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This paper aims to introduce a collection of papers about careers in cross‐cultural perspective, which contributes to the growing body of literature that addresses careers from different locations around the world.

Introduces the topic, providing some background and discussion of the main concepts.

Briefly introduces the papers and their main findings – differences and similarities among careers and career attributes in different cultural and national contexts.

Contextualizes the issue and extends the overall knowledge in the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to bring together job design and career theory in the examination of how proactive employees optimize their well-being (i.e. job satisfaction and perceived health) through job crafting and career competencies. This study offers an integrated account of the pathway from proactive personality to well-being.

Data were collected by a cross-sectional self-report survey study among 574 employees working in various organizations.

The results of structural equation modeling analyses supported the proposed double mediation model: job crafting and career competencies both mediated the positive relationship between proactive personality and well-being. The findings suggest that proactive employees can enhance their well-being both through proactive job redesign and the development of career-related skills and abilities.

This study precludes causal explanations. Future research should further investigate the role of employee proactivity related to contemporary work topics, including temporary contracts and self-employment.

Managers and HR practitioners can optimize employee well-being by focusing on HR policies related to job redesign, as well as investing in training and development of career competencies.

This paper integrates two research domains by exploring how proactive employees take a proactive stance toward their job as well as their career, and investigates how this proactive approach contributes to their well-being. In addition, the authors demonstrated a link between the development of career competencies and employee health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of pay in the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior, and its subsequent effects on employee career satisfaction.

A two-wave quantitative investigation was conducted among alumni of a large public university in the Netherlands.

The results show that taking charge behavior mediates the positive relationship between employee ambition and career satisfaction. They also show that pay positively moderates this mediation, such that the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior is stronger when ambitious employees receive an increase in pay, leading to increased career satisfaction. Conversely, a decrease in pay does not moderate ambitious employees’ taking charge behavior and the impact on their career satisfaction.

The study draws on self-report data collected in one country: the Netherlands.

The study highlights the importance of pay for higher job involvement, demonstrating its impact on taking charge behavior among employees with higher levels of ambition.

This is the first empirical study to examine the impact of pay on employees’ taking charge behavior and the subsequent implications for career satisfaction.

This study seeks to explore the key themes in identity play during unemployment and the potential obstacles faced by unemployed individuals.

This qualitative study is based on 23 interviews with unemployed individuals in Germany.

The authors identify three obstacles to identity play during unemployment: a lack of psychological safety to explore possible selves, a lack of opportunity to try out possible selves and a lack of social validation for possible selves. Several interviewees highlight the impact of social context, creating an absence of institutional support and a limited identity “playspace.” As such, the authors illustrate that when faced with these obstacles, the unemployed individuals of this study predominantly focus on identity work instead of identity play. Only a few interviewees seem to engage in and sustain identity play. The authors propose that the elaborate nature of their possible selves and their focus on future opportunities may overshadow the present self and immediate obstacles.

The authors argue that identity play is not readily available to all individuals in all situations. Instead, they suggest that some psychologically and socially threatening contexts such as unemployment are characterized by obstacles that constrain individuals' identity play and prevent the adoption of new work identities. Hence, the authors call for a more balanced and localized understanding of identity play.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of identity play process by including the stories we live by in depth. Over the past decade, identity play literature has placed more emphasis on the role of self-narratives. Yet, the “stories we live by”, including the told or untold stories of past and imagined events of the future, have not been considered in depth in these self-narratives.

This conceptual paper draws on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures and attempts to include the stories we live by in scholarly conceptualizations and explorations of identity play processes.

Drawing on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures this paper offers a comprehensive conceptual model of how the stories we live by infuse individual identity construction processes. The model highlights the inter-connectivity among stories we live by, identity play, identity work, sensemaking and social validation. Looking through the lens of the personal construct theory and taking these inter-connectivities into account lead to the observation of temporality in identity construction and the plurivocality of self-narratives.

This paper looks at identity play through the lens of the personal construct theory. However, self-narratives are seen as a medium for manifestation of personal constructs. Thus, this paper also draws on the narrative identity literature and dialogical-self concept, which helps access the multiplicity of the self-narratives to widen our grasp of personal constructs. This paper combines discourse of deconstruction with the dialogical-self concept and provides more means for the explication of identity play.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.

The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.

The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of the dynamic character of career and its key attributes, and the embeddedness of their definitions and meanings in national social, political and economic contexts.

Features of three recent distinct social, political and economic situations in Russia are used to explore the meanings of nine key career attributes introduced by the Western career literature.

It was found that in Russia each of the nine key career attributes accommodates a different meaning compared with their original Western meaning, and that these meanings are continuously changing to reflect the current social, political and economic environment. In sum, this exploration revealed a dynamic character to career attributes, and their content changed depending on the underlying context.

Among key research implications are: a possibility of using Western career theories mainly as conceptual frameworks for studying careers in other countries; that current social, political and economic contexts need to be taken into consideration when studying careers in a particular country; and the “intelligent career” concept can be used to study careers in various cultural contexts, and to examine the interdependence between career and a national culture.

This paper examines the extent to which Western career concepts may be used to study careers in various countries around the globe. It notes the dynamic character of career and its related career attitudes. This paper also makes suggestions on how the “intelligent career” concept can be used for exploring career meanings in a particular national setting. Finally, this paper looks at specifics of careers in Russia, which are still underrepresented in the literature.

This paper examines the effects of the development of employees’ career competencies (knowing-why, knowing-how, and knowing-whom) on the employing organization and assesses the role of career satisfaction in this relationship. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on the consequences of employees’ boundaryless careers.

The study involves a two-wave quantitative investigation of alumni of a large public university in the Netherlands.

The results suggest that by investing in the development of their career competencies, employees contribute to organizational culture, capabilities, and connections. However, these contributions depend on employees’ level of perceived career satisfaction. If employees are satisfied with their careers, they contribute more to their organizations.

Further longitudinal research, strengthened by an additional, third wave of data collection, is needed to replicate the present findings.

The study highlights the importance of employees’ career development for organizations.

This study is the first empirical investigation of the link between the development of employees’ career competencies and employees’ contributions to their employers and one of a few studies that examines career satisfaction as a moderating variable.

This paper aims to study careers across cultures, distinguishing among international career, cross‐cultural and globalization perspectives.

The conceptual development is based on a review of four empirical papers in this special issue with a focus on “Careers in cross‐cultural perspective” and other recent research in this area.

Work on international careers has traditionally looked at careers that cross national boundaries, such as those involving expatriate career assignments or self‐initiated international careers. Research into cross‐cultural careers reflects the primary work of this special issue's articles, primarily by looking at differences between two or more cultures. Career research into globalization is more recent and more tentative. It covers how careers interact with the economic, political, social and environmental changes commonly associated with the term globalization.

The proposed framework is a reflection of current theoretical and empirical debates.

The framework offers new guidance for both interpreting existing and developing new research.