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  • 1.  Human Relations Special Issue Call for Papers on 'Careers in cities'

    Posted 01-16-2018 21:16

    Human Relations Special Issue Call for Papers on 'Careers in cities'

    Guest Editors:
    Jeffrey C Kennedy (Massey University, New Zealand)
    Svenja Tams (University of Bath, UK)
    Michael B Arthur (Suffolk University, USA)
    Kim Yin Chan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

    Submission deadline: 31 January 2019 (submissions will not be considered before 01 January 2019; this special issue is intended for publication in early 2021.)


    Objective of this special issue

    This special issue aims to advance interdisciplinary research and theory on the topic of 'careers in cities'. By recognizing the importance of urban areas as a context for careers in the 21st century, it seeks to revive and extend interest in the societal and spatial contexts that shape, constitute and are constituted through careers.

    Careers invite attention to people's movement through work and employment experiences over time. This movement is increasingly taking place within cities. More than half the people in the world live in urban areas, rising to as high as 80% in developed regions (The World Bank, 2015). Cities are a spatial nexus where work is organized by powerful institutions across diverse fields, such as commerce, education and public services. They also provide for high population density and a greater opportunity for social interaction across these fields. Cities compete for economic success and cultural prestige, seeking to attract talented people and innovative industries while also addressing issues of liveability, economic inequality and sustainability. A career lens extends prevalent perspectives on these issues – such as economics, human geography and urban planning. Given the traditional foci of careers research – such as, the availability of appropriate work over time, people's adjustment to employment opportunities over time, and the balance between work and non-work lives (De Vos and Van der Heijden, 2015; Lee, Kossek et al., 2011) – a career lens offers a way to examine the connections between micro- and macro-level aspects of people's lives in cities. While a career lens attends to people's movement through work experiences in cities, it also explores how people's careers in cities are interrelated with their quality of life, family and community well-being, personal growth, identity, and local and national economic outcomes.

    Our focus on cities and urban areas elaborates the 'contextual turn' in careers literature (e.g., Chudzikowski and Mayrhofer, 2011; Gunz et al., 2012; Khapova and Arthur, 2011; Mayrhofer et al., 2007; Tams and Arthur, 2010). This 'turn' emerged in response to new thinking about careers. Beginning in the 1980s, economic shifts resulted in firms taking a more transactional view of employment relationships. Employing organizations are no longer providing the security of employment and development over time (Cappelli, 1999). With alternative career models widening our perspective beyond organizations (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Hall, 2002; Savickas, 2005), the space within which careers unfold has broadened (Gunz et al., 2011). While career scholars have studied a wide range of occupational and cultural contexts (e.g., Barley and Kunda, 2006; Cappellen and Janssens, 2010; Dany, 2003; Duberley et al., 2006; Ituma and Simpson, 2009; Mitra, 2015; Tams and Marshall, 2011; Valette and Culié, 2015), one spatial context for careers which has not been adequately addressed is that of cities – a context which enables exploration of careers at the intersection of geographical, material, economic, political, social and cultural spaces.

    The topic of cities has attracted researchers from diverse disciplines – sociology, human geography, psychology, economics, history, architecture, ecology, political science and others. Ideas generated by these disciplines directly affect many aspects of work and employment. Recent examples include explorations of cities as nodes of transnational urban networks (Sassen, 2011), knowledge-based urban development (Carrillo et al., 2014), innovative leadership and participative democracy for inclusive cities (Hambleton, 2015), and the influence of education and innovation on jobs and incomes across geographic regions (Moretti, 2012). These and similar works have the potential to reveal new insights into career theory development, research and practice. In this undertaking, contemporary researchers can revive the concerns of the early career studies conducted by members of the Chicago School of Sociology. In William Foote Whyte's (1943) Street Corner Society, the careers of Italian immigrants are shaped through their involvement in the local gangs, groups and communities of the North End of 1930s Boston. Similarly, Everett Hughes' (1958) Men and their Work acknowledges that careers are shaped by the technological, economic and spatial evolution of cities and their relationship to rural areas. These studies offer a sense of social roles, identities and career transitions as physically embodied and materially grounded in the geographical space and the social fabric of cities and their neighbourhoods.


    Possible themes

    • Defining /conceptualizing 'cities' in relation to careers. Cities are often defined in terms of administrative or local government boundaries. However, we consider a broader and multi-dimensional definition, focusing on the urban characteristic of cities. Frey and Zimmer (2001) suggest that the concept of urban is constituted by three broad elements: ecological (e.g., population size, density), economic (e.g., non-agricultural production, diversity of activity, agglomerative economies, commuting patterns), and social (e.g., infrastructure, entertainment options, crime). Each of these dimensions suggests possibilities for considering how a city context interacts with (or facilitates, or inhibits) careers, as well as ways in which cities differ from other spaces (e.g., regional industry clusters, rural communities). Cities are not only a context for careers; they also constitute careers and are constituted by careers. What difference does "a city" make in careers? Alternatively, how are careers entwined with cities' practices and processes of economic and symbolic production?
    • Roles and identities in cities. Cities are a nexus of material infrastructure, diverse cultures, social conflicts and political agendas. They are also increasingly shaping their own collective identity or 'brand' – for example, through their unique architectural styles (Jones and Svejenova, 2017) or when packaging themselves as a financial centre, creative hotspot, or cultural capital. Some cities are strongly identified with a particular industry or company (e.g., Corning, USA or Wolfsburg, Germany). How does people's career-related identity work draw on these different city identities? And, how do these city identities enable or constrain people's perceptions of what career options are possible or desirable? Cities are also sites of extreme economic, social and cultural differences, such as between high income professionals, low income service workers and a younger generation of well-educated professionals who can no longer afford the homes and life-styles that older generations have taken for granted. How can we advance our understanding of the way cities are entangled with people's multiple roles and identities – not just in paid work for organizations, but in the range of contexts (family, community, social, spatial and others) which impact their career?
    • Temporal development and flows into, out of and within cities. We define a 'career' as "the evolving sequence of a person's work experiences over time" (Arthur et al., 1989: 9), where the time dimension is crucial. It is valuable to know that one new high-tech worker in an American city creates five additional jobs (Moretti, 2012), but it is just as important to know where (literally and metaphorically) the people in those new jobs came from, and where they will go. While "young wealth creators… who create the jobs of tomorrow" (Haynes & Langley, 2014: 6) are important economically, cities depend on the efforts of people in a wide range of jobs, from professional to unskilled. Moreover, cities change. They are places of growth, but also of decline, and sometimes of revival. Since "everyone who works has a career" (Arthur et al., 1989: 9), how can we better understand careers in cities involving less visible jobs and changing occupations in cities?
    • International and developing country perspectives on careers in cities are encouraged. As illustrated in the recent World Bank report on African cities (Lall et al., 2017), the character of cities and level of development varies around the world, but the importance of social connections, affordable communities and liveable environments remain central to the availability of career possibilities. How can urban infrastructure influence relations between cities, the availability of jobs and the cost of accessing them?

    Possible empirical and theoretical contributions

    Empirical and theoretical contributions are welcomed, with topics including (but not limited to):

    Design elements:

    • How do the dimensions defining a city affect the way in which careers evolve? What possibilities are opened up by the density of population, diversity of economic activity, and social character of urban spaces? What constraints do these dimensions introduce? How do city careers differ from careers in rural areas?
    • How does urban design affect career choices and opportunities? How do such design choices interact with employment practices to impact liveability (e.g., commuting time, housing costs)? How do they impact people at different life stages (e.g., young workers, dual-career couples, aging populations, etc.)?
    • How does city design (including the design of office and industrial districts, buildings, transport infrastructure, innovation hubs, shared workspaces, commons, "smart" cities) influence networks and, in turn facilitate career transitions?
    • What aspects of cities create career barriers? How do factors such as commuting times, housing costs, costs of education and sustainable living influence decisions about work and location? How might new and old technologies (e.g., "smart" cities, car-sharing apps, urban biker movements, public transport, co-working hubs) alter their impact?
    Identity elements:

    • Magnet cities (Haynes and Langley, 2014) focus on high end employment – young creatives who have the potential to generate more jobs. But what about the careers of others who keep vital services (education, healthcare, sanitation, construction, etc.) running? Is there a tension between designing cities to attract wealth creators and designing for the majority of workers?
    • How do cities (versus non-cities) shape the evolution of careers? How do urban spaces, materiality, practices, processes and institutions and their ecological, economic, and social aspects affect careers? How do factors such as technological change, sociotechnical complexity of work, the variety and timeframes of economic opportunities influence the careers available?
    • How do the actual, lived career experiences of individuals in cities match our prevailing career models? How and where do traditional organizational careers (with a prolonged period of employment over multiple roles in the same organization), boundaryless careers, 'gig economy' careers, or protean careers coexist in cities?
    • Does the spatial, material and social character of urban life have different implications for career success than rural life? In which ways are cities sites for developing interdependence, boundaryless mindsets, local embeddedness, and career transitions?
    Societal elements:

    • Can cities ameliorate some of the negative effects of the post-Fordist economy? While individual employers cannot guarantee life-long employment, can cities? Glaeser (2011: 71) describes a big city as a "diversified portfolio of employers". Do cities provide the kind of environment more suited to the evolution of individual career stories (Barley, 1989)? What city initiatives might provide for greater certainty and less precariousness in employment?
    • An important characteristic of cities relevant to careers is the copresence of other actors (e.g., Glaeser, 2011; Grabher et al., 2017). How does an awareness of diverse organizations, networks and sectors influence careers? With technology (e.g., cloud computing) facilitating the return of entrepreneurial innovation from suburban tech parks to cities (Florida and Mellander, 2016), how does the close social and geographical proximity of workers from different sectors and areas of expertise shape their careers? How does the prevailing national culture contribute to this (Tams and Arthur, 2007)? How can social media substitute for or complement physical proximity (cf. Rainie and Wellman, 2012)?
    • Cities attract migrants and refugees (Zikic et al., 2010). How do these new arrivals move from finding a job to having a career? What career ecosystems (Baruch and Altman, 2016) are emerging among migrants and refugees? Could these models be extended to other groups?

    We invite papers that integrate cities and careers conceptually: Cities are not merely a descriptive context of careers. Conceptual contributions may elaborate theoretical approaches that prior literature has used to advance a contextual understanding of careers. For example, careers have been proposed as constituted through people's enactment of institutions (e.g., Barley, 1989; Dany et al., 2011; Duberley et al., 2006), occupational communities (Barley and Kunda, 2006; Parker et al., 2004; Van Maanen and Barley, 1984), networks (Jones, 2010), public discourses (e.g., Coupland, 2004; Mitra, 2015) and culturally-situated social practices (Chudzikowski & Mayrhofer, 2011; Mitra, 2015). However, we explicitly welcome new theoretical lenses to theorize the relationship between cities and careers.


    Contributors should note:

    • This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be double-blind reviewed by experienced scholars in the field.
    • Submitted papers must be based on original material not published or accepted by, or under consideration with, any other journal or outlet.
    • For empirical papers based on data sets from which multiple papers have been generated, authors must provide the guest editors with copies of all other papers based on the same data.
    • The guest editors will select a limited number of papers to be included in the special issue. Other papers submitted to the special issue may be considered for publication in other issues of the journal at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief.
    • To be considered for this special issue, as well as fitting this call for papers, submissions must fit with the Aims and Scope of Human Relations:
    • http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/submit_paper/guidance.html. Submissions should also adhere to the Journal's requirements relating to originality, length, and formatting: http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/submit_paper/how_to_submit.html.
    • Papers must be submitted through the online systemhttp://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hr
    • Please indicate in your covering letter that your article is intended for this special issue.

    Please direct questions about the submission process, or any administrative matter, to the Editorial Office: humanrelationsjournal@tavinstitute.org.

    The guest editors of this special issue would be happy to be contacted directly with queries relating to potential submissions:

    Jeffrey Kennedy J.C.Kennedy@massey.ac.nz
    Svenja Tams svenjatams1@gmail.com
    Michael B Arthur marthur@suffolk.edu
    Kim Yin Chan akychan@ntu.edu.sg

    The call for papers is published on the Human Relations website:
    http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/CareersInCities.html

    References

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    Arthur MB and Rousseau DM (1996) The boundaryless career: A new employment principle for a new organizational era. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Barley SR (1989) Careers, identities and institutions: the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. In: Arthur MB, Lawrence BS and Hall DT (eds) Handbook of career theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 41–65.

    Barley SR and Kunda G. (2006) Contracting: A new form of professional practice. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(1): 45–66.

    Baruch Y and Altman Y (2016) The ecosystem of labor markets and careers. People & Strategy, 39(3): 16–19. 

    Cappellen T and Janssens M (2010) Enacting global careers: Organizational career scripts and the global economy as co-existing career referents. Journal of Organizational Behavior , 31(5): 687–706.

    Cappelli P (1999) The new deal at work: Managing the market-driven workforce. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

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    Svenja Tams
    University of Bath
    BATH
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  • 2.  RE: Human Relations Special Issue Call for Papers on 'Careers in cities'

    Posted 01-20-2018 19:52
    Thank you for sharing, Svenja. This is a really interesting special issue topic, and I especially like the contextual element of the cities that you are promoting for this issue. Hopefully you will get many high quality submissions!

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    Jos Akkermans
    Associate Professor
    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
    Netherlands
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