Review of The future of career.

Abstract

AUDREY COLLIN and RICHARD A. YOUNG (EDS.) The Future of Career Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 335 pages (ISBN 0-521-64021-0, us$64.95, Hardcover) Reviewed by JOHN STEWART In this book on the future of career, the editors intend to clarify the themes, issues, and implications that are likely to be characteristic of career in the new century. In general, the authors raise the question of whether the construct of career has a future, most particularly within North American and European countries, and Australia. The editors' rationale for this focus centres around the notion that career is a unifying construct that gives purpose and meaning to individuals' experience and helps them to construct their perceptions of the future. There are two recent developments that appear to be fueling the need to reconceptualize career: the role of technology in the workplace and the possibility of large amounts of unemployment. Technology has greatly influenced growth in the information sector of the economy. This growth presents the possibility of a polarization in the workplace between information-rich occupations and unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Because of this and other developments in the world of work, this topic is highly appropriate to consider, particularly as individuals experience new realities in the workplace at the beginning of the new millennium. Audrey Collin and Richard Young bring together a collection of essays which were written by a number of academics of diverse perspectives and from different countries. These essays, which can be used individually or together, examine the broad changes in the work contexts, analyze new constructions which appear to be emerging from work contexts, and suggest some ways to conceptualize career so that it has a future in the next century. In the lead-off essay, the editors present an analysis of what is happening to the construct of career from the multidisciplinary perspectives of psychology, sociology, career guidance, and education. They pose a number of questions in order to provide a structure around which contributors examined this issue: how present understandings are shaped by existing theorizing, how contexts are changing and how people experience and interpret career within these changes, and what are the new challenges resulting from these changes and their implications for research and theorizing within this domain. The volume is divided into three parts. In Part I, the contributors present a variety of topics concerning the present context of the world of work. For example, Julie Storey discusses the idea of fracture lines, which have a potential to alter industries, services, and organizations as points of change in labour markets. Marie-France Maranda and Wan Comeau highlight the need to consider sociological perspectives in career development and how cultural changes have reshaped work and its organization, while Wendy Patton discusses the need to consider broad social values in the construction of personal meaning in individuals' work roles. Mark Savickas accents the need for further conceptualizations of career in vocational psychology and Collin examines the relational aspects of career and how career is coconstructed with others both in and outside the workplace. In the second section, the contributors offer new perspectives on career. One such perspective, provided by Suellen Littleton, Michael Arthur, and Denise Rousseau is the boundaryless career and how the experiences of people in some industries need reinterpretation as well as accent the need for individuals to take responsibility for their lifelong learning. Another contributor, Danielle Riverin-Simard, discusses the nonlinear aspects of career particularly for adults 40 years or older and presents a number of themes, including ruptures, departures, and redefinition which characterize their work histories. Additionally, Heather Hopfl and Pat Atkinson raise the issue of gender and power in the workplace and their implications for women's careers, while Damian O'Doherty and Ian Roberts examine the difficulties of Western reason and rationality in career theorizing as evidenced in modernists' notions of organization, order, identity, and career. …