Human Relations
Special Issue Call for Papers: Conceptualising flexible careers across the life course
Guest Editors: Jennifer Tomlinson (University of Leeds, UK; Marian Baird (University of Sydney, Australia); Peter Berg (Michigan State University, USA); Rae Cooper (University of Sydney, Australia)
Read the full call for papers here: http://www.tavinstitute.org/ humanrelations/special_issues/ Flexible%20careers.html
Submission deadline: 1st March 2016; please do not submit papers before 1st February 2016
In recent years, much literature and research on the quality of working lives focuses on jobs as the unit of analysis, emphasizing job quality and flexibility. Through this call, we seek to shift the focus to careers and, in particular, develop the construct of a ‘flexible career’ drawing attention to the fact that work occurs over time in sequence and trajectory. We are interested in the conditions under which flexible and sustainable careers can develop and flourish. Given this perspective, the overarching objective of this special issue is to encourage new analytical approaches to studying the concepts and intersection of flexibility and careers. More specifically, it is to provide a space to examine the meaning of flexible careers from different disciplinary perspectives and to question the extent to which careers can be forged and maintained at different points across the life course in the current social and economic context. In doing so, we focus on what is perhaps the one of the greatest tensions in contemporary labour markets and societies: how to combine the social and economic need for individual life-long work opportunity, accomplishment and development (careers) with the need for a workforce able to continuously adjustment to the supply and demand for labour in space, time and function (flexibility).
Organizations, Occupations and Work 