Career or slide? Managing on the threshold of sense

Abstract

How to ‘career’ has become a dominant motif for those researching career and for those individuals within careers in organisations, both of whom we want to argue in this chapter are in the end-less process of (dis)organisation. This chapter offers a challenge to traditional and more critical thinking in the broad practice and study of career. We draw our focus from intellectual developments in critical organisation studies which offer a way of developing radical neo- or post-disciplinary study that is relevant and opportune for our contemporary conjuncture. Clearly, therefore, in addressing broad ontological and epistemological phenomena – what for some might be defined as ‘the human condition’ – our challenge necessarily cuts across constructed micro-disciplinary boundaries such as career counselling, career development, career guidance, and career management. Thus the nature of our argument is such that we do not consider the minutiae of relationships and debates between these micro-disciplines but seek to question current understanding and practice by a consideration of what we propose to call ‘metacareer’ praxis We first introduce and outline the relationship between so-called ‘postmodernity’, our views on ‘meta-career thinking’, and the challenge this poses to extant theory and practice in the field of career. Whilst we acknowledge that theoretical advances concerned with subjectivity, identity, and interpretation have opened up significant new ways of looking at career (e.g. Young & Collin, 1992), we argue that the literature across the micro-disciplines of career remains insufficiently self-critical and unwittingly dependent upon the fragile assumptions and constructions of Western reason and rationality. Second we identify five key humanist ‘gold standards’ or anchors, namely true self, meaning, progress, order, and positioning. We argue that we have to be aware of and question our ‘faith’ in the persistence of a redemptive humanism in the face of what some want to call ‘postmodern times’.