Search results

Acknowledges that, for at least the last 30 years, both theoretical and practical definitions of career have emphasized structure, succession and status. Career has therefore been viewed as the sequence of attempts to move onward and upward through organizational hierarchies. Considers the development of career theory over a longer period, however, identifies a much wider range of interpretations of the concept. Taking these broader conceptions as a starting point, considers the career as a “vehicle” for the (continuous) realization of self. Drawing on examples of graduates’ own talk about their careers, argues that we can define the typical career as a sequence of developmental phases, each of which is delineated by a reported shift in the individual’s sense of self. Presents data which lend support to a theory of early career development in which this developing sense of self emerges. Discusses three meta‐level phases: adjustment/reality shock; career success/self affirmation; and re‐evaluation/congruence. Concludes with a consideration of both the theoretical and practical implications of this kind of approach to our understanding of organizational careers.

The current rhetoric about the demise of traditional concepts of “career” poses a challenge to organizations which rely on the development of managerial talent through fast‐track programmes. Reports on the career management philosophy, strategy, policy and practice of 20 organizations which are major graduate recruiters. Human resource and career management specialists responsible for fast‐track recruitment and career development within these companies provided information via semi‐structured interviews. Data were analysed using content and thematic analysis with the aid of a qualitative data analysis package to elicit patterns and trends in the approaches being used. Organizations varied in the extent to which they were attempting to achieve a shift in the employment relationship offered to graduates. Symbolic shifts were being generated through both cultural and process changes in an attempt to move from a traditional notion of career to a transactional‐type relationship with graduates, based on opportunities for development.

IN 1887 A. M. Wellington discussed in his book Economic Theory of the Location of Railways the way in which railroad layout could affect the development of the surrounding regions. At one point he analysed the cost/value relationship of two possible sites for a railway bridge near the fork of a river and decided that the more difficult site, despite higher costs, was preferable because it would provide a better basis for industrial growth and commerce in a city there.

Since 1980, property cycles have emerged emphatically as a phenomenon of urban development in both developed and developing countries. Among the many things which need to be explained is the continuing high levels of financial investment in property sectors, even well past the time when supply exceeds demand and vacancy rates continue to grow. Various intellectuals have put forward new theories and some situational explanations of the periodic over‐capitalisation in property. The economic adversities are not confined to the property and finance sectors. They extend into the socio‐economic performance of national economies, and in some cases they have international linkages and impacts. Gives exposition and evaluation relating to cyclicity in the USA, the UK, Japan, and some developing countries in Asia. The aim is mainly centred on explanation and theory, extending earlier published work in the authors’ research programmes in property cycles, urban development, and experience in both developing and developed countries. The economic, social, and political significance of property cycles is enormous.

Within the growing study of transnational entrepreneurial practice, existing conceptualisation of diaspora entrepreneurship has often lacked engagement with the particularities of the diaspora condition. This paper seeks to advance theoretical understanding and empirical study of diaspora entrepreneurship through identifying the processes that generate diaspora entrepreneurship across economic, social and political spheres.

To analyse the relationship between the development of venture activity and diaspora (re)production, in depth, qualitative biographical analysis was undertaken with UK-based diaspora entrepreneurs embedded within the particular contexts of the Sri Lankan Tamil and Kurdish diasporas. Skilled and active diaspora entrepreneurs were purposively selected from these extreme case contexts to explore their entrepreneurial agency within and across the business, social and political realms.

Results identified key dimensions shaping the development of diaspora entrepreneurship. These comprised the role of diaspora context in shaping opportunity frameworks and the mobilisation of available resources, and how venture activity served to sustain collective diaspora identity and address diaspora interests. These findings are used to produce an analytical model of the generation of diaspora entrepreneurship to serve as a basis for discussing how heterogeneous and hybrid entrepreneurial strategies emerge from and shape the evolving diaspora context.

By placing the reproduction of social collectivity centre-stage, this paper identifies the particularities of diaspora entrepreneurship as a form of transnational entrepreneurship. This recognizes the significance of a contextualised understanding of entrepreneurial diversity within wider processes of diaspora development, which has important implications for policy and practice development in homeland and settlement areas.

This chapter explores women leaders’ outward appearance in the male-dominated world of rail, through the lenses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Drawing on 31 interviews with women leaders in rail, it maps how a postfeminist logic is evident in women leaders’ narratives of aesthetic femininity. Aesthetic femininity refers to women leaders’ outward appearance which they describe as feminine. The research participants justify their feminine ‘work style’ through postfeminist themes of individual choice, natural sex differences, irony, personal initiative, skill and empowerment. The findings also show a patterning of justification around aesthetic femininity that fits a neoliberal self-governance as enterprise, self-flexibility and self-confidence. It is argued that whilst these iterations of aesthetic femininity are rooted in postfeminist and neoliberal contexts, they have consequences for sustaining gendered inequalities and traditional feminine norms in the highly masculinised culture of rail. Women’s narratives, whereby gender inequalities are acknowledged then subsumed into individualised agency through dress and appearance, do little to challenge the gendered culture in this sector.

It is well known that job stress is major cause of salesperson job dissatisfaction and turnover. Salespeople require the resources to cope adequately with a multitude of job stressors, and the purpose of this study is to demonstrate that salesperson wellness promotes the ability of salespeople to use effective coping strategies in the workplace and as a result decrease their intentions of leaving the firm.

Data including measures of coping strategies and a wellness lifestyle orientation were collected from a sample of 441 full-time professional salespeople in two metropolitan statistical areas of the USA. Structural equation modeling was used to demonstrate the relationship of a wellness lifestyle to coping strategies and in turn the relationship of coping strategies to job satisfaction and turnover intentions.

The study demonstrated the influence of the wellness lifestyle on salespeople’s ability to cope effectively with job stress. It extends previous research by demonstrating the direct influence of salesperson wellness on coping behaviors and demonstrates the nomological validity of the wellness lifestyle construct by modeling its relationship with job satisfaction and the intent to leave the organization.

The study recommends new research on the synergies that might be produced by simultaneous consideration of the social, physical, and psychological elements of the multicomponent wellness lifestyle. This should be particularly valuable in the context of the Challenger Sale.

Wellness programs may be introduced or improved following an assessment of coping resource weaknesses of the sales force. New employees could be screened by examining their wellness profiles.

Major firms have promoted wellness lifestyle programs for years, but no studies have examined the influence of such programs on coping with job stress by salespeople. The paper demonstrates the value of the salesperson wellness lifestyle by showing that it promotes the most adjustive form of coping strategy, problem-focused coping.

Team cognition research continues to evolve as the need for understanding and improving complex problem solving itself grows. Complex problem solving requires members to engage in a number of complicated collaborative processes to generate solutions. This chapter illustrates how the Macrocognition in Teams model, developed to guide research on these processes, can be utilized to propose how intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) could be developed to train collaborative problem solving. Metacognitive prompting, based upon macrocognitive processes, was offered as an intervention to scaffold learning these complex processes. Our objective is to provide a theoretically grounded approach for linking intelligent tutoring research and development with team cognition. In this way, team members are more likely to learn how to identify and integrate relevant knowledge, as well as plan, monitor, and reflect on their problem-solving performance as it evolves. We argue that ITSs that utilize metacognitive prompting that promotes team planning during the preparation stage, team knowledge building during the execution stage, and team reflexivity and team knowledge sharing interventions during the reflection stage can improve collaborative problem solving.

This chapter considers the interwoven history of child care advocacy and feminism in Canada. It begins by examining the efforts of second-wave feminists to make child care part of national political discussions. It then moves into the 1980s and 1990s, when, as part of broader neoliberal reforms, feminist demands were no longer foregrounded in child care advocacy. Instead, ‘social investment’ and childhood development rationales took centre stage. This chapter considers the implications of the ‘disappearing woman’ from child care advocacy, and concludes by making a case for the ongoing relevance of intersectional feminism to the child care landscape, to ensure that all women are offered meaningful choice, opportunities and rights when it comes to their roles as caregivers and workers.