Career adaptability and perceived overqualification: Testing a dual-path model among Chinese human resource management professionals

Based on career construction theory, the current research examined the relationship between career adaptability and perceived overqualification among a sample of Chinese human resource management professionals (N = 220). The results of a survey study showed that career adaptability predicted perceived overqualification through a dual-path model: On the one hand, career adaptability positively predicted employees' perceived delegation, which had a subsequent negative effect on perceived overqualification. At the same time, career adaptability also positively predicted career anchor in challenge, which in turn positively predicted overqualification. This dual-path mediation model provides a novel perspective to understand the mechanisms through which career adaptability affects perceived overqualification, and demonstrates the coexistence of opposite effects in this process. In addition, the results also showed that the effects of perceived delegation and career anchor in challenge on perceived overqualification were stronger among employees with a higher (vs. lower) level of organizational tenure. These findings carry implications for both career development theories and organizational management practices

Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance

Anthropologists engaged inpost-colonial studies are increasingly adoptingan historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain morean extractive than an ethnographic one.Documents are thus still invokedpiecemeal to confirm the colonial invention ofcertain practices or to underscore culturalclaims, silent. Yet such mining of the content of government commissions,reports, and other archival sources rarely paysattention to their peculiar placement and form .Scholars need to move fromarchive-as-source to archive-as-subject. Thisarticle, using document production in the DutchEast Indies as an illustration, argues thatscholars should view archives not as sites ofknowledge retrieval, but of knowledgeproduction, as monuments of states as well assites of state ethnography. This requires asustained engagement with archives as culturalagents of ``fact'' production, of taxonomies inthe making, and of state authority. What constitutes thearchive, what form it takes, and what systemsof classification and epistemology signal atspecific times are (and reflect) critical featuresof colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of thelate nineteenth-century imperial state, arepository of codified beliefs that clustered(and bore witness to) connections betweensecrecy, the law, and power.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41825/1/10502_2004_Article_5096461.pd

Destroying Mumiani: Cause, Context, and Violence in Late Colonial Dar es Salaam

This article examines and contextualizes a riot that occurred in Dar es Salaam in 1959, in the peri-urban neighbourhood of Buguruni. The riot involved accusations that security guards and police were abducting neighbourhood residents and killing them in order to use their blood for the preparation of magical medicines. Those who abducted Africans for this purpose were popularly termed mumiani. Their rumoured existence is examined in the wider context of Dar es Salaam's rapid urbanization, its peri-urban politics and land conflicts, and its systems of law and knowledge. The article also explores the many possible interpretations of this riot. Drawing on interviews with local residents, court testimonies, official correspondence, newspaper accounts, and colonial memoirs, the article constructs a historical account of the riot's location, Buguruni, as well as a narrative of the riot itself and the subsequent legal actions. Such a violent event raises questions about the relationship between historical evidence and causality, as well as questions about contextualizing major events that fit awkwardly into prevailing historical narratives

Role Transition and the Interaction of Relational and Social Identity: New Nursing Roles in the English NHS

Our study provides an analysis of role transition, examining how macro-level influences and micro-level practice interact in framing role transition, with a focus upon professional identity. Empirically, we examine the case of nurses in the English NHS, for whom government ‘modernization’ policy has opened up a new occupational position in the delivery of genetics services within a professional bureaucracy. We track the experiences of the nurses through their recruitment to, enactment of, and progress on from, the new genetics role over two years. Our qualitative interview-based study encompasses six comparative cases. Analysis draws upon two linked literatures — role and identity, and sociology of professions — to examine the tension between the identity expected by the profession and the role expected by government policy-makers. While policy encourages reconfiguration of roles and relationships to support the new, less-bounded role, concerns aligned to professional identity mean that inter-professional competition between doctors and nurses, and intra-professional competition within nursing itself, constrain the enactment of the new role. Through our empirical study, we develop literature on role transition through its application to a professionalized context, and sociology of professions literature, within which issues of identity are relatively neglected. Our study demonstrates that the emphasis of identity within a professional bureaucracy lies at the collective level