Boundaryless Career

Conceptual Overview

The boundaryless career concept is of relatively recent origin, dating back to work done by Michael Arthur and other careers scholars in the early 1990s. Current boundaryless career scholarship has descriptive, normative, and instrumental streams.

Much of the work in the descriptive stream seeks to describe how careers have changed over time. The boundaryless career concept came into wide usage at a time in which organizations were engaging in downsizing, using contingent workers, and outsourcing. In recent years, job tenures with particular employers have seemed to decline over time, and many workers find themselves (voluntarily or involuntarily) working for multiple employers during their careers. An edited volume by Arthur and Rousseau in 1994 brought together early streams of such research, and the descriptive stream research continues to describe whether and how employment relationships and personal careers are changing. The broad thrust of this research is that employers are investing less in their employees, employees are expected to maintain their employability, and job tenures are declining as the number of employers employees work for on average is increasing.

The normative stream of boundaryless careers research describes the boundaryless career as either a good thing (as Arthur, Inkson, and Pringle argue in their 1999 work) or a bad thing (as does Van Buren in his 2003 paper) for employees and employers. In contrast to the instrumental stream of research, however, the normative stream attempts to focus on the meaning of careers, the decline of loyalty between employees and employers, and the ethical effects of boundaryless career patterns on employees and other organizational stakeholders. Normative boundaryless career research in a positive direction focuses on how employees can better construct meaning through moving from employer to employer, and seeks to contrast employee freedom in the boundaryless careers with the effects of being stuck with the same employer for a long time.

More-negative boundaryless career research addresses whether such careers affect some employees negatively while questioning whether the systemic effects of boundaryless careers on the institutions of business and society are positive or negative.

Instrumentally oriented boundaryless career research addresses whether boundaryless careers are good for employees (in terms of outcomes like upward mobility and job satisfaction) and for organizations. There is not, however, a large amount of research in this area. Arthur, Khapova, and Wilderom noted in 2005 that there is a paucity of research bringing together boundaryless career theory and career success theory. Similarly, Becker and Haunschild noted in 2003 that boundaryless career research has paid comparatively little attention to the effects of changing employment patterns on organizational-level outcomes.

...