Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- PART I CURRENT APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CAREERS
- PART II NEW IDEAS FOR THE STUDY OF CAREERS
- Introduction to Part II
- 11 People as sculptors versus sculpture: the roles of personality and personal control in organizations
- 12 Work, stress, and careers: a preventive approach to maintaining organizational health
- 13 Re-visioning career concepts: a feminist invitation
- 14 Reciprocity at work: the separate, yet inseparable possibilities for individual and organizational development
- 15 Career improvisation in self-designing organizations
- 16 Organization career systems and employee misperceptions
- 17 Blue-collar careers: meaning and choice in a world of constraints
- 18 A political perspective on careers: interests, networks, and environments
- 19 Rites of passage in work careers
- 20 Pin stripes, power ties, and personal relationships: the economics of career strategy
- 21 Rhetoric in bureaucratic careers: managing the meaning of management success
- 22 The internal and external career: a theoretical and cross-cultural perspective
- PART III FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAREER THEORY
- Name index
- Subject index
17 - Blue-collar careers: meaning and choice in a world of constraints
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- PART I CURRENT APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CAREERS
- PART II NEW IDEAS FOR THE STUDY OF CAREERS
- Introduction to Part II
- 11 People as sculptors versus sculpture: the roles of personality and personal control in organizations
- 12 Work, stress, and careers: a preventive approach to maintaining organizational health
- 13 Re-visioning career concepts: a feminist invitation
- 14 Reciprocity at work: the separate, yet inseparable possibilities for individual and organizational development
- 15 Career improvisation in self-designing organizations
- 16 Organization career systems and employee misperceptions
- 17 Blue-collar careers: meaning and choice in a world of constraints
- 18 A political perspective on careers: interests, networks, and environments
- 19 Rites of passage in work careers
- 20 Pin stripes, power ties, and personal relationships: the economics of career strategy
- 21 Rhetoric in bureaucratic careers: managing the meaning of management success
- 22 The internal and external career: a theoretical and cross-cultural perspective
- PART III FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAREER THEORY
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
We all have skills. Whether we use them in this plant is the question.
Auto worker quoted by R.J. Thomas 1988Should we bother with blue-collar careers?
Answer 1: No. Blue-collar workers don't have careers, they have jobs. Jobs involve limited tasks and responsibilities. Jobs tend not to be connected to an ascending staircase (i.e., as in the normative model). At best, they make sense as “work histories,” not as careers like professionals or managers have.
Answer 2: Yes. But toss out the normative, achievement-oriented model of careers. Develop instead an inclusive perspective that transcends the color of the collar and, in the process, seeks similarity in work experience over time while helping to explain differences. Insert an objective definition or a set of dimensions that allow for horizontal as well as vertical mobility, that contrast externally defined tasks or responsibilities with internally generated rationales for a history of jobs, and that introduce parallel sequences, like adult development, life cycles, or family stages.
It is tempting to go with the first answer and be done with the topic. After all, despite the persistent theme of human resource development in the management literature, few organizations subscribe in practice to the idea that low-level, nonsupervisory employees have or even want careers. Certainly most organizations provide reasonably clear steps or gradations in jobs that can be construed as paths of upward mobility. But quite often the training necessary for climbing the organizational staircase is inadequate or inaccessible, external credentialing is required, or some other obstacle (e.g., family, ability, individual preference) intervenes to make the staircase look like a series of cliffs each separated by a deep crevasse.
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- Handbook of Career Theory , pp. 354 - 379Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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