The Routledge Companion to Career Studies

Hugh Gunz, Mila Lazarova, Wolfgang Mayrhofer, Hugh Gunz, Mila Lazarova, Wolfgang Mayrhofer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317379966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Routledge Companion to Career Studies is an in-depth reference for researchers, students, and practitioners looking for a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of career studies. Split into five parts, the volume looks at major areas of research within career studies and reflects on the latest developments in the areas of theory, empirical studies, and methodology.

The book's five parts cover (1) major theoretical and methodological debates and approaches to studying careers; (2) careers as dynamic, ongoing processes covering such issues as time, shaping careers, career outcomes and patterns, and the forces shaping careers; (3) the local, national, and global context of careers, (4) implementing career research to design practical interventions in areas such as education, counseling, and national policy; and (5) a commentary on the current state of career scholarship and its future development as represented in this volume, by founding scholars in the field.

This book will be a sourcebook for scholars studying careers, research students intending to take up the study of careers, and anyone – scholars and practitioners – with an interest not only in understanding careers, the factors shaping them and where they lead, but also in how this understanding might be used in practice.

1
Career studies

A continuing journey

Hugh Gunz, Mila Lazarova, and Wolfgang Mayrhofer

Those who study career come from a very broad set of disciplines and interests. Indeed careers have been a central interest of people in general, probably since humans emerged as sentient beings. For much if not most of humankind, this interest springs from the existential question: who am I? Particularly in what Max Weber labels more traditional societies – but not only there – it can be boiled down to the more straightforward question: where do I come from? Increasingly, though, it also leads in a different direction, towards reflection on the question: what is my life story? How has what has happened to me and what I have done made me what I am today? And this, in turn, leads to reflection on career.

A brief history

Career means many different things to different people. In this Companion, our focus is on the study of work career in its richness and complexity, with particular reference to careers associated with organizations and their management. Much of the interest in looking at work careers can be traced to the contributions of an influential group of Chicago sociologists, in particular those working with Everett Hughes, who brought the study of people’s stories to the social sciences (Barley, 1989). Their accounts of the life histories of inhabitants of Chicago – ordinary people, often but not always those living at the edges of society – introduced concepts to sociology such as “career contingencies (Becker, 1953b), career timetables (Roth, 1963), and career lines (Hughes, 1937, 1958)” (ibid.: 45). These, in turn, involved linking the concept of career to the social structures within which the careers were lived. But the rise in interest also has a lot to do with two groups, one “mainly based in Boston at institutions such as MIT and Harvard, and led by figures such as Edgar Schein and Donald Super, and … [one] organized by George Milkovich at Cornell” (Gunz and Peiperl, 2007a: 5).

These two North American groups, together with others in Europe for example (e.g., Sofer, 1970; Eckardstein, 1971; Bauer and Cohen, 1981; Berthel and Koch, 1985; Gerpott, 1988) inspired a burgeoning literature on careers, in particular those of members of organizations and those who manage the organizations. By 1989 the editors of the first handbook on career scholarship (Arthur et al., 1989a) were observing that “career theory has ‘gone legitimate’. We (people who study careers) have become established. We have become a field” (Arthur et al., 1989b: xv, emphasis in the original).

Others have questioned the nature of this field, or rather, what it means to talk about the “field of career studies.” As Moore et al. (2007) suggest, scholarly social science interest in career can be traced to at least three streams in the literature – in the fields of sociology, developmental psychology, and vocational psychology – each bringing with it a particular approach to understanding career. These streams reach back a long way to figures such as Freud, Weber, and even Cicero, and have a lot to do with why it is that there are so many literatures on career. It also explains why, although scholars contributing to the literature tend to be somewhat aware that the others exist, they spend very little time interacting with each other. We raise this point not because the issue of the multidisciplinary origins of career studies is specifically addressed in the present volume, but because it is important to note that these multidisciplinary origins are closely related to the divisions that run through the field. There are, in fact, several fields that on the surface one would expect to be closely allied with the work of organization and management scholars but which in practice are not. For example, the vast and complex vocational psychology literature is the principal focus of only one chapter of this book (Chapter 20), and the equally large life course literature makes little appearance (nor does “career” appear much in the life course literature: Mortimer and Shanahan, 2003; Shanahan et al., 2016).

That there are divisions in the field is not a new observation. Edgar Schein, one of the seminal contributors to the study of careers in organizational settings, observes:

What is most amazing to me is that when I got into the field in the late ’50s there was almost zero overlap between the psychologists (Strong, Super, Osipow, Holland) and the sociologists (Hughes, Becker, Goffman, White)… . Hughes and the sociologists were working on careers as they are lived and had literally no overlap with Super, Osipow, and others who were completely focused on the Strong Interest Inventory and trying to predict, like good psychologists, who would be suitable for what kind of career and, based on psychometric and interview data who would succeed (usually measured narrowly by income)… . Not a single reference in either group to the other group. This state of affairs led to my paper, “The Individual, the Organization and the Career,” which I believe broke the ice and started some thinking about psychological contracts and how organizations (work) and individuals each have to take the other into account.

(E. H. Schein, personal communication, January 13, 17, 2005; cited in Moore et al., 2007: 21)

This gulf between disciplines with an interest in career is one that has been repeatedly commented on, lamented even, since then – nor is it the only one (Chapter 2).

The question of whether the study of career is a field in itself or just a label that is used by scholars from many different disciplines stretching from the social sciences to the humanities (Arthur et al., 1989c) has been widely discussed and probably will continue to be so for as long as social scientists in particular retain their interest in people’s life stories. Indeed the matter of what the word “career” means has been debated extensively; we shall not get into this debate here, although it is addressed in Chapter 2 of this volume. For now we should return to the stream of literature that sprang from the work of the Chicago sociologists, that grew as a result of the contributions of, for example, the Boston and Cornell groups and that was landmarked by the 1989 handbook edited by Michael Arthur, Tim Hall, and Barbara Lawrence. For convenience, and following Gunz and Mayrhofer (2018), we shall refer to the focus of this stream of research as “organization and management careers” (OMC).

The 1989 handbook proved highly influential, providing a springboard for increasing interest in the OMC field over the following decades. The 1980s saw historic upheavals on a global scale, for example the collapse of the Soviet Union and its subservient administrations across Eastern and Central Europe. Immense change in corporate structures had profound effects on the lives of the people working for these corporations. By the 1990s an influential school of thought within OMC was pointing to the changing nature of career boundaries (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996), and many writers were claiming that the organizational career was now dead (e.g., Hall, 1996). Although this view was not universally accepted (e.g., Rodrigues and Guest, 2010; Jacoby, 1999), it was evident by the early 2000s not only that the OMC field had become more established, but that the issues being discussed in it were substantially different from those in the 1989 handbook. That in turn led to the publication of a second handbook (Gunz and Peiperl, 2007b) that attempted to provide an overview of the state of the field as it was in 2007, nearly 20 years after the production of the first such publication. Almost simultaneously, an encyclopedia covering OMC and much more was published (Greenhaus and Callanan, 2006), further cementing the position of the field within organization studies generally.

Almost immediately after these two volumes were published – the 2006 encyclopedia and 2007 handbook – the world changed drastically.¹ First came the international financial catastrophe of 2008, and then the lengthy economic recovery that followed and its accompanying growth in inequality. By 2016 it became painfully evident in a series of unexpected political events that those left behind by globalization and many others who, though largely unaffected nevertheless feared its effects, were easily persuaded that this was leading their countries to disaster. They proved highly responsive to the wild claims of demagogues and popularists, whose appeal was enhanced by the largest displacement of people across national borders since the Second World War. During the following two years, in an unsettling echo of the events in 1930s Europe, impervious national boundaries started to become reasserted and concern grew about the future of the world economic and political order. In addition, the extraordinary technological change during the past decade, involving for example the appearance of now ubiquitous handheld information technology (IT) devices, the establishment of social media and big data analysis, and the growth of artificial intelligence, has transformed the way people communicate, their privacy, and the way social movements and polities grow and change. This combination of a long period of economic growth and political and social upheaval sets the scene for the present volume. First, these changes mean that the context of careers has changed considerably. Second, they have had substantial impact on the academic world in many ways. The consequence has been a noticeable shift in the character of work within the OMC field from the broad, almost encompassing coverage of researchers such as the Chicago sociologists to approaches that focus on a narrower range of perspectives (Schein, 2007; Gunz and Mayrhofer, 2018: 130–145).

It seemed to us, the editors, that the world has changed so much since 2007 that it was well worth the effort to examine what has happened to the OMC field. Add to that a generational change involving the emergence of a new and very productive international cohort of OMC researchers and the need to revisit the 2007 Handbook of Career Studies became even more salient.

Handbooks such as this provide an opportunity for scholars deeply embedded in the field to reflect on its state as they see it and consider what that might mean for its future. This kind of book provides a useful reference point for other scholars in the field and those interested in joining it, a collective statement about what the field is in the view of some of its leading scholars and what is interesting to them about it. Of course, the choice of subjects is inevitably a personal one reflecting the views of the editors, and anyone in this role is acutely aware that their choices – of approach, range of topics, and authors – is theirs alone. Given that compendia of writing in the careers field rarely if ever overlap much in their choice of topics (Peiperl and Gunz, 2007), it would be surprising if there would be much agreement that the subjects covered in, for example, this volume, were the right ones. Many readers will be baffled that certain topics were left out and others included. But, of course, publishers place limits on how long these works can be, so choices have to be made. And in a field that has been described as a “fragmented adhocracy” (Whitley, 1984) – one in which there is no consensus around a central organizing theoretical framework, nor any around which topics matter most – there is no basis for agreement across the field on what should be in a handbook, what shouldn’t, and how it should be organized. Each group of editors makes their own choices and hopes that they have not upset too many of their colleagues in the process.

The choices we made were based on a five-part concept. First, we wanted the book to examine the nature of career and the approaches, theoretical and methodological, that affect the development of its study. Next, it should consider the processual side of career: how career choices are made, where careers lead, and what affects the routes people take during their careers. Then, as careers are always careers in context (Mayrhofer et al., 2007), it needed to examine context at several levels of analysis from organizational to global. We also thought it important to bring the focus closer to praxis: in the light of all this research, what can people do about their careers, and about the careers of the members of their organization or even the citizens of their country? Finally, we wanted to find a way of reflecting on the volume as a whole.

That was the basis of the brief that we invited our authors to consider: what has changed in their particular subfield within OMC, and what in their view does this mean for the future of that sub-field? Where do they see it going? Furthermore, given the extraordinary level of change to which we refer above, we decided to invite an international group of authors who were in the early to middle stage of their careers rather than established “senior” academics, because we wanted this volume to be the product of those who have been and are closest to the changes that are happening, who are now shaping and will continue to shape the field over at least the next decade and possibly much longer. It didn’t turn out like this in every case; there are some areas of the field which have not yet attracted the interest of early career stage scholars. However, that was our basic approach as we invited contributions to this volume. Next, we briefly preview the material in each of the book’s parts.

Overview of the handbook

The book is in five parts.

Part I, “Studying Careers,” develops the idea to which we refer above, namely that career studies, even when defined as OMC, has attracted a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. It begins (Chapter 2) by examining the concept of career and what is involved in its study; that is, what do career researchers do? It moves on to look at the range of theory that is invoked in the study of career (Chapter 3), drawing on the oft-noted point that career as a phenomenon bridges micro- and macro-levels of analysis. Subsequent chapters examine what can be learned about careers by reviewing the approaches of different disciplines (Chapter 4), the contribution of the agency-structure debate to the study of careers (Chapter 5), how diversity provides a useful perspective to the field (Chapter 6), and the range of methodologies that researchers employ (Chapter 7).

Part II, “Developing Careers,” addresses a range of issues to do with the processual side of career. Although, as we see in Chapter 2, there are many approaches taken in the literature to defining career, there is a general consensus that a key element of career is that of time: careers are things that take place over time. The time in question may be the individual’s lifespan (or lifespan to date), the time they spend working in a particular occupation or profession, or in a particular organization. But if what is being studied does not play ou...