ABSTRACT
In this chapter we briefly explore the concept of career. It is a commonplace to say that career is a concept that is found almost everywhere in the social sciences, not to mention a substantial part of the humanities. Arthur et al. (1989) list psychology, economics, sociology, demography, organization studies, anthropology, political science, history, and geography as disciplines in which careers are studied; Moore et al. (2007) trace the origins of the field of organizational careers to what they call sociological, vocational, and developmental streams, each with its own distinct literature. Careers appear in the humanities, too, most obviously in history in terms of the lives of historic figures, in biography, and so on. On top of that, since everyone has a career, there is a vast industry publishing advice on how to navigate that career successfully. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the term “career” gets used in many different senses – Hall (2002: 8) refers to it as “suffer[ing] from surplus meaning” – so it is important that we are clear about how we use it in this chapter.
