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
19 - Rites of passage in work careers
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
There is a comparison between the ritual way major life stages are negotiated in small-scale societies and our own poverty of effective rites of passage – Western culture is lacking in effective mechanisms for socialization.
Colin Turnbull 1984Entering into a trade, marrying, growing old and aging, are also celebrated … after the phrase of Van Gennep, they have come to be called rites of passage, rites of transition.
Everett Cherrington Hughes, 1958In essence, a work career can be conceptualized as a series of transitions from one role to another within an organizational or occupational social system (Barley, Chapter 3; Hall, 1976). The fact that work careers are comprised of sequences of roles is often obscured by alternative conceptualizations that emphasize career's more unitary connotations as a calling, vocation, or professional pursuit. Yet, if we take seriously the idea that a career consists of a sequence of roles, the question of just how the transitions between these roles are accomplished takes on an importance in its own right. Indeed, the study of the social and psychological mechanisms that enable individuals to transit across roles proves to be quite a critical area of investigation.
Hence, this chapter suggests that the role transitions encompassed by work careers, these “turning points” (Hughes, 1958:11), are central to careers and that they pose crucial problems to anyone seriously interested in understanding how careers work. An anthropological model known as rites of passage [Van Gennep, 1960, (1909)] is used to show that major transitions are managed ceremonially across three universal stages of separation, transition, and integration.
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- Information
- Handbook of Career Theory , pp. 397 - 416Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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