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The purpose of this paper is to present research findings on the experience of career barriers by women who have changed career, and to suggest the practical implications of these findings for career management.

An established, qualitative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis, was used to explore participants' experiences. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with eight women who had changed careers and were analysed to identify the salient themes.

Participants experienced career barriers, but their subjective experience did not necessarily match objectively defined barriers. One participant, for example, experienced redundancy not as a barrier to her career path but as an opportunity. It was only when situations or events threatened the self‐concept that problems were experienced as barriers. These barriers were not insurmountable and participants used a number of strategies to overcome potential barriers.

The findings suggest that career management or counselling should acknowledge and explore the client's subjective experience of career barriers. Strategies such as challenging or reframing potential barriers can be effective methods for helping clients to dismantle them.

This research points to the gap in career theory and research on the experience of barriers in adult careers. It presents evidence on the subjective nature of barriers and on strategies used to overcome them.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural career barriers in project-based construction and property development organizations in Australia, and explore how these affect women and their project careers. It applies the insights of the institutional theory to explain how the process of normative isomorphism continues to reproduce female underrepresentation in those organizations.

Based on an exploratory interpretive approach, this study consisted of 16 in-depth interviews with female project managers from the Australian construction and property industry.

The research shows that organizational practices may contribute to the ongoing female underrepresentation in the Australian construction and property development industries. The structural career barriers unique to project organizations include work practice, presenteeism, reliance on career self-management and the “filtering of personnel” in recruitment and promotion practices.

The results support the institutional theory as an explanation for the factors that influence women’s’ perceptions of their project management careers. Addressing inequity between men and women is perceived as an organizational choice.

To achieve a substantive change in the numbers of women in project management, organizational leaders in male dominated industries such as construction and property development are encouraged to think strategically about how to overcome the access and opportunity that affect women’s career progress.

Drawing on the institutional theory, this study explores how the process of normative isomorphism may reproduce female underrepresentation and gender segregation in traditional project-based organizations.

This article presents and discusses results of a research project on the personal and career benefits of the MBA. These results suggest women value the experience of doing the course and that this gives them greater “intrinsic” benefits of enhanced confidence and self‐worth. Men gain greater “extrinsic” benefits of enhanced pay and status, and place a greater emphasis on the credential value of the MBA. However, the MBA has less of a transforming effect on how they see themselves and their organisations.

An instrument for assessing job advancement potential in organizational contexts was developed and administered to a sample of professional females. The Power and Fast Track Job (PFTJ) scale included items measuring organizational power, employee recognition, mentorship, and job flexibility/autonomy. As expected, the PFTJ scale was found to be positively related to self‐reported career success, perceptions of leadership ability, and company support for equal opportunities in the workplace. In addition, follow‐up data indicated that scores on the PFTJ scale were useful in predicting subsequent job promotion or demotion in the current sample. These preliminary findings suggest that the PFTJ scale might have some potential utility as an assessment tool for female professionals seeking job advancement. However, women who rated their jobs as having greater power and fast track potential were also more likely to experience work/family role conflict, and reported less job satisfaction. The costs and benefits associated with jobs having advancement potential are discussed.

Qualified immigrants (QIs) and their work experiences have been studied using a wide variety of theoretical approaches with divergent characteristics. This paper reviews theoretical progress and proposes directions for future research and practice.

Using relevant keywords, articles indexed by Web of Science in management, business, industrial relations and applied psychology were systematically searched for and analysed. In total, 60 theoretical articles published during 2008–2018 were included. The theoretical progress and future theoretical and practical challenges were organised based on the notions of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Eight theoretical approaches utilised to study QIs' work experiences were recognised: (1) human capital theory, (2) career capital theory, (3) theory of practice, (4) intersectionality, (5) social identity theory, (6) sensemaking, (7) cultural identity transition and (8) the career-centred approach. The contributions and limitations of each theoretical lens were then scrutinised. Overall, research on QIs still lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework. As a step towards that, the paper proposes considering the role of organisations and labour market intermediaries, strategic view over the immigrant workforce, agency–institution play, identity–capital play and host–immigrant play.

The focus is on theory development and empirical papers with no clear theoretical foundation are excluded.

This review is the first attempt to summarise and direct the divergent research on the topic. The main contribution is setting an agenda for future research, particularly by proposing the elements of a comprehensive theoretical framework for studying QIs in the workplace.

Recent evidence from glass cliff research suggests that women are more willing than men to accept risky leadership positions. The purpose of this paper (based on three studies) is to reveal and resolve the apparent paradox that women are more risk averse than men yet end up in risky leadership positions.

In Study I, risk attitudes of 125 participants were surveyed to understand gender differences in risk taking. In two experimental vignette studies, 119 university students (Study II) and 109 working adults (Study III) were offered a leadership position in either a risky or successful company and asked to rate their willingness to accept the job.

Together, the results showed that although women are generally more risk averse than men, women who scored low on career self-efficacy were more likely to perceive a risky job as a promotional opportunity and were therefore more willing to accept such a job. These findings shed light on the role of women’s career decision making in the glass cliff phenomenon.

Glass cliff research has focused almost exclusively on organizational decision makers. The authors aim to better understand the glass cliff phenomenon by incorporating the perspective of job seekers.

This study uses a Kaleidoscope Career (KC) approach to explore how UAE women managers experience their careers, the advancement in management and the career models they encounter.

This study employs an interpretative phenomenological approach to analyse in-depth face-to-face interviews with 22 Emirati women in middle and senior management positions across various industries in both the public and private sectors.

This research is significant in uncovering career advancement mechanisms and three career models: “my life is not elsewhere,” “seizing opportunities” and “wholehearted dedication to the country.” These models highlight women managers' pivotal role in UAE's economic development.

This study is confined to a convenience sample of women managers from Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. While not fully representative of all local women, the findings on career advancement mechanisms and Emirati women managers' non-traditional career paths hold theoretical significance. The results challenge the uncritical adoption of Western career models, highlighting the need to consider alternative career models and advancement mechanisms.

This research expands the authors' knowledge of career advancement mechanisms and models experienced by Emirati women, offering insights for enhancing gender equality in Arab world managerial roles.

These findings open new research avenues to explore Emirati women's careers beyond the largest Emirates and assess their broader economic and societal contributions.

The call for more women to start up and grow businesses as a vehicle for economic vibrancy is a prevailing discourse in the UK. There have been calls for greater co-ordination between research, policy and practice to create collaborative spaces whose focus is to influence and shape structures and processes beyond the individual or community level to a macro level of enterprise policy. However, calls have not specifically focussed on the issues of gender or other categories of social difference. This study aims to understand how such co-ordinations can be established to enable progress within the women’s entrepreneurship space through the development of collaborative spaces fusing research, policy and practice and how they should be structured to ensure inclusion through the process as well as enabling greater inclusion as part of the collaborative space outcome.

Taking a critical feminist perspective, the study draws from extant literature on women and minority networks research from the women in leadership, diversity and inclusion fields as a lens through which to frame the analysis of women’s enterprise policy in the UK, research and practice.

The study highlights the importance of collective feminist action drawing upon post-feminist sensibilities and an Engaged–Activist Scholarship approach. Such collective feminist action appreciates the importance of the micro as an enabler to progressive action at the macro level to enact structural and system change within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. A framework for inclusive and collaborative entrepreneuring space development is offered.

This paper offers policymakers, researchers and practitioners a framework as a practical way forward to ensure efforts are progressive and enable structural and systemic change.

The paper offers a framework for developing inclusive and collaborative entrepreneuring spaces to ensure progression by lifting the focus to a macro level of change to enable inclusion as part of the process and outcome of such collaborative spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors which influence individuals to take up international assignments in hostile environments (HEs). Using an intelligent careers (IC) perspective, an expanded framework of expatriation drivers to work in hostile contexts is developed that comprises individual, organizational and location-specific factors. In addition, the understanding of career capital acquisition and transfer is refined.

A “deviant” case study method to challenge the underlying assumptions of career capital maximization and transfer in global careers is used. To investigate the case, 25 individuals in an international development organization who had to decide whether to work in HEs were interviewed.

Five insights into decision drivers and career capital effects associated with postings to HEs are presented. These span all three levels of individual, organizational and location-specific decision factors.

Due to the case study approach, the usual limitations of qualitative case-based research with respect to generalizability apply. In the conclusions three theoretical implications for the IC framework with respect to career capital acquisition, utilization and temporal effects are outlined.

A range of practical implications in relation to the selection, talent management, performance and reward approaches as well as repatriation and family considerations in global mobility are explored.

The insights help organizations to design global mobility policies for HEs. In addition, individuals and their families benefit from greater clarity of global mobility drivers in the context of high risks.

The drivers of individuals to accept assignments to HEs are under-researched. This paper operationalizes and applies a holistic decision to work abroad framework, expands the literature on of the motivations of individuals and develops valuable insights to nuance the IC framework.

The purpose of this paper is to explore four types of equality and diversity actors at both the national and the local level and the extent to which such actors may be seen as either alternative sources of loyalty and as replacements in competition with trade unions or as complementary to existing union structures.

The research method is multi‐level and based on national level policy analysis and on two local NHS trust case studies. It relies on 30 interviews with policy advisers and key actors (i.e. officials of trade unions, Black networks, identity groups and community groups) and 66 case study interviews; in sum, a total of 96 participants were involved in the study. The paper also involves documentary analysis of Department of Health strategies on equalities and diversity, BMA reports and advisory documents, and policy and advisory documents of the two hospitals.

Findings indicate that the interrelationship between networks reflects both the complementarity and replacement theses, but recognises different networks may also operate in different spheres leading to little or no interrelationship.

This exploratory framework has drawn attention to the importance of equality actors in the field of industrial relations and employment. It is recognised that these findings are situated in a particular geographical and historical moment and that different replacement/complimentarity forms may emerge in different national, sectorial and historical context.

Reflecting insights from mobilisation theory, the paper identifies the importance of leaders and issues of injustice as important components of the formation and development of equality and diversity networks at different levels but demonstrates the complexity of the attribution concept.

This paper's originality lies in its exploratory framework of the interelationship between different equality actors and the replacement/complementarity debate in industrial relations.