Occupations, Organizations, and Boundaryless Careers

Abstract

It does not take a particularly perspicacious observer to note that industrial societies are characterized by a wide variety of work careers-careers that are linked to very different types of labor markets and employment relationships. These differences are denoted in contemporary research by an array of terms and associated acronyms-firm internal labor markets (FILMs), occupational labor markets (OLMs), secondary labor markets (SLMS), and so forth (see Althauser and Kalleberg 1981). Although such conceptual distinctions clearly imply variations in career patterns, the notion of career, nonetheless, has come to be strongly associated with a particular employment relationship-a relationship characterized by long-term employment with a single employer, and involving movement through a series of interconnected, and increasingly prestigious and powerful jobs arranged within a hierarchy.

Recruiters' valuation of young people's employment insecurities in Bulgaria and Switzerland: making sense of job-hopping and unemployment in the hiring process

“…Although work organizations retain their scope of discretion to decide how to organize work and how to recruit and reward their workers, the dominant space influences the logic of recruitment and the matching of graduates with jobs. Thereby, the different social spaces also affect career trajectories and patterns (Marsden, 1982;Maurice et al, 1980;Tolbert, 1996).…”