Determinants of alternative career paths. An international comparison of the empirical literature

The task set forth in this paper is twofold. First, we will take a look at the literature concerning the new career types, which include the boundaryless career (Arthur, 1994; Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) and the protean career (Hall, 2002), and will review their determinants as they appear in the empirical studies. In doing this we have not the intention to (re)produce the entire theoretical debate around these emergent career types, albeit reserving a few pages for theoretical considerations, including an introduction. Instead, our focus lies within the field of existing empirical exploration of these career types, even though we are warned beforehand, that the extent of such exploration is not grand (Gunz, Evans, & Jalland, 2000; Segers, Inceoglu, Vloeberghs, Bartram, & Henderickx, 2008; Valcour & Tolbert, 2003). We limit ourselves to these two new career conceptualizations as at the time of this writing they account for the vast majority of the existing empirical work on the post-traditional career patterns, which to a degree reflects their popularity in the career literature in general.

Our secondary task is to put the “new career” thesis in doubt, even if only for the sake of argument, and try to set it in a critical perspective, comparing the newly emerged paradigm with the traditional outlook on the career. To be more precise, we would like to synthesize a coherent set of available theoretical options related to these two perspectives, and juxtapose this set to the array of the acquired data. In this sense, we are especially concerned with the issue of continuity between the two perspectives, as well as with factors ensure the descriptive power of the former and the latter models. We will closely inspect the elementary aspects of both career types in order to acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of their relationship with the empirical data across both models.