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Many nations, including African ones, view PhD graduates as a means to be more internationally competitive, and national policies may encourage outward mobility of potential PhDs, expecting that graduates on return will enhance the country’s capacity. Many studies of such mobility, as with studies of early career researchers generally, focus on their work-related experiences. That is, they do not incorporate the broader life considerations that can intersect with their work-career decisions. So, this study of 36 Africans who completed their PhDs abroad uses a framework that embedded an individual’s work within personal considerations, such as life goals, while not ignoring the structural factors, such as job availability, in play when making work-career decisions.

The paper used a narrative methodology, with two stages of analysis: first of individual cases, then of patterns across individuals.

Multiple personal factors came to bear in negotiating the structural factors related to work and career. Moreover, there were multiple intersections between personal factors, and the influence of a factor ranged from sustaining through disrupting, highlighting the specific context-bounded nature of the thinking at the time of decision-making.

This was a small-scale study with no intention to generalize to the broader population of African PhD holders. Rather but the goal was an in-depth examination of individual’s work within personal considerations to further conceptualize the understanding of career decision-making.

PhD programmes could encourage PhD students to consider the importance of life intentions and hopes in career decision-making and how careers evolve over time in light of structural and life factors.

Overall, participants demonstrated an intricate weighing of personal factors in making decisions as they also sought to negotiate different structural factors to advance their careers. Further, no other studies the authors are aware of report how the same interacting factors can have a sustaining through disrupting influence dependent on specific contexts, thus further revealing how nested contexts and personal factors co-influence the work-career decisions that each individual makes.

Examines the issues which managers consider when making career decisions and finds that, faced with reduced levels of employment security, they are redefining careers in terms that now include references to lifestyle and the achievement of a balance between the personal, domestic and employment aspects of their lives. Identifies that changes in any of these areas of managers’ lives can cause them to revise their career strategies. Identifies that life events also have a major impact upon career decisions. Recognises that there are gender‐related differences in the career strategies that managers adopt. Concludes that for some managers the definition of self is becoming less focused upon employment and more related to lifestyle.

There are signs that leisure is becoming increasingly important in contemporary working lives. This paper seeks to contribute to the career literature by examining how work and leisure can operate as allies.

Qualitative data from fieldwork engaging with hotel employees located within the tourist resort of Queenstown, New Zealand are used to explore the positive interdependencies between work and leisure for both the leisure‐orientated employee and the hotels.

The results suggest that skiing‐orientated employees are able to engage in skiing due to the money and time resources they receive from their hotel employment. At the same time, hotels have access to a seasonal, non‐standard work‐time and leisure competent labour pool as a result of the employees' orientation and participation in skiing.

The results support the existence of a leisure‐orientated career identity that conforms to the contemporary individualistic revision of career. In addition, the results emphasise the significant impact that the employment relationship, industry setting and geographic location have on the leisure‐work relationship.

In a number of recent studies, it has been demonstrated that mental illness imposes real and large costs over and above the direct expenses of care and treatment. Each year in the U.S., 5–6 million workers between 16 and 54 years of age lose, fail to seek or cannot find employment as a consequence of mental illness. Among those who do work, it is estimated that mental illness decreases annual income by an amount between USD 3500 and USD 6000 (Marcotte & Wilcox-Gök, 2001). Similar results have been shown in a number of studies (Ettner et al., 1997).

The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that influence Saudi Arabian women to persist in nontraditional work careers, which are primarily in gender-integrated work environments and male-dominated industries.

Qualitative research was conducted based on semistructured interviews with 30 Saudi women – 18 of whom were working in nontraditional careers and 12 of whom had worked in nontraditional careers but subsequently left to pursue more traditional, female-associated career opportunities. Interview data were recorded, transcribed and analyzed using grounded theory methods.

Distinct similarities and differences between the two subsamples emerged from the data. Similarities between the two groups included men's underestimation of women's performance, lack of access to workplace sites and resources, male colleagues' cultural fears of violating gender norms and social rejection of women in the workplace. Women who persisted in nontraditional work careers articulated a high level of self-efficacy, an optimistic future vision, positive relationships with male colleagues and family support, which enabled them to persevere despite numerous difficulties associated with working in a male-dominated environment. A conceptual model is developed that integrates the findings explaining Saudi women's persistence in nontraditional work careers.

Self-reported data and a small sample size are the main limitations of this study.

Male managers of women in nontraditional work settings are encouraged to engage positively with women professionals in their teams and to provide opportunities for growth and development for all members of the workforce. Saudi public policy decision-makers, families, educators and organizations interested in retaining and increasing female workforce participation should take into account the factors influencing Saudi women's persistence in nontraditional work careers.

Although some studies in Western contexts have addressed the factors that influence the persistence of women in nontraditional careers, less work has been done in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) sociocultural context. Specifically, in the present study, the authors investigate the factors that influence women's persistence in nontraditional careers in Saudi Arabia's high gender-role-oriented culture.

Institutional structures of professional career paths often support breadwinner–homemaker families, with a stay at home wife available full time to support the professional (and children), so the professional can devote complete energy and time to developing a career. This research examines how two partners in the same narrowly structured, fast track occupational culture such as those occurring for dual military officer couples shape how women and men negotiate decision making and life events. Data from interviews with 23 dual U.S. Navy officer couples build upon Becker and Moen’s (1999) scaling back notions. With both spouses in these careers, placing limits on work is extremely difficult due to fast track cultures that demand higher status choices and structures that formally do not reliably consider collocations. Trading off occurs, but with distress due to the unique demands on two partners in the fast track culture, which means career death for some. Two partners in fast track careers may not yet have given up on two careers as many peers may have, but they lose a great deal, including time together and their desired number of children. But they ultimately posit individual choice rather than focusing on structural change. The pressured family life resulting is likely similar to that for partners in other narrowly structured, fast track cultures such as in law firms and academia.

To empirically consider work and career as potential influences of suicide.

In this qualitative study we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 16 individuals who were survivors (i.e. family members or intimates) of individuals who had committed suicide. Data was analyzed using a grounded theory methodology.

This exploratory study used purposive self-determination as the theoretical framework for analyzing their life histories. Factors of purposive self-determination, including lack of purpose, feeling controlled, experiencing failure, and social exclusion all figured prominently but differentially according to life-stage. Distinct work and career themes for early-career, mid-career and late-career suicides emerged. Early-career suicides were attributed to educational or work-related contexts, leading to a sense of hopelessness. Mid-career suicides emphasized despair based in failure. Finally, an attempt to escape from challenges associated with transitioning roles in retirements emerged as a key theme in late-career suicides.

Although suicide has been studied extensively from medical, psychopathological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical and religious perspectives, there is a dearth of research considering why certain individuals choose to end their own lives as a result of work and career related reasons. This study sought to contribute to our understanding of this under-researched phenomenon. Additionally, while extant careers theory and research has considered positive notions of career such as career success or careers as a calling, this work presents an alternate lens, the consideration of career failure and careers as a sentence.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of job satisfaction on the intended retirement age of self‐employed and organisationally‐employed white‐collar professionals. The analysis also examines potential boundary conditions imposed by other domains of life for the applicability of this relationship.

The study employs ordered probit regressions to analyse primary survey data comprising 1,262 Finnish white‐collar professionals.

The econometric results suggest that job satisfaction is a significant determinant of the intention to retire later and thus prolong a career. The analysis does not find a difference in the effect of job satisfaction between salary earners and self‐employed individuals. However, the analysis finds that other domains of life influence how job satisfaction affects retirement‐age intentions, and that these influences differ between self‐employed and salaried respondents.

The findings imply that developing measures to improve the job satisfaction of (highly educated) older workers is an alternative to the widely debated regulatory approach of prolonging working careers by increasing the statutory retirement age. The principal limitation is the focus on white‐collar professionals in a single country.

This is the first empirical comparison of the effect of job satisfaction on the intended retirement age between salary earners and self‐employed individuals. It is also the first examination of the effect of job satisfaction on retirement intentions or behaviour that accounts for the effects of other domains of life satisfaction.

This chapter departs from a specific Swedish perspective on structural changes which took place during the 1990s in Sweden. Before this period Sweden had a long period of improving democracy at work. From the start of the 1990s a number of structural changes were – according to national surveys – associated with increasing psychological demands at work. According to the same sources this was followed during the three last years of the 1990s by a reduced decision latitude. The prevalence of work-related psychological problems started to rise when decision latitude started to decrease. A discussion of concepts related to work democracy is followed by a review of the literature on work democracy and health. Finally, strategies for improving democracy and possible health promoting effects of such improvement are discussed.

Purpose – This chapter explores ways in which urban women in China balance work and family demands, as the state's protective and welfare functions in post-Mao reform are increasingly being replaced by market forces, and the chapter examines how urban women's enactment of work and family roles are shaped by changing workplaces as well as by their personal and family circumstances. The purpose is to understand the impact of marketization on gender configuration through the lens of the work-family nexus.

Research design – Data come from in-depth interviews conducted between 2005 and 2007 with 115 married women in four large cities. For analytical purposes, the informants were divided into three groups: stay-at-home moms, family-orientated working women, and work/career-oriented women.

Findings – Although market reform may create opportunities for some women to enhance their personal lives, as a consequence of workers' loss of the safety net and welfare benefits, the neglect of women's reproductive work, and the commercialization of child care and child education, it has generated, for many women, much role conflict between work and family. Work/career-oriented women are able to actively engage in market activities precisely because they are protected still by the state, can afford commercial services of domestic tasks, or have strong support from their extended families.

Originality/value – Women's varying role orientations reflect more their strategies of coping with structural changes than their mere adherence to certain gender ideologies.

Social implications – The chapter calls for curbing unbridled market forces and restoring public services so as to create a family/women-friendly work and social environment.