There is a comparison between the ritual way major life stages are negotiated in small-scale societies and our own poverty of effective rites of passage – Western culture is lacking in effective mechanisms for socialization.
Colin Turnbull 1984Entering into a trade, marrying, growing old and aging, are also celebrated … after the phrase of Van Gennep, they have come to be called rites of passage, rites of transition.
Everett Cherrington Hughes, 1958In essence, a work career can be conceptualized as a series of transitions from one role to another within an organizational or occupational social system (Barley, Chapter 3; Hall, 1976). The fact that work careers are comprised of sequences of roles is often obscured by alternative conceptualizations that emphasize career's more unitary connotations as a calling, vocation, or professional pursuit. Yet, if we take seriously the idea that a career consists of a sequence of roles, the question of just how the transitions between these roles are accomplished takes on an importance in its own right. Indeed, the study of the social and psychological mechanisms that enable individuals to transit across roles proves to be quite a critical area of investigation.
Hence, this chapter suggests that the role transitions encompassed by work careers, these “turning points” (Hughes, 1958:11), are central to careers and that they pose crucial problems to anyone seriously interested in understanding how careers work. An anthropological model known as rites of passage [Van Gennep, 1960, (1909)] is used to show that major transitions are managed ceremonially across three universal stages of separation, transition, and integration.