How does one come to edit a work like a Handbook of Career Studies? In one sense the answer is simple: We were asked to do it. Al Bruckner, of Sage Publications, approached one of us (Gunz) out of the blue with the proposition: How would you feel about editing a handbook on careers? And because we had been planning for many years to develop some kind of synthesis of the careers field, but had never quite figured out what it should be, this seemed the ideal opportunity. Gunz contacted Peiperl, Peiperl swallowed hard and agreed, and that was that.

But in another sense, it was, perhaps appropriately for a book on careers, a product of our backgrounds. Although both of us share a fascination with career studies, our own careers have been somewhat unusual for business academics working in the field. Gunz is a chemist by training and a former Shell technologist; Peiperl is an engineer and an ex-IBMer. Admittedly, we both legitimized ourselves, so to speak, by completing our PhDs in social science disciplines. But perhaps because of our initial education, we both tend to view the field from a perspective that is not that of someone trained ab initio in one of the social sciences. For the field of career studies has something of the Rorschach test about it. As we discuss in the Introduction (Chapter 1), it is broad almost to the point at which it is not a field at all but a perspective on social enquiry.

We explain in Chapter 1 what we think that perspective is. Suffice it to say for the moment that it is, as Michael Arthur, Tim Hall, and Barbara Lawrence point out in their 1989 Handbook of Career Theory, one that covers virtually all the social sciences and a fair proportion of the humanities. So you can see in the inkblots of careers pretty much what you want to see. If you are a vocational psychologist, you are naturally likely to see careers first as being about choosing occupations; if you are a sociologist you are equally likely to see careers as fundamental to the way societies reproduce themselves. And so on. Once you have been working in the field for some years, however, your view may broaden, so that it is perhaps no accident (as we shall see later in this Handbook) that it is senior careers scholars who typically lead the way in arguing for integration across the disciplines.

But if you are a chemist or an engineer, you lack the strong particular perspective that an initial training in a particular social science would have afforded, so your view of the inkblots is likely to be unpredictable and somewhat catholic. Someone says to you, “Careers are about occupational choice,” and you reply, “How fascinating!” Someone else says, “Careers are about the social reproduction of societies,” and you reply, “Of course, how intriguing!” This does not, obviously, lead to a profound understanding of every possible perspective on career; that would be a presumptuous claim. But it does create fertile ground for wanting to work with people who really do combine between them such a breadth of understanding, which is to say, editing a Handbook.

Not that such a truly comprehensive project is possible, of course, without producing a whole set of volumes each the size of this or larger, and probably not even then. But we have tried at least to be as representative as we could of the main currents in the field and to bring together as [Page xiv]many of the leading thinkers as we could, knowing that, inevitably, we were leaving out others. We apologize both to our readers and to those omitted scholars for these gaps. But we have found this journey utterly absorbing and fascinating and we hope you do, too. We have learned an immense amount from our authors about the state of the field of career studies; we can never thank them enough for their ideas, their unflagging hard work, and especially their patience.

There are many others who helped us with this project. First among them are our wives, Elizabeth Badley and Jennifer Georgia, both of whom have quite overwhelming enough professional lives without husbands endlessly going on about their Handbook. We thank them profusely for putting up with it, and us, anyway. Gunz, in particular, is profoundly grateful to the Peiperl household for acting as such gracious hosts during what must have seemed to them interminable editing sessions.

We learned a great deal about editing from, and, in fact, would never have embarked on this Handbook, without the interest and support of Michael Arthur, Tim Hall, and Barbara Lawrence, whose original Handbook helped to define the field.

In addition to her role as author, Celia Moore assisted in many ways, not least in acting as rapporteur to the meeting of Part III authors in Lausanne, Switzerland, a meeting that would not have been possible without the financial support and hospitality of Dr. Peter Lorange and the faculty and staff of IMD, and especially the organizational efforts of Sonia Klose. We are also most grateful to Al Bruckner and MaryAnn Vail of Sage Publications for suggesting the project in the first place and helping us see it through to completion. The production phase of the book was orchestrated patiently and meticulously by Melanie Birdsall, for whom nothing was too much trouble however late the editors were in discovering things they should have noticed much sooner. Mike Badley made available to us, free of charge, the outstanding software package Unite-It, which facilitated enormously the business of planning and controlling such a complex project—in particular, keeping track of the myriad versions of each chapter, no matter who was editing it, or where. Finally, Slavka Murray kept things running smoothly in Gunz's department at the University of Toronto, which made his frequent absences on editing sessions in Maryland and Switzerland feasible.

To all who worked with us and helped us on this project, we offer our profound thanks. The chapter authors as well as the editors will welcome readers' comments. The editors, of course, accept responsibility for any shortcomings.