The return of the comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 connected us to a far distant past and future. By making the sweep of time and space visible in the heavens to the naked eye, it offered some measure and meaning of the vastness of time, and spoke of our lineage as human beings on our planet in space. In contrast, in the run-up to the new millennium, our apocalyptic vision was of the havoc to be wrought should computers fail to recognise the start of the year 2000, and no longer be able to translate the future into the present. Today's experiences of time are ‘increasingly instantaneous and glacial or evolutionary’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 9). While ‘glacial’ time ‘moves back out of immediate human history and forwards into a wholly unspecifiable future’ (p. 243), ‘the future is dissolving into the present’. It is within this context of ‘post-modern time’ (p. 243) that we have to view the future of career.

Revolutions in information, communications, transport, and other technologies are having a major impact on career. According to analysts of this age of ‘high modernity’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 4), of ‘the network society’ (Castells, 1996, p. 433), ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 2), and ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 124), they are also transforming the temporal and spatial dimensions of societies and of individual lives. Indeed, Giddens ‘has placed the analysis of time (and space) at the very heart of contemporary social theory’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 230).

This book has brought together authors from different countries, disciplines, traditions, and fields of practice to take a view of the future of career. From their different perspectives, they address various aspects of career, of what it is and has been. They point to actual and potential changes not only in career paths and patterns, and in individuals' experiences of career, but also in the construct and discourse of career, and consider issues for theory, practice, and policy arising from them. The book thus presents a kaleidoscopic view of career and its future. Implicitly, some chapters challenge others, interrogate others, or resonate with others. While the juxtaposition within this book of their differing angles and perspectives has the potential to stimulate new understandings of and questions about career, it also fragments and refracts any glimpse of its future they may afford. However, there are also common themes and issues running through the book. The challenge of this closing chapter is to celebrate these multiple interpretations, yet draw their various messages into a greater whole.

We open by highlighting the key themes of the book, and then set out to join-the-dots of our contributors' perspectives within a long-term view of the context of career. This enables us to draw out how career is multi-layered, and intertwined with other significant social constructs and processes, and to highlight the stakeholders in it, such as employers, individuals, and the career ‘industry’ as a whole. Having discussed some of the key issues for its stakeholders, we then propose a reframing of career that captures and makes sense of the issues raised in the book, and ways forward in the twenty-first century for those concerned with career.

Career has been a key notion in twentieth-century Western societies. Although ‘career’ is often used as a short-hand term for work histories and patterns, it has also served more significant purposes. Many in our complex and highly differentiated society use it to attribute coherence, continuity, and social meaning to their lives. By tying people to labour markets and employment in ways that are both personally meaningful and beneficial to work organisations and society, career is also part of the rhetoric that supports the ideologies of society and thereby contributes to its stability. Thus, the future of career has implications not only for individuals, including their personal identity and meaning, but also for groups and institutions, and for society itself.

Like so many words in the English language, ‘career’ is flexible and elastic, enabling it to adapt well to a variety of functions and contexts. This makes it a term of multi-layered richness and ambiguity, which is a ‘major source of its power’ (Watts, 1981, p. 214). As we shall discuss here and, indeed, encounter in the various chapters of this book, ‘career’ is used in various ways: as a concept, and as a construct in lay, professional, and academic discourses. It is the future of this overarching notion of career that is the subject of this book.

Whatever the specific context in, or function for which, career is used, to date it has involved a representation or construction of actions and events, and in some instances, the self, across time. Janus-like, career relates the past and present to the future, including our planning for and anticipation of the future, and also addresses how the future motivates action and the construction of meaning in the present.

The original idea for this chapter arose as I was reading the analysis of the genres of epic and novel by Bakhtin (1981), a major theorist of literature now regularly cited outside that field (for example Gergen, 1992; Jeffcutt, 1993; Potter, 1996; Shotter, 1992). What immediately struck me about Bakhtin's contrast between these two genres was that it could be used to illustrate the changing nature of career. Whereas, during most of the twentieth century, career had been like the traditional epic, it was becoming more like the (nineteenth-century) novel. However, in exploring these genres further, I came across the socio-historical approach to literature of Schlaffer (1989) and Moretti (1996), and this made me aware that these literary forms could perhaps have something even more significant to say about career.

Schlaffer (1989) adopts a ‘ “materialist” theory of aesthetic production’ (p. 5): while respecting the aesthetic individuality of an artistic work, he sees it as a manifestation of a historical problem, as the ‘embodiment of a social contradiction’ (p. 123). Comparing some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works, he concludes that their image of the hero made ‘visible the complex situation of the bourgeois age: the contradiction between the narrowness of its reality and the breadth of its consciousness’ (p. 15). Moretti (1996) takes a similar approach: literature ‘helps reduce [the] tension’ produced by the ‘ethical impediments, perceptual confusions, ideological contradictions’ arising from transformations in society (p. 6). He argues that what he calls the ‘modern epic’, with its digressions, polyphony, and polysemy, makes the tensions of modern, urban, and global experiences of the world more comprehensible and acceptable.