Accelerat ing t he world's research.

Cuzzocrea, Lyon Sociological

conceptualisations of career
Dawn Lyon, Valentina Cuzzocrea

Related papers Download a PDF Pack of t he best relat ed papers 

Cuzzocrea_ flexi-jobs.pdf
Valent ina Cuzzocrea

Women's Agency in Gender Tradit ional Religions: A Review of Four Approaches

Kelsy Burke

Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisat ion: From Fragment s t o Spat ial T heory
Susan Halford
Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x

Sociological Conceptualisations of ‘Career’: A Review

and Reorientation
Valentina Cuzzocrea1* and Dawn Lyon2
1
Università di Cagliari
2
University of Kent

Abstract
In the last decades, the use and meaning of the concept of career has profoundly changed, shaped
by a ‘new career’ literature rhetoric and a move away from mainstream sociological debate. Our
aim in this article is to provide a critical assessment of the concept, and to make a productive con-
tribution to the current debate on careers, and work more generally. Specifically, we seek to: (i)
critique the lack of elaboration of the concept within the discipline of sociology in recent years;
(ii) reposition the concept of careers as a key sociological category; and (iii) assess and reorient the
current meanings of career. After tracing the history of career from linear to boundaryless, we sit-
uate the concept in a broader sociological understanding of gender and habitus and structure and
agency, and through a methodological discussion of narrative approaches for studying careers.
These concepts and approaches are especially effective for understanding careers. Having showed
the added value of the concept of career for sociology, we conclude with a research agenda which
attempts to overcome the voluntaristic pitfall of its use in recent years and opens up a more
thoughtful and articulated understanding of careers for both teaching and research.

Introduction
This article offers a critical assessment and a reorientation of the concept of career. We
critique the lack of elaboration of the concept within the discipline of sociology in recent
years, and we argue for its relevance and usefulness for making sociological sense of the
working lives of people, especially in the context of current economic and social changes.
Following our review of the use and understanding of ‘careers’ into the 21st century, we
critically discuss the so-called ‘new career literature’ and its overemphasis on agency. To
explore the sociological strength and potential of career, we have selected the concepts of
gender and habitus and structure and agency from current mainstream sociological litera-
ture to shape our discussion. We demonstrate how they speak through the notion of
career, permitting us to assess it within a broader sociological perspective. The selection
of these concepts is partial and deliberate. They are central sociological ideas and espe-
cially powerful for making sense of careers and highlighting the value of the concept.
Finally, we discuss researching careers with a focus on methodology, notably narrative
approaches. Again, this best allows us to demonstrate the merit of working with a socio-
logical understanding of careers. We conclude with a discussion of the value of the con-
cept of careers for sociology today and with a research agenda for the field.

Positioning career studies

A key objective of this article is to reposition the concept of ‘career’ within the discipline
of sociology, a need which has arisen both as a result of the ways in which careers have

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1030 Rethinking the Concept of Career

been conceived in recent years, and the directions taken by the sociology of work
(Strangleman 2005). In this section we offer a map for the current disciplinary location of
the concept. In the special issue of Sociology, ‘In search of the sociology of work’, Halford
and Strangleman (2009) lament the decline of this sub-discipline in teaching and research
in sociology departments across the UK. The study of careers is a case in point here as
the most influential literature today is published outside of sociology journals. Strong
arguments have recently been made for a more interdisciplinary approach to careers
research, drawing on different approaches whilst avoiding conceptual confusion (Arthur
2008; see also Human Relations 2011, 64(1)). Notwithstanding this, we contend that the
location of careers research within business schools and management journals may lead to
a loss of a specifically sociological understanding of the careers, a point Halford and
Strangleman (2009, 820) make with regard to work more generally.
Most current research on careers is published in management and organisation studies
journals. The Journal of Organizational Behaviour has featured a special issue on Enacting
global careers: Organizational career scripts and the global economy as co-existing career referents
in 2010 (vol. 35, issue 5). More generally, many key articles on careers have appeared
in: Journal of Career Development, Journal of Career Assessment, Journal of Management,
Human Relations, Gender, Work and Organization, Educational Administration Quarterly,
Journal of Management, Group & Organization Management, International Review of Adminis-
trative Sciences (significant articles where the word ‘career’ appears in the title are found
in all these journals). If a similar search is performed in mainstream sociology journals,
the results are quite different. We have searched for all articles appearing between 2000
and 2010 in The American Journal of Sociology (AJS), Sociology, European Societies – respec-
tively the official publications of the American Sociological Association, the British
Sociological Association and the European Sociological Association – as well as the Brit-
ish Journal of Sociology (BJS), Sociological Review and the American Sociological Review
(ASR), and we have found the following. European Societies has not published anything
featuring career in the title, despite a special issue on professional work (2008) and sev-
eral articles whose contents included work and employment; BJS has published seven
articles, although three of them pertain to Hakim’s preference theory, and the other
two appeared in a special issue on ‘Education, Class and Gender’. AJS has published
only two pieces (in 2001 and 2005), as has the ASR (in 2004 and 2007) in recent
years. Sociology has published only two articles in this period, in 2003 and 2006
although a stronger interest in career was apparent during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite
a special issue on elites (2008), Sociological Review has published only four articles in the
last 10 years. Very recently, however, there appears to be some renewed sociological
interest in careers. A section in a recent issue of 2010 of Work, Employment and Society
(also an official BSA journal) is devoted to careers, as well as one in the first 2011 issue
of Human Relations, with articles discussing typical sociological themes (narratives, Slay
and Smith 2011) and authors (e.g. Bourdieu in Chudzikowski and Mayrhofer 2011).
Also Work and Occupations features one article in early 2011 (vol. 38, 1), whilst only six
in the previous decade.
We thus argue that the concept of career and our understandings of how careers hap-
pen remain under-elaborated within sociology. If the study of work has become signifi-
cantly disembedded from wider social theory (Wolkowitz 2009), a specifically
sociological understanding of how careers happen, and the more general relevance of the
concept of career in grasping the interplay of opportunity structures and the ways in
which people navigate them, or as a site through which institutional processes might be
viewed (Barley 1989, 49), has been neglected.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1031

Tracing the history of the concept: from linear to boundaryless careers

Having discussed the position that ‘careers’ currently assume in research, it is useful to
step back to the origin and history of the concept. The term career is derived from the
Latin carraria, meaning a road or carriageway. However, from the sixteenth century, it
signified a racecourse and a gallop, then any rapid or unrestrained activity (Williams
1983). This is quite different from what later became the dominant understanding of
career in the twentieth century: a linear trajectory of interconnected jobs in a single orga-
nisation, with upward vertical mobility, and a sense of inevitability and closure. Progress
is ordered and (more-or-less) predictable where jobs represent change ‘in responsibility,
status, and authority’ (Wilensky 1961, 523). Advancement within a hierarchy of power
or prestige is central and considered to be positive. Accounts of careers make reference to
stages, phases, steps, and turning points (Barley 1989, 44–6). Metaphorically, such careers
have been depicted as ‘ladders’ or ‘tracks’.
This conceptualisation of careers has implications for how they can be studied, and
allies itself with a structural approach. If careers take place largely through organisations
and the positions within them that individuals can occupy, it makes sense to study career
structures such as salary scales and the contracts which define them, or career routes in
which employees are the central unit of analysis (Evetts 1992). However, these
approaches reify structures which overdetermine career outcomes, and establish norms of
career patterns; and since they have an exclusive focus on the workplace, personal cir-
cumstances are seen to ‘affect’ careers but not to ‘constitute part of career development
and career success’, so sustain an idealised version of a male career free from any domestic
demands (Evetts 1992, 8; Halford and Leonard 2006), also neglecting Hochschild’s (1989)
insights on the significance of the burden of domestic work on women’s careers.
A different elaboration of the concept of careers was put forward by Chicago sociolo-
gists, especially Hughes (1937, 1958), who treated career as ‘a heuristic applicable to a
much wider range of situations than is typical of current usage’ (Barley 1989, 45): to the
life histories of juvenile delinquents, marijuana users, doctors and executives; to the logic
of illness and recovery, the process through which labelling takes hold, consumption pat-
terns, and family life. For instance, Becker et al.’s seminal text about the culture of trainee
medics, Boys in White (1961), explored a whole universe of work rather than a narrowly
conceived occupation or profession. Furthermore, it has been very influential as a socio-
logical study, understood for its relevance beyond the study of work (Barley 1989).
Arguably, the original notion of career is once again more salient in the 21st century.
Indeed, a third set of conceptualisations of careers is now dominant, arising out of the
recent socio-economic context of deindustrialisation or post-Fordism in the west. The
extensive restructuring of firms and organisations means that markets are no longer con-
fined to national and regional boundaries (Silbey 2006). In these globalised times, capital
and culture circulate, assisted by the widespread introduction of new technologies. The
world order is increasingly competitive and based on interconnections of flows of infor-
mation (Castells 1996). Sociologists have made sense of these changes notably through
the concepts of liquidity (Bauman 2000), risk and uncertainty (Beck 2000), and mobility
(Urry 2000), leading to disorientation in working lives (Sennett 1998).
However, this picture of the contemporary labour market in constant flux and chaos is
not accepted by all scholars. Strangleman argues that the supposed decline in stable, per-
manent employment has to be critically assessed. For him, there is nostalgia in ‘attempt[s]
to make sense of the fragmentary present by its juxtaposition with a seemingly stable,
intelligent past’ (2007, 94). Fevre (2007) suggests the difficulty in measuring insecurity

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1032 Rethinking the Concept of Career

contributes to its overstatement. Drawing on Green (2006), OECD studies (2002), and
the UK Labour Force Survey, he points out a difference between ‘objective’ and ‘per-
ceived’ stability. Also according to Doogan, based on data from the Eurobarometer,
MORI, and ESRC skill surveys, actual insecurity is ‘a misnomer to a large extent’ (2001,
438). Notwithstanding these critiques, one significant change is the increase in women’s
labour market participation in the late twentieth century as the service sector has grown
(despite ongoing and horizontal and vertical segregation). And at the lower end of the
labour market, job polarisation and wage differentials have been widely documented
(Goos and Manning 2007), as well as collapses in internal labour markets and career lad-
ders (Bernhardt et al. 2001; Cappelli 1995, 1999; Osterman 1996; Vidal 2011).
Broadly described as the ‘new career literature’ (Arthur et al. 1999), new conceptualisa-
tions of career no longer rest on the assumption of upward vertical mobility, and refer to
different constructions of careers across all levels in the occupational hierarchy, especially
in the creative and cultural industries (Gottschall and Henninger 2007). For instance, the
expression ‘protean career’ (Hall 1976, 1996, 2002) (from the Greek god Proteus who
‘could change shape at will’) consists of all the ‘person’s varied experiences in education,
training, work in several organisations, changes in occupational fields’ (Hall 1976, 201). A
subsequent job may, or may not, be internal to the same organisation or agency, and is
not necessarily more difficult, complex or rewarding, in terms of pay or recognition.
Workers are supposed to develop a portfolio of skills, which implies the ability to quickly
convert existing skills according to the environment and tasks. Such skills define the con-
dition of ‘employability’. In this sense, the term ‘portfolio career’ has also been used
(Handy 1994). With a focus on the organisational dimension, careers have been con-
ceived as ‘boundaryless’ (Arthur and Rousseau 1996), ‘post-corporate’ (Peiperl et al.
2000) and ‘kaleidoscope’ (Mainero and Sullivan 2006), taking shape across separate
employers, based on networking, learning and enterprise.
This literature clearly presents a conceptualisation of actors operating within networks
and systems of jobs with greater self-reliance than their predecessors and looser ties to the
organisation, which is no longer the primary provider of career structures (e.g. Gunz
et al. 2000). The boundaryless career is a ‘disorderly’ career, to use Wilensky’s (1961)
term, in contrast to traditional ‘orderly’ organisational careers. Entrepreneurship is seen to
be fundamental for ‘people pursuing modern-day, network sensitive careers’ (Kanter
1989) in a world in which ‘discourses of excellence’ (Du Gay 1996, 59) abound, support-
ing the idea that excellent companies seek to cultivate ‘enterprising subjects’ (1996, 60).
Whilst the new career literature offers a more flexible and inclusive conceptualisation of
trajectories recognising that careers occur both within and beyond organisational bound-
aries, and that people may move in and out of paid work (Dany et al. 2003, 706), it
presents individuals as free to invent their careers, regardless of structural constraints
(Dany 2003), gendered or otherwise, something which is noted in a celebratory tone
(Pringle and Mallon 2003, 848). So, whereas in the traditional conceptualisation of career,
individuals are thought to be the bearers of supposedly intrinsic motivation, in the new
approaches, they carry autonomous intentions in their elaboration of their strategies. The
assertion that individuals are shaping their own destinies overstates their power, falling
into voluntarism and neglects the context that limits and shapes them. A deeper under-
standing of agency, especially in the context of careers which are to some extent, boun-
daryless, is needed (Tams and Arthur 2010).
Furthermore, this literature does not take into account well-established empirically
grounded sociological research which evidences the ongoing significance of class or forms
of capital (economic, cultural and social) in the making of careers, and understates the

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1033

impact of racism and discrimination (Pager 2003). How resources continue to shape indi-
vidual social trajectories in the 21st century is especially pertinent in the case of people at
high levels. Indeed, it may be that social inequalities widen over the course of a career, as
Goux and Maurin (1997) have shown with respect to France, and Useem and Karabel
(1986) previously demonstrated in the United States. In the new career literature, the
necessity of persistent and informal networking, building contacts across multiple dimen-
sions is presented as a feature of contemporary working life (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello
2005). There is debate about the extent to which in some settings networks take prece-
dence over social origins as determinants of future positions. In any case, it is already well
established that relationships count in careers, both in the conduct of work, and in the
allocation of opportunity and reward, whether through formal associations or ‘weak ties’
(Granovetter 1974), or through mentors, sponsors, or friendships (Bourdieu and Passeron
1990; Burt 1992; Kadushin 1995; Lamont 1992), and that the operation of these mecha-
nisms is gendered (Benschop 2009). The deployment of social capital in working life has
become a significant area of research in recent years, shifting from a focus on the tight
interconnections of people in power to studies which analyse how people manage wider
networks (Savage and Williams 2008).
Finally, associated with the loosening of organisational careers, there has been a prolif-
eration of popular, self-help literature (books and magazines) on making careers, especially
in the field of management (Flecker and Hofbauer 1998). In these accounts, individuals
must take responsibility for their own career futures, and are rewarded for new configura-
tions of the self which emphasise enterprise and the capacity to cultivate relationships and
networks to gain access to other people’s knowledge and resources. Indeed, the role of
networks, and the individual who can manage and mobilise networks effectively is espe-
cially prominent. In Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) analysis of self-help management lit-
erature in France from the 1960s to the 1990s, they found motifs of individual freedom
and creativity whilst stressing adaptation, change and flexibility. These normative models
of being are both a prescription for and add up to a ‘new spirit of capitalism’. In Cuzzo-
crea’s (2009) study of young professionals, career booklets in the UK reproduce norms of
comportment and skill, emphasising confidence, self-presentation, communication and
the ability to accomplish tasks to deadline. These amount to a ‘career propaganda’ related
to the individualist expression of one’s ambition in the public domain. Again with spe-
cial attention to professionals getting established in a new boundaryless area, MBAs have
also been looked at and interpreted as new rites of passage (Kelan and Dunkley Jones
2009).

Reviving a sociological understanding of careers

We now propose to draw attention to the value of thinking about careers through some
central sociological categories. We have selected the concepts of gender and habitus, and
structure and agency for this discussion. The opposition between structure and agency is
a central sociological debate. Discussing careers through this debate allows us to explore
the dynamics and tensions in the theoretical understanding as well as the lived experience
of careers. Gender is widely recognised as a ‘constitutive element of social structure’
(Britton 2000, 418) and exploring it in relation to habitus allows us to situate it at several
levels: as a social structural feature, as an aspect of identity, and as a social practice. As dis-
cussed earlier, these are deliberate but partial choices of focus, ones which we consider
are especially powerful for highlighting the significance of the concept of careers and for
a grounded understanding of the lived experience of careers.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1034 Rethinking the Concept of Career

Gender and habitus

As feminist scholars have long argued, employment and domestic life, the household and
the formal economy are intertwined (Glucksmann 2005). The intersection of paid and
unpaid work marks households as well as individuals, where the domestic labour of one
partner (mostly women’s) contributes to the labour market success of the other (Finch
1983; Walby 1997). Pursuing a career has a differential impact on the domestic life of
men and women, as does domestic life on the pursuit of a career (Hochschild 1989).
Women in demanding jobs have lower marriage and fertility rates (or delayed mother-
hood), especially in certain occupations and professions, such as law and banking. Con-
versely, for men in certain fields, for instance, law, family formation can contribute to
career success (Crompton 2006).
Gender also operates powerfully within work; arguably gender is a ‘foundational ele-
ment of organizational structure and work life’ (Britton 2000, 419). Work organisations
through which careers take place are based on gendered discourses, assumptions and prac-
tices (Acker 1990; Halford and Leonard 2006; Poggio 2006). Gender is understood as
something which is accomplished in interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987), crafted
and performed (Kondo 1990), including at work (Gherardi 1995; Poggio 2006). This
means that organisations are more than contexts for the operation of gender, and that
gendered subjectivity is part of organisational belonging. This recognition is a departure
from previous research which argued that bureaucracies are ‘gender neutral’, and that
power differences linked to organisational structure underlie sex segregation (notably,
Kanter 1977), not only in traditional organizational contexts but also in new media work,
for example (Gill 2002).
Although there is widespread acceptance in the literature of the ways in which gender
(as well as ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc.) structures working life, this is not always appar-
ent in research which focuses on barriers to women’s advancement. At times there is an
implication that the functioning of organisations can be ‘corrected’ by measures which
better support women’s responsibilities outside of employment (e.g. child care facilities
and flexible working patterns), and other measures to improve so-called ‘work-life bal-
ance’ but which fail to fully appreciate the unequal impact of domestic work on women’s
careers; (Hochschild 1989), or through measures intended to address the ‘glass ceiling’
within work (e.g. recruitment and promotion practices, networking, etc.). (For a discus-
sion of the glass ceiling, see Wilton and Purcell 2010).
Within research on gender and careers, some scholars have argued that the concept of
career is based on an idealised male-centred construct of working life and does not there-
fore apply to women as it does not reflect the reality of women’s working lives which
are often marked by less linearity and greater complexity (e.g. Gherardi and Poggio
2007); and (more controversially) that women do not necessarily seek the same goal-
centred careers as men (Hakim 2000). The gain of feminist critiques of narrow conceptu-
alisations of career has been to widen the scope of what is seen as relevant in the
construction of career. This includes a better understanding of how gender operates in
the working lives of both men and women. For instance, Kanter (1977) and Roper
(1994) both evidence male careers based on strong emotional bonds, rather than pursued
exclusively on rational and instrumental bases, and highlight the diversity of career prac-
tices of both men and women.
A gender analysis examines the production of sexual difference, i.e. in what ways the
opposition between men and women is inscribed in social relations and sustained through
social practices at work. This lends itself to a focus on practice (Bruni and Gherardi 2007;

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1035

Connell 1995; Martin 2003, 2006) which has implications for methodology. For instance,
Lyon and Woodward’s (2004) interview-based research points to the ways in which men
and women in high-level careers in business and politics in Belgium are differently posi-
tioned in everyday working life and the ‘tests of availability’ used to challenge women’s
legitimacy in these roles. McDowell’s (1997) study of merchant bankers in London high-
lights the narrow and dominant form of hegemonic masculinity in this world which
excludes many men as well as women. Recent approaches have also made explicit use of
the concept of intersectionality to explore the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity, age
and sexuality operate together in the shaping of working lives (Britton and Logan 2008).
With respect to networking – often seen as central to career success, as discussed earlier –
Benschop’s micro-analysis of the politics of networking highlights the gain of understand-
ing networks as ‘socially accomplished and dynamic’ (2009, 218). Her emphasis on
processes of networking, rather than structural outcomes, makes it possible to explore
‘relational and interactional’ (2009, 222) practices and the production of gendered identi-
ties within and through networks.
The effect of the gendering of jobs on women means that ‘they [women] never seem
quite right for the job, or not quite ready’ (Wajcman 1998, 274 with respect to manage-
ment in the UK). This apparent unsuitability has been productively explored through
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which refers to ‘a pre-reflexive level of practical mastery’
(McNay 1999, 100), learnt by the body and not able to be explicitly articulated: the
resultant dispositions, tastes, habits of bearing and behaviour, feeling and thought then
become naturalised (Lovell 2000, 12). Indeed, Bourdieu argues that it is not direct insti-
tutional discrimination which creates large-scale inequalities but that these are established
‘through the subtle inculcation of power relations upon the bodies and dispositions of
individuals’ (McNay 1999, 99).
If habitus produces events which are ‘relatively unpredictable … but also limited in
their diversity’, it is also generative (Bourdieu 1995, 35). Further, as habitus is realised
only in relation to specific situations, predisposition to one thing does not mean foreclo-
sure of another (McNay 1999, 103). For women in high-level careers for instance, it may
be that the habitus of their class origin equips them with the sense of entitlement to the
places they attain; alternatively, the transposability of practices of key experiences may be
what gives them ‘practical mastery’ of these high-level positions. In Lyon’s (2003)
research on men and women in high-level careers, the case of a woman who grew up in
a boys’ boarding school where her parents worked was particularly instructive. She never
felt the exclusion that some other women report in men-only social and professional
spaces and was able to bring this ease and expectation to her working life. Habitus is also
useful for thinking about the intersections of class and gender. For example, people in
high-level career positions may act on the assumption of or entitlement to a professional
future, based on a sense of the openness of such worlds to them, an expectation of
belonging.

The structure-agency debate

The structure-agency debate might be said to constitute the backbone of a sociological
divide between traditions of research. We have therefore chosen to employ this central
debate as a second theme through which we argue that the concept of career not only
is fundamentally sociological, but also can be used to enhance sociological analysis.
Arthur et al. suggest that ‘careers reflect the relationships between people and the pro-
viders of official positions, namely, institutions or organisations’ (1989, 9): the concept

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1036 Rethinking the Concept of Career

of career contains the potential to overcome the separation between the job seeker ⁄
worker and the ‘objective’ labour market and ⁄ or employment situation. Whilst most lit-
erature tries to identify how jobs – seen as simply out there – fit with the person who
obtains them, or focuses on their suitability for climbing the ladder, a career is actually
the result of continuous negotiation between the agent and what he ⁄ she identifies as
resources to be used, as in Cuzzocrea’s study of early career professionals (2011). A
dynamic interplay embeds agents in their own material and cultural contexts and ren-
ders visible the meanings they attribute to work through their choices to activate par-
ticular resources. What Barley calls ‘career scripts’ – a concept recently used to
understand globally oriented careers (Cappellen and Janssens 2010) – provide ‘resources,
interpretative schemes, and norms that shape people’s actions […which] in turn, modify
career scripts’ (Barley 1989, 54).
However, there remains a need for the greater articulation of structure and agency in
the pursuit of careers, especially because most recent literature does not recognise the
dynamism of this relationship, clearly overstating agency as discussed earlier. Focusing on
careers should be seen as an encouragement to study both individuals and structure in
their interconnections and in the ways in which they are intertwined. This is even more
significant once recognised that an holistic view of the person was present in the work of
early career theorists such as Argyris (1957) and McGregor (1960) – as Arthur et al.
(1989) suggest – but then was lost in later works.
The fact that agents are able to ‘act otherwise’ means that they can intervene in the
world, or else they can refrain from such intervention. They are ‘always rooted in a struc-
tural context’, but also ‘always and inevitably drawing upon their knowledge of that
structural context’ (Stones 2005, 17). For instance, a middle class woman who embraces
non-traditional studies might perceive new prospects in the chosen path. Actions depend
upon the capability of the individual to ‘make a difference’ to a pre-existing state of
affairs or course of events (Giddens 1984, 14). An author who has explicitly linked
careers to the debate on structure and agency is Julia Evetts (1996). She discusses how
women who pursue either occupational or organisational careers in science and engineer-
ing redefine, with their work, the respective organisational cultures of these traditionally
male fields. In this view, what it means ‘to have no choice’ is to be questioned (Giddens
1984, 15). Yet, agents may lack the competences or the cultural, or economic, or social
resources to direct their career construction actions. Therefore, being aware of this duality
in careers is a powerful way to recognise the pitfalls of voluntaristic views, such as those
contained in the new career literature.
However, discursive consciousness – the rationally articulated justifications for action
(Giddens 1984) – implies that agents are competent, and have developed their own
meanings and strategies: they identify what and who is changing in their worlds, and the
direction of that change, and locate themselves in this scenario in a more or less active
voice. For example, young educated people tend to overstate their power to change the
structure of opportunity whereas older, even successful people in career terms speak of a
greater recognition of structural constraints. The capacity of the individual to plan his ⁄ her
future is central to the exercise of agency (Archer 2007; Emirbayer and Mische 1998).
External conditions such as the flexibility of labour markets ‘enter’ the agents, in the
sense that they affect their general attitudes, but actions are ‘reflexively monitored’. Not
to forget, though, that at the same time there is a recursion by which ‘institutions jointly
‘constitute’ and are ‘constituted by’ the actions of individuals living their daily lives’
(Barley 1989, 52), and that ‘when social practices are reproduced they perpetuate the
structure, making it a social reality’ (Cohen 2006, 16). Thus, we suggest to move the

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1037

discussion into a methodological level, i.e. how careers can be studied, and we do so by
choosing a perspective which we find particularly insightful.

Researching careers through narrative and framing

To fully understand how a career takes shape, we need to attend to how people are
accounting for their trajectories, backwards and forwards in time. How we think of and
account for ourselves to real or imagined others is not only a retrospective construction;
it is also prospective, i.e. it matters for how we act into the future (Archer 2007). The nar-
rative methodological approach is based on an understanding of the significance of narra-
tive in the constitution of meaning in everyday life (Poggio 2004) and across the life
course, and has fuelled the so-called ‘biographical turn’ (Chamberlyne et al. 2000). In this
section, we highlight some key points about this approach, then discuss Goffman’s (1974)
notion of ‘framing’ for making sense of careers.
We choose to emphasise narrative in the study of careers as we contend that a focus
on narrative goes some way to overcome the difficulties identified (in the discussion ear-
lier) in existing modes of research. An attention to narrative is more than an attention to
agency and identity. If we accept that careers are sites of broader institutional processes –
as Barley (1989) has put it – this means that they are the expression of the interplay
between structure and agency, and that accounts of them can give us access to the ways
in which this tension – and others, such as around gender – is lived and negotiated, as
for instance in Benschop’s (2009) analysis of processes of networking. Narrative analysis
can trace the cultural or interpretive repertoires available for sense-making as these are
echoed in interviewees’ accounts and underlie the ways in which people frame the mean-
ings of their working lives. In Kelan and Dunkley Jones (2009) analysis of people’s
accounts of studying for an MBA, they make effective use of this kind of approach. Fur-
thermore, whilst habitus cannot be directly spoken, its significance (to the sociologist’s
ear) emerges in open-ended accounts of how careers happen, such as in the example
given above of the woman who grew up in a boys’ boarding school and who recounted
in a taken-for-granted way the ease she could assume in a male-dominated and masculine
working environment.
Narrative allows for an explicitly sociological approach to careers. It is central to our
experience of social life (Bruner 1990; Kearney 2002; Somers and Gibson 1994), the con-
struction of identity (Ibarra and Barbulescu 2010), even a privileged medium for self-inter-
pretation (Ricoeur 1991a, 188) as our actions in the world in the passage of time ‘call
for’ a narrative account. We construct narratives through and in relation to the cultural
repertoires available to us. With respect to careers, these repertoires may be specific to a
sector of work, they may be national, or global, or a configuration of these different
levels. The extent to which employing organisations or institutions are relevant is an
empirical question and depends on the nature of the career itself (Cappellen and Janssens
2010).
Narrative accounts are marked by thematic plots that link events, turning them into
episodes, in which meaning is relational, derived in connection to other events or experi-
ences. Plot is central an ‘integrating process’, complete only in the act of reception of the
story, where it ‘serves to make one story’ out of multiple happenings (Ricoeur 1991b,
21). It is through being a character in our own and other people’s narratives we achieve
a sense of identity (Kerby 1991, 40). Narrative requires closure, a beginning and an end-
ing (White 1981), where the structure is retrospectively seen to have been immanent in
the events all along, the past being both determinate and consequential (Mink 1981,

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1038 Rethinking the Concept of Career

238). Stories ‘move forward in time’ (Steadman 1998, 251), the end somehow fixing the
tale, the point (in time and as meaning) from which the rest unfolds. There is then always
‘another story ‘waiting to be told’ just beyond the confines of ‘the end’ [of the present
one]’ (White 1981, 22 in Mink 1981, 238). However, narrative can never fully achieve
closure as it must be ready to accommodate new possibilities (McNay 2001, 87). And so
the past is not fixed.
In the case of careers, which may seem to have an implicit coherence, it is only in and
through the act of narrating (to oneself, or to an imagined or real audience) that they
become apprehended as a ‘set’ of events (Herrnstein Smith 1981, 225). Narrative analysis
has to see through this ‘edge of inevitability’ (Freeman 1993) that recounting a career can
produce (Bourdieu 1986), to challenge and unpack the ways in which stories are told
(Riessman 1993, 2008). Indeed, career paths ‘lend themselves to analysis through narra-
tives collected in organisations’ (Cohen 2006; Gherardi and Poggio 2007, 23).
Goffman’s (1974) concept of the frame is a particularly useful way to analyse narrative
accounts of careers. Framing is ‘a coherent, meaningful way to organise feelings and
events’ (Flax 1996, 590). Frames both organise the past and ‘structure and determine how
‘new’ experience is felt and interpreted’ thus confirming and perpetuating themselves
(Flax 1996, 590). They reveal felt possibilities and operate as ‘logics of action’ (Wright
Mills 1940). How we frame what we are doing make certain possibilities more or less
likely (Archer 2007; McNay 2001). Indeed, individuals act in certain ways because it
would violate their sense of being to do otherwise’ (McNay 2001, 80), an important
dimension which underlies the interplay of structure and agency.
Frames are a useful concept for the study of careers as they offer a level of analysis
which opens up understanding of apparent contradictions and changes over time in a
career trajectory. Whilst some kinds of frames do tend to get embedded, they remain
malleable in principle, some more or less vulnerable or robust than others. Change can
happen through the intersection of different frames, and there may well be multiple
frames in a single account. Overall, frames are neither arbitrary nor infinite but config-
ured through the available (and differentially valued) cultural repertoires for sense-making,
and are therefore context dependent, in both time and place. For example, in Lyon’s
(2003) research, the account of French politician Catherine Gagnon (a pseudonym) is
permeated by a primary frame of public service, across both her employment as a civil
servant and her roles in politics (minister, MP). For Gagnon, her commitment to public
service extends into an imagined future shaping what she considers and excludes. In
short, her career has come about and continues to take shape in part through the mean-
ings with which she has imbued it. This dimension of understanding careers is usually
understated in research on careers (and on work more generally).

Conclusions
In this article, we have retraced the meaning of the concept of careers, and critically
assessed the dominant ideas and discourses it carries. After demonstrating that the concept
is largely researched under a management perspective at the present time, and in a way
which overstates agency, we have proposed a reorientation and repositioning of the con-
cept at the core of the sociological domain. More specifically, we have argued that the
so-called ‘new career literature’ overstates the power of the individual, possibly as a result
of the permeation of neoliberal ideologies in career discourses (Roper et al. 2010). Con-
nections between structure and agency are insufficiently articulated in much current
research and it is necessary to bring back a more thoughtful understanding of this

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1039

dynamic, as we have sought to do in this article. Reflecting on how salient some tradi-
tionally sociological themes are in studying careers, from both the substantive and meth-
odological standpoint, allows us to reclaim the sociological value of the concept which
has been neglected in recent years. It is in this vein that we have proposed further study
of careers that focuses attention on gender, habitus, structure ⁄ agency dynamics, and narra-
tive methods, discussions which allow us to highlight the potential of careers. These ways
of thinking open fruitful avenues for using the concept of careers in a way which resem-
bles the influential, broad meanings that scholars from the Chicago School first attached
to it, thus reclaiming the ongoing sociological relevance of careers.
Recent empirical research shows that there is considerable potential in the investiga-
tion of ‘the practical reasoning and reflective ‘accounts’ that people use on a daily basis
and that make social life an ongoing, practical accomplishment’ (Silber 2003, 429) for
the understanding of how careers happen. However, the range of arguments and princi-
ples of evaluation which individuals deploy in grappling with a career in progress is
embedded in a broader cultural and socio-economic context. Indeed, career narratives,
along with career structures and systems of promotion and advancements, vary depend-
ing on the occupation or profession, as well as on the broader national or cultural con-
text. Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) have identified what they call ‘regimes of
justification’ to disentangle how people mobilise principles of evaluation, an approach
which has been applied in various fields (Lamont and Thévenot 2000). This makes
careers not only an inherently sociological object of study, but also an especially suitable
one for comparative design.
Research which focuses at the level of labour market, jobs or single professions, could
be usefully complemented by a renewed understanding of the concept of careers, which
is especially valuable in understanding how lived trajectories cut across professions, life
spheres, and organisations. Researching careers means continually shifting perspectives –
at one moment, focussing on a particular experience of work, at another seeing the way
analysing careers sheds light on the bigger picture, e.g. gender relations, and the kaleido-
scope-like interconnections of different spheres of life including beyond work. This
would be particularly powerful in comparative research a multi-tiered design, such as in
Brannen and Nilsen (2011), or more generally in context-sensitive research (Nilsen
2011).
Moreover, the value of the concept should be emphasised, not only because of its
potential in research, but also due to its usefulness in teaching sociology. Focusing on
careers allows us to see how different sociological traditions ‘work’ if used to understand
the same phenomenon. Careers have a strong significance for mainstream sociology, as
well as for highlighting interdisciplinary connections (Arthur 2008), and recognising this
is pivotal to avoid compartmentalisations within the sociological domain.

Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank the editors, the anonymous reviewers and Tim Strangleman
for insightful comments on previous drafts of this article, and acknowledge the Autono-
mous Region of Sardinia for funding both during the period in which this article was
written (through a ‘Giovani Ricercatori’ fellowship for Valentina Cuzzocrea and a Visit-
ing Professorship for Dawn Lyon, both at the University of Cagliari, Italy). The article
stems from a joint work of the authors. However, Valentina Cuzzocrea has written
sections on Positioning career studies, Tracing the History of the concept, and the sub-
section on the Structure-agency debate; Dawn Lyon the remaining part of the article.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1040 Rethinking the Concept of Career

Short Biographies
Valentina Cuzzocrea is a Research Fellow at the University of Cagliari, Italy, where she
graduated in Political Science and has more recently taught Sociology. She holds a MA
and PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex, where she has developed a broad
research interest on the difficulties that qualified young people encounter in first entering
the labour market. She has written on careers, youth, transitions to adulthood and her
work appears in international journals and several edited volumes. She is also author of
Flexi-jobs or Flexi-lives? (Bologna: Odoya, 2011), and co-editor of Value of Work (Oxford:
Interdisciplinary Press, forthcoming).
Dawn Lyon is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and
Social Research at the University of Kent, UK. She completed her PhD at the European
University Institute, Italy. She has published in the field of gender and work, and is
co-editor of Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contem-
porary Europe (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). She has a strong interest in visual sociol-
ogy and together with Lynne Pettinger (University of Essex), runs the website,
nowaytomakealiving.net. Her current research is on the work of fishmongers in the
socio-economic process that brings fish from sea to table.

Note
* Correspondence address: Valentina Cuzzocrea, Università di Cagliari, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Dipartimento
di Ricerche Economiche e Sociali, Viale Sant’Ignazio 78, Cagliari 09124, Italy. E-mail: cuzzocrea@unica.it

References
Acker, Joan. 1990. ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations.’ Gender & Society 4(2): 139–58.
Archer, Margaret. 2007. Making our Way Through the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Argyris, Chris. 1957. Personality and Organization. New York: Harper.
Arthur, Michael B. 2008. ‘Examining Contemporary Careers: A Call for Interdisciplinary Enquiry.’ Human Relation
61: 163–86.
Arthur, Michael B., Douglas T. Hall and Barbara S. Lawrence (eds). 1989. Handbook of Career Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Arthur, Michael B., Kerr Inkson and Judith K. Pringle. 1999. The New Careers. London: Sage.
Arthur, Michael B. and Denise Rousseau. 1996. The Boundaryless Career. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barley, Stephen R. 1989. ‘Careers, Identities and Institutions: The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology.’ Pp.
41–65 in Handbook of Career Theory, edited by Michael B Arthur, Douglas T. Hall and Barbara S. Lawrence.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, Ulrich. 2000. The Brave new World of Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Becker, Howard, B. Geer, Everett. C. Hughes and Anselm L. Strauss. 1961. Boys in White. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Benschop, Yvonne. 2009. ‘The Micro-Politics of Gendering in Networking.’ Gender, Work & Organization 16:
217–37.
Bernhardt, Annette, Martina Morris, Mark S. Handcock and Marc A. Scott. 2001. Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility
in the New American Labor Market. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2005 [1999]. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. [1991]. On Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. ‘L’illusion Bibliographique.’ Actes de la Recherche 62(63): 69–72.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995 [1977]. ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices.’ Pp. 31–45 in Rethinking the Subject, An Anthology of
Contemporary European Thought, edited by D. Faubion. Boulder, San Francisco, London: Westview Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Brannen, Julia and Ann Nilsen. 2011. ‘Comparative Biographies in Case-Based Cross-National Research: Methodo-
logical Considerations.’ Sociology 45: 603–18.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1041

Britton, Dana. 2000. ‘The Epistemology of Gendered Organization.’ Gender and Society 14: 418–34.
Britton, Dana and Laura Logan. 2008. ‘Gendered Organizations: Progress and Prospects.’ Sociology Compass 2: 107–
21.
Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruni, Attila and Silvia Gherardi. 2007. Studiare le Pratiche Lavorative. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Burt, Ronald. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cappellen, Tineke and Maddy Janssens. 2010. ‘Enacting Global Careers: Organizational Career Script and the Glo-
bal Economy as co-Existing Career Referents.’ Journal of Organizational Behaviour 31: 687–706.
Cappelli, Peter. 1995. ‘Rethinking Employment.’ British Journal of Industrial Relations 33: 563–602.
Cappelli, Peter. 1999. ‘Career Jobs are Dead.’ California Management Review 42: 146–67.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chamberlyne, Prue, Joanna Bornat and Tom Wengraf (eds) 2000. The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science:
Comparative Issues and Examples. New York: Routledge.
Chudzikowski, Katharina and Wolfgang Mayrhofer. 2011. ‘In Search of the Blue Flower? Grand Social Theories
and Career Research: The Case of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice.’ Human Relations 64: 19–36.
Cohen, Ira. 2006. ‘Agency and Structure.’ Pp. 75–77 in The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, edited by Brian
S. Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connell, Robert W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Crompton, Rosemary. 2006. Employment and the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cuzzocrea, Valentina. 2009. ‘Careers in Shaping. Experiencing the Graduate Career Propaganda in Italy and Eng-
land.’ Pp. 43–63 in Emerging Systems of Work and Welfare, edited by Pertti Koistinen, Amparo Serrano-Pascual
and Lilja Mósesdóttir. Bruxelles: Peter Lang.
Cuzzocrea, Valentina. 2011. Flexi-Jobs of Flexi-Lives? Starting a Professional Career in Italy and England. Odoya: Bologna.
Dany, Francoise. 2003. ‘‘Free Actors’ and Organizations: Critical Remarks about the New Career Literature, Based
on French Insights.’ International Journal of Human Resource Management 14(5): 821–38.
Dany, Françoise, Mary Mallon and Michael B. Arthur. 2003. ‘The Odyssey of Career and the Opportunity for
International Comparison.’ International Journal of Human Resource Management 14: 705–12.
Doogan, Kevin. 2001. ‘Insecurity and Long-Term Employment.’ Work, Employment and Society 15: 419–41.
Du Gay, Paul. 1996. Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische. 1998. ‘What is Agency?’ American Journal of Sociology 103: 962–1023.
Evetts, Julia. 1992. ‘Dimensions of Career: Avoiding Reification in the Analysis of Change.’ Sociology 26: 1–21.
Evetts, Julia. 1996. Gender and Career in Science and Engineering. London: Taylor & Francis.
Fevre, Ralph. 2007. ‘Employment Insecurity and Social Theory: The Power of Nightmares.’ Work, Employment &
Society 21: 517–35.
Finch, Janet. 1983. Married to the job: Wives’ Incorporation Into Men’s Work. London: Allen and Unwin.
Flax, Jane. 1996. ‘Taking Multiplicity Seriously, Some Implications for Psychoanalytic Theorizing and Practice.’
Contemporary Psychoanalysis 32: 577–93.
Flecker, Jorg and Johanna Hofbauer. 1998. ‘Capitalising on Subjectivity: The ‘New Model Worker’ and the Impor-
tance of Being Useful.’ Pp. 104–23 in Workplaces of the Future, edited by Paul Thompson and Chris Warhurst.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Freeman, Mark. 1993. Rewriting the Self, History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge.
Gherardi, Silvia. 1995. Gender, Symbolism and Organizational Cultures. London: Sage.
Gherardi, Silvia and Barbara Poggio. 2007. Gendertelling in Organizations. Narratives From Male-Dominated Environ-
ments. Liber- Copenhagen: Business School Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Oxford: Polity Press.
Gill, Rosalind. 2002. ‘Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in
Europe.’ Information, Communication and Society 5: 70–89.
Glucksmann, Miriam A. 2005. ‘Shifting Boundaries: The ‘Total Social Organisation of Labour Revisited.’ Pp. 19–
36 in The New Sociology of Work, edited by Jane Parry, Rebecca Taylor, Lynne Pettinger and Miriam Glucks-
mann. Oxford: Blackwell ⁄ Sociological Review Monograph.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay On The Organization Of Experience. Boston: Northeastern Univer-
sity Press.
Goos, Maarten and Alan Manning. 2007. ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain.’ The
Review of Economics and Statistics 89: 118–33. MIT Press.
Gottschall, Karin and Annette Henninger. 2007. ‘Freelancers in Germany’s Old and New Media Industry: Beyond
Standard Patterns of Work and Life?’ Critical Sociology 33: 43–71.
Goux, Dominique and Eric Maurin. 1997. ‘Meritocracy and Social Heredity in France: Some Aspects and Trends.’
European Sociological Review 13: 159–77.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1974. Getting a Job, A Study of Contacts and Careers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
1042 Rethinking the Concept of Career

Green, Francis. 2006. Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in an Affluent Economy. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Gunz, Hugh, Martin Evans and Mike Jalland. 2000. ‘Careers in a ‘Boundaryless’ World.’ Pp. 24–53 in Careers in a
‘Boundaryless’ World, edited by Maury Peiperl, Michael Arthur, Rob Goffe and Tim Morris. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hakim, Catherine. 2000. Work-Life Choices in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halford, Susan. and Pauline Leonard. 2006. Negotiating Gendered Identities at Work: Place, Space and Time. Basing-
stoke: Palgrave.
Halford, Susan and Tim Strangleman. 2009. ‘In Search of the Sociology of Work: Past Present and Future.’ Sociol-
ogy 43: 811–28.
Hall, Douglas T. 1976. Careers in Organizations. Santa Monica: Goodyear.
Hall, Douglas T. 1996. Career is Dead-Long Live the Career. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hall, Douglas T. 2002. Careers in and out of Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Handy, Charles. 1994. The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future. London: Hutchinson.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. 1981. ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.’ Pp. 213–36 in On Narrative, edited by
W. T. J. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Viking Penguin.
Hughes, Everett C. 1937. ‘Institutional Office and the Person.’ American Journal of Sociology 43: 104–43.
Hughes, Everett C. 1958. Men and Their Work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Ibarra, Herminia. and Roxana Barbulescu. 2010. ‘Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences
of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions.’ Academy of Management Review 35: 135–54.
Kadushin, Charles. 1995. ‘Friendship Among the French Financial Elite.’ American Sociological Review 60: 202–21.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1977. Women and Men of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1989. When Giants Learn to Dance. London: Simon and Schuster.
Kearney, Richard. 2002. On Stories. London: Routledge.
Kelan, Elisabeth and Rachel Dunkley Jones. 2009. ‘Reinventing the MBA as a Rite of Passage for a Boundaryless
era.’ Career Development International 14: 547–69.
Kerby, Anthony P. 1991. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners, The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, Michèle and Laurent Thévenot (eds) 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology, Repertoires of Evaluation
in France and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lovell, Terry. 2000. ‘Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu.’ Feminist Theory 1: 11–32.
Lyon, Dawn. 2003. The Making of Careers: Women and men in Business and Politics in Britain, Belgium and France,
Unpublished PhD, Florence: European University Institute.
Lyon, Dawn and Alison Woodward. 2004. ‘Gender, Time and the Top: Cultural Constructions of Time in High
Level Careers and Homes.’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 11: 205–21.
Mainero, L. A. and S. E. Sullivan. 2006. The Kaleidoscope Career. Mountainview, CA: Davies-Black Publishing.
Martin, Patricia Y. 2003. ‘‘Said and Done’ vs. ‘Saying and Doing’: Gendering Practices, Practicing Gender at
Work.’ Gender & Society 17: 342–66.
Martin, Patricia Y. 2006. ‘Practicing Gender at Work: Further Thoughts on Reflexivity.’ Gender, Work and Organi-
zation 13: 254–75.
McDowell, Linda. 1997. Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell.
McGregor, Douglas. 1960. The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.
McNay, Lois. 1999. ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field, Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity.’ Theory, Culture
and Society 16: 95–117.
McNay, Lois. 2001. Gender and Agency, Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mink, Louis O. 1981. ‘Everyman His or Her Own Annalist.’ Pp. 777–83 in On Narrative, edited by W. T. J.
Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Nilsen, Ann. 2011. ‘Work, Life Course, and Gender. Career and non Career Jobs in Context.’ European Societies
iFirst 1–22.
OECD 2002. Employment Outlook. Paris: OECD.
Osterman, Paul. 1996. Broken Ladders: Managerial Careers in the new Economy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pager, Devah. 2003. ‘The Mark of a Criminal Record.’ American Journal of Sociology 108(5): 937–75.
Peiperl, Maury A., Michael B. Arthur, Tob Goffe and Timothy Morris (eds) 2000. Career Frontiers. New Conceptions
of Working Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poggio, Barbara. 2004. Mi Racconti una Storia? Il Metodo Narrativo Nelle Scienze Sociali. Roma: Carocci.
Poggio, Barbara. 2006. ‘Editorial: Outline of a Theory of Gender Practices.’ Gender, Work & Organization 13: 225–
33.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x
 Rethinking the Concept of Career 1043

Pringle, Judith. K. and Mary Mallon. 2003. ‘Challenges for the Boundaryless Career Odyssey.’ International Journal of
Human Resource Management 14: 839–53.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991a. ‘Narrative Identity.’ Pp. 188–99 in On Paul Ricoeur, Narrative and Interpretation, edited by
David Wood. London and New York: Routledge.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991b. ‘Life in Quest of Narrative.’ Pp. 20–33 in On Paul Ricoeur, Narrative and Interpretation, edited
by David Wood. London and New York: Routledge.
Riessman, Catherine K. 1993. Narrative Analysis. Qualitative Methods Series. Newbury Park CA: Sage.
Riessman, Catherine K. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. London: Sage.
Roper, Juliet, Shiv Ganesh and Kerr Inkson. 2010. ‘Neoliberalism and Knowledge Interests in Boundaryless Careers
Discourse.’ Work, Employment and Society 24: 661–79.
Roper, Michael. 1994. Masculinity and the British Organization Man Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savage, Mike and Karen Williams. 2008. Remembering Elites. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences of Work in the new Capitalism. New
York: Norton.
Silber, Ilana F. 2003. ‘Pragmatic Sociology as Cultural Sociology.’ European Journal of Social Theory 6: 427–49.
Silbey, Susan. 2006. ‘Globalization.’ Pp. 245–8 in The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, edited by Brian S. Turner.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slay, Holly and Delminize A. Smith. 2011. ‘Professional Identity Construction: Using Narrative to Understand the
Negotiation of Professional and Stigmatized Cultural Identities.’ Human Relations 64: 85–107.
Somers, Margaret R. and Gloria D. Gibson. 1994. ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the
Social Constitution of Identity.’ Pp. 37–99 in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, edited by Craig Calhoun.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Steadman, Carolyn K. 1998 [1986] ‘Stories.’ Pp. 243–54 in Women, Autobiography, Theory, A Reader, edited by
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Stones, Robert A. 2005. Structuration Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strangleman, Tim. 2005. ‘Sociological Futures and the Sociology of Work.’ Sociological Research Online 10. [Online].
Retrieved from: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/4/strangleman.html.
Strangleman, Tim. 2007. ‘The Nostalgia for Permanence at Work? The end of Work and its Commentators.’ The
Sociological Review 55: 81–103.
Tams, Svenja and Michael B. Arthur. 2010. ‘New Directions for Boundaryless Career: Agency and Interdependence
in a Changing World.’ Journal of Organizational Behaviour 31: 629–46.
Urry, John. 2000. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.
Useem, Michael and Jerome Karabel. 1986. ‘Pathways to top Corporate Management.’ American Sociological Review
51: 184–200.
Vidal, Matt. 2011. ‘Reworking Postfordism: Labor Process Versus Employment Relations.’ Sociology Compass 5:
273–86.
Wajcman, Judy. 1998. Managing Like a Man, Women and men in Corporate Management. Oxford: Polity, in association
with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Walby, Silvia. 1997. Gender Transformation. London: Routledge.
West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. ‘Doing Gender.’ Gender and Society 1: 125–51.
White, Hayden. 1981. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.’ Pp. 1–24 in On Narrative, edited
by WTJ Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Wilensky, Harold L. 1961. ‘Orderly Careers and Social Participation: The Impact of Work History on Social Inte-
gration in the Middle Mass.’ American Sociological Review 26: 521–39.
Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Flamingo.
Wilton, Nick and Kate Purcell. 2010. ‘The Impact of Partnership and Family-Building on the Early Careers of
Female Graduates in the UK.’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 29(3): 271–88 (2040–7149).
Wolkowitz, Carol. 2009. ‘Challenging Boundaries: An Autobiographical Perspective on the Sociology of Work.’
Sociology 43: 846–60.
Wright Mills, C. 1940. ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive.’ American Sociological Review 5: 904–13.

ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 5/12 (2011): 1029–1043, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00429.x