Brenda L. Berkelaar

Bait and switch or double-edged sword? The (sometimes) failed promises of calling:

How people talk about their work and careers matters. Desiring meaningful work, people increasingly describe work and careers as a calling. Such callings may be secular or sacred. Popular ways of talking about calling often create problematic, rather than positive, career and life outcomes. In this article, we examine five common, historically influenced assumptions underlying contemporary talk about secular and sacred callings: necessity; agency and control; inequality; temporal continuity; and neoliberal economics. We showcase some of the likely downsides of calling as these underlying assumptions interact with people’s everyday lives. We suggest possible solutions for rehabilitating calling to help people find some of the career and quality-of-life benefits that calling promises. In sum, this essay contributes to a more nuanced understanding of calling and agency in contemporary careers while also offering a framework and direction for developing research and practice on calling.

Cybervetting, Online Information, and Personnel Selection: New Transparency Expectations and the Emergence of a Digital Social Contract

This study examines employers’ and workers’ sensemaking about cybervetting—employers’ use of online information for personnel selection. Analysis of 89 employer and applicant interviews suggest a shift in the social contract—the implicit expectations for how personnel selection and employment relationships should work. Results suggest an extension of new proactive transparency expectations from organizations to workers, the implicit acceptance of which points to the emergence of a digital social contract. The digital social contract prescribes normative expectations for workers’ digital visibility, thereby extending the times and contexts within which employment evaluations and career management occur. Using a communicative perspective to address research gaps on everyday ethics, practices, and technologies of personnel selection, contributions include introducing and explicating the digital social contract, documenting the extension of new transparency expectations to individuals, and explicating ethical and practical implications of new technologies and information visibility on contemporary personnel selection.

Online Employment Screening and Digital Career Capital Exploring Employers’ Use of Online Information for Personnel Selection

This study explores how employers report using online information to evaluate job candidates during personnel selection. Qualitative analysis of 45 in-depth employer interviews emphasizes how new and different information visibility afforded by the Internet simultaneously replicates and shifts how employers evaluate reconstructed information about candidates during personnel selection. Data revealed that employers evaluate the relative presence or absence of certain types of visual, textual, relational, and technological information in patterned and idiosyncratic ways. We discuss the likely consequences for theory and practices of personnel selection and careers, emphasizing the increasing expectations for workers to curate digital career capital to manage the expanding contexts within which employers construct and evaluate professional and/or workplace identities.

The worker as politician: How online information and electoral heuristics shape personnel selection and careers

Employers’ use of increasingly visible online information extends when, where, and in what role contexts personnel selection—and correspondingly career management—occurs. Data from 59 employers suggest the use of a new lens to evaluate workers: the worker as politician. By appropriating strategies from electoral contexts to “vote” on job candidates, employers are (unintentionally) reimagining personnel selection. Participants report seeking appropriately endorsed workers with electable personalities, who demonstrate commercially “sanitized” public images and reflect the “right” kind of private life and mainstream values. Results contribute to research on how new technologies and information visibility affect personnel selection, career management, and reputation management.

Joining and Leaving Organizations in a Global Information Society

Social, political, economic, and technological changes are reshaping how people join and leave organizations, a process called organizational socialization. In light of these changes, there is a need to extend and challenge existing scholarship, while also considering the multiple organizational memberships that shape human experience (e.g., educational, healthcare, political, religious, terrorist, volunteer). Taking into account macro-through micro-level factors—globalization, new technologies, time, changing workforce conditions, family structures, political (in)stabilities, and understudied organizations/organizing—this chapter suggests research trajectories that offer opportunities for communication subdis-ciplines to benefit from and contribute to organizational socialization research and practice while also expanding interdisciplinary influence.

Context matters: Examining discourses of career success in Tanzania

Although geopolitical, temporal, and sociocultural factors shape normative stories of meaningful and attainable work and careers, most scholarship addresses Western, white-collar contexts. Analysis of two Tanzanian youth magazines revealed different normative stories of career success for educational achievers (Fema) and youth outside the educational system (Si Mchezo!). Both appeal to themes of self-reliance, collective good, entrepreneurship, and healthy relationships; however, the normative story for educational achievers appeals to discourses of achievement whereas the normative story for educational underachievers appeals to discourses of survival offered via Horatio Alger–like plots. We argue that nuanced differences between discourses necessitate evaluating contextual factors in career research and management, and provide a beginning framework accounting for cultural levels, material constraints, and temporal shifts.

Storying the digital professional: how online screening shifts the primary site and authorship of workers’ career stories

ABSTRACT Employers’ use of online information increases the communicative demands and complexity of employability. For employers, gathering online information for personnel selection—a process called cybervetting—supplements or augments existing information acquisition processes. For workers, cybervetting’s extractive processes require considering potential and possible career stories employers might construct. Workers increasingly need to engage in prospective and retrospective storying to communicate and maintain employability and employment. Drawing on exemplars from employers’ reports, this essay highlights: (a) how employers report assembling and making sense of workers’ information during personnel selection; (b) the limitations of existing employability strategies; as well as (c) the increased and unequally distributed uncertainty and risk; and (d) the associated and different work expected of workers as the primary site and authorship of career stories shift.

Formative Communication Experiences and Message Production Ability in Adulthood: Family Communication Patterns and Creative Facility

Everyday experience suggests that there are individuals who are “glib,” who are “quick-witted,” and who can “think on their feet.” This ability to formulate fluent, novel messages has been termed creative facility, and previous research has identified various personality trait and information processing correlates of the phenomenon. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether formative communication experiences (i.e., family communication patterns) might be related to creative facility in a sample of young adults. The results indicated that people reporting a high family conformity orientation tended to be less fluent in formulating simple novel narratives and, further, that this effect was heightened under more cognitively demanding encoding conditions. Family conversation orientation did not have an effect on message fluency.

A network under stress: using embeddedness to understand uncertainty management and resilience in campus emergencies

ABSTRACT Persistent school shootings have generated ongoing pressure to assess and enhance crisis communication effectiveness via strategies such as resilience-building and post-crisis restoration. A network perspective offers a robust, multilevel approach for examining complex information flows among community, campus, and individual actors affected by crises. Drawing on relational and structural embeddedness and Uncertainty Management Theory, we offer nine propositions that help explain structural and relational changes in a network over time. Although theoretically driven, these propositions are primarily functional, offering practical implications for safety officials and administrators trying to understand, prepare for, and respond to crises. Thus, we suggest measures and recommendations to improve information flow, uncertainty management, and resilience before, during, and after a crisis.

How implicit theories help differentiate approaches to online impression management: A preliminary typology

This article proposes an empirically-grounded typology to describe how people approach online impression management across multiple digital sites given employers’ use of online information for personnel selection. Qualitative analysis revealed four primary online impression management types: acceptor, dissident, scrubber, and strategist. The four types are primarily differentiated based on people’s relatively fixed or relatively flexible implicit theories about information, technology, visibility, and identity, and whether people take passive, reactive, or active approaches to online impression management. Although research on implicit theories usually focuses on individual attributes, these findings highlight how people’s implicit theories about the context or field of communicative action work in combination to influence impression management behavior. This study suggests practical interventions to increase people’s agency and effectiveness in managing online information and provides foundations for future research on online impression, information management, and implicit theories.