The field of career theory was established in the 1970s as a trans-disciplinary research program, which drew its main influences from management and organisational studies and social psychology. The established definition of what constitutes the field’s object is that a career is
“the unfolding sequence of a person’s work experience over time” (Arthur et al. 1989: 8; Arthur et al. 2005: 178). While this minimal definition has survived since the mid-twentieth century beginnings of the field, the nature of careers and the perspectives on them has changed significantly since.
The stance of traditional career research was informed by the social and economic conditions pervasive in the industrial capitalism of Western countries during the middle decades of the twentieth century. This era was characterised by low rates of unemployment, a dominance of the manufacturing industry with regulated and stable employment relations, and income levels allowing for a “male-breadwinner-model” of family income, i.e., salaries high enough to not only sustain the worker, but also his (traditionally gendered) spouse and children. In this context, a specific institutionalisation of the life course developed, based on a certain normative model of biography (Heinz 2005: 187f): for men, it was the norm to follow the life course of education (youth) – work (adulthood) – retirement (old age), centred on the world of work (Kohli 1986), whereas for women the normative sequence to follow was education – employment – mother and homemaker – employment (Born et al. 1996), with the focus on family and domestic life.
The normative bearing of these idealised life courses was born out of the relative stability of cultural values, norms and social structures in the middle of the twentieth century. This is reflected not only in the gender norms underlying these separate model biographies, but also in distinct markers of age, status, and transitional points in the course of a career (Heinz 2005:
187). A major factor for this stability was the corporatist arrangement, in which the stable workplace relations allowed for single firms and organisations to occupy a central role in the working life of their employees. The main object of study for career theory therefore was
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initially the progression of an individual through positions in an organisation. In consequence, the majority of the literature on careers focuses on the organisation and the individual as the sole two elements of interest when studying careers, whose interaction in turn yields two defining viewpoints: from the perspective of the organisation, the decisive question in the study of careers is how to find the “right” individual for a specific position, whereas studies focusing on the individual try to answer questions about what the required attributes of individuals are to attain certain positions, or how “career success” in its various definitions can be achieved.
Both views, the former most prominent in literature on management and personnel development, the latter mainly in psychological literature, ultimately find careers to be determined by either organisational decisions or individual traits and aspirations (Peiperl and Gunz 2007).
A paradigmatic example for the traditional approach is Edgar Schein’s (1971) organisational career model. At the centre of this model lies a conception of the firm as a functionally differentiated, hierarchical entity, represented in the shape of a cone (Figure 6.1).
In this model, the career paths of individuals can progress in three independent dimensions:
vertically, along increasing ranks of authority, horizontally, across different areas of specialisation or departments, and radially, corresponding to the notion of “centrality” within the organisation, i.e., whether the individual belongs to the “in-group” within the organisation, to be included in important communications and decisions, or not. Corresponding to the types of movement, the structure of the organisations is defined by three types of boundaries:
hierarchical boundaries separating levels of authority, inclusion boundaries separating degrees of centrality, and functional boundaries between specialised sections or departments. For the classical analysis of careers, the filters of these boundaries form the central point of interest, as the criteria which allow an individual to cross these boundaries hold crucial information about how an organisation is functioning, and how individuals and the organisation interact.
Crucially, the crossing of these boundaries is thought to be guided by rational criteria, which the organisation applies to an internal pool of possible applicants, i.e. an internal labour market.
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Figure 5-1: A three-dimensional model of an organisation (Schein 1971: 404)
The corresponding concept of the individual in Schein’s model is built around the assumptions of role theory. The psychological structure of the person in question may contain various traits of beneficial or detrimental effect to one’s career. Their effect is however mitigated through the socialisation into and acculturation to the function a person fulfils (or aims to fulfil) within the organisation. While the “deep structure” of personality, talents, and traits is seen to indeed influence the aptitude for specific positions, careers are seen as an effect of people’s ability to adapt to certain demands an organisational position imposes on them.
Consequentially, the intra-organisational validation of these abilities is seen as the central motivation underlying careers, making the organisation a central factor in the shaping of its employees’ identities.
Since their development during the middle of the twentieth century, such simple models of organisations and of the careers within them have been subjected to profound challenges and revisions. A major point of critique has been the de-contextualised perspective depicting careers
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simply as “people moving up the corporate ladder”. Instead, a broader understanding on careers was established, locating them at the “intersection of societal history and individual biography”
(Grandjean 1981: 1057). While the traditional model of careers focuses either on the organisational determination of career paths or on individual agency and attributes, mirroring the wider structure-agency debate in the social sciences, such a broader perspective not only underscores the interaction between these two dimensions, but also takes the wider societal context of the working life into account. In their review of management literature, Mayerhofer, Meyer, and Steyrer (2007: 217ff) identify four levels of contextual factors in the research on careers. These contextual factors pertain firstly to the societal configuration on the widest scale;
factors such as demography, relations of ethnicity and gender, and how the integration into certain communities and cultures affect both individual and organisational attitudes and decisions, thereby shaping the space of possibilities in which careers take shape. On a second level lies the “context of origin”, comprising social and class backgrounds, the educational socialisation, individual work histories, and current life situations, which interact with individual career patterns. Again, this shapes individual agency as well as organisational planning. Finally, the immediate surroundings of an organisation have the most direct influence on careers: the functioning and structure of the labour market, the form of the organisation of work in general, and the immediate social environment – one’s direct social relations and networks – can either infringe or enhance career opportunities for-, and aspirations of individuals, and thus need to be considered by organisations in their planning.
With this wider perspective on careers it is not only the boundaries within the organisation identified by Schein (1971) which are of interest, but also the external boundary of the organisation that comes into focus. Careers, in this perspective, are not determined by individual and organisational decisions alone – they arise out of the threefold interplay between the organisation, the individual and their respective contexts.
A primary link between the inside and the outside environment of organisations is found in the biography of the individual. One’s abilities and identity are shaped primarily by life experience outside of the place of work, long before socialisation into an organisation begins.
But the contextual factors identified by Mayerhofer and his colleagues. (2007) also work on organisations directly and influence their internal structures and dynamics. Specific ties to a community, the general economic environment, the labour markets an organisation recruits from, its history, and the dominating norms and values in society, are all contexts which an organisation must take into account when determining their form and strategies.
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The increased attention of career research to factors outside of organisations reflects the social and cultural changes of recent decades. While the traditional models of careers and organisations stem from a time of relative normative, cultural, and economic stability, newer approaches to career research engage more actively with the changing social environment of work and careers.