Rethinking Career Studies: Facilitating Conversation across Boundaries with the Social Chronology Framework

Description

Careers are studied across many disciplines - particularly from the social sciences - but there is little conversation between them. Many scholars are studying the same thing in different ways, too often missing opportunities to learn from one another and draw on each other's ideas and findings to enrich their own. Gunz and Mayrhofer bridge these scholarly discourses as they explore the meaning of 'career' and answer the question: what is it that career scholars do when they study careers? The framework that emerges from this answer - the Social Chronology Framework (SCF) - vitally facilitates valuable conversations between scholars in different intellectual traditions. Building on the SCF framework, this comprehensive introduction to career studies encourages students, researchers and practitioners to identify commonalities between the topics they are studying and those examined in other fields, such as organization studies, drawing together interdisciplinary insights into career outcomes and their influencing factors.

Hugh Gunz has a Ph.D. in Chemistry and in Organizational Behaviour, and is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the book Careers and Corporate Cultures (1989), and co-editor of the Handbook of Career Studies (2007). He serves or has served on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Journal of Professions and Organization, Academy of Management Journal, and the Journal of Managerial Psychology, and Emergence, and is a former chair of the Careers Division of the Academy of Management. Wolfgang Mayrhofer is Full Professor and head of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Management and Organisational Behaviour, Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien, Austria. He has (co-)authored/(co-)edited thirty-one books and (co-)authored more than 210 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He serves as editorial or advisory board member of several international journals and research centres and regularly consults with organisations in the for-profit and non-profit world. He has received national and international awards for outstanding research and service to the academic community.

'In this authoritative book, Gunz and Mayrhofer demonstrate an inspiring width of vision and depth of analysis that will benefit career studies enormously. Their ability to identify and explain abstract concepts and then apply them rigourously to specific examples of career research is truly impressive. This book deserves to be a landmark in career studies and beyond - at last we have something that achieves what many of us careers academics have been calling for but have not delivered. The Social Chronology Framework deserves to become a key reference point for careers researchers in designing and interpreting their work, and in incorporating new ideas into their thinking.' John Arnold, Loughborough University 'This book ought to be read by every scholar who studies careers . It is a demanding book, but the deeper you go the more you will be rewarded. The authors carefully sequenced propositions, models and illustrative examples promote a rich appreciation of how career scholars can integrate and gain greater respect for one another's work. Moreover, the book provides a point of departure for conversations with scholars who study other topics - such as identity, role and leadership - which can also benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. We need more books like this if social science is ever going to fulfill its potential.' Michael B. Arthur, Emeritus Professor, Suffolk University, Boston 'HG and WM, as they call themselves in this book, offer us a historical and a sometimes detailed/sometimes witty perspective of careers scientific field studies, searching for better definitions, mapping connections between theories and presenting SCF as a device for tackling careers studies.' Tania Casado, Universidade de Sao Paulo