Fragmentation and Its Consequences

Fragmentation is by no means unique to the field of OMC studies in particular or the proto-field of career studies in general. For decades, influential figures in the field of management studies have been regularly pointing out the state of disarray of the field. As early as 1962, Koontz, for example, writes that

By 1984 not much has changed:

Pfeffer returns to the theme in Reference Pfeffer1993 in a paper setting out the benefits of paradigm development within a field, which he enumerates in considerable depth before turning to organization studies:

It does not stop there. Fast-forward twenty years to 2013, to find Shepherd and Challenger (Reference Shepherd and Challenger2013) writing about what they describe as the “paradigm wars” that still, they argue, sweep the field of management research. While observing that

A tacit assumption of many of these laments is that, ultimately, fragmentation is detrimental to the development of the field. Rather, it should be organized around a common paradigm, albeit acknowledging that the term is used in many different ways, at least twenty-one of which come from Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1970; critically and with more emphasis on gradual change: Lakatos, Reference Lakatos1984), the spiritus rector of the idea of science as developing along different paradigms and their revolutionary change, himself (Masterman, Reference Masterman, Lakatos and Musgrave1970).

However, there is a contrary view to that notion. Perhaps Van Maanen’s response to Pfeffer’s plea for more paradigmatic consensus within organization and management studies puts it most succinctly:

That said, favoring a plurality of viewpoints does not preclude an emphasis on the importance of mutual exchange and conversations across boundaries. Van Maanen recognizes that “it is pernicious and beside the point to suggest we stick to our own claustrophobic ways with each of us camped by our own totem pole. We need ways of talking across research programs and theoretical commitments” (Reference Van Maanen1995: 691). This theme is echoed by Czarniawska:

To sum up, in this chapter we are in territory that is familiar to anyone who has been following the progress of the field of management studies (and others; for a thoughtful analysis of similar issues in the field of management information systems, see Banville and Landry, Reference Banville and Landry1989). One set of voices points to the disorganization of the field and the harm that this does to scientific progress; another set argues that, even if it could be done, this would result in the field being put in a straitjacket with catastrophic loss of creativity. A third set of voices argues for an intermediate position between what Knudsen (Reference Knudsen2003) calls the “specialization” trap, in which all that happens is that researchers work unimaginatively on safe, established paradigms, and the “fragmentation” trap, in which new theories proliferate faster than anyone can evaluate or compare them. However, regardless of the position one takes in terms of the need or danger of a common paradigm, it seems to be a common denominator that conversation is needed between the fragmented parts of the field and beyond (Czarniawska, Reference Czarniawska1998). But what exactly is conversation, and how can it help?

Conversation as a Way Forward

We subscribe to the notion that scientific progress requires the free exchange of ideas, talking to each other across disciplinary, theoretical, methodical, methodological, epistemological, geographical, and ideological boundaries. Fragmentation is an obstacle to this, regardless of whether the ultimate goal is a unified paradigm or a field where a thousand flowers bloom. But is conversation, put forward by major voices (e.g. Arthur, Reference Arthur2008) as an important way of communicating across boundaries, a suitable candidate for this? We now address this question.

Conversation is a specific kind of communication. Three of its major characteristics important here (for a more general discussion on features of conversations, see, e.g. Thornbury and Slade, Reference Thornbury and Slade2006; Warren, Reference Warren2006) are (1) the need for establishing common ground, (2) the absence of predefined goals other than reaching understanding and strengthening social ties, and (3) the equal status of participants.

Ideal Types Facilitating Conversation

One of the benefits of examining the field of career studies through the SCF is that, as we show later in this chapter, it allows us to construct a number of ideal types of single career studies. These ideal types help career researchers see where the foci of studies are by simplifying their complexity. Ideal types experienced their breakthrough in the social sciences through the work of German sociologist Max Weber (Reference Weber1968 [Original 1922]: 190 ff.). The term is used in a variety of senses, but the one we use here is an idealized representation of a concept, of a kind that does not exist in the real world but that helps us make sense of that real world. It can be used to denote an abstraction of something that is empirically observable. So, for example, Barley (Reference Barley1996) describes how new models of work and of the relations of production allow us to construct new ideal-typical occupations:

More commonly, however, ideal types are used in connection with taxonomies of social constructs. Van de Ven, Ganco, and Hinings (Reference Van de Ven, Ganco and Hinings2013) list a number of ideal types from the literature, including March and Simon’s (Reference March and Simon1958) and Thompson’s (Reference Thompson1967) types of programs for organizing, Burns and Stalker’s (Reference Burns and Stalker1961) distinction between organic and mechanistic structures, Mintzberg’s (Reference Mintzberg1979) five organizational designs, and Miles and Snow’s (Reference Miles and Snow1978) types of organizational design (prospector, analyzer, defender, reactor). Nelson and Nielsen (Reference Nelson and Nielsen2000) describe three ideal types of inside counsel (lawyers employed by commercial operations, the types being cops, counsels, entrepreneurs); Swanson (Reference Swanson1999) distinguishes between two ideal types of corporate social interactions, value neglect and value attunement. Arguably, the rational decision-making model is another ideal type, one that has provided a useful straw person for decision theorists for many years.

Ideal types have been widely used in the career literature, too, to denote various kinds of career taxonomies. For example, Nicholson (Reference Nicholson1996) describes traditional and new paradigms of career as being ideal types because they have a

Similarly, King, Burke and Pemberton (Reference King, Burke and Pemberton2005: 982) talk about traditional and boundaryless careers as ideal types in the sense that “neither adequately captures the complex interaction between individual agency and structural constraints that circumscribes a person’s career”; Mayrhofer (Reference Mayrhofer2001) describes four ideal type organizational international career logics; Inkson et al. (Reference Inkson, Gunz, Ganesh and Roper2012) also consider describing the boundaryless career as an ideal type but dismiss the idea because the construct’s boundaries are too fuzzy.

It is important for present purposes to emphasize that the “ideal” in the term “ideal type” does not mean to imply desirability, as Weber himself wryly remarked in a letter to a colleague:

So the ideal types we list here do not describe specific forms of career scholarship as ideals against which all real career scholarship will emerge wanting and inadequate. Because the SCF talks in broad terms about condition, social space, and time, it is easy to draw the erroneous inference that an ideal type career research project would examine all aspects of the condition of the career actor, within a global and multifaceted social space, against a background of historic time approached in any way that time can be conceived of in a social setting. It would also be easy to draw the, again erroneous, inference that any career research that fails to address each of these in its fullness is inadequate. Of course, for practical reasons no single study can do that. Every researcher must make choices about what to focus on and what to leave out; otherwise nobody would ever get anything done. The ideal types serve here a different purpose, namely to help identify distinctions between different types of career scholarship in order, as we note previously, to facilitate conversation within and between them.

The ideal types we derive from the SCF emerge from the observation that although, as we argue, career scholarship involves the application of all three perspectives, not all such scholarship necessarily places equal emphasis on all three. Depending on the focus of any given topic area, studies within it are likely to place greater emphasis on only one or two of the perspectives. That is not to say that the other perspectives are ignored, but simply that they play a more background role. In rather the same way that Mintzberg (Reference Mintzberg1979) constructs a set of ideal types of organization based on the varying degree of emphasis the different types place on elements of his basic model of organization, we distinguish between three ideal typical forms of career research that we call focused, bivalent, and balanced. While in the following we will illustrate these ideal types with examples of single studies, they also can apply to larger discourses such as fields within career studies.

Focused

Focused career research concentrates primarily on one perspective of the SCF while placing lesser emphasis on the other two dimensions. Two examples at the level of individual studies may suffice. Career studies focusing on the link between personality and different types of career success are examples of focused career research emphasizing the ontic aspect of careers. While they vary in the importance they give to factors located in the social space and to the dimension of time in which careers are embedded, their primary interest lies in personality and/or factors closely linked with the person.

A well-cited piece by Seibert and Kraimer (Reference Seibert and Kraimer2001) examines the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and extrinsic as well as intrinsic career success, measured as promotion and salary, and career satisfaction, respectively. Their focus clearly is on the effects of the Big Five on career success. However, in controlling for what they call “other career related variables,” they acknowledge the importance of the other perspectives for their research interest. Indeed, they find, among other things, that the negative effect of agreeableness on salary was moderated by occupation, in SCF terms an element of the social space.

Arguably, the analysis by Hesketh (Reference Hesketh2000) looking at time-discounting principles in career-related choices and focusing on the temporal perspective also reflects this ideal type of focused career research. It speaks to the discussion about job choices and their anticipated future consequences, how individuals discount the value of a delayed outcome, and the role that time and probability information plays in career-related decisions. The two experimental studies in the paper look at choices related to student union fees and scholarships and at the differences in time discounting between career counseling novices and experts when giving advice about job options. Clearly, the interest is the temporal dimension, using the concrete issues – partly ontic, partly spatial – only as a vehicle.

Bivalent

Bivalent career research gives roughly equal weight to two perspectives and lesser emphasis to the third. A good example of putting a dual emphasis on the spatial and temporal aspects can be found in studies of career timetables (Lawrence, Reference Lawrence1984), examining the rate (temporal) at which people move through hierarchical levels within organizations or professions (spatial). This points to various forms of intra-organizational mobility analysis focusing on structural characteristics of the organization and career trajectories, a classical topic of career research.

A highly influential contribution by White (Reference White1970) looks at promotions from within and ponders the consequences of an internal promotion. He argues that the subsequent set of transitions is not a set of vacancies, but, in effect, is one single vacancy, triggered by the original job move, propagating through the organization. Developing mathematical models to analyze mobility within organizations and to measure vacancy chains, understood as chains of contingent events, he empirically demonstrates the relevance of his considerations by using data from three churches as organizational settings.

Focusing on the temporal and ontic aspect, a classic study by Staw et al. (Reference Staw, Bell and Clausen1986) argues for a more dispositional approach, explicitly countering calls for greater situationalism in organizational research. The study uses three waves of a longitudinal sample (Guidance Study, Berkeley Growth Study, Oakland Growth Study) coming from the Intergenerational Studies effort following individuals over a span of fifty years with five time periods under scrutiny (early adolescence, twelve to fourteen years; late adolescence, fifteen to eighteen years; and three adult periods more or less evenly distributed between thirty and fifty years of age). The study shows that dispositional measures predicted job attitudes over a span of fifty years and is an excellent example of a temporal/ontic study.

Balanced

Balanced career research gives roughly equal weight to all three perspectives of the SCF. While there might be – and often is – a primary focus, the other perspectives are prominently present and do play a major role in the design of studies and in explaining the findings. Again, two illustrations may suffice.

The widely cited study by Rosenbaum (Reference Rosenbaum1979b) analyzes intra-organizational mobility patterns in a large corporation. Covering a thirteen-year time span, this study builds two conflicting conceptual viewpoints: a basically ahistorical path independence model with contest and sponsored mobility and a tournament model that takes into account the historical, i.e. developments over time where careers are seen as a sequence of competition, with each competition having consequences for the next round, usually putting the winners and losers on different tracks from then on. From a spatial perspective, the organization and the various tournament rules provide the social context; the temporal perspective emphasizes the historical, path dependent quality – or the lack of it – of career trajectories; the ontic perspective emphasizes status, the prestige assigned to people based on their position and operationalized as level category that shows the linkages between the spatial and the ontic perspective.

Going beyond organization, Higgins (Reference Higgins2005) looks at the effects that career imprints have on the careers of these individuals. Imprints are the cumulative outcome of strategy, structure, and culture of employers for their executives’ connections, capabilities, cognition, and confidence. These career imprints, an ontic element, travel with the individuals across different contexts such as other firms or industries (spatial) and not only affect the career trajectories of the individuals over time (temporal) but can also have effects on other organizations or even whole industries, e.g. by transferring certain views or practices from one context to another.

Graphically, one can depict these ideal types as follows. The inner circle indicates that in all career studies, the three perspectives are present at least as a nucleus. The outer circle indicates where the actual emphasis lies (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Ideal types of career research

In principle, we could have specified seven rather than three ideal types: three focused ideal types, one for each perspective; three bivalent, one for each possible pairing of perspectives; and one balanced. However, loosely applying one version of Ockham’s razor – enough but not too much or, more precisely, numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate (plurality is never to be posited without necessity; Ockam, Reference Ockam1962: Book 1, page 391, column A, line 42 [Original 1495: Book 1, Dist. 27, Qu. 2, K]) – leads us to the three basic ideal types that serve best for our purpose, facilitating conversation in a fragmented field.

Up to now in this chapter we have identified the need for exchange across various boundaries of fragmented fields such as career studies. We have proposed that conversation with some of its major requirements and characteristics – establishing common ground, emphasis on mutual understanding and strengthening social ties rather than reaching predefined goals, and equal status of participants – is a suitable candidate for such an exchange and have outlined three ideal types of career research following from the SCF. We now show how the SCF supports different kinds of conversations. We start with conversations between interlocutors pursuing different research interests, using examples from the OMC field.

Establishing Common Ground

The three perspectives and the ideal types offer a conceptually founded view of seemingly very different activities, allowing participants to detect a new kind of order and common ground at a more abstract level beyond discussing research questions and objects, theories, and methods. Researchers getting into such a conversation can easily identify their relative emphases and basic interests and detect commonalities despite profound differences with regard to constructs, theories, and methods used. This can lead to a shared conceptual pact and situational model that provides the basis for exchange.

A good example of this is a stream of research examining the topic of personality and career success from the perspective of I/O psychology (Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller, Reference Judge, Kammeyer-Mueller, Gunz and Peiperl2007) and another one looking at occupational choice from the perspective of vocational psychology (Savickas, Reference Savickas, Gunz and Peiperl2007). Although the latter field is much broader than the former, in the sense that it also deals with the decision-making process that the individual goes through in making an occupational choice and the counseling interventions that can help this choice process, it is still fundamentally concerned with the same thing as the personality and career success field. Each attempts to predict career success on the basis of the career actor’s personality. Yet the way they conceptualize career success is markedly different. The OMC topic area linking personality and career success takes a clearly ontic perspective and uses dependent variables such as income or career satisfaction. In contrast, the vocational discussion emphasizes crossing spatial boundaries, in particular into specific vocations, and the individual–job fit. Consequently, they represent different ideal types, the OMC approach being ontic focused and the vocational ontic-spatial bivalent. The temporal does play a role, in the sense that career success is always subsequent to personality measurements, but it does not emerge as an issue of primary importance to either.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, out of the 147 unique references in total cited by the two chapters listed previously that appear in the same handbook (Gunz and Peiperl, Reference Gunz and Peiperl2007a), only one is common to both. In the face of this evidence, there does not seem to be much conversation between the two. A more detailed analysis using the SCF leads to a structured and analytically detached diagnosis suggesting why this might be the case, as we see next.

Leaving aside for the moment the different role that the spatial perspective plays in the two approaches, the ontic perspective provides the most obvious points of contrast between them. To oversimplify in order to make the point, conversation between these two is complicated by superficially similar but actually different applications of the ontic perspective. They are superficially similar in the sense that they are both interested in predicting career success from a knowledge of the actor’s personality. But the two literatures differ strikingly in the constructs that they use to examine the condition of career actors, i.e. how they conceptualize personality and career success.

Targeting personality, the personality/career success literature typically works with personality variables such as the five-factor model (FFM: Judge, Heller, and Mount, Reference Judge, Heller and Mount2002), proactive personality, agentic and communal orientation, and core self-evaluations such as locus of control, self-esteem, and self-confidence (Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller, Reference Judge, Kammeyer-Mueller, Gunz and Peiperl2007). The vocational literature employs a large variety of instruments based on varying approaches to establishing person–environment fit (Savickas, Reference Savickas, Gunz and Peiperl2007). Some assess the qualifications of the person for a particular job (complementary fit), while others assess their similarity to people who are doing the job (supplementary fit). Examples of these instruments include the Campbell Interest and Skills Survey, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the Kuder Occupational Interest Inventory (Savickas and Taber, Reference Savickas and Taber2006). Holland’s (Reference Holland1959) RIASEC model has become extremely influential in assessing both personality and positions in the vocational literature, and the instruments in common use now typically use its framework.

Turning to career success, the personality/career success literature normally uses standard constructs for viewing objective and subjective success (Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller, Reference Judge, Kammeyer-Mueller, Gunz and Peiperl2007). The most commonly used objective career success criteria are income, number of promotions, and occupational status, while subjective success is most often measured in terms of the actor’s satisfaction with their career (ibid.). The vocational literature, by contrast, as noted earlier, looks for person–environment fit: how well the person fits either with the requirements of the job or with other people doing it (Savickas, Reference Savickas, Gunz and Peiperl2007). In a 2013 review of the vocational field, for example, career success does not figure prominently in the topics of interest to vocational scholars and not at all in practice articles (Sampson et al., Reference Sampson, Hou, Kronholz, Dozier, McClain, Buzzetta, Pawley, Finklea, Peterson, Lenz, Reardon, Osborn, Hayden, Colvin and Kennelly2014).

To summarize, then, the SCF allows us to identify with some precision basic characteristics of a conversation between members of the topic area/field. On the one hand, the two we have been discussing here do indeed have a great deal in common. For each, their real interest lies in the ontic. In addition, their use of the ontic reflects the aims of the respective topic area/field. The conceptual pact, then, involves agreeing that each is interested broadly in personality and career success, and the conversation can then proceed by examining why each views these constructs as it does.

On the other hand, the SCF also helps us understand why such a conversation might be difficult. While they are both interested in the link between personality and different forms of career success, applying the SCF reveals that their operationalization of two features of the ontic perspective is incommensurable, that the words and concepts each topic area/field uses have different meanings, and that there is very little connection between them in this regard. By being able to see familiar “facts” in a new light through the SCF, it supplies additional grounds for the conceptual pact between interlocutors from the two areas/fields. Rather than asking the bland question of why is it that two sets of researchers working on similar aspects of careers have so little in common, the SCF provides a conceptual framework that leads the interlocutors to focus in a nonthreatening way on where they are different and what they have in common.

In a similar vein, the SCF can also help establish common ground in cases of more segregated fields of research. While the break between the personality/career success and vocational literatures is one of the more remarkable within career studies, that between OMC and life-course studies is, if anything, an even more remarkable example of a lack of conversation. Until recently, work on the life course went to considerable lengths to avoid the use of the term “career,” and when it did so it did it in a way that made it clear that life-course researchers regarded the career as a subset of the life course. For example, Volume I of the authoritative Handbook of the Life Course (Mortimer and Shanahan, Reference Mortimer and Shanahan2003a) has just one reference to “career” in its index, in which career is defined as “an individual’s sequence of jobs held across the socioeconomic life cycle” (Pallas, Reference Pallas, Mortimer and Shanahan2003: 167). Volume II (Shanahan, Mortimer, and Kirkpatrick Johnson, Reference Shanahan, Mortimer and Kirkpatrick Johnson2016) has many references to the term “career” throughout but almost no reference to the OMC literature. The life course, by contrast, is “the age-graded, socially-embedded sequence of roles that connect the phases of life” (Mortimer and Shanahan, Reference Mortimer, Shanahan, Mortimer and Shanahan2003b: xi). The two concepts are distinguished by the comparatively restricted sense in which life-course scholars appear to think of career:

Perhaps as a result, not only do life-course researchers hardly ever refer to the OMC literature (and many to the term “career”), but career researchers return the compliment by being, on the whole, oblivious of the life-course literature. For example, two major handbooks of career theory/studies (Gunz and Peiperl, Reference Gunz and Peiperl2007a; Arthur et al., Reference Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989b) identify the life course solely with life-course psychologists such as Levinson et al. (Reference Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson and McKee1978), who examined the stages of lives of men in the USA, or the developmental models of writers such as Alderfer (Reference Alderfer1972) or Vaillant (Reference Vaillant1977).

Yet a strong case could be made for the life-course field to be an excellent example of what we call here balanced career research. Elder, Johnson, and Crosnoe (Reference Elder, Johnson, Crosnoe, Mortimer and Shanahan2003: 10ff.) identify five “paradigmatic principles in life-course theory,” which map on to the SCF remarkably well (Table 6.1).

Indeed the life course as defined in the life-course literature resembles at its core the career as we define it in Chapter 3: quite simply, its canvas is the actor’s entire lifetime to date and all of the social and geographic space occupied by the actor during that time. So, to follow the logic of our argument in that chapter, “career” as typically conceived of particularly in the OMC literature is pretty much exactly as it is seen by life-course theorists: a subset of the life course, over a limited time (the time span where one is part of the workforce) and involving only that part of the social space occupied by the actor’s work roles, possibly extended to those (e.g. home life) that interfere with work roles.

Using the language of the SCF, we tend to see more clearly why life-course scholars show little interest in the careers literature: they seem to see it as unduly constrained in its application of the three perspectives. It also explains why career scholars apparently show little interest in the life-course literature. The life-course literature talks about things – early childhood, disadvantaged or unemployed people – who are outside the temporal zone or social space defined by the conventional (post-Chicago) careers literature (see later in this chapter for a fuller account of what we mean by post-Chicago). Yet the temporal zone of interest to careers scholars is creeping forward in time, now encompassing, for example, retirement (Sargent, Lee, Martin, and Zikic, Reference Sargent, Lee, Martin and Zikic2013) or interest in work-life balance (Williams, Berdahl, and Vandello, Reference Williams, Berdahl and Vandello2016). So the intellectual boundaries that career scholars work with are becoming more permeable than previously, suggesting that they may well find conversation with life-course scholars profitable. If only, that is, the conversation could be established.

For this to happen, a conceptual pact needs to be established, and the SCF-based analysis we have just conducted makes it obvious what that pact should be. By framing both fields in terms of the three perspectives, the interlocutors establish conceptual agreement about what it is that they do: each applies the three perspectives to the study of people, but one (life course) has a broader definition than the other (career) of the social space and time that are of interest. So the life-course scholar may help the career scholar by suggesting additional constructs that might be of use in understanding what is going on, while the career scholar might help the life-course scholar by providing more detail about the constructs that the life-course scholar is trying to apply, particularly those to do with organizations.

Overall, the theme connecting our examples with regard to the role of the SCF in establishing common ground can be summarized as follows. In order to establish conversation between career scholars working in different fields of a fragmented proto-field (Chapter 1) or between scholars working in ostensibly different fields that have a great deal in common, it is necessary to establish a conceptual pact between interlocutors. The SCF provides an approach to doing this by offering a way of moving to a more abstract level so that the particularities of each topic area or field’s discourse cease to be an obstacle to communication. That is not to say that everyone needs to abandon their normal way of describing the concepts and constructs with which they work. But by mapping the concepts and constructs on to the SCF perspectives, they can establish the common ground – the conceptual pact – that helps connect their conceptual framework with that of their interlocutor.

Emphasizing Understanding, Evenhandedness, and Social Ties

Beyond establishing common ground, the SCF also pushes conversations between researchers with an interest in various ideal types of career research toward understanding the ideas of others. As a broad heuristic framework, the SCF neither requires nor allows one to judge specific studies to be better or worse than others. Rather, it helps participants in such a conversation to establish a common frame for description and clarification of what they do, thus generating the possibility of mutual understanding. This explicitly discourages the standard academic game of deploring other research only because it either emphasizes different perspectives or uses different constructs and operationalizations within the same perspective or ideal types. Rather, it provides generic categories for mutual, descriptive exchange. There is not per se a right/wrong or better/worse way of exploring the relative emphases of the three perspectives. The joint search concentrates on descriptive information and, hopefully, mutual understanding of what the other does and deems important.

Take the example of two researchers with a clearly bivalent career research interest. Let us assume one is a member of the Cross-Cultural Collaboration on Contemporary Careers (5C; www.5C.careers) looking at the role of various contextual settings differentiated by cultural and institutional characteristics for careers and pointing toward a qualitative eleven-country study (Shen et al., Reference Shen, Demel, Unite, Briscoe, Hall, Chudzikowski, Mayrhofer, Abdul-Ghani, Bogicevic Milikic, Colorado, Fei, Las Heras, Ogliastri, Pazy, Poon, Shefer, Taniguchi and Zikic2015a) that shows how different contexts bring forth differences in what individuals view as career success and how this relates to organizational HRM policies and practices. Its emphasis, then, is clearly ontic-spatial. The other belongs to a group investigating the relationship between general mental ability (GMA), human capital, and career success. She admires a study that draws on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, covers a time span of twenty-eight years, follows the development of individuals based on yearly (1979–1994) or biannual (from 1995 onward) interviews, and proposes a crucial role for GMA in the form of more intelligent individuals not only reaching higher levels of extrinsic career success by getting earlier promotions but also achieving steeper career success trajectories that, in turn, constitute the basis for a self-reinforcing cycle where skills are amplified and contribute to greater career success (Judge et al., Reference Judge, Klinger and Simon2010). The emphasis of this work is evidently ontic-temporal.

In such a situation, it is not uncommon for academic conversations to head toward a contagious self-enhancing exchange bordering on boasting and openly or tacitly leading to an evaluative, implicitly or explicitly judgmental comparison along the lines of academic superiority and astuteness. Sample sizes, sophistication of methods of analysis, publication channels, and reputation of coauthors fuel a debate that, sooner or later, is likely to end in an implicit “winner-loser” division between the participants in the exchange. This is clearly less likely to happen within the realm of the SCF. As a framework, it does not qualify very well for a conversational turn toward “winning-losing.” Within the SCF, it is hard to imagine building a credible claim that “ontic-spatial,” as is the case with 5C, is a better form of bivalent research than the “ontic-temporal” emphasis of the study on general mental ability. The SCF also does not imply that one of these bivalent approaches or even balanced studies constitute the “ultimate coronation” of career research. Sure enough, these claims can be made. But they have to come from outside the SCF and require additional arguments, assumptions and – often implicit – value judgments. At its core, the SCF invites systematically guided inquiry to better understand what the other does, to dig deeper and to get a better map about the respective efforts with regard to condition, boundary, and time on different levels of social complexity.

Focusing on understanding rather than proving one’s own superiority and being relaxed about various kinds of outcomes of the conversation also shifts the focus toward the personal relationship. Not only are such an exchange and its tacit evenhandedness compatible with the rhetoric of science being a joint effort of equals. They also at least implicitly convey the basic notions of esteem and acceptance. “Here we are, two professionals interested in partly similar, partly different aspects of careers, having an informed conversation detecting commonalities and differences while referring to a framework that constitutes a starting point for common ground, generic enough to capture our views and classify our emphases while not in itself promoting better/worse or right/wrong judgments” – this or a similar inner image of individuals participating in such a conversation has the potential to strengthen social ties by providing commonalities and strengthening self-esteem.

The Chicago School

It has been suggested that the current field of career studies has its roots in three intellectual traditions coming from, respectively, sociology, vocational psychology, and developmental psychology (Moore et al., Reference Moore, Gunz, Hall, Gunz and Peiperl2007). These differing traditions have left their mark on the field, most notably in what is sometimes described as the almost unbridged gulf between organizational and vocational career studies to which we refer in Chapter 1 (Collin and Patton, Reference Collin and Patton2009). The story we shall be telling here, which we acknowledge is a partial one leaving out a lot of interesting threads, focuses on the seminal role of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) school in the 1970s. It ignores career research happening elsewhere in the USA, most notably at Cornell (Vardi, Reference Vardi2006; Dyer, Reference Dyer1976), and outside North America (for one national example, Germany, see, e.g. Domsch and Gerpott, Reference Domsch and Gerpott1986; Gerpott, Domsch, and Keller, Reference Gerpott, Domsch and Keller1986; Berthel and Koch, Reference Berthel and Koch1985; Eckardstein, Reference Eckardstein1971). In order to do so, we need to take one further step back in time to examine another school of thought, coming from the Chicago Department of Sociology, that plays a key role in the way that the MIT group’s ideas developed (Barley, Reference Barley, Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989).

The 1930s were a difficult time in both Europe and North America, both economically and politically. They also saw the rise of large industrial bureaucracies on both sides of the Atlantic and, with that trend, an increase in the number of people making their careers in these bureaucracies (Hughes, Reference Hughes1937). The sociologist Everett C. Hughes returned to his PhD alma mater, the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, in 1938, where there was a tradition of producing “ethnographies of deviant subcultures based on the life histories of people who partook of the subculture. Notable among these were Anderson’s (Reference Anderson1923) study of hobo life, Cressey’s (Reference Cressey1932) description of taxi-dance halls, and Sutherland’s (Reference Sutherland1937) work on professional thieves” (Barley, Reference Barley, Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989: 43). Hughes, as a student of his mentor, Robert E. Park (whom he quoted “all the time” to his students; Becker, Reference Becker1999: 7), developed his interest in the effect on the person of moving through and between what he termed “institutional offices” (Hughes, Reference Hughes1937). The so-called “Chicago school,” a term much criticized by one of its members, Howard S. Becker, who tells the story (Becker, Reference Becker1999) of a typical academic department in which colleagues are at loggerheads about their various theoretical and methodological approaches, produced a long stream of research on careers, where the career is seen as encompassing the person’s entire life (as we note in Chapter 3).

In SCF terms, it is a classic example of balanced research. The ethnography is rich, describing the people, their contexts, and the stages through which their careers progress. As we see in Chapter 2, Hughes views careers both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively and from an ontic perspective, the Chicago sociologists are interested in the meanings that the people they study attribute to their careers (Barley, Reference Barley, Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989). Objectively and spatially, they are interested in the institutional forms in which their subjects make their careers and how they move through these forms. And temporally, they are fascinated by the stages through which their subjects pass as their careers progress (perhaps the best-known of these studies being Roth, Reference Roth1963); the concept of status passage (Glaser and Strauss, Reference Glaser and Strauss1971) is central to their thinking.

1960s and 1970s: The Age of the Organization

1980s: A Period of Transition

The 1980s began on an uncertain note. The USSR became bogged down in Afghanistan in much the same way that the Americans got bogged down in Vietnam some ten or more years earlier. The Iran-Iraq war continued inconclusively but at hideous cost in human lives. The USA’s President Carter continued to lose face as a result of a failed attempt to rescue hostages from the US embassy in Tehran. The post-Mao confusion in China carried on with the prosecution of the “Gang of Four” who had attempted to succeed Mao. A global recession set in during the late 1970s.

The uncertainties and strife of the 1970s led to sweeping changes to the government of a number of countries, many moving to the political right. Margaret Thatcher’s government achieved power in the UK at the end of the decade after a disastrous series of public sector strikes accompanied by worrying levels of stagflation. Ronald Reagan was elected as President of the USA and raised the temperature of US Cold War rhetoric against the Soviet Union. The global recession eased, led by the USA, which was hailed as a victory for supply-side economics. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev became a member of the USSR Politburo, and Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, began to win advances for the workers he represented. Indira Gandhi and Anwar Sadat were assassinated by ethnic and religious insurgents. Following a series of short-lived leaders, Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and attempted to warm relations with the West as well as to open up to greater visibility (“glasnost”) and restructure (“perestroika”) the government of his country. Economic and political change began to sweep through Eastern European countries, and the decade ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc as an economic, political, and military entity, amid extraordinary political change in Europe.

At the same time, globalization became much more evident. For example, Di Giovanni, Gottselig, Jaumotte, Ricci, and Tokarick (Reference Di Giovanni, Gottselig, Jaumotte, Ricci and Tokarick2008) pointed toward increases in:

• The value of trade (goods and services) as a percentage of world GDP … from 42.1 percent in 1980 to 62.1 percent in 2007.

• Foreign direct investment … from 6.5 percent of world GDP in 1980 to 31.8 percent in 2006.

• The stock of international claims (primarily bank loans), as a percentage of world GDP, … from roughly 10 percent in 1980 to 48 percent in 2006.

• The number of minutes spent on cross-border telephone calls, on a per-capita basis, … from 7.3 in 1991 to 28.8 in 2006.

• The number of foreign workers … from 78 million people (2.4 percent of the world population) in 1965 to 191 million people (3.0 percent of the world population) in 2005.

These massive changes were accompanied by the gradual abandonment of the conglomerate corporate structure (the account that follows draws on Davis, Diekmann, and Tinsley, Reference Davis, Diekmann and Tinsley1994). Conglomerates, in the form that dominated much of the latter part of the twentieth century in the USA, were the result of anti-trust legislation of the mid-century (particularly the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950). Because the ability of corporations to grow by buying firms to support horizontal and vertical integration thus became curtailed, the firms sought other methods of growth and hit on the conglomerate – a corporation consisting of businesses that have little if any relationship with each other – as the solution. The concept is that of the firm-as-portfolio (Fligstein, Reference Fligstein, Powell and DiMaggio1991), in which the head office acts “as an internal capital market, allocating resources among the units” (Davis et al., Reference Davis, Diekmann and Tinsley1994: 552). By the early 1980s the conglomerate form dominated the USA’s large corporations. “Only about 25 percent of the 1980 Fortune 500 operated exclusively in a single 2-digit SIC industry, while over half operated in three or more” (Davis et al., Reference Davis, Diekmann and Tinsley1994: 553). But also by the beginning of the 1980s, it had become evident to anyone who looked at the numbers that, at least in terms of stock market valuation, the concept was a failure: conglomerates were typically worth less than their component parts would be separately. This led to an industry of “bust-up takeovers,” aided by a change in policy by the US federal government that “reduced the barriers to acquisition in the same industry” (ibid.: 554). These takeovers, often financed by junk bonds that were repaid with the proceeds of the breakup sales, argue Davis et al. (Reference Davis, Diekmann and Tinsley1994: 549), over time had a radical impact on the way that organizational boundaries were viewed:

In the mid-1980s, business process reengineering was presented as a rational solution to the problems of organizing (Kleiner, Reference Kleiner2000). Neoliberal thinking in public policy was reflected in a growth in interest in transaction cost economics (Williamson, Reference Williamson1975) and the firm as the outcome of decisions to minimize these costs. Organization theorists were changing the level of their analysis from the organization itself to populations of organizations. Two themes emerge in the literature, one based on population ecology (Hannan and Freeman, Reference Hannan and Freeman1977) and the other on neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1983). If anything connects these disparate initiatives, it is the notion of organizations as the product of their circumstances: the cost of their transactions, the nature of the ecological niche they occupy, or the mimetic forces to which they are subject.

Research within the OMC field delved into these changing organizational structures and processes that provide the context for, particularly, managerial careers. There was interest in, among many other topics, career exploration (Greenhaus and Sklarew, Reference Greenhaus and Sklarew1981), the nature of work role transitions (Nicholson, Reference Nicholson1984; Louis, Reference Louis1980a), the structure of internal labor markets and what causes them to function as they do (Gunz, Reference Gunz1989a; DiPrete, Reference DiPrete1987; Forbes, Reference Forbes1987; Baron, Davis-Blake, and Bielby, Reference Baron, Davis-Blake and Bielby1986; Lawrence, Reference Lawrence1984; Anderson, Milkovich, and Tsui, Reference Anderson, Milkovich and Tsui1981; Grandjean, Reference Grandjean1981; Jacobs, Reference Jacobs1981; Stumpf and London, Reference Stumpf and London1981; Rosenbaum, Reference Rosenbaum1979a) and how they relate to corporate performance (Feldman, Reference Feldman1988; Sonnenfeld and Peiperl, Reference Sonnenfeld and Peiperl1988; Pfeffer and Davis-Blake, Reference Pfeffer and Davis-Blake1986; Gupta and Govindarajan, Reference Gupta and Govindarajan1984; Szilagyi and Schweiger, Reference Szilagyi and Schweiger1984; Scholl, Reference Scholl1983; Brown, Reference Brown1982; Snow and Hrebiniak, Reference Snow and Hrebiniak1980), organizational demography (Stewman, Reference Stewman1986; Wagner, Pfeffer, and O’Reilly, Reference Wagner, Pfeffer and O’Reilly1984, McCain, O’Reilly, and Pfeffer, Reference McCain, O’Reilly and Pfeffer1983), the backgrounds of CEOs (Useem and Karabel, Reference Useem and Karabel1986; Kerin, Reference Kerin1981; Lee, Reference Lee1981), mobility and the structure of managerial careers (Nicholson and West, Reference Nicholson and West1988; Kanter, Reference Kanter and Osterman1984; Veiga, Reference Veiga1983; Poole, Mansfield, Blyton, and Frost, Reference Poole, Mansfield, Blyton and Frost1981), and mentorship (Kram, Reference Kram1985; Hunt and Michael, Reference Hunt and Michael1983).

If there is a theme linking these approaches to OMC, it is that the organization remains as a critical contextual factor. It is not that careers are seen as remaining within organizations exclusively, let alone that they take place within a single organization, a myth that seems to have grown up as part of the OMC discourse during the next period we examine. It is simply that organizations, although partly changed in comparison to the 1970s, still provide a major context for careers and that OMC researchers are interested in exploring the implications of this observation. There is therefore a strongly spatial element to the work reflecting the equally strong structural element to organization theory of the period, although the ontic, as represented for example by the growing interest in career exploration and mentorship, is becoming evident. The temporal is present in the work of, for example, Lawrence’s (Reference Lawrence1984) study of age grading, the dynamic modeling of Stewman and Konda (Reference Stewman and Konda1983), and continuing surveys of managerial careers (e.g. Nicholson and West, Reference Nicholson and West1988), but it does not play quite such a strong role as it did in the 1960s and ’70s because of the strong structural interest of career researchers during this period.

At the same time, there is consciousness growing of the existence of OMC as a field. Works begin to appear developing the theme that there is a theoretical foundation for the study of careers (Collin and Young, Reference Collin and Young1986; Sonnenfeld and Kotter, Reference Sonnenfeld and Kotter1982). This culminates in the 1989 Handbook of Career Theory (Arthur et al., Reference Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989b), an influential work that declares: “In a word (or two), career theory has ‘gone legitimate.’ We (people who study careers) have become established. We have become a field” (Arthur et al., Reference Arthur, Hall, Lawrence, Arthur, Hall and Lawrence1989c: xv; emphasis in the original). The volume is both retrospective and prospective, summarizing the achievements of the field but also speculating on the directions in which it could move. It provides both a focus and a rallying point for the field to gather around and grow from.

1990 to Date: Boundarylessness and Beyond

The beginning of the 1990s marked a significant transition in the way that the North American and European worlds viewed national boundaries and hegemonies. It was a period of imperial transition that was close to home, as opposed to that of the dissolution of the European empires that had, by and large, affected only people in distant countries whom the imperialists had spent a century or two subjugating and exploiting. The Soviet empire collapsed at the turn of the decade, upsetting a great many assumptions about how national boundaries work in Central and Eastern Europe and removing the USA’s Cold War enemy. The Treaty of Maastricht, forming the European Union (EU), was ratified in 1992–1993 by the then twelve member states of the EU. The entire decade witnessed the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and a brutal war between its ethnic groups. The rise of Islamism as a major international force began coming into focus with the Iranian revolution at the end of the 1970s and continued through the ascendency of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile another great rearranger of boundaries, the World Wide Web, began unobtrusively in a CERN office in 1989 and started becoming a factor in people’s thinking with the release of the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, in 1993.

This turbulence in international boundaries was reflected in parallel changes in the business world. In the early 1990s, a new rhetoric was becoming evident in managerial discourse in the USA; new, that is, to anyone who had not read Burns and Stalker’s (Reference Burns and Stalker1961) work on the organic organizational form:

This, it was argued, had an impact on corporate forms:

The upshot, argue Davis et al., was a new rhetoric of boundarylessness, citing two examples of how it was being written about in the business press:

Ironically, as Davis et al. put it, the one remaining large US corporation that continued to operate as a conglomerate, General Electric, also started using this rhetoric. Arguably, its CEO Jack Welch became the leading proponent of the so-called boundaryless organization. In a widely cited manifesto for boundarylessness, Welch writes:

The Academy of Management got swept up in this fevered atmosphere and dedicated its 1993 annual meeting to “Managing the Boundaryless Organization.” This provided the stimulus for Michael Arthur and Robert DeFillippi to organize a symposium at the meeting on the topic of what they labeled the boundaryless career, which led in turn to a journal special issue (Arthur, Reference Arthur1994) and, subsequently, an influential edited book in which many authors expand on the idea (Arthur and Rousseau, Reference Arthur and Rousseau1996a). While not rejecting the influence of organization on career, the boundaryless career is presented as the outcome of changes to employment practices, themselves the consequences of the changes to corporate structures including those that we have just been reviewing as well as the substantial changes happening to careers in Western economies as a result of globalization of business operations, including increasing offshoring (Feldman and Ng, Reference Feldman and Ng2007). The boundaryless career is presented as “the opposite of ‘organizational careers’ – careers conceived to unfold in a single organizational setting” (Arthur and Rousseau, Reference Arthur, Rousseau, Arthur and Rousseau1996c: 5).

In a thoughtful retrospective and prospective article on the boundaryless career, Arthur (Reference Arthur2014) points out that the definition of career we cite in Chapter 3 from Van Maanen and Schein (Reference Van Maanen, Schein, Hackman and Suttle1977: 31), namely “a series of separate but related experiences and adventures through which a person passes during a lifetime,” says nothing about organization despite the fact that the MIT school is very well known (as we, too, note earlier) for its work on organizational careers. So boundarylessness was not a new concept in 1996 despite the focus in the careers literature during the 1970 and ’80s on organizational careers. But the appearance of the boundarylessness concept nevertheless had a profound effect on the rhetoric of the careers field. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, and despite the occasional skeptical voice being raised to question the extent to which careers had indeed become boundaryless (e.g. Jacoby, Reference Jacoby1999), it became almost de rigueur to begin any paper with a reference to “today’s boundaryless world” or the equivalent, albeit with its critics (e.g. Inkson et al., Reference Inkson, Gunz, Ganesh and Roper2012; Rodrigues and Guest, Reference Rodrigues and Guest2010). Mobility, both geographic and interorganizational, became an important theme in the careers literature (Feldman and Ng, Reference Feldman and Ng2007), but so did employability (De Vos, De Hauw, and Van der Heijden, Reference De Vos, De Hauw and Van der Heijden2011), identity (Arthur, Reference Arthur2014), and psychological mobility (“the perception of the capacity to make transitions”; Sullivan and Arthur, Reference Sullivan and Arthur2006: 21). At the same time Hall’s protean career, introduced in his Reference Hall1976 book (Hall, Reference Hall1976), enjoyed a resurgence. Although Hall was critical of the extent to which people muddled the boundaryless and protean concepts (Briscoe and Hall, Reference Briscoe and Hall2006), the two concepts clearly share a sense of agency and self-reinvention that was consonant with the zeitgeist. At the same time, a considerable amount of research was published on mentorship, a concept that has a strong temporal basis in early work such as Kram’s (Reference Kram1983) process model but that, in the 1990s and 2000s, tended to focus much more on what makes for a successful mentoring relationship (Chandler, Kram, and Yip, Reference Chandler, Kram and Yip2011), giving it more of a contemporary agentic flavor.

So although it would be easy to identify the driving force behind these changes as spatial – mobility within and between organizations implies an interest of some kind in social and geographic space, and indeed the very term “boundaryless” implies spatiality, while mentorship involves working across and crossing organizational boundaries – it is clear that this period is also marked by a strong interest in the ontic perspective.

Another indication of the ontic emphasis can be seen in the difficulty structural approaches had in gaining a foothold in the OMC field. Attempts to interest careers scholars in the structural forces behind careers did not meet with a great deal of success, for example, those that connect career, structures, and strategy (e.g. Higgins and Dillon, Reference Higgins, Dillon, Gunz and Peiperl2007; Higgins, Reference Higgins2005; Gunz and Jalland, Reference Gunz and Jalland1996; Sonnenfeld and Peiperl, Reference Sonnenfeld and Peiperl1988). This approach had more luck outside the careers field (e.g. Dokko and Gaba, Reference Dokko and Gaba2012; Broschak, Reference Broschak2004; Burton, Sorensen, and Beckman, Reference Burton, Sorensen, Beckman, Lounsbury and Ventresca2002; Sorensen, Reference Sorensen1999; Boeker, Reference Boeker1997; Haveman and Cohen, Reference Haveman and Cohen1994). Another approach involved attempts to bring grand sociological theory to the careers table (e.g. Mayrhofer, Meyer, Steyrer, and Langer, Reference Mayrhofer, Meyer, Steyrer and Langer2007b; Iellatchitch et al., Reference Iellatchitch, Mayrhofer and Meyer2003), but again it does not appear to hit the careers mainstream.

Career research from this period, then, has a spatial feel to it coming from writing on boundarylessness but is fundamentally ontic: it is about people, their reactions to the “boundaryless world,” their beliefs about their mobility, and the people (mentors) who might be able to help them. The temporal perspective, despite its centrality to the mentorship concept, is, with a few exceptions (e.g. Koch et al., Reference Koch, Forgues and Monties2016; Bidwell and Mollick, Reference Bidwell and Mollick2015; Kattenbach et al., Reference Kattenbach, Schneidhofer, Lücke, Latzke, Loacker, Schramm and Mayrhofer2014; Schneidhofer, Schiffinger, and Mayrhofer, Reference Schneidhofer, Schiffinger and Mayrhofer2012; Bidwell and Briscoe, Reference Bidwell and Briscoe2010) surprisingly absent, at least in part because longitudinal research is both too expensive and risky for junior faculty trying to establish a foothold in the academic world.

The OMC Field’s History: Conclusion

We broadly summarize the story we have been telling in Figure 6.2. The story is one of increased focus: of starting with a balanced approach to studying careers, moving to a bivalent one in which the temporal perspective takes something of a back seat, ending up with a more focused approach on the ontic, not, of course, to the complete neglect of the other two perspectives.

Figure 6.2 Development of the OMC field

The progressive change of emphasis is intriguing. The first, Chicago, period is clearly the outcome of a particular group of scholars trained to do a particular kind of research, namely very detailed ethnographic studies of particular populations. It resulted in a rich approach to studying careers that has rarely been emulated since. As time moves forward to the 1960s and 1970s, we see the influence of advances in organization theory and a growing interest in developing theories of career that reflect these advances. Organizations become objects of considerable interest, and career theorists in turn become interested in organizations as major influences on careers. Through the 1980s, the world of organizations moves into a period of turbulence that lasts for quite some time. Initially it has little effect on career research, which continues to concentrate on organizations as the primary home for careers, although interest in the temporal perspective begins to wane. This trend continues into the last of our four periods, during which the emphasis in the world of practitioners on boundarylessness appears to cause career researchers to lose interest in the social space within which careers are made. Somehow, many writers interpret boundarylessness as meaning an irrelevance of boundaries rather than careers involving boundary-crossing as those who introduced the concept intended. In addition, interest in the temporal perspective diminishes. We have come a long way from Hughes and his Chicago sociologists.

What are we to make of this gradual focusing of research in the OMC field? Does it, for example, reflect the unsurprising focus of OMC research within business schools as opposed to, for example, sociology departments? After all, in business schools, particularly North American ones, psychology is more commonly represented than sociology or anthropology among the faculty who study people. And is it in part a reflection of the nature of academic careers now, which, because of the need for young scholars to rapidly build up their CV with publications in “good” journals and the increasing scarcity of research funds, makes field research that is more complex than questionnaire studies of their students, let alone longitudinal research, increasingly risky and unaffordable (Miller, Taylor, and Bedeian, Reference Miller, Taylor and Bedeian2011; De Rond and Miller, Reference De Rond and Miller2005)?

These speculations are just that: speculations. But the difference between the focused research of the 1990s and beyond and the more balanced research of earlier years speaks to the difficulty of learning from the past. It also speaks to why it might be that Schein notes such a striking disconnect between the career research that originated in the 1950s and that was picked up by the MIT school he was part of, and that of more recent times: