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.

This article provides a systematic description of various positions on dialogue and their implications for understanding activism and social change. It describes three orientations toward dialogue-collaboration, co-optation, and agonism-which are differentiated by assumptions regarding the pervasiveness of dialogue, the role of difference, and conceptions of power. We argue for a multivocal, agonistic perspective on dialogue that centers issues of power and conflict in activism. Such a perspective illuminates a broad range of activist tactics for social change instead of privileging consensus-oriented methods. These approaches are illustrated with two ethnographic case studies that highlight the importance of lay theories of activism and dialogue.Political upheaval and conflict across the world in 2011 from New York and Wisconsin to Syria and Egypt, underscored the tremendous global need for democratic social change in the wake of a slew of crises arising from political repression, corporate corruption, and rapid environmental degradation. The proliferation of research centers on civic discourse, democracy, participation, and voice in a range of universities such as Arizona, Kansas State, Southern California, Stanford, Texas, and Washington, among others demonstrates that communication scholarship has much pragmatic value in offering visions of how such change can take place and how democracy across the world can be deepened and woven into everyday communication practices. Indeed, theoretical concerns with democratic change have arguably been at the heart of much communication inquiry in the past century, and scholars have crafted a diverse range of perspectives on communication processes and mechanisms through which individuals, communities, and organizations procure and enact democratic change.Throughout, however, we find that scholars have relied on dialogue and activism as significant tropes to understand specific communication processes involved in such change. There are many ways in which communication scholars have positioned these two concepts with and against each other, so our purpose in this article is to clarify 66 Communication Theory 22 (2012) 66-91

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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

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