Abstract
‘How are contemporary careers constructed?’ The aim of the article is to answer this question by developing a conceptual model of how professional and organizational environments shape careers in today’s knowledge-based economy. Focusing on the interplay of two macro-level forces, professionalization and the diversity of organizations, we develop a typology of four distinct career models and incorporate them into a dynamic evolutionary process of careers. The implications for developing a more integrated and dynamic approach on contemporary careers are discussed.
We are frequently reminded that we live in a world where everyone should take charge of his or her own career and be proactive in career decisions. HR specialists, management gurus and career counselors often suggest that employees be entrepreneurial in this new world of boundaryless careers (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Hall, 2004). At the same time, we are also constantly told that we live in a knowledge-based economy where people are expected to develop professional knowledge through progressive career steps. Increasingly, employees identify themselves with a specific occupation, work to acquire necessary credentials or licensing, and subscribe to the aspirations and career goals of their occupations (Anteby et al., 2016; Brint, 2001; Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Leicht and Fennell, 1997).
This changing world of careers, which simultaneously promises unlimited entrepreneurial opportunities while constraining alternatives through occupational dynamics, requires new conceptual frameworks that integrate how individual career choices are made in a social space formed by the forces of occupations and organizations. Such frameworks are essential for understanding not only the work experiences of individuals as they build their careers but also the institutional settings in which their work is conducted (Gunz et al., 2011; Inkson et al., 2012). By bringing together three streams of research that have evolved quasi-independently in the literature—existing approaches to the study of careers, the sociology of professions, and organization theory—our aim is to develop a conceptual model of how professional and organizational environments shape careers in today’s knowledge-based economy.
Careers are ‘the evolving sequences of a person’s work experience over time’ (Arthur et al., 1989: 8). Viewing ‘career’ as a sequence of job positions over a person’s lifespan, we seek to understand the underlying mechanisms that produce not only commonality but also diversity in careers and shape career trajectories. Specifically, we define career variations as the degrees to which individuals in an occupational domain construct their careers in similar (or dissimilar) ways. Understanding the sources and processes of such career variations is important because they determine the degrees of freedom that individuals have in constructing careers. For example, in an occupational domain with a low career variation, individual careers are likely to be more homogeneous and more collectively determined, while those in a domain with a high career variation are likely to be more heterogeneous and more individualized.
To understand what forces shape career variations, we focus on situational mechanisms ‘by which social structures constrain individuals’ action and cultural environments shape their desires and beliefs’ (Hedström and Swedberg, 1998; Hedström and Ylikoski, 2010: 59). These mechanisms shape careers by standardizing and differentiating specific elements of career construction. Moreover, the situational mechanisms provide the markings of macro-level forces, since career choices of individuals reflect what is appropriate, desirable and valued within specific occupational and organizational communities in a given time and place. The analysis of such situational mechanisms thus helps us understand the causal processes by which occupational and organizational environments shape individual career choices.
Specifically, we focus on two macro-level forces, professionalization of an occupation and the diversity of organizations in such occupational domain, and develop a conceptual model of the situational mechanisms by which these two forces influence individual career construction. First, following the contemporary approach to the study of professions (Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Muzio et al., 2013), we define professionalization as the degree of success in the claim to an exclusive jurisdiction for a particular occupational domain, which varies across occupations. In our conceptual model, we view such professionalization as a converging institutional force that homogenizes and standardizes varieties of careers by establishing normative and cultural meanings of what careers should look like. Second, we draw upon organizational ecology theory and view the diversity of organizations as a diverging ecological force that produces and increases the varieties of careers by providing more opportunities for diverse career constructions. In particular, we focus on two kinds of organizational diversity: (1) the diversity of organizational forms in an occupation and (2) the diversity across organizations in a given form.
Focusing on the combination of these two opposing forces—professionalization (weak, strong) and diversity of organizations (low, high) —we develop a typology of four distinct career trajectories, which is similar to Weber’s (1949: 90) ‘ideal-type’ construct. On the basis of this typology, we illustrate what careers typically look like in each of these four conditions, examine how individuals, organizational and professional environments play a role in constructing careers, and compare career variations across the four different conditions. Later, we develop an evolutionary process model of how careers are linked to changes in the interactive dynamics between professionalization and organizational diversity. As time-dependent social forces, the converging professionalization and the diverging organizational diversity take place at different speeds or to different extents. We propose that, depending on how the intensity of these forces changes, different career construction patterns would be produced.
By examining the impact of professionalization and organizational diversity on individual career construction, this article makes three main contributions to career research. First, our article redirects attention of career research beyond its traditional focus on the immediate organizational context by incorporating the role that the interactive dynamics between professional and organizational environments play in constructing careers. Our model provides a useful framework to consider the reciprocal influence of both professional and organizational environments on careers and proposes that such simultaneous consideration is critical for understanding careers in today’s landscape of knowledge-based work. Second, our article contributes to a better understanding of career similarities and differences among individual participants in occupational and organizational communities. We explore the situational mechanisms that determine the degree of variation among careers in an occupation, which can be used as a basis to assess both career stability and change in various occupational contexts. Third, we argue that to better understand career construction, attention should be paid to the totality of a career as a whole, rather than to simple transitions between pairs of jobs. Time is central to understanding a career. Nevertheless, the focus of concern among career researchers has been mainly around job mobility, rather than the linked sequences of career advancements over time.
The components of career construction
Most occupations in the contemporary economic world have some degree of professional knowledge, whether one is a hairdresser, technician, physical therapist, grade school teacher or lawyer (Anteby et al., 2016; Barley et al., 2016; Bell, 1973; Brint, 2001; Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Susskind and Susskind, 2015). We thus view contemporary careers as sequences of professionally and organizationally defined events and roles that individuals enact over time.
Figure 1 presents our view of a career, illustrating career events at three major sequential stages. As shown in Figure 1, we focus on the totality of a career, considering how the type, duration and ordering of individual career events are organized as a whole. First, at the entry stage, an individual would be expected to start with meeting the requirements of education, training or apprenticeships, completing the qualifications of certifications and credentials, and/or obtaining the membership of professional organizations. Existing literature extensively discusses how access to career entry events is related to particular demographic factors such as gender, age and ethnicity. These social, legal or demographic requirements can serve as entry barriers that prevent outsiders from penetrating a particular occupation (Larson, 1977; Weeden, 2002). Moreover, they often act as early determinants of one’s position in the status stratification of the labor market because the quality of initial career entry events can determine future mobility opportunities, status and earnings through facilitating or limiting access to valued career paths (Scherer, 2004; Spilerman, 1977). For example, the prestige of a doctoral program is an important determinant of later career opportunities in the academic marketplace (Bedeian et al., 2010; Cole and Cole, 1974). Second, in the transition stage, an individual is faced with job mobility opportunities offered by various factors such as employing organizations (Greve, 1994; Haveman and Cohen, 1994), occupational labor markets (Smith and Abbott, 1983) or geographic locations. How these transition movements are sequentially ordered constitutes a major portion of one’s career and is subject to the prevailing norms, values and conventions in one’s organizational and occupational environments. Finally, the exit stage of a career is marked by the way an individual leaves the occupational domain (e.g. exit from the domain, retirement or death). Those who exit before retirement age and migrate into a different occupational domain are usually expected to be back to the career entry stage in a new domain.
Career construction processes.
In order to understand how professional and organizational environments shape careers in today’s landscape of knowledge-based work, we focus on career variations indicating the extent of dissimilarity among individual career sequences in a given occupational domain. In some occupations, there exist a few typical career pathways based on an elaborate and pervasive system of expectations for appropriate career entry, transitions and exit. For example, Abbott (1988: 129) stated that:
. . . careers aiming at high intra-professional status generally have longer training periods and are more fixed in form than other careers. Law students aiming at major firms must make law review, and later must march along the junior associate, senior associate, junior partner path to senior partnership.
The common paths into which types, duration and ordering of transitional career events are organized as a whole provide the representative basis of how individuals move forward into appropriate professional and organizational roles in a specific occupational domain. Owing to the existence of professional expectations of such common paths, individuals build their work lives not as a series of randomized jobs, but towards socially accepted career paths. They do not wander around aimlessly and accidentally at any stage of their careers. Instead, they strive to follow career paths established in their occupation because their career outcomes, such as status, power and income, are tightly associated with whether they follow these paths (Abbott, 1988). In a similar vein, DiMaggio and Powell (1983: 152–153) noted that career construction in a highly institutionalized occupation is ‘so closely guarded, both at the entry level and throughout the career progression, that individuals who make it to the top are virtually indistinguishable.’ Such similarities in career construction reflect the collectively developed character of situational mechanisms as well as the dynamics of path dependency where the scope of alternative choices is narrowed down over time (see Sydow et al., 2009).
However, depending on how the types, the duration and the ordering of transitional career events are organized as a whole, the degree of career variations varies across occupations. Hughes (1937) suggested two types of societies in terms of career variations: (1) rigid societies where careers are of expected types and each individual’s work history is relatively predetermined, and (2) freer societies where individuals have less certainty and more discretion for choosing their own positions. In some occupations where career construction is subject to a few established paths, participants’ careers may be less variable, more collectively determined and more predictable. Those who enter into occupations with low career variations are likely to easily identify which paths they should follow to become a successful professional by continuously comparing their past or future career events to the few well-established career models. By contrast, in other occupations where career construction is open to numerous paths, participants’ careers may be less uniform, more flexible and more individualized. Those who enter into occupations with high career variations are likely to have discretion among diverse career choices but, at the same time, might face uncertainty in identifying successful career paths or making a clear assessment of their career events. This is the question we investigate next: What forces shape career variations?
The role of situational mechanisms in career construction
An understanding of situational mechanisms in career construction is important for explaining how prevailing norms and structures in professional and organizational environments serve as social timetables to guide individual career construction. Career scripts and boundaries exist partly independent of their producing agents and are shaped by social and cultural norms and practices (Barley, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Dany et al., 2011; Gunz et al., 2007, 2011). As Gunz et al. (2011: 1613–1614) pointed out, ‘the broad social context that provides the canvas on which work careers are painted, rather than the immediate organizational context . . . is an important, yet partly neglected factor for understanding work careers.’ We suggest that one way to address this neglected social context is to give greater attention to the situational mechanisms of career construction by which macro contextual factors, such as globalization, growing demographic diversity, unionization, and changes in technological or regulatory environments, influence individual career construction. Among these contextual factors, this article focuses on the roles of two interrelated but often conflicting situational mechanisms—professionalization of an occupational domain and the diversity of organizations utilizing such domain—in the construction of contemporary careers. The reason for this choice is two-fold. First, prior research has long recognized professional and organizational expectations as two main competing sources of authorities to influence specific elements of career construction (Abbott, 1988; Anteby et al., 2016; Freidson, 2001; Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Leicht and Fennell, 1997; Tolbert, 1996). Second, our objective is to ground studies of careers in the interactive dynamics between professional and organizational environments.
Professionalization and career construction
Professionalization is a key situational mechanism influencing the construction of careers because its central aim is to establish exclusive control of work in a particular occupation. While old approaches to professional development focused on identifying the distinguishing characteristics that exclude other occupations from traditional professions such as law or medicine (Freidson, 1994; Wilensky, 1964), contemporary approaches view the attributes that characterize a profession as a variable rather than as a typology (Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Von Nordenflycht, 2010). As Gorman and Sandefur (2011: 276–277) pointed out in their review on the study of professional work, ‘interest is no longer confined to the traditional professions, nor are researchers particularly concerned with policing the boundaries of the concept of profession and excluding occupations that do not qualify.’ Such perspective encourages research to expand into a broad range of knowledge-based work and study how professionalization manifests itself (Barley et al., 2016; Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Susskind and Susskind, 2015). Following the contemporary approach, our argument is based on the premise that professionalization is a process, which is placed on a continuum of weak to strong across occupations, rather than a category.
As a situational mechanism, the degree of professionalization determines the extent to which occupational authority has control over key career-related decisions. Such decisions include setting up required qualifications for the employment in terms of professional education and certification (Dunn and Jones, 2010), defining the appropriate division of labor for professional practice (Reay et al., 2006), and establishing a professional standard of job promotion ladders (Park et al., 2011). Because the extent of occupational control over these decisions largely depends on the degree of professionalization, it is a key source of the widespread adoption of professionally prescribed employment and promotion practices, such as ‘up-or-out’ systems in law firms (Swaine, 1948) or tenure systems for academic professionals (Dany et al., 2011; Park et al., 2011). In strongly professionalized occupations, individuals that gain professional endorsement through conforming to professionally prescribed credential and employment practices can receive legitimacy and status benefits (Abbott, 1988). In contrast, those failing to meet established professional standards may receive serious social and economic penalties. Such deviations from professional expectations are often regarded as undesirable and sometimes even impossible because they may be coercively or normatively sanctioned. For example, Reay et al.’s study (2006) on the emergence of nurse practitioners in Alberta, Canada shows the comparison of different career requirements and expectations among physicians, nurse practitioners and registered nurses. Professionals in each of these three specializations are required to have different levels of education, training and practice experience and acquire different certifications and credentials. A nurse’s chance of becoming a physician or a nurse practitioner would be zero without meeting the established professional requirements.
We propose that, for a given occupational domain, the greater the degree of professionalization, the lower the degree of variation among careers. In other words, we view the degree of professionalization as a converging institutional force that promotes career similarity because major elements of career construction become increasingly institutionalized. For example, an important component of professionalization is to develop a systematic body of abstract technical knowledge and expertise (David et al., 2013; Dunn and Jones, 2010; Freidson, 2001; Lounsbury, 2002). This technical expertise, which is typically acquired by an intensive investment in education and apprenticeship, plays a critical role at the career entry stage by defining the entry qualifications required for professional practice. As a result of professionalization, homogeneous career entry events would be not only encouraged, but also required before one could perform professional practice. These institutionalized entry requirements restrict both internal competition within an occupation through status stratification and external competition with other occupations by the claim of exclusive jurisdiction. Such restrictions enable individuals to compare their career trajectories to those of their peers and reduce career variations. This is an essential aspect of developing social closure (Weeden, 2002) or economic monopoly power (Larson, 1977) in some occupations.
Increasing career similarity driven by professionalization would be observed not only at the career entry stage but also at the career transition and exit stages in Figure 1. In a strongly professionalized occupation, individuals are induced to conform to rule-like professional expectations of appropriate career progressions that are supported and regulated by professional knowledge bases, educational systems and professional associations. Career outcomes such as power, status and income are usually accrued and stratified through specific career movements in a predetermined order. By contrast, in an occupation with weak professionalization, a variety of alternative choices would be available to individuals at all career stages. Park et al. (2011)’s overview on the history of tenure systems among higher education organizations in the US provides a good example of how professionalization can result in the widespread adoption of a professionally prescribed employment practice. As a result of strong conformity pressures successfully mobilized by the professional association, almost all colleges and universities in the US had a tenure system in place after 1940, which had not been the case at the initial professionalization stage in the early 20th century.
It should be noted, however, that even in a strongly professionalized occupation, there can be major changes in taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs of how individuals should construct their careers. Important factors that can promote such changes are commodification of professional expertise (Abbott, 1988), changes in the scope of services offered by professionals (Greenwood et al., 2002; Reay et al., 2006), the increased use of non-standard part-time workers (Galperin, 2017; Park et al., 2011), or the weakening of institutional boundaries between professionalized practitioners (Dunn and Jones, 2010; Hinings et al., 1999). These challenges to professionally-defined career paths may act as counter-movements against convergence pressures driven by professionalization and reshape existing career trajectories.
The diversity of organizations and career construction
While professionalization is an institutional force driving towards career convergence, we view the heterogeneity of employing organizations in an occupational domain as a competing ecological force driving towards career divergence. Considering the broader ecology of organizations beyond a focal organization perspective, research in organizational ecology seeks to answer the question, ‘Why are there so many kinds of organizations’ (Hannan and Freeman, 1989: 7). Viewing organizational diversity as an important factor in shaping careers, Hannan (1988) argued that both the shape of average careers and the inequality of career outcomes rely on the diversity of organizations in a social system. The basic underlying mechanism for this argument is that the degree of organizational diversity determines the extent of diverse career choices available to individuals. An increase in organizational diversity can expand the diversity of firm-specific or industry-specific job positions (Hannan, 1988), which encourages individuals to construct their career transitions in idiosyncratic ways based on their interests and capabilities by moving to the kinds of organizations they could best match (Miner and Akinsanmi, 2016). Empirical research provides evidence that the diversity of organizations in an industry influences job mobility (Fujiwara-Greve and Greve, 2000; Greve, 1994; Haveman and Cohen, 1994) and the inequality of career outcomes (Sorensen and Sorenson, 2007).
Drawing on the ecological perspective, we propose that career variations in an occupational domain can be influenced by two kinds of organizational diversity: (1) the range (i.e. different types) of organizational forms in a domain and (2) the diversity across organizations within a given organizational form. 1 First, one source of career variations is the range of organizational forms existing in an occupational domain, which we expect to influence careers in a more large-scale fashion. Greenwood and Suddaby (2006: 30) defined an organizational form as ‘an archetypal configuration of structures and practices given coherence by underlying values regarded as appropriate within an institutional context.’ It is important to note that what defines a distinct organizational form is a combination of core organizational features involving goals, division of labor, authority relations, coordination/controlling mechanisms, technologies and client markets (Hannan, 2005; Rao and Singh, 2001). Differences in such core features can lead organizations to have different sets of job positions as well as different career opportunity structures. For example, an attorney who is employed as an in-house corporate lawyer in a manufacturing firm would have different career opportunities, compared with a similar attorney who works in a law firm. Lawyers working in law firms are typically expected to develop their careers based on extensions or adaptations of the standard Cravath model, the central component of which is an ‘up-or-out’ system for promotion to partnership (Morris and Pinnington, 1998; Sherer and Lee, 2002; Swaine, 1948). In contrast, in-house counsel in the corporate sector are lawyers who ‘present themselves as enthusiastically committed to corporate objectives’ (Nelson and Nielsen, 2000: 457). These lawyers take on different professional roles, and their selection, promotion and compensation are mainly determined by the employing corporation’s HR department. Similar conditions also exist for other professionals such as accountants, doctors or scientists. For example, according to Smith-Doerr’s (2004) comparison of heterogeneous organizational forms for life scientists, a life scientist who works in the biotechnology sector is expected to have less minutely specialized tasks and less finely graded job ladders, compared with a life scientist who is employed in the pharmaceutical sector. Such cross-sector differences in hierarchy, the division of labor and the standardization of roles offer different career construction opportunities for life scientists.
Second, the other source of career variations is the diversity across organizations within a given form. Organizations within a form differ on many dimensions such as size, age, strategies, status, resources and relationships with clients. Such differences may lead organizations to organize their work in different ways, adopt different specialized roles, and employ different hiring, promotion, training and retirement practices (Hannan, 1988). This provides individuals with opportunities to exploit organizational diversity over the course of their careers by pursuing good job matches through inter-organizational transitions. For instance, Bidwell and Briscoe (2010) found that IT professionals tend to begin their careers in large workplaces and then move to smaller ones in their advanced career stage, because large organizations provide better training and skill-development opportunities.
We propose that, for a given occupational domain, the greater the degree of these two kinds of organizational diversity, the higher the degree of variation among careers. In other words, we view the expansion of organizational diversity as a diverging ecological force that promotes career dissimilarity. Furthermore, diverse organizational settings and a growing number of career moves can mutually influence each other by establishing alternative social networks of professional relationships (Ibarra and Deshpande, 2007). These broadened networks may act as a carrier to disseminate alternative career construction scenarios and offer guidance, mentoring and sponsorship for those alternatives.
It should be also noted that organizational diversity even within a strongly professionalized occupation continuously evolves in response to the changing economic, social, or political conditions. For instance, the traditional up-or-out partnership system, which was based on a strict tournament model, has now been supplanted with what is being termed as ‘elastic tournaments’ (Galanter and Henderson, 2008). The consequences of this transformation have been very critical for the construction of lawyers’ careers. Law firms have adopted new titles and positions such as non-equity partners, counsels, staff lawyers, staff associates, contract lawyers and abandoned the equation of seniority with ownership (Gorman, 1999; Morris and Pinnington, 1998; Sherer and Lee, 2002). Similar observations have been made in other professional labor markets. For example, even within one of the most stable career models, academic careers, more diverse career and promotion scripts have been practiced in different university employment settings (Dany et al., 2011; Duberley et al., 2006; Park et al., 2011).
The interaction of professionalization and diversity of organizations
As we point out in the previous section, a careful examination of the existing literature informs us that professional and organizational factors interact and influence the construction of contemporary careers. To understand how individuals construct their careers in a career space formed by professional and organizational environments, we identify four distinct career models as shown in Table 1. For each of them, we elucidate how individuals construct careers and compare the degree of career variations across different professional and organizational environments.
Interaction of professionalization and diversity of organizations in career construction.
Individual agency-based career model
In Model 1, an occupational domain is characterized by weak professionalization and high organizational diversity. Under this condition, we expect the construction of careers to be primarily driven by individuals, leading to a high degree of career variations. Owing to a lack of critical conditions for professionalization, collective expectations regarding appropriate career entry, transitions and exit would be weak and remain open to alternative interpretations. There would be few social norms and rules for educating and socializing individual participants. Professional certifications or credentials would likely be at best optional and may even occur after the employment into organizations. Such lack of entry barriers and other regulatory arrangements would encourage people from various occupations to take part in this domain. In addition, highly diverse organizational settings across different industry sectors would develop their own idiosyncratic jobs, employments and HR practices. In addition to the availability of such heterogeneous organizational forms, organizational diversity within an organizational form would further provide individuals with numerous organizational choices for their careers. Such high organizational diversity allows them to be less constrained by career expectations of a particular organization or a particular organizational form and proactively pursue a good match with their own traits, interests, and capabilities as they build their careers.
Taken together, we suggest that this is the domain where boundaryless (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996), protean (Hall, 2004) or idiosyncratic (Miner and Akinsanmi, 2016) career construction is most commonly observed. Weak professionalization allows individuals to cross occupational boundaries and high organizational diversity induces them to cross organizational boundaries. Frequent movement across organizations, industries and occupations is likely to produce more individualized career trajectories in terms of the types, duration and ordering of major job positions. Individuals can use these job transitions to develop new skills and competencies, receive additional certifications, explore other occupational domains, and develop diverse social networks (Bidwell and Briscoe, 2010; Kleinbaum, 2012; Miner and Akinsanmi, 2016; O’Mahony and Bechky, 2006). Their career outcomes would be directly related to human and social capital acquisitions as they move from one organization to another. Under this contingency, we expect that it is relatively more common to observe less structured sequences of career movements as well as temporary, part-time and contractual employment relations (O’Mahony and Bechky, 2006).
Research on contemporary IT professionals’ careers exemplifies such career construction. A study on their career histories (Joseph et al., 2012) found that only about a third adhered to an IT career, while the remaining others chose to explore multiple occupations by either leaving the IT workforce after a brief early career or taking a mid-career move into the IT. An extremely high-level diversity of organizations in this domain supports boundaryless careers that span organizations, industries and occupations (Joseph et al., 2012) and leads frequent job mobility to be perceived as the norm, not the exception (Bidwell and Briscoe, 2010). A similar example is careers in the HR domain. Despite collective professionalization attempts by HR practitioners, studies have found that the critical characteristics of highly professionalized occupations such as the mandatory fulfillment of professional training, certifications and credentials are not present in the HR domain (Pohler and Willness, 2014; Wright, 2008). Similar to IT professionals, HR professionals are employed by almost every organization, whether industrial, educational, governmental or religious, and their organizational settings are highly diverse. With little professional career guidance and numerous choices of organizational forms, HR professionals have the opportunity to construct their careers in considerably flexible ways.
Organizational form-based career model
In Model 2 with weak professionalization and low organizational diversity, we suggest that career construction is mainly based on career expectations and practices prevailing in a given organizational form. Consider the case of career construction in a weakly professionalized occupational domain where there is only one organizational form (or population), made up of essentially similar employers. Within this form, organizational differences on dimensions, such as size, age, resources or governance provide opportunities for individuals to move between organizations and construct alternative career paths (Fujiwara-Greve and Greve, 2000; Greve, 1994), thereby increasing the degree of career variations. However, compared with Model 1 where it is relatively easier for individuals to move across organizational forms in different industry sectors, Model 2 provides more restricted organizational choices since career movement is likely to occur within an organizational form (or a small range of organizational forms). Also, unlike in Model 1, moving out of an organizational population in Model 2 is more likely to be associated with the departure from their occupational domain, which would place a limit on career movements across organizational forms. Owing to such limited organizational scope for career construction, we expect that individual careers in Model 2 are likely to be highly dependent on those similar organizations within an organizational form (Hannan, 1988). Under this contingency, employing organizations can usually exercise control over the details of employment such as job titles, recruitment, promotions and retirements. Thus, the duration and ordering of major events at different career stages are likely to follow the logic of dominant career structures and practices within an organizational form. Taken together, we expect that career variations would be smaller in Model 2 than in Model 1.
A good example of this career model is librarians’ careers in the US. Compared with strongly professionalized domains such as law or medicine, librarianship in the US is considered less successful in professionalization (Abbott, 1998). It has no legal permission granted by the state in order to claim exclusive jurisdiction. Multiple types of credentials from other occupations have been also accepted in this domain, though it is common to require librarians to earn a one- or two-year master’s degree in library science. Furthermore, as information technology routinizes some of its core activities such as cataloging or information searching, the basis of the occupation’s existence has been seriously challenged (Nelson and Irwin, 2014; O’Connor, 2009). Most librarians work in relatively homogeneous organizational settings; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US (2012), 84% of librarians work for school and public libraries. Because non-librarians, such as school boards, elected city officials or other administrators, usually exercise control over the details of librarians’ employment including salary, benefits, and promotion, the career of librarianship becomes highly dependent on career practices regarded as appropriate within the organizational form of libraries. Another example for this model is careers of agents in the global advertising industry. Careers in advertising agencies do not typically require credentials such as standard education requirements, professional certifications, or licensing, and regulations involving the exclusivity of practice do not exist. People from various educational backgrounds take part in this domain (McLeod et al., 2009). Although the global advertising industry is fragmented with a large number of small firms, they are just one kind of employment settings—firms that sell their professional services to business clients (Von Nordenflycht, 2011). Also, zoo-keepers in modern zoos and aquariums are a good example to illustrate this career model.
Profession-based career model
In Model 3 with strong professionalization and low organizational diversity, the degree of congruency between professional and organizational expectations with regard to career construction becomes critical. Career construction processes are influenced on the one hand by rigid professional expectations and on the other hand by relatively uniform employment practices. Potential conflicts in expectations are usually resolved through professional-dominated organizational settings that maintain or enhance professional control over core organizational features such as goals, a body of work, division of labor, authority relations or controlling mechanisms (Leicht and Fennell, 1997). Under this condition, we suggest that career construction is primarily driven by professional expectations in that both individuals and employing organizations subscribe to the institutionalized professional norms. Professionally and organizationally convergent forces through the form of professional-dominated organizations would promote the similarity of careers, guiding specific career paths as appropriate. Professional norms and rules to encode appropriate entry requirements reduce variations at the career entry level. This convergence process is further driven at later stages of one’s career by the commonalities of organizational settings in which professional work takes place.
Thus, we expect that individuals under this condition are likely to draw on these professionally and organizationally developed recipes in their career construction. A good example of this is provided by careers in dentistry. Although complex organizational arrangements have increased in recent years, the majority of dentists work either in solo private practice or in partnerships with other dentists (Kaldenberg et al., 1995). They often start their careers as salaried associates in large dental clinics or public health service after graduation, and then leave to pursue their own independent practices. As a result of the dominance of this traditional model, diverse or complex organizational career ladders are mostly irrelevant for their careers. Another good example for this model is careers of approximately over 410,000 catholic priests worldwide (Esteves, 2016). Their careers are relatively homogeneous and predictable because both strong professionalization and low organizational diversity drive the convergence among careers.
Profession‒organization based career model
In Model 4 with strong professionalization and high organizational diversity, the tension between professional and organizational expectations becomes more profound. The idealized model of a strongly professionalized occupation, on the one hand, is based on the assumption that individual professionals have the necessary knowledge and discretion to independently carry out their work. Alternative organizational settings, on the other hand, may constrain professional discretion through organizational controls and mandate formalized bureaucratic role structures (Suddaby et al., 2009; Wallace, 1995). Tensions between these two often exist owing to differences between professional and organizational values, between professional autonomy and bureaucratic control, and between professional and organizational boundaries (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001; Greenwood et al., 2006). Unlike those in Model 3 who typically play a central role in managing their own jurisdiction through professional-dominated organizations, individuals in Model 4 are often subordinated to an external or administrative jurisdiction that focuses primarily on organizational efficiency or survival, as opposed to professional discretion and control. Under this condition, professional expectations play a particularly important role in defining career entry events into the domain by making a clear demarcation between qualified professionals and disqualified others through certification and licensing. Diverse organizational forms across industry sectors offer professionals numerous possibilities for inter-organizational mobility and promote non-linear career paths across multiple organizational forms.
Taken together, when professionally convergent but organizationally divergent forces meet, we suggest that individuals would follow professionally guided expectations especially at the beginning stage of their careers but diverse organizational settings would give them opportunities to move their careers forward in flexible ways at the later stages. For instance, accountancy is widely regarded as a strongly professionalized occupation (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006), but organizational settings for CPAs (certified public accountants) are extremely diverse. Greenwood et al. (2002) reported that 41% of chartered accountants in Canada work in a variety of industries: 7%, in government agencies; 2%, in educational organizations; and 29%, in international and local accounting firms. Depending on their choices, chartered accountants may make the career of an auditor, tax advisor, business advisor, or accountant staff in corporations, colleges, or non-profit organizations. Similarly, careers of lawyers offer another good example for Model 4. Recent studies on in-house counsel provide evidence that a growing number of lawyers are employed by corporations as corporate counsel (Nelson and Nielsen, 2000; Uzzi and Lancaster, 2004). This increasing influence of corporate counsel led The Economist (2012) to assert that ‘the power of in-house lawyers has grown hugely in the past ten years. The chief legal officer (CLO) is now one of the mightiest figures in the C-suite.’ Similar to accountants, lawyers unfold their careers, moving beyond traditional private law firms to corporations in a wide variety of industries.
In summary, based on the combination of two key situational mechanisms—professionalization and diversity of organizations—four distinct career models in Table 1 illustrate the contingencies under which individuals, organizational or professional environments are likely to be the primary factor in guiding career construction. The first conclusion we draw from Table 1 is that the impact of neither professional nor organizational environments on careers can be fully understood without taking the other into consideration. Second, individuals would construct their careers in the most flexible ways in those domains characterized by weak professionalization and high organizational diversity. When both professional and organizational environments drive the convergence of careers into a few viable paths, sequences of careers would be more institutionally-dependent and more uniform.
The evolution of situational mechanisms and career variations
The four career models presented in Table 1 mostly paint a static picture of career construction. The institutional structures of professional and organizational environments, however, shift over time, acting on, or in close relation with each other. Like two tectonic plates, conflicting tensions often exist between them (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001; Tolbert, 1996). Therefore, it is not plausible to expect that dominant career construction patterns in a specific occupational domain are time-independent and fixed in one of these four career models (Jones and Dunn, 2007). Instead, they change over time as the converging professionalization and the diverging organizational diversity emerge at different speeds or to different extents. Thus, the degree of career variations in an occupation, along with these changing institutional environments, evolves as well.
Figure 2 presents an illustrative example of how career variations in an occupation evolve over time as the interactive dynamics between professionalization and organizational diversity change. As time-dependent social forces, they both have specific evolutionary propensities for change. Professionalization with a negative slope illustrates how professionally developed collective expectations of appropriate careers would reduce career variations in an occupation (Abbott, 1988; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In contrast, diversity of organizations with a positive slope would increase career variations, opening up new and alternative career platforms (Hannan, 1988). As shown in Figure 2, the sum of these two forces would determine the final degree of career variations in the domain.
The evolution of situational mechanisms and career variations.
Two features of this dynamic process in Figure 2 merit further attention. First, the conceptual representation of the process shown in Figure 2 should be taken as an illustrative example. Every occupational domain does not necessarily follow this U-shaped curve in terms of career variations. Instead, different slopes of professionalization and organizational diversity would produce different evolutionary patterns of career variations. For example, dynamic changes in career variations may be significantly different when fast and accelerated professionalization is associated with either fast or slow rates of organizational diversity. Likewise, a different pattern would be produced when a slow rate of professionalization is combined with either fast or slow rates of organizational diversity. The availability of diverse career options depends on how the intensity of these two forces changes over time.
Second, career variations can be high during the beginning and ending stages as shown in Figure 2, but for different reasons. During the beginning stage of a new occupational domain, there can be high career variations because collective expectations regarding appropriate careers would not yet be formed and few institutional bases exist. By contrast, during its later stage, high career variations can be also observed, as professional work would be performed in diverse organizational forms and continue to expand into new organizational forms. The increasing specialization of professional expert and the growth and differentiation of client bases can promote the recombination of existing career paths as well as the formation of new career paths, thereby expanding the alternatives available to professionals. Some career models that were the most valued, prestigious or well-compensated in previous work settings may be no longer the only alternatives available to those who are entering into an occupational domain (e.g. Sherer and Lee, 2002). Likewise, some elements of professional promotion systems that were highly institutionalized through professionalization may be no longer taken for granted (e.g. Park et al., 2011).
Two occupations that have had long histories, software engineering and journalism, provide interesting examples to illustrate different evolutionary patterns of careers. Software engineering has been around for more than 70 years (Jones, 2013). Since its inception after the Second World War, early pioneers in this occupation worked in either large corporations (e.g. IBM, Xerox) or military establishments because only these organizations had the resources to operate mainframe computers. In other words, there was little organizational diversity in which individuals could construct alternative career paths. After the digital revolution of the 1970s and the ongoing expansion of software engineering, potential career choices have expanded exponentially. Today’s software engineers could work in the medical sector, GPS mapping, or cybersecurity industries, or develop their own applications as entrepreneurs. The end result is a highly fragmented and diverse array of career trajectories. What is more interesting is the fact that after 70 years, software engineering does not have the markers of a strongly professionalized occupation (Adams, 2007; Jones, 2013). There are no certification or licensing requirements, no ethics guidelines, or even no particular degree expectations. In other words, professionalization process has been very slow or non-existent, whereas the diversity of organizations has increased tremendously.
In contrast, journalism has had a long and successful history as a more professionalized occupation. The 20th century had witnessed the evolution of this occupation in which well-trained professionals were able to work in print as well as visual mass media to objectively deliver news (Deuze, 2005). There have been well-established career trajectories for journalists, well-defined educational programs offered by major higher education institutions, and strongly held ethical and legal expectations that shaped the careers of every journalist. In other words, until recently, how to define a journalist was firmly established. Today, however, the image of journalism as a well-formed and stable professional career has been challenged (Witschge, 2013; Witschge and Nygren, 2009). The established business models that have sustained newspapers and TV stations have become obsolete; new media technologies involving the Internet and mobile devices have made the production and the consumption of news interchangeable. New employment practices that are mostly based on freelance arrangements, new competitors who are called citizen journalists or participatory journalism, and new online organizational forms such as The Huffington Post have transformed individual careers. This is an example of an occupation ‘caught between change and tradition’ (Witschge, 2013: 160).
Discussion and conclusion
During the mid-20th century, recognized as the ‘golden age’ of traditional professionalism, a majority of professionals were self-employed entrepreneurs (Gorman and Sandefur, 2011), and the ways of constructing their careers were relatively simple and stable. Today, traditional professions such as law and medicine have grown rapidly and broadened their expertise, new forms of knowledge-based work have emerged, and more and more professionals are employed by a diverse range of organizations (Anteby et al., 2016; Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Leicht and Fennell, 1997; Muzio et al., 2013). The underlying mechanisms through which individuals construct their careers have become not only complex and dynamic, but also of great importance since professionally dominated, knowledge-based organizations have become a key part of modern economies in this post-industrial era (Bell, 1973; Brint, 2001; Scott, 2008). The study of careers, however, has not kept up with these social changes (Arthur, 2008).
To better understand career construction in this changing world of knowledge-based work, this article has proposed a conceptual framework that views careers as collectively produced through interactive dynamics between professional and organizational environments. With this framework, we focused on theorizing the situational mechanisms by which individuals construct their careers with the building blocks provided by professional and organizational environments.
Our conceptual model of contemporary careers presents some important implications for developing a more integrated approach to career research beyond the traditional uni-disciplinary approaches. First, we explored the role of the interactive dynamics between professional and organizational environments that shape career trajectories. Because of its applied and prescriptive focus, career research, especially in the management literature, tends to ignore professional environments in which individuals socialize, develop, and move to meet professional requirements and expectations (Tolbert, 1996). However, it is practically impossible to discuss careers without any reference to professional norms and expectations of what careers look like. Furthermore, given that knowledge-based work is increasingly performed within complex and diverse organizational settings (Gorman and Sandefur, 2011; Leicht and Fennell, 1997; Muzio et al., 2013; Von Nordenflycht, 2010), professional norms and expectations may have conflicts with organizational practices in a wide range of career-related domains such as the division of labor, hiring, socialization, job ladders, and mobility structures. Thus, future career research should bring back professional dynamics and examine careers under the simultaneous consideration of the two major social environments in which contemporary work is conducted—professional and organizational environments.
Second, this article suggests that focusing on the totality of a career is a critical conceptual step toward a better understanding of career construction. Although analyses of job mobility can lead to a better understanding of career transitions at a particular point in time and place, they provide only partial insights for studying the complete shape of work histories and the interplay between institutional environments and careers. Focusing on the totality of a career as an analytic construct allows one to identify at which career stage variations among careers are most likely to occur and analyze why and how such variations occur. In this aspect, our article emphasizes the significance of linking career research to the life course perspective that pays specific attention to the totality of a life course as a whole. Considering the ways in which career events are linked together and sequentially ordered, future research can assess the degree of career variations in an occupation, which allows researchers to cross-sectionally compare career variations across occupations or longitudinally explore the evolution of career variations in a particular occupation. Recent theoretical developments of life-course research (Mayer, 2009) and growing interests among scholars in analyzing career sequences (Biemann and Datta, 2014; Joseph et al., 2012; Stovel et al., 1996) should encourage future career research to empirically examine what typical career paths look like at a given time and place, how and why those paths evolve over time, and under what circumstances individuals depart from standard practices and create alternative career models. Furthermore, future research could extend our approach and explore outcome implications of career variations for individuals and organizations. For example, future studies could explore the relations between career variations and individual career outcomes (e.g. salaries) in an occupation. Alternatively, future research could look at different opportunities and challenges that organizations face in occupational domains with high vs. low career variations.
Finally, we suggest that interactive mechanisms between actors and social institutions in today’s knowledge-based economy can be fully understood only if we do not limit ourselves to the abstract study of a knowledge-based economy, but analyze the ways in which those mechanisms are activated through the linked sequences of career movements in people’s work histories. As scholars (Arthur et al., 1989; Barley, 1989; Hughes, 1937; Jones and Dunn, 2007; Moore et al., 2007) have pointed out, the study of careers provides unique opportunities to understand the essential mechanisms bridging actors and social structure. Such bridging processes make the study of careers an ideal venue for examining the manner in which individuals collectively create, sustain, and change the institutional elements of professional and organizational environments. The evolution and transformation of careers could challenge jurisdictional claims in existing professional domains, redraw social boundaries, and contribute to creating new institutions. Future research could provide insights on the role of professionals in changing professional or organizational environments towards a knowledge-based economy by analyzing deviations from professionally accepted career paths and how these actions redraw professional or organizational boundaries.
Some boundary conditions should be considered for future research to further validate our conceptual framework. First, this article focused on situational mechanisms in career construction, but there are other important mechanisms for understanding the construction of careers. For example, individuals are not only influenced by situational mechanisms reproducing well-established career paths, but also involved in transformational mechanisms remodeling dominant career models. These micro-to-macro transformational mechanisms can contribute to a better understanding of how individuals reject, change, and reinterpret well-established career models. Second, while we believe that our conceptual model is relevant and applicable across different social and cultural contexts, the examples herein should be interpreted with caution, given that they are mostly from Anglo-American occupations. Future empirical studies are needed across different contexts to validate our framework.
Traditionally, career research has mostly been descriptive, focusing ‘on the shifting landscape of career development and its contexts’ without much durable theory (Nicholson, 2007: 567). The purpose of this article was to address this concern and to theorize the situational mechanisms of career construction in today’s knowledge-based economy. As the evolution, adaptation, and speciation among organisms are studied through examining how gene sequences are organized and change over time, the investigation of how careers are organized spatially and temporally could reveal significant information about the ways individual career choices affect or are affected by the evolution and adaptation of historical and structural conditions.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.