Careers around the World

Individual and Contextual Perspectives

Jon P. Briscoe, Douglas T. Hall, Wolfgang Mayrhofer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415871419
• eBook ISBN: 9781135245641
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Companies are becoming more global and international, and commerce and information flow seamlessly across national borders. In addition, modernization, rapid technological change, an increasingly (shared) global culture, and shifting socio-demographic values have created conditions in which career stability is more threatened, while the importance of managing the career well is paramount. But, what do we know about careers in different contexts and how those career experiences vary in different regions and countries of the world?

The goal of this book is to develop new understandings of career from the vantage point of those who live in diverse cultures, and who belong to different generations.

Careers Around the World explores the very meaning of what a career for individuals is in different countries, cultures, professions and age groups. What does career success mean for people around the world? What are key career transitions, and how are they best managed in different cultures? As those questions have not yet been investigated in the literature of careers across cultures and generations, the authors have taken an approach that led to hearing the answers directly from working people around the globe. This book presents the answers to these questions from each of the seven major cultural regions of the world and the practical implications of these differences for those who manage human resources in organizations that cross national boundaries, as well as those who advise on careers.

Part 1

Introduction

1

Careers Around the World

Jon P. Briscoe, Douglas T. Hall and Wolfgang Mayrhofer

A laborer in South Africa leaves his job on a work crew to work for another work crew. When asked about his definition of career success, he gives a surprised stare and says “feeding my family.” A businesswoman in the U.S.A. targets achievement after achievement (succeeding) until, late in her career, she realizes she is not fulfilled or learning, and changes course. A young nurse in Malaysia follows her family’s wishes to enter the field, but her heart lies elsewhere. A young businessman in Mexico is able to connect his vocational aspirations to the spiritual resonance he feels toward his family responsibilities.

These very brief vignettes paint a picture of careers that vary based upon cultural contexts, personalities, family dynamics, social class and myriad other factors. They immediately attest to the fact that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to careers. Yet in terms of theory and to a lesser degree research, we have not had a good idea of how careers vary across cultures. This matters. It matters deeply, because the career is the nexus of so many relevant contexts representing many different levels of analysis.

It is through the career that one provides immediate and basic sustenance to support self and family well-being. But it is also true that the career is a primary way of discovering and expressing one’s identity (Katz & Kahn, 1978). Likewise, the career is a space where family and work lives merge (Friedman & Greenhaus, 2000; Hall & Associates, 1996). From an organizational point of view it is critical both to supply motivators to fuel the career and to extract temporal, mental and physical resources from that career. On social (Sennett, 1998) and economic levels (Cappelli, 1999, 2002; McClelland, 1967), ways of life and national well-being can depend upon the degree to which the right preparation and a given execution of careers are realized. Thus, we submit that careers’ significance represents far more than might initially meet the eye of the casual observer.

Appreciating the special significance of careers, it is essential to better understand how careers play out across various cultures. This is what this book, and as its basis the research of 5C (the Cross-Cultural Col-laboration on Contemporary Careers), is all about. As with other realms of study (especially management), much of the available theory has been created in the United States or other Western contexts. While we hardly discount this type of research, we recognize that the world is a much bigger place than one country. To do justice to the existing variety of the (career) world, it must be better understood on a local and global level for us to be effective as scholars and practitioners.

We present this book as a sort of hybrid between traditional textbooks that at times serve as high-end glossaries, and the much more academic treatise that is valuable to our academic peers but not known or accessible to others. In doing so, we offer our findings and insights to a variety of users—to professors and students, yes, but also to individuals managing their own careers; to managers, organizations and consultants trying to understand individuals and groups that they strive to serve; and to anyone who desires to better understand the strivings of people as they attempt to make sense of and optimize their working lives across time.

While the book contributors mostly work in schools of management, we believe that the findings we present and the questions we pose will be relevant to a number of fields: education, health care, vocational training, government and non-profit studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology and many others.

In the rest of this chapter we will explore briefly some major historical and contemporary understandings of the “career” as a starting-off point. Then we will explore existing international studies focused on careers as well as other important topics such as human resources. As we explore these, we will make a case for why more cross-cultural research is needed in order to fully understand how careers vary across cultures including from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Finally, as we close the chapter, we will outline the remainder of the book.

The Study of Careers: Past, Present and Future

Both careers in general and managerial careers in particular have been subject to extensive and multi-disciplinary research (Arthur, Hall & Lawrence, 1989a: 10), including views from, among others, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, history and geography (Bird, Gunz & Arthur, 2002: 1, 9). Within this broad stream of research, typical schools of thought can be identified (Collin, 1998: 413), for example work that focuses on career choice, education and counseling (e.g. Baker & Taylor, 1998; Dagley & Salter, 2005; Fouad & Byars-Winston, 2005; Osipow, 1983) or on the link between organization and individuals (see, for example, Brousseau, Driver, Eneroth & Larsson, 1996; Hall, 1976, 2002; Schein, 1978). Basically, career research tries to understand at different analytic levels what happens when individuals travel through their professional lives. Over the past decades, there have been a number of informative overviews about career studies (see, for example, Arnold, 1997; Arthur, Hall & Lawrence, 1989b; Baruch, 2004; Becker & Strauss, 1956; Dalton, 1972; Glaser, 1968; Hall, 1987; Holland, 1973; Hughes, 1951; Ornstein & Isabella, 1993; Schein, 1980; Slocum, 1974; Super, 1957; Van Maanen, 1977).

More recently, two major benchmark books have provided a good opportunity to get an overall perspective on the field of career studies, and to determine what has been and what has not been studied.

Greenhaus and Callanan (2006) not only try to give a concise overview about key concepts and issues in career studies, but also look at cultural and international perspectives of careers. In particular they focus upon international careers and various forms of expatriation, the significance of culture and globalization for careers, and the role of multinational organizations. Gunz and Peiperl (2007) structure the field around three major themes—the individual, the context and the institution. Again, careers across cultures and global careers do play a major role. In addition to these more explicitly career-related studies, the whole field of expatriation with its link to human resource management (HRM) addresses numerous career issues, for example career aspirations, career patterns or career outcomes.

The works mentioned do address conceptual as well as methodological issues in the study of careers across national and cultural borders. In addition, there is a considerable body of research, in particular about international careers and expatriation, looking at drivers and effects of such individual careers (see, for example, Harrison, Shaffer & Bhaskar-Shrinivas, 2004; Mendenhall, Kühlmann, Stahl & Osland, 2002). Yet a closer look at these works also reveals a clear deficiency in two areas. First, there is a significant dearth of systematic comparative studies across different nation states and culture clusters looking at how core concepts of career studies play out in different parts of the world; in particular, what does career actually mean for individuals and how is career success conceptualized? Second, there is little if any systematic reflection of the issue of an ethnocentric and universalistic bias in career research.

Regarding the former, this lack of systematic empirical research beyond the notorious two- or three-country comparison (see, for example, the overview by Thomas & Inkson, 2007) is surprising. Cross-cultural and comparative research in general and areas closely related to career in particular such as comparative HRM or international business have a considerable history. Yet we lack sufficient insight into how country- and culture-related factors such as cultural norms, societal fabric or legal regulations shape individual career behavior and organizational career systems. Such an understanding is crucial—few would dispute that action at the individual and organizational level is strongly shaped by such factors. Existing calls for a more systematic inclusion of culture into various aspects of career research and practice (see, for example, Young, Marshall & Valach, 2007) remain largely unheard. Especially in industries or segments of the population heavily affected by globalization or doing business across national and/or cultural borders (as well as in world regions which are culturally and institutionally highly differentiated such as Europe; see Mayrhofer & Schneidhofer, 2009), more insight is needed into issues such as: conceptualizations of different aspects of careers in various countries and cultures; interplay between various contextual factors and consequences for career outcomes; and implications for HRM following from similarities and differences with regard to career.

Regarding a potential ethnocentric bias in career research, much current research seems firmly rooted in a universalist paradigm (in more detail see Brewster & Mayrhofer, 2011). In brief, it assumes that individuals and organizations ultimately are identical across the world and that there is one best way to manage them. Conversely, we argue that organizations and individuals are socially embedded in their external environment and affected by respective forces that require them to adapt their structures and behaviors to deal with their respective contexts. Context in this sense goes beyond the internal organizational context (e.g. organizational size) and includes the cultural (national culture and values) as well as the institutional (e.g. legal regulations or the respective industry) environment(s). Our view is more in line with the contextual position of HRM which searches for an overall understanding of what is contextu-ally unique and why it is different. It is focused on understanding what is distinctive between and within HRM in various contexts, and what the antecedents of those differences are. The policies and practices of “leading-edge” companies, often the focus of universalist HRM research, are of less interest than identifying ways that labor markets work and examining what the more typical organizations are doing. As a result, researchers increasingly acknowledge that HRM is one of the management subjects in which organizations are most likely to maintain a national flavor and have a strong contextual interface. This switches the focus from best practice to best fit, especially related to different contexts. For example, for Europe, arguably a continent with a high density of different cultural and institutional contexts, many studies reveal substantive differences between various aspects of HRM in European countries (e.g. Brewster, Mayrhofer & Morley, 2004; Morley, 2009).

Applied to career studies, this type of thinking challenges much of career research. Implicitly, most career studies do assume some universalist quality of what a career “is,” do regard the distinction between objective and subjective career success as a given and are on the lookout for universally applicable factors responsible for the development of careers and for career outcomes. Yet there is no convincing empirical or theoretical evidence that such implicit assumptions are conceptually sound or empirically robust.

Thus, a large part of our motivation in conducting our study was to find out for ourselves how careers are perceived both within and across varying national contexts, through the eyes of local career actors. In this way we could discover where generalizations are appropriate and where the local context(s) must be understood in order to adequately make sense of career understanding and behavior. Beyond our personal interest, this type of research strengthens the contextual perspective within career research and contributes to comparative career research, a line of inquiry very much in its infancy compared to other areas of research such as comparative HRM. Specifically, we pursue six questions in the book.

First, what is the role of culture for understanding careers? When considering contextual influences on careers, be it individual career behavior or organizational career decision making, culture is a primary candidate as the source for differe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Research Findings
• Part III Analysis
• Part IV Country Chapters
• Index