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Career theorists have been increasingly occupied with role transitions across organisations, neglecting role transitions undertaken within single organisations. By exploring in depth the aspects of career capital that role holders need to facilitate their own organisational role transition, this article builds upon career capital theory.

Adopting an interpretivist approach, this study explores the experiences of 36 business leaders who have undertaken a recent role transition within a UK construction business.

The article empirically characterises 24 career capital aspects, clustered into Knowing Self, Knowing How and Knowing Whom. It argues that these aspects are important to internal role transitions and compares them to mainstream career capital theory. In addition, the concepts of connecting, crossing and investing career capital are introduced to explain how career capital supports such transitions.

This study proposes a new career capital framework and refocuses debate on organisational careers. It is based on a single organisation, and it would be beneficial for future researchers to explore its applicability within other organisations.

The article explores the implications of the new career capital framework for business leaders and organisational managers who wish to build individual and organisational career mobility.

This study proposes a new, empirically grounded, career capital theoretical framework particularly attending to organisational role transitions.

This study aims to improve the understanding of the learning and development that occurs during initial and subsequent role transitions within knowledge intensive workplaces.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 19 knowledge workers in a multinational company and the learning experiences of new graduates contrasted with those of more experienced workers who had recently joined or changed role within the organization.

Graduate recruits and more experienced workers utilise a similar range of learning approaches, favouring a combination of traditional formal learning, learning by doing and learning with and from others, but differ in the precise modes and strategies used. It was found that graduate induction provides appropriate support for initial transition into the workplace, but that experienced workers undergoing subsequent career transitions do not receive similar socialization support despite encountering similar challenges.

This study brings concepts and literature from two distinct research traditions together to explore learning during transition. In doing so, the impact of organizational socialization strategies as a mechanism by which an environment to support rich learning is created can be seen. The study was exploratory in nature, examining only one organization and studying a relatively small group of workers.

While employee induction has been studied in detail, the learning occurring at this time, and particularly during subsequent career transitions, is less well understood. This article is of value to those investigating learning in knowledge intensive workplaces, as well as human resource managers responsible for socialization of employees entering new roles.

The purpose of this paper is to examine through a sensemaking lens the transforming nature of scientists’ work role in public research organizations (PROs), resulting from organizational innovations in the form of collaborative culture.

Based on a symbolic-functionalist theory of work role transition, the paper uses interview data from a case study to explore scientists’ sensemaking of work role change.

Work role transition and identity processes among scientists in traditional PROs reveal tensions regarding organizational restructuring to the extent that organizational innovations are changing scientific work conflict with organizational norms, procedures and reward structures in hierarchical, bureaucratic PROs.

As the paper is based on only one case study, further research should be carried out on the difficulties involved in transforming the nature of the scientific work role and the way scientists recognize, contradict and make sense of changes.

The novelty of this paper is in the un-discussed role of organizational innovations in enabling new work roles for scientists in public research centers and how scientists make sense of and react to these innovations. Therefore, this paper could be beneficial for PROs facing pressure to restructure.

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on carrying out “at-home” ethnography by building and extending the notion of roles as boundary objects, and to elucidate how evolving roles mediate professional identity work of the ethnographer.

In order to theorize about how professional identities and identity work play out in “at-home” ethnography, the study builds on the notion of roles as boundary objects constructed in interaction between knowledge domains. The study is based on two ethnographic research projects carried out by high-level career switchers – corporate executives who conducted research in their own organizations and eventually left to work in academia.

The paper contends that the interaction between the corporate world and academia gives rise to specific yet intertwined roles; and that the meanings attached to these roles and role transitions shape the way ethnographers work on their professional identities.

These findings have implications for organizational ethnography where the researcher’s identity work should receive more attention in relation to fieldwork, headwork, and textwork.

The study builds on and extends the notion of roles as boundary objects and as triggers of identity work in the context of “at-home” ethnographic research work, and sheds light on the way researchers continuously contest and renegotiate meanings for both domains, and move from one role to another while doing so.

Although a significant body of work has amassed that explores the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of employee turnover in organizations, little is known about how employees go about quitting once they have made the decision to leave. That is, after the decision to voluntarily quit their job is made, employees must then navigate through the process of planning for their exit, announcing their resignation, and potentially working at their company for weeks after their plans to resign have been made public. Our lack of understanding of the resignation process is important as how employees quit their jobs has the potential to impact the performance and turnover intentions of other organizational members, as well as to harm or benefit the reputation of the organization, overall. Moreover, voluntary turnover is likely to increase in the coming decades. In this chapter, we unpack the resignation process. Specifically, drawing from the communication literature and prior work on employee socialization, we develop a three-stage model of the resignation process that captures the activities and decisions employees face as they quit their jobs, and how individual differences may influence how they behave in each of these three stages. In doing so, we develop a foundation upon which researchers can begin to build a better understanding of what employees go through after they have decided to quit but before they have exited their organization for the final time.

The rise of social media marketing has brought significant implications for advertising industry and its organizations. The traditional role of advertising professionals had been changing from a clear identity to an unclear one. However, previous research has studied relatively little about advertising professionals’ roles and identities or how they may be changing in the social media marketing era. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A qualitative, interpretive approach was taken in this study. It involved 32 in-depth interviews with advertising professionals in advertising organizations differing in size, digital focus and ownership in different multinational full-service advertising organizations and digital organizations.

The findings indicated that the role of advertising professionals is innovating from a traditional “idea generator” to a “solution facilitator” in response to the social media marketing.

This study identified the key experiences of advertising professionals that they were found to have divergent role identities linked to their identification with traditional and digital organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the motivations behind teleworkers’ role transitions in a coworking office and how these motivations shape role communication between independent workers in a shared office.

This paper draws upon observation, in-depth interviews (n=23) and temporary membership in the organization.

Self-enhancement and self-validation motivations work in concert to prompt individuals to capitalize on the networking opportunities that come with membership in this office and individuals strategically position an occupation-framed version of their identity in these networks.

Only one coworking office was studied. However, this is countered by the richness of the data.

Communication managers whose organizations employ teleworkers are encouraged to provide ongoing social and task-related support to their teleworkers; coworking site proprietors are encouraged to ensure members understand what is expected of them when they join a coworking office.

As teleworking is a widely-used flexible work arrangement, this study advances knowledge of teleworker management.

Scholars have not yet explored how individuals use coworking spaces and what motivates teleworkers to establish their role identities in mixed offices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of new nurses in Singapore of their experiences of role transition and to examine the implications for managers in terms of employee training, development and retention.

This qualitative study was conducted using a constructivist grounded theory approach. In total 26 novice nurses and five preceptors (n=31) from five different hospitals participated in the study. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews and reflective journal entries and analysed using the constant comparative method.

The findings revealed that novice nurses remained emotionally and physically challenged when experiencing role transition. Two major constructs appear to play an important part in the transition process; learning how to Fit in and aligning personal with professional and organisational identities. The findings highlight factors that facilitate or impede Fitting in and aligning these identities.

Although the concept of Fitting in and its relation to the attrition of novice nurses has been explored in global studies, that relationship has not yet been theorised as the dynamic alignment of multiple identities. Also, whilst most research around Fitting in, identity and retention has been conducted in western countries, little is known about these issues and their interrelationship in the context of Singapore. The study should inform decision making by healthcare organisations, nurse managers and nursing training institutions with respect to improving the transition experience of novice nurses.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse role transition for professionals moving towards hybrid managerial roles. Specifically, the authors examine reforms to the national tax agency in the UK, focusing on attempts to shift hybrid managers away from a focus on tax compliance, to a greater customer focus. This extends understanding of the relationship between New Public Management (NPM) and the public professions, by offering greater insight into the dynamic between regulators and regulatees, as professionals are co-opted into management roles that encompass greater customer orientation.

The authors draw on documentary data relating to reform from 2003 to 2012 and 43 semi-structured interviews with senior tax inspectors co-opted into hybrid manager roles.

The findings support established accounts of the effect of NPM reform to public professions, as these professionals are co-opted into hybrid management roles. Some hybrid managers resist, others embrace the demands of the new role. Linked to a hitherto neglected aspect of analysis (the extent to which hybrid managers embrace a greater customer orientation) the findings also show a more novel third response: some hybrid managers leave the national tax agency for opportunities in the private sector. These public-to-private professionals the authors call “canny customers”. Canny customers are ideally placed to exploit aspects of NPM reform, and thereby accelerate changes in the governance of public agencies, but in a way that might undermine the function of the tax agency and tax professions.

In regulatory settings, policy reform to co-opt professionals into hybrid managerial roles may have mixed effects. In settings where a focal dynamic is the regulator-regulatee relationship, effective governance will require understanding of the labour market to temper excess influence by those hybrid managers who become canny customers, otherwise, in settings where it is easy for individuals to move from regulator to regulatee, the pace and consequences of reform will be harder to govern. This runs the danger of eroding professional values. The specific case of tax professionals reflects themes in the literature examining hybridisation for accountants, and provides novel insight into the dynamics of professionalism that extend to the case of accountants.

The contribution is to extend the literature on role transition of professionals. The authors focus on hybrid managers in the context of a regulatory agency: the UK national tax agency. Policy reforms associated with hybridisation emphasised customer orientation. The authors highlight labour market characteristics impacting the regulator-regulatee dynamic, and an as yet unexplored, unintended consequence of reform. The public professional who leaves for the private sector becomes a “canny customer” who can exploit and accelerate reform.