Careers in Context

Careers, as Mayrhofer, Meyer, and Steyrer point out in Chapter 12, are always careers in context. To some extent, we have already explored some aspects of context, if only because it is virtually impossible to separate career from context. But in Section 2, we focus on it explicitly.

We begin with Mayrhofer et al.'s broad introduction to contextual issues in the study of careers. Their aim is “to help the reader to create an image of the exogenous phenomena that shape careers”; they organize this using an “onion skin” model, which places individual career patterns at the center, surrounded successively by contexts of work, origin, society and culture, and the globalizing world. The authors review the literature about research on each of these contextual levels. They analyze the context of work by considering external labor markets, the new forms of working and organizing that have become apparent within the past decade, and social relationships (in particular those resulting from social networks). The context of origin is factored into class and social origin, educational socialization and individual work history, and the current-life context of the individual (e.g., family or marital status). The context of society and culture is examined under the categories of gender, ethnicity, demography, and community factors (the way in which people are integrated into their local communities). Two aspects of the global context are reviewed: internationalization and virtualization. Next, the authors identify four recent developments in career context: a shift in contextual categories, the increasing significance of configurations of variables rather than single variables, the way in which gender has changed from a single variable to an overall perspective, and the intrusion of a pervasive economic logic. Finally, they present what they label a “kaleidoscopic” view of career context, identifying the contributions made by three grand theorists, Bourdieu, Giddens, and Luhmann, to the understanding of career in context.

Chapter 13 addresses a very personal form of context, that of the mentor. Chandler and Kram review the evolution of mentoring in the careers field from a single, long-term, hierarchical relationship to multiple, shorter-term relationships that comprise a developmental network. They examine the construct, the functions and phases of mentoring, and the growing interest in the types of developmental relationships involved in mentoring. Next, they review research on individual and organizational antecedents to and outcomes of mentoring, identifying (as they do throughout the chapter) what, in their words, we don't know (and should). They then turn to examine some of the complexities introduced by diversified relationships and diversity—both gender and race complexities and cross-gender and cross-race challenges and opportunities, as well as age complexities. The authors next turn a developmental lens on mentoring, looking at the contributions of four distinct theoretical perspectives: phase theories, stage theories, relational models, and the recently applied [Page 212]attachment theory. All these raise the critical issue of the strategies that might be applied to foster mentoring—something, it turns out, that still has many unanswered questions associated with it. This leads naturally to a research agenda that the authors propose in the light of the changing context of mentorship.

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