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The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era, edited by Michael B. Arthur and Denise M. Rousseau. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
This is an ambitious collection of articles by noted scholars who assume the daunting task of framing contemporary careers in the milieu of changing organizational and societal conditions. Arthur and Rousseau delineate a boundaryless career as taking any number of forms-a distinct departure from traditional views of careers as organizationally driven and unfolding in a predictable, hierarchical trajectory. As set forth in this volume, a boundaryless career is a multifaceted phenomenon involving navigation across employers, market confirmation of one's knowledge and choices, and connections to networks of a social and professional nature. Consequently, the major thread throughout the book is that of networks as a mechanism of cyclical learning, with individuals rather than organizations configuring boundaryless careers. Chapters are carefully chosen and juxtapositioned into a comprehensive composite of how public policy, industry conditions, individual and organizational learning, nonwork factors, and the work experiences of diverse people influence career development.
The book is composed of twenty-two chapters organized into five sections. Each section contains a preface and conclusion that explain how respective components illustrate and extend our thinking. The first section, Exploring the Nature of Boundaryless Careers, explains the reciprocal nature of learning between organizations and individuals. Such learning is the ticket to traversing the boundaries of networks formed by alliances among suppliers, customers, employers, and employees. In networked relationships an individual enacts the complexity and ambiguity of many new, unstructured projects to learn cumulatively and collectively, ultimately influencing organizational forms. This is illustrated in Saxenian's description of how technology transfer and collaboration associated with innovation in Silicon Valley emerge from shared identity in the semi-conductor electronics industry. Robinson and Miner explain that as individuals span organizational borders, they supply new knowledge and activity variations from which to learn. The values, procedures, and behaviors most associated with adaptivity are identified, selected, and retained. Thus, according to Weick, organizations and their employees mutually develop a career and learning system. This is evident in the independent film industry; according to Jones, career socialization occurs by honing one's technical skills to enhance employability and by maintaining good relationships with internal and external...