Customized Careers

We were asked to write a chapter on nontraditional careers. To do so, we first needed to establish what we mean by career and what a traditional career might look like—only then could we think about the nontraditional career. The definition of “career” in this Handbook, as in the previous one (Arthur, Hall, & Lawrence, 1989), is “the evolving sequence of a person's work experiences over time.” It is not clear, given this definition, that there is such a thing as a traditional or nontraditional career. Indeed, coming as it does from the Chicago School (see Barley, 1989), this definition is neutral about normative expectations. In Men and Their Work, Hughes (1958) writes of the career as “the struggle of the individual to find a place and an identity in the world of work”—or one side of a duality, the other of which is the “organized system” in which this struggle unfolds (pp. 8–9). There is nothing traditional or nontraditional about this understanding of careers. Rather, careers—in this tradition—are a “perspective … a way of looking at things” (Becker, 2004), “a lens with which to view both the dynamic interweave between choice and constraint and the dynamic interplay among society, organizations, and individuals' lives” (Moen & Han, 2001, p. 427). In this sense, careers link individuals to the institutional context in which their lives evolve.

Despite this origin of the definition used in this Handbook, the meaning we will use is closer to Wilensky's (1961) “orderly career”: a pattern of work involving intense commitment to and continuous engagement with the occupational world, along with a striving for upward mobility and achievement of external markers of success. Careers that would normally be [Page 189]“orderly” in this sense, but are not—these are the topics for this chapter. As we will see, such nontraditional careers return us, in some respects, to the more descriptive, less normative view of the Chicago School.

Such “orderly” or “traditional” careers involve full-time, continuous involvement in the workforce, typically starting in one's 20s, following the completion of formal education, and ending with total and permanent withdrawal from the workforce some 40 or 50 years later at retirement. Steady upward advancement within an organization and/or a profession is presumed—or, at the very least, the desire for upward advancement and adherence to norms of behavior typically required for promotion. Put another way, not wanting to get ahead is deviant in Merton's (1968) sense, according to the underlying ideology of the traditional career. Such a career envisions an “ideal worker” for whom employment forms the basis of identity and who grants priority to work over other life domains (Bailyn, 2006; Kanter, 1977; Williams, 2000). Much of the U.S.-based research on careers and career success reflects this view of career. It commonly examines the work histories and experiences of individuals (primarily men) pursuing upward mobility in a managerial or professional field through continuous employment, often with a single employer and typically within a single occupation.

If we compare this ideal career template with the actual careers of a broad sample of people in managerial and professional occupations—and particularly if we pay attention to women's careers—we see different patterns of engagement with the labor force. In this chapter, we review what is known about career paths and patterns that differ in some way from the traditional career template, even though their incumbents are subject to norms that would lead them to follow the traditional career path. We call these nontraditional career paths customized careers.<>

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