduring or malleable over time.

From a practical perspective, it may be incumbent on organizations, career counsellors and individuals to develop an awareness to which career profile individuals belong (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1996). Doing so may offer insight into the likely challenges that career actors will face as their career unfolds, and ideally help individuals develop career management strategies to create career growth, rather than a more passive and reactive approach. A number of implications for each of the three career profiles are offered within the paper.

Utilizing a two-step clustering procedure, the authors provide empirical evidence of three of the 16 career profiles proposed by Briscoe and Hall (2006): Trapped/Lost, Protean Career Architects and Solid Citizens. Next, the authors explored the utility of the profiles for career development and demonstrated significant differences in career-related psychological factor and attitudes across profiles. Finally, the authors take a person-centric approach to career orientation, allowing for individual differences in career enactment. Overall, the results of this study show that career profiles are a highly useful composite that reflect important patterns relative to new career variables.

Contemporary global mobility and dual careers are two key features of working life today. Little is known, however, about where they intersect, where one partner travels for their career, while the other partner is left behind, caring for the family and attempting to manage their own career. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the partner’s career is impacted by the traveller’s absence, and the strategies employed to enable their continued career development.

The paper employs a qualitative methodology, drawing on semi-structured interviews with the partners of international yachtsmen.

The findings highlight the prioritisation of the traveller’s career, for reasons of finance and their passion for their career. The implications of this could be detrimental to the partner’s career. Personalised, flexible working arrangements are essential in order for the partner to achieve a sustainable career of their own.

The gendered nature of the sample provides an opportunity for further research examining the implications of the female being the traveller and the male the stay at home partner.

The paper examines a range of alternative strategies for maintaining or developing the career when also faced with additional family responsibilities.

This paper gives consideration to the career of the stay at home partner. A new dual-career strategy is identified – the entrepreneurial secondary career strategy, which has the potential to deliver the flexibility required to manage both work and family demands, and allow partners to enact their authentic career.

The field of careers studies is complex and fragmented. The aim of this paper is to detail why it is important to study careers, what we study and how we study key issues in this evolving field.

Key theories, concepts and models are briefly reviewed to lay the groundwork for offering an agenda for future research.

The authors recommend ten key directions for future research and offer specific questions for further study.

This paper contributes to the development of the theoretical underpinning of career studies.

The authors hope that the proposed agenda for future research will help advance the field and encourage more research on understudied, but important, topics.

This paper presents a comprehensive view of research on contemporary careers.

Today’s boundary‐less and knowledge‐based economy with its focus on learning organization delivers a contradictory message to employees in managing their careers. On the one hand, contemporary organizations expect and demand that employees adopt a lifelong learning approach, be global‐oriented, successfully manage the dynamics of diversity in the work and marketplace, work in self‐directed teams, develop a feel for and rapid response to fast changing customer expectations and so on. On the other hand, organizations are silent on the question of who is going to bear the enormous cost of ongoing technical and behavioral training that the employees need to successfully manage in a global village. While today individuals accept the fact that they can no more expect the organizations to provide them lifelong, full‐time and stable careers, they would certainly prefer not to work for organizations that adopt the “help us but help yourself” attitude to career management. This paper discusses the implications of this paradox on the career management process at the organizational level and reviews best practice scenarios.

Human capital is a key component of the success of organisations, and career development of staff is a vital component to both increasing and retaining human capital. Universities are no different, their people are key to their mission. There has been limited rigorous study of the careers of professional staff in the academy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A systematic literature review methodology resulted in a review of 23 articles dedicated to research on careers of professional staff in higher education (HE). Thematic analysis identified a series of enablers and barriers that influence career development and progression.

Career enablers and barriers have been found to exist at both the institutional and individual levels. Within the HE context, professional staff have a hybrid career mindset, desiring traditional and more contemporary career factors, leading to a reciprocal relationship between the organisation and the individual.

There is a need for future research to investigate the hybrid career mindset, and the reciprocal relationship, both to add depth to understanding of careers for professional staff in universities, and to examine this in other settings.

Universities may need to consider ways to integrate institutional support for high performance work systems (HPWS) with opportunities for professional staff, while individuals may need to consider adopting career self-management behaviours (CSMB) to fit their hybrid mindset.

This review has highlighted organisations and individuals will benefit if the relationship between HPWS and CSMB is better understood for the hybrid career mindset.

This paper focuses on the relatively unexplored link between international experience and academic careers. Drawing on a study of 30 British academics in four countries, it reports how they accounted for their decision to take an overseas appointment and how they evaluated that appointment. The contemporary career literature is used as a framework for analysis connecting the findings with “traditional” and “new” career themes. The desire to travel was found to be a key driver in taking the overseas appointment. When it came to evaluating the overseas appointment, however, upward career mobility in the context of increasing internationalisation was a major concern. The paper offers a number of key concerns for managers in institutions of higher education, particularly those concerned with the management and recruitment of international faculty.

Scholarly and general interest in sustainable careers is flourishing. Sustainable careers are focused on the long-term opportunities and experiences of workers across dynamic employment situations, and are characterized by flexibility, meaning and individual agency. The current paper analyzes and challenges the underlying ideological assumptions of how sustainable careers are conceptualized and advocates the inclusion of the ecological meaning of sustainability and the notion of dignity into the sustainable careers concept.

Using Slavoj Žižek's (1989, 2001) conceptualization of ideology as fantasy-construction, the authors explore how the use of sustainable careers is influenced by fantasies about the contemporary workplace and the role of the individual in the workplace. This is a conceptual method.

The authors argue that the concept of sustainable careers is grounded in the neoliberal fantasy of the individual. The paper concludes by presenting an alternative concept of sustainable careers grounded in a dignity-perspective on sustainability, which offers an alternative theoretical understanding of sustainable careers in the contemporary workplace, sharpening its contours and usefulness in theorizing careers.

This paper is the first to systematically analyze the use and conceptualization of sustainable careers in the literate and to expose the ideological underpinnings of the concept. Propositions are developed to be explored by future research.

This article aims to introduce the special issue entitled “the role of career shocks in contemporary career development,” synthesize key contributions and formulate a future research agenda.

The authors provide an introduction of the current state-of-the-art in career shocks research, offer an overview of the key lessons learned from the special issue and present several important avenues for future research.

The authors discuss how the special issue articles contribute to a better understanding of career shocks' role in contemporary career development, focusing on (1) conceptual clarity of the notion of career shocks, (2) career outcomes of career shocks, (3) mechanisms that can explain the impact of career shocks and (4) interdisciplinary connectivity.

This article offers a synthesis of the critical contributions made within this special issue, thereby formulating key ways to bring the field of career shocks research forward. It also provides new avenues for research.

This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.

The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.

Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.

The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.