Re-imagining career transition: What help from typologies?

Abstract

This article considers the part played by typologies in analysing career transition. It identifies three strands of typological thinking in seeking to understand this phenomenon. These are typologies as method, as a method-theory bridge, and as a theoretical mode of sociological thinking. The discussion explores ways in which each of these approaches to career transition may contribute insights or may simply complicate analysis. Positive and negative examples of career transition typologies are used to illustrate typology creation and usage. The argument presented is that while each strand can contribute sociological insights, it is the theoretical use of typologies that is paradigmatic, not method-driven typologies, for contemporary career transition inquiry.

Changing Logics in Healthcare and Their Effects on the Identity Motives and Identity Work of Doctors

“…Yet a further explanation arose, which lay more in speculation, summarized by an observation from a senior medical director, who proposed that many hospital doctors become ‘bored with their jobs’ or highly dissatisfied (Zuger, 2004) in their mid-40s and seek fresh challenges in either research or education, or in leadership. This mid-life career transition explanation is common in other professions, resulting in large numbers of ‘drift-outs’ and ‘bow-outs’ (Burns, 2013). Thus, it is one that deserves further research in medicine because it may also help explain why many traditionalists delegitimize the identity motives of consultants seeking medical leadership positions as characteristic of ‘failed doctors’.…”

Adult educational ‘lateness’ norms: hysteresis in mid-career retraining in law

“…This is a less frantic description of lateness in terms of urgency, but rather the acceptance of his partner’s several years of mid-career study that delayed his further education. It also exemplifies Burns’ (2015) model of career start-and-end-point framing when this respondent observes, ‘people recognise that you are closer to retirement than you are to when you started’.…”

“…Arthur and Rousseau’s (1996) notion of bounded career presupposes career training in certain historical organisational circumstances and carrying more than factual meaning embodied in organisational and personal habitus that is not easily shifted as self-perception or interpretive tool. For example, Moen and Roehling’s (2005) depiction of a ‘career mystique’ speaks to an implicit career subjectivity governing individual lives – bounded or otherwise – becoming naturalised, apparently real and normatively accepted as a model of how careers ‘should’ or ‘would’ proceed (Burns, 2015). Neugarten et al’s (1965) assumptions of what ought to happen when in a person’s life make shocking reading today, a half-century later.…”

“…When is mid-career? Burns (2015) described how the selection of a mid-career period is frequently driven by research convenience or methodology. However, a more theoretically formed description can identify three alternate ways of referring to mid-career as follows: it may be some time after career commencement; or a variable period of time mid-way between start and end of career; or a period beyond a midpoint in the second half of career.…”

Working identity constructions and workplace learning modes in a global South country: Exploring relations through a narrative approach

“…Moreover, "for the most part, such typologies did not engage theoretically with broader social and socio-economic processes in contemporary workforce and society" (Burns, 2015, p. 934). Burns (2015) highlighted that typologies may opening up interpretive explanatory possibilities and a "more hermeneutic than categorical usage may be the best way forward to avoid the concretising that typologies bring to situations for which they are not entirely appropriate" (p. 947). Layder (1998) complemented this idea by arguing that typologies may foster engagement "in theoretical elaboration and thus to think in terms of chains of reasoning" (p. 73).…”