Boundaryless career theories are increasingly prominent in career studies and management studies, and provide a new ‘status quo’ concerning modern careers. This paper contextualizes the boundaryless careers literature within management studies, and evaluates its contributions, including broadening concepts of career and focusing interorganizational career phenomena. It acknowledges the considerable stimulus given to career studies by this literature, but also offers a critique based on five issues: inaccurate labelling; loose definitions; overemphasis on personal agency; the normalization of boundaryless careers; and poor empirical support for the claimed dominance of boundaryless careers. Because these problems render the boundaryless career concept increasingly obsolete as a ‘leading edge’ construct in career studies, we offer new directions for theory and research. In particular we re-examine the role of career boundaries, and suggest the development of new, boundary-focused careers scholarship based on boundary theory, to facilitate studies of the processes whereby career boundaries are created, and their effects in constraining, enabling and punctuating careers.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce further clarity to career scholarship and to support the development of career studies by complementing earlier theoretical literature reviews with an evidence-based historical analysis of career-related terms. Design/methodology/approach – Data from 12 career scholars were collected using the historical Delphi method to find consensus on the career terms that have shaped career studies between 1990 and 2012. The authors then explored the literature by collecting data on the occurrence of these terms, analyzing frequencies and trends via citations and indexes of citation using a mixed-method combination of historical literature review and performance analysis. Findings – Career scholarship is indeed a descriptive field, in which metaphors dominate the discipline. Career success and employability are basic terms within the field. The discipline tends to focus narrowly on career agents. There is a plethora of terminology, and, contrary to the expectations, concepts introduced tend not to fade away. Originality/value – The authors offer an overarching perspective of the field with a novel mixed-method analysis which is useful for theory development and will help unify career studies. Earlier comprehensive literature reviews were mostly based on theoretical reasoning or qualitative data. The authors complement them with results based on quantitative data. Lastly, the authors identify new research directions for the career scholarship community.

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A theoretical framework is proposed which brings out the duality of managerial careers by distinguishing between organizational and individual levels of analysis. At the organizational level, careers can be seen as part of a process of social reproduction, which points the way to linking organizational form and behaviour with comparatively stable career patterns characteristic of particular firms or kinds of firm. At the individual level careers are expressed as a sequence of work role transitions, representing choices between opportunities presented to managers by organizations. Each level of analysis illuminates a different aspect of managerial careers, but it is equally important that each should be seen in the light of the other.