Dear colleagues,
On behalf of David Collings, Mila Lazarova, and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, I am excited to share the following call for papers for a special issue in the Organizational Psychology Review:
Reconceptualizing Careers in Disruptive Times
How much of what we know about careers still holds in today's world of work?
Just think of ongoing disruptions around digitalization, AI, gig work, job deconstruction, and geopolitical turbulence. All of these are fundamentally reshaping how careers unfold. And yet many of our core theories still rest on assumptions of relative stability and predictability that cannot capture contemporary realities. We believe we need a 𝙣𝙚𝙬 'new career' paradigm.
That's what our new special issue in Organizational Psychology Review (OPR) is all about. Below, we provide information about the special issue and an upcoming webinar to help you get started.
𝗔𝗶𝗺𝘀 & 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝗽𝗲
This SI invites scholarship that challenges existing assumptions in careers theory, introduces new conceptual frameworks, and shapes the research agenda for the field. Two questions are at the heart of our vision:
➡️ How should existing career theories and concepts be updated to understand contemporary careers?
➡️ How can new theoretical frameworks, from within or beyond our field, help us better analyze careers today?
We're especially interested in work that integrates insights across disciplines, such as careers, OB, HRM, and beyond, to rethink foundational assumptions about how careers unfold in today's world.
𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝗱𝗲:
💡 The impact of AI (and agentic AI) on career development
💡 Careers in the gig economy, platform work, and job deconstruction
💡 Reconceptualizing core career-related constructs (e.g., employability) in volatile labor markets
💡 Career identity, success, and self-management in digital and hybrid work
💡 Career sustainability, inequality, and inclusion in changing labor markets
💡 Temporal dynamics, non-linear paths, and prospective career theorizing
💡 Global mobility, migration, and geopolitical disruption
𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀
📅 Submission window: April 1 – May 1, 2027
📄 We welcome conceptual papers, conceptual review papers, methods papers (with a clear theoretical link), and meta-analyses. Note: OPR does not publish standalone empirical papers.
💻 Webinar: June 4, 2026, at 17:00 CEST / 11:00 EDT / 08:00 PDT.
We will host an interactive Q&A with the editorial team. If you're interested in joining this webinar, please send an email to j.akkermans@vu.nl. We will share the meeting link a few days before the webinar. A recording will be available for those who can't join live.
If you're working on ideas that push the boundaries of how we think about careers, we'd love to see your work in this SI.
Questions? Feel free to reach out!
The full call for papers is attached and also available HERE
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Jos Akkermans
Full Professor
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Netherlands
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