Careers in context: An international study of career goals as mesostructure between societies’ career-related human potential and proactive career behavior

Careers exist in a societal context that offers both constraints and opportunities for career actors. Whereas most studies focus on proximal individual and/or organisational‐level variables, we provide insights into how career goals and behaviours are understood and embedded in the more distal societal context. More specifically, we operationalise societal context using the career‐related human potential composite and aim to understand if and why career goals and behaviours vary between countries. Drawing on a model of career structuration and using multilevel mediation modelling, we draw on a survey of 17,986 employees from 27 countries, covering nine of GLOBE's 10 cultural clusters, and national statistical data to examine the relationship between societal context (macrostructure building the career‐opportunity structure) and actors' career goals (career mesostructure) and career behaviour (actions). We show that societal context in terms of societies' career‐related human potential composite is negatively associated with the importance given to financial achievements as a specific career mesostructure in a society that is positively related to individuals' proactive career behaviour. Our career mesostructure fully mediates the relationship between societal context and individuals' proactive career behaviour. In this way, we expand career theory's scope beyond occupation‐ and organisation‐related factors

Probing the Antecedents and Nature of Career Success

International audienceThe purpose of this symposium is to meta-analytically review the career success literature, as well as to enrich and extend this literature by exploring four fundamental questions about the nature of career success. First, what is unique and what is common about how career success is conceptualized and attained in different career fields? Second, how might individual and contextual predictors interact in affecting career outcomes? Third, might the received conceptualization of career success as a cumulative outcome be usefully supplemented by reconceptualizing it as an emergent process? Finally and perhaps most controversially, is there really such a thing as objective career success? The opening paper, Objective and Subjective Career Success: A Meta-Analysis of Predictors, will provide an updated meta-analytic response to the perennial question: What predicts career success? The second paper, a qualitative study on Career Success in the Context of School Teaching and Business, will explore the meaning of career success and forms of career capital that enable it within different career fields. The third paper will be a quantitative study on Predicting Career Success: The Joint Impact of Trait Competitiveness and Competitive Climate at Work. The final two conceptual papers will critique some of the most well-established foundations of the careers literature by exploring the potential merit of reconceptualizing Career Success as an Emergent Process, and also When and Why Objective Career Success Deserves a Demotion. Each of the five papers aims to address the imperative for more nuanced approaches to conceptualizing and/or studying career success. <br/

Probing the Antecedents and Nature of Career Success

International audienceThe purpose of this symposium is to meta-analytically review the career success literature, as well as to enrich and extend this literature by exploring four fundamental questions about the nature of career success. First, what is unique and what is common about how career success is conceptualized and attained in different career fields? Second, how might individual and contextual predictors interact in affecting career outcomes? Third, might the received conceptualization of career success as a cumulative outcome be usefully supplemented by reconceptualizing it as an emergent process? Finally and perhaps most controversially, is there really such a thing as objective career success? The opening paper, Objective and Subjective Career Success: A Meta-Analysis of Predictors, will provide an updated meta-analytic response to the perennial question: What predicts career success? The second paper, a qualitative study on Career Success in the Context of School Teaching and Business, will explore the meaning of career success and forms of career capital that enable it within different career fields. The third paper will be a quantitative study on Predicting Career Success: The Joint Impact of Trait Competitiveness and Competitive Climate at Work. The final two conceptual papers will critique some of the most well-established foundations of the careers literature by exploring the potential merit of reconceptualizing Career Success as an Emergent Process, and also When and Why Objective Career Success Deserves a Demotion. Each of the five papers aims to address the imperative for more nuanced approaches to conceptualizing and/or studying career success. <br/

Testing times: in-house counsel and independence

Independence has long been seen as a key to ethical lawyering. It is associated with improving the quality of legal work, and promoting advice that aligns the client's interests with the 'set of general social norms'. It is seen as so important that it 'defines the lawyer as a professional'. Yet lawyers' independence also presents some difficulties. Despite the exhortations in its favour over many years, the term remains vague and under-developed. Without a clear concept of what is being sought, it is difficult to ascertain what value can be given to it, and what techniques of regulation can be used to encourage it. The process becomes a fairly unproductive one of examining lawyers for traits of independence and failing to find any. This has led more than one commentator to doubt the value of independence as a way of considering legal practiceSuzanne Le Mirehttp://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=244925702612925;res=IELHS