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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This paper reports on the sustainability practices of New Zealand businesses based on two national surveys and a series of focus groups and interviews. There was an average increase of 10% in the number of companies adopting environmental practices from 2003 to 2006. There was less of an increase for social practices, although still more commonly adopted by companies than environmental practices. Values and beliefs of management were the overwhelming driver for the adoption of sustainability practices with reputation and brand also signifi cant drivers. Costs, management time, and knowledge/skills were the three most commonly reported barriers to adoption of sustainability initiatives. The implications of the study are that for New Zealand business, there is a strong link with the business case for sustainability. For policymakers interested in achieving sustainability goals, the results suggest that a 'soft' approach to business practices may be in order in New Zealand.

A B S T R AC TDecades of critical research have established that economic and political ideologies permeate and shape thought, text and action, and academic knowledge production is no exception. This article examines how ideologies might permeate academic texts, by assessing the reach and influence of neoliberalism in research on boundaryless careers. Specifically, it asks: did the emergence and growth of scholarship on boundaryless careers support, challenge, or merely run parallel to the rising dominance of neoliberal ideology? It was found that a diversity of knowledge interests, including managerial, agentic, curatorial and critical interests underlie the production of research on boundaryless careers. However, all four of these knowledge interests are complicit in discursively constructing and aligning the notion of boundaryless careers with neoliberalism in two specific ways. Implications for scholarship on careers and work are discussed. K E Y WO R D Sboundaryless careers / discourse / knowledge interests / neoliberalism