Abstract
PurposeThe current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies.Design/methodology/approachProject managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis.FindingsResults showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career.
Highlights
Consistent with the changes that affected human labor over the last decades, the number of organizations whose work is based on projects is increased nowadays and “[. . .] more than 20% of global economic activities taking place as projects” (McKevitt et al, 2017, p. 1673)
The main aim of this paper was to contribute to the development of career sustainability theory, adopting a qualitative and socio-constructivist perspective in examining project managers’ discourses about their careers
The paper argued for the need to integrate the study of sustainable career with further insights coming from qualitative investigations in order to understand the discursive elaboration of the sense-making processes substantiating career as a personal experience
Summary
Consistent with the changes that affected human labor over the last decades, the number of organizations whose work is based on projects is increased nowadays and “[. . .] more than 20% of global economic activities taking place as projects” (McKevitt et al, 2017, p. 1673). Consistent with the changes that affected human labor over the last decades, the number of organizations whose work is based on projects is increased nowadays and “[. . .] more than 20% of global economic activities taking place as projects” While project management initially spread in some sectors as aerospace and information. © Alessandro Lo Presti, Amelia Manuti, Assunta De Rosa and Angelo Elia. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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