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

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.

Figures; Tables; Preface; Part I. Point of Departure: 1. Establishing the need for the Social Chronology Framework; 2. Exploring career as a concept; Part II. The Social Chronology Framework (SCF): 3. The three perspectives and their view of career; 4. A heuristic model of career; 5. Exploring the architectonics of the SCF; Part III. Putting the SCF to work: 6. Facilitating conversations within career studies; 7. Stimulating cumulative research within career studies; 8. Bringing ideas in from organization studies; 9. Contributing to organization studies; Part IV. Conclusion: 10. Taking the SCF forward; References.

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, Wirtschaftsuniversität 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.