Call for Papers

Time and space are fundamental to the study of careers. Through converting these two career dimensions into internally relevant "social time" and "social space," we can better understand individual career situations (Van Maanen, 1977, p. 19). For years, career researchers focused on the social time and social space of careers unfolding in single organizational settings. Prominent examples include the study of the "organizational implicit career timetable," which people use to determine whether their careers are on and off schedule (Lawrence, 1984), and of the "tournament mobility" model (Rosenbaum, 1979), reflecting how organizational systems facilitate selected "fast track" employees through a series of progressively more selective competitions.

However, today both the social time and social space of careers have gone global. With respect to social time, we used to be concerned with organizational "timetables" which assisted individuals in "dividing up the days and weeks into manageable components," and provided reference to how one's career was unfolding (Van Maanen, 1977, p. 19). We have now moved to timetables that include 24–7 productive hours involving collaborators from across the globe (DeFillippi, Arthur and Lindsey, 2006) providing different opportunities for the realization of careers. The emergent unpredictability of lifetime employment has taken us beyond traditional career stage assumptions (e.g., Levinson et al. 1978; Super, 1957) toward contemporary career models such as the "boundaryless career" (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996), "protean career" (Hall, 2003), and "working identity" (Ibarra, 2003) that suggest new possibilities for people's unfolding careers.

Social space in the global context has not only extended organizational boundaries from national to global ones (Friedman, 2005). The emergence of the World Wide Web has also brought about career opportunities involving both collaboration and competition in global, virtual space (Castells, 2001). Contemporary career patterns transcend not only organizational but also national boundaries (Sullivan and Arthur, 2006) providing for international "brain circulation" (Tung, 2008). Moreover, the emergence of open source collaborations in software development (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and in knowledge base development (Wikipedia) point to fresh opportunities for widespread virtual self-organizing stemming from individual career investments. They in turn diminish the significance of national identity adding to the significance of professional identity (Khapova, Arthur and Wilderom, 2007). These identities are "based less on prescribed social roles and more on individual choices, on decisions that each person makes about what values to embrace and what paths to pursue in love and work" (Arnett, 2002, p. 781).

While from an organizational careers standpoint social space was receiving considerable attention, the study of social time remained elusive. Researcher opportunism (in gaining access to an organization), research conventions (especially concerning cross-sectional designs and short-term experiments), lack of guiding theory, and lack of methodologies and practical experience contributed to a paucity of longitudinal (that is, time-sensitive) studies (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman (2001). Careers research therefore has a dual task. One is to catch up by responding to calls for more longitudinal research. Another is to take our sensitivity for time into the global arena that now widely affects career outcomes (Roe, 2008).

The careers sub-theme of the 2010 EGOS colloquium in Lisbon invites papers that will help us in understanding careers in the context of the revised, global meanings of social time and social space indicated above. We also invite papers which will go further in their methodologies and offer studies that examine career-relevant processes that unfold over time; methodologies that allow us to witness effects over time; alternative methodologies, such as for example recording data through verbal accounts (narratives), film, video and audio tracks, etc. to provide fresh insights into how social space and social time are viewed in contemporary careers.

Topics for prospective papers may include but are not restricted to those that:

• Explore the temporal nature of careers by studying processes that unfold over time rather than examine simple correlations, and allow us to witness longitudinal effects that help explain career phenomena;
• Add to our understanding of (social and geographical) space, location variables and their impact on career;
• Consider the impact of social space on how careers unfold, exploring diverse contexts and populations (e.g., baby boomers, entrepreneurs, self-initiated expatriates);
• Combine time and space, and study the antecedents and consequences of transitions across both;
• Offer comparative studies on careers across temporal and spatial dimensions;
• Address the role of work-life quality across time and space;
• Examine organizational consequences of the extended boundaries of the social time and the social space.