Michael B. Arthur

Suffolk University · Department of Strategy and International Business

With careers increasingly taking place within and between cities, this article maps the territory for research and theory on careers in cities. Cities present a microcosm for advancing a systemic understanding of people’s careers over time and in relation to broader issues. We acknowledge cities’ multilayered contexts by identifying six spheres—loc...

With careers increasingly taking place within and between cities, this article maps the territory for research and theory on careers in cities. Cities present a microcosm for advancing a systemic understanding of people's careers over time and in relation to broader issues. We acknowledge cities' multilayered contexts by identifying six spheres-loc...

With this article, we open a special issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior on “Calling and Careers: New Insights and Future Directions.” Calling has become an important emerging topic of study in vocational psychology and organizational behavior, as the exponentially increasing volume of published studies on the topic indicates. After summari...

The empirical literature on charismatic or transformational leadership demonstrates that such leadership has profound effects on followers. However, while several versions of charismatic leadership theory predict such effects, none of them explains the process by which these effects are achieved. In this paper we seek to advance leadership theory b...

The purpose of this qualitative study is to contribute to the scholarship on career success within a boundaryless career context. Within the body of boundaryless careers research, we adopt the intelligent career framework to highlight success factors described by twenty-eight distinguished academics (DAs) and eight of their spouses to illustrate th...

The concept of boundaryless careers characterizes emerging career patterns that are less dependent on traditional organizational career management. Based on an evidence-based review of literature on the relationship between career boundarylessness and career success published from 1994 to 2018, we found that boundaryless careers have mixed effects...

Read the full call for papers here: http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/CareersInCities.html Deadline for paper submissions: 31 January 2019 This special issue aims to advance interdisciplinary research and theory on the topic of 'careers in cities'. By recognizing the importance of urban areas as a context for careers in the...

Work–family researchers are increasingly recognizing the need to expand their focus to advance the field. One population largely neglected by work–family researchers is individuals who have been extremely successful in their careers. In addition, organizational career scholars have largely neglected the interplay between employees’ work and family...

INTRODUCTION Our careers are woven into the fabric of our lives, providing structure, meaning and purpose. Defined as “the unfolding sequence of a person’s work experiences over time” (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989, p. 8), a career is personal, often focusing on paid employment yet extending beyond that to include any aspect of life that connects...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to reflect on a broad body of work that responds to the boundaryless career concept, first introduced in 1993, and to anticipate new theory-building and research. Design/methodology/approach - Covers the origination of the concept, its meaning and definition, the underlying influence of an earlier group of car...

This article introduces “career entrepreneurship,” a rapidly spreading phenomenon in the global knowledge-driven economy. Career entrepreneurship involves taking an entrepreneurial approach to managing our careers. It means doing things that seem “illegitimate” to other people and contradict socially-recognized and accepted sequences of work experi...

This is the opening article in a Human Relations special issue on ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary career studies’. After introducing a story of an ‘exceptional — but real’ career, we argue for an urgent shift toward greater interdisciplinary inquiry. We reflect on the story to describe differences in the way each of psychology, sociol...

This study posits that individual contribution to organizational learning depends greatly on the meanings people ascribe to their work. Our assumption is that organizations learn by drawing on employees' career competencies. The study examines in which ways different types of employees contribute to their employing organizations. The data analysis...

This paper reconnects to the intellectual climate from which the formulation of the boundaryless career perspective emerged in the 1990s. Based on 17 years of cumulative research, we develop the case for extending beyond a primary focus on boundaryless careers as forms (e.g., contractor or global itinerant). We argue that opportunities for further...

This paper examines how separate behavioral science disciplines can be brought together to more fully understand the dynamics of contemporary careers. We adopt one interdisciplinary framework – that of the “intelligent career” – and use it to examine how separate disciplinary approaches relate to one another. The intelligent career framework sugges...

This article describes an urgent need for interdisciplinary careers research in the emerging global knowledge economy. It begins by identifying a range of traditions in careers research, including both occupational and organizational research traditions from professional schools of education and management. It proceeds by offering a view on contemp...

This paper introduces a fresh phenomenon, that of "career entrepreneurship," which we argue is becoming increasingly adopted by individuals in order for them to succeed in the contemporary, global world of work. At its core, career entrepreneurship involves breaking widely accepted assumptions about careers in terms of age, level of education, gend...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate career change intention and its predictors among career change seekers interested in a career opportunity in the information technology (IT) industry. Design/methodology/approach Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB) was used to predict career change intention in this group. In addition, we ex...

Using data from a recent survey of job changes among computer specialists, Michael Arthur investigates the impact of occupational career circumstances upon employee turnover. The results confirm the importance of the occupational career in explaining employee mobility. In contrast, pay levels play a minimal role.

Purpose This paper aims to study careers across cultures, distinguishing among international career, cross‐cultural and globalization perspectives. Design/methodology/approach The conceptual development is based on a review of four empirical papers in this special issue with a focus on “Careers in cross‐cultural perspective” and other recent resea...

This paper compares contemporary career theory with the theory applied in recent career success research. The research makes inconsistent use of career theory, and in particular neglects the interdependence of the objective and subjective careers, and 'boundaryless career' issues of inter-organizational mobility and extra-organizational support. Th...

Both career development and participation at work activities have emphasized a “prospecting” approach to inquiry. Although jointly inspired by the humanistic ethic, the two ventures have grown as separate streams of inquiry through their distinct responses to economic, hierarchical, technological, reductionist, and systems imperatives about work. A...

Although there has been increased interest in the boundaryless career since the publication of Arthur and Rousseau’s book (1996), there is still some misunderstanding about what the concept means. This article examines the boundaryless career and presents a model that attempts to visually capture Arthur and Rousseau’s suggestion that the concept in...

The study examined the effects of job change characteristics on perceived career change and attitudes toward the new job. The job change characteristics examined were content of change, magnitude of change, direction of change, volitionality of job choice, and duration of the unemployment period between the two jobs. The subjects were 222 universit...

The boundaryless career concept widens our perspective towards a range of possible career forms both within and across organizations, but is not primarily driven by the career system of a single organization. The formulation of the boundaryless career concept responds to the observation that stable employment and careers account for the career expe...

This paper compares contemporary career theory with the theory applied in recent career success research. The research makes inconsistent use of career theory, and in particular neglects the interdependence of the objective and subjective careers, and ‘boundaryless career’ issues of inter-organizational mobility and extra-organizational support. Th...

Change, ambiguity and shifting relationships are recurrent themes in contemporary career development. In turn, personal success in the unfolding knowledge economy calls for selfawareness, adaptability and the ability to work with others.A challenge in career coaching is to help people better develop these kinds of skills, and in turn to help people...

This paper explores the concept of career communities: social structures that provide career support and frequently transcend the boundaries of any single organization. The theoretical background notes the convergence of a number of different perspectives from both career development and organization studies, pertaining to the social contextualizat...

Changes in the nature of careers, and also of families, mean new challenges for the increasing number of dual-career couples in society. Each couple faces multiple concerns, including two individual careers, a shared relationship and the interdependence among all of these elements. This paper contributes to the counselling literature by reporting t...

This paper examines a new kind of career odyssey, namely that into the relatively uncharted territory of the world wide web. It extends recent ideas about personal and communal career investments by exploring people's web-enabled career behaviour, based on Tapscott et al.'s (2000) typology of web roles. MBA students completed a preliminary career e...

This article proposes a merger between the traditionally separate worlds of occupational and organisational career counselling. It is suggested such a merger can be achieved through a self-organisingview of careers, and of helping people exercise greater influence over their own career directions. This view is supported by describing the combined a...

Developments in the theory of creativity have begun to converge with contemporary ideas in career theory, and in particular about the impact of careers upon larger creative contexts, such as companies, industries, and host economies. Specifically, Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view (1999: 314-15) sees creativity not simply as an individual act, but as...

We respond to the points raised by Baruch in his critique of our introduction. We believe the critique is helpful because it directs our attention to some important questions that need addressing when applying ideas from one branch of science to another. We argue that there is value in looking elsewhere for ideas, provided that it is done carefully...

The papers that comprise this Special Issue represent a variety of attempts at exploring the potential contributions to careers scholarship that might emerge from applying concepts and models from the so-called "new sciences," a term widely used to denote a large area of enquiry in the physical and complexity sciences. This article introduces the s...

This paper reflects on the first author’s attempts to adapt traditional social science methods to her own purpose. The research involved developing a methodology to explore the subjective career, concerned with people’s internal, self-referential views of their unfolding career experiences. The paper describes a series of problems encountered along...

Traditional views of industry evolution focus on the company as their principal unit of analysis. We offer an alternative view that links between workers' careers and successive community, company and industry effects. We apply this view to evidence from independent film-making, and suggest a conception of the career, involving three "ways of knowi...

In this article, the project is a potential learning episode for both project participants and the project-sponsoring company. People's past learning experiences are the `career capital' they invest in their current project activity. The project-sponsoring company's past learning experience is non-financial `company capital' it invests in the proje...

The fragmented nature of modern working life is leading to fundamental changes in our understanding of the term 'career'. Few people now expect to have a lifetime of continuous employment, regardless of their qualifications or the sector they work in. This book presents a kaleidoscopic view of the concept of career, reviewing its past and consideri...

The topic of careers has become both increasingly important and increasingly complex. Contemporary economies have bought about changes in the nature of careers, and uncertainty in the structure and longevity of firms and their ability to offer long-term employment. Corporate policy-makers struggle with alternatives to traditional employment structu...

The new economy is characterized by escalating interfirm competitiveness and rising interdependence among workers who themselves have complex and varied relations with their employers. The human resource (HR) function is reinventing itself in response. Traditionally HR has focused on a set of activities that have been referred to as the agency func...

The creation of temporary enterprises for project-based work has become an increasingly salient feature of the new economy. These project-based enterprises challenge several tenets of strategic management theory. Film making has a long tradition of project-based organizing. This article presents an intensive case study of a big-budget motion pictur...

Expatriate assignment (EA) and overseas experience (OE) models of international career experience are compared. Analysis of recent case study data suggests OE's advantages over EA for people's development and its consequences. In turn, the analysis suggests both human resource management and national policy-making shift from planning toward knowled...

The shift from circumscribed careers to boundarylessness confronts us with a problem outside our previous experience. No norms and few models exist to tell how to evaluate, plan, review, analyze, promote, or otherwise live out a boundaryless career. Change dominates over stability. But of all changes, the most fundamental are changes in assumptions...

Some observers have noted how careers are increasingly characterized by inter firm mobility (MaGuire, 1993; Pfeffer and Baron, 1988; Kanter, 1989a, 19896). U.S. workers typically experience ten employers over their adult lives (Topel and Ward, 1992). Japanese male workers-despite their country’s reputation for lifetime employment-typically experien...

This book has dealt with change-in “the new organizational era.” Change has been examined through a new conceptualization of careers-boundary less careers-which replaces more circumscribed conceptualizations that have come before. The chapters in this book have extended our exploration of change along the new pathways that boundary less careers sug...

Work gets done. Time passes. Careers— sequences of work experiences over time—unfold. A career depicts the person, the elementary unit in work arrangements. Careers invoke relationships within and among firms. Careers spell economic and social outcomes. Put simply, everyone who works has a career. And everyone’s life outside work is connected to th...

Including contributions from leading scholars at Harvard Business School, Yale, and MIT's Sloan School of Management, this book explores the ways that careers have changed for workers as their firms reorganize to meet global competition. As firms re-engineer, downsize, enter into strategic alliances with other firms, and find other ways to reduce c...

Executive Overview While the new paradigm of the “intelligent enterprise” has captivated the imagination of managers and management scholars alike, few have considered its impact on people's careers.¹ Thus, as a point of departure, we take up that challenge. By exploring the competency-based, learning-centered view of the intelligent enterprise, we...

This paper seeks to provide some practical insights into how smaller firms can grow. At the same time, it questions the current emphasis on entre preneurship as 'the relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled'. To achieve its objective, the paper locates the growth challenge for small firms in the initial res...

This paper deals with the choice of methodological approach within strategic network research. Network-oriented research approaches indicate a broader set of organizational and environmental variables. the issue of trust in network relations implicates contextual aspects such as the socio-cultural foundation of people's interaction. the striving to...

This paper proposes a competency-based view of careers, derived from competency-based models of employer firms. The implications for boundaryless careers are explored by reference to changing organizational, occupational and industry community contexts. All of these contexts are seen as likely to promote boundaryless career behaviors. Future resear...

Despite apparent consensus about the importance of leader rhetoric, the topic has not received systematic attention from leadership scholars. The purpose of this article is to advance the study of the relationship between rhetorical behavior and charismatic leadership in three ways: first, by presenting theoretically derived propositions about the...

The empirical literature on charismatic or transformational leadership demonstrates that such leadership has profound effects on followers. However, while several versions of charismatic leadership theory predict such effects, none of them explains the process by which these effects are achieved. In this paper we seek to advance leadership theory b...

The relationship of marital status, spouse’s career status, and gender to salary was examined from five different theoretical perspectives for a sample of managers and professionals in one large organization. Results showed that married individuals whose spouses did not have careers earned more than anyone except those who were divorced, controllin...

This study explored possible determinants, both inside and outside the job sphere, of willingness to relocate. Data were collected from a large sample of managerial and professional employees in one organization. Unlike previous research, this study investigated willingness to relocate for three different purposes: (1) for a better job or career de...

Dr. Chris Hendry is a Principal Research Fellow in the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and Mr. Alan Jones and Dr. Michael Arthur are Senior Research Fellows. The authors have recently completed a study of human resource development in small-medium enterprises for the UK Department of Employm...

The study examined the relationships between four career concerns (Personal Success, Organizational Involvement, Skill Development and Autonomy) and two categories of political tactics in organizations (Hierarchical Tactics and Networking Tactics) in a sample of management school alumni. Career concerns were not related to the employment of hierarc...

This is a book review. Note: There is no digital copy of this book.

Predictors of willingness to relocate were investigated for a large corporate sample of managers and professionals. Individual, organizational career, family and community factors all emerged as significant antecedents of willingness to relocate. Antecedents of willingness to relocate for a) career enhancement or company needs and b) to remain empl...

This cross-disciplinary text is designed to appeal to a diversity of social science scholars. The central focus is on new ways of viewing the career, or how working lives unfold over time. Fresh views from psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, organization theory, economics, and political science are among those represented in the...

explores how the diversity of theoretical perpectives that share the career concept can be brought together to promote cross-fertilization and new career theory development discuss definitions of career and career theory, the range of social science perspectives relevant to career studies, and the characteristics that guide career theory to highl...

Contenido: 1. Explorando la naturaleza de las carreras sin límites; 2. Más allá de los límites: mercados laborales abiertos y aprendizaje en el Valle del Silicón; 3. Promulgamientos y la carrera sin límites: organicémonos mientras trabajamos; 4. Carreras en las redes de proyectos: el caso de la industria fílmica; 5. Las carreras cambian mientras la...