Françoise Dany

‘Free actors’ and organizations: critical remarks about the new career literature, based on French insights

What is the reality of contemporary careers? Have individuals become masters of their professional destiny? While the ‘new career literature’ puts forward the figure of an individual free to invent his/her career (the ‘free actor model’), this article shows that the changes purported to affect careers are less radical than they seem. Despite a weakening of environments, discriminating career mechanisms are still imposed on cadres, at least in France. Because individuals do not always have the means or the will to escape those mechanisms, ‘external clues’ continue to mark careers more than the new career literature supposes. To account for the realities observed in France, this paper proposes a specific view on careers, which highlights why career rules still exist in the country.

Academic careers: The limits of the ‘boundaryless approach’ and the power of promotion scripts

Despite serious criticism, the boundaryless view of careers still heavily influences research. This article aims to do more than just challenge the claim that careers are becoming more boundaryless: our goal is to make clear that careers need to be thought of in alternative terms. To this end, we build on an analysis of academic careers to explain why regarding careers as either bounded or boundaryless is too simple and why more attention should be paid to the scripts that influence career choices. We draw from an empirical study carried out in two French universities that shows that promotion scripts operate under three conditions — credibility, legibility, and legitimacy of promotion models. We conclude that scripts are potentially very useful in understanding a wide range of careers.

New insights into the link between HRM integration and organizational performance: the moderating role of influence distribution between HRM specialists and line managers

Unlike most of human resource management (HRM) research attempting to identify the set of practices that are likely to improve organizational performance, this paper focuses on two key aspects of the organization of HRM: 1) the integration of HRM and business strategy; and 2) the distribution of roles and influences between line managers (LMs) and HRM specialists. Building on the resource-based view, we suggest that HRM integration is a necessary but not sufficient condition for HRM positively to impact organizational performance. An equally necessary condition is to provide HRM specialists with a prominent role compared to LMs in order to ensure the required proper quality of implementation of decided HRM policies. Using data from the Cranet Survey, we employed a series of structural equation models to test the moderating effect of the HRM/LM relationship on the link between HRM strategic integration and organizational performance. This technique allowed us to estimate measurement models and structural relations among latent variables, which reinforces to a great extent the robustness of our empirical findings compared to previous studies, which have relied merely on standard OLS regression analysis. Our empirical findings lead us to call for less emphasis on ‘instrumental’ approaches to researching HRM, emphasizing ‘what practices must be implemented?’, in favour of an approach which HRM examines the question of who is in charge of defining and implementing HRM practices.

The odyssey of career and the opportunity for international comparison

The concept of career is where human resource management (HRM) processes and practices, and received social opinions about work, meet the aspirations and well-being of individuals at work. The effects are not all one way, though, as evolution in individual and collective career patterns can eventually challenge and reshape HRM practices. Thus the power of the concept of career is precisely the recursive link that it provides. To study careers orients attention not only to the external features of working lives – positions, promotions and organizational and occupational career structures – but also to how people perceive these features, as well as to the dialectical relationships between people and their environments. This allows for a wide-ranging examination of the intersection of individuals, organizations and social structures over time and space. Thus, the concept career provides a useful vehicle for exploring social processes and social change (Collin and Watts, 1996; Herriott, 1992; Arthur et al., 1989). There has been renewed interest in careers recently (e.g. Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Peiperl et al., 2000; Collin and Young, 2000; Inkson et al., 2002), stemming from the widespread debate about the career implications of those organizational and social changes which threaten traditional assumptions about work. The comfortable notion that careers travel predictable routes up organizational or occupational hierarchies appears no longer to hold. In response to the debate, a discernible body of literature has emerged addressing what has been described as a shift from ‘organizational careers’ to so-called ‘boundaryless careers’ involving less predictable career trajectories (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Images of careers as protean (Hall et al., 1996), boundaryless (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996), capitalist (Inkson and Arthur, 2002), portfolio (Handy, 1994) and free agent (Hecksher, 1995) have been proposed. Much of this literature invites a sharper focus on the individual and the personal ‘odyssey’ involved in career journeys that are more idiosyncratic in their engagement with the changing world of work over time. Most new approaches to careers converge in exploring ‘independence from, rather than dependence on, traditional organizational career arrangements’ (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996: 6). Emerging ideas about careers as less predictable, less organizationally dependent and more boundaryless have acted as a powerful counterforce to earlier views of careers which have acted as limits to the legitimacy of a wide variety of career stories Int. J. of Human Resource Management 14:5 August 2003 705–712

Politics of place: The meaningfulness of resisting places

The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.

Organizational Entrepreneurship as Active Resistance: A Struggle Against Outsourcing

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging perspective on organizational entrepreneurship by outlining how resistance to managerial policies and decisions can give birth to alternative organizational styles. Drawing on an in–depth analysis of a personal narrative of an R&D team manager opposition to hierarchical decisions, we link studies on resistance and organizational entrepreneurship to suggest that active resistance, which we define as the capacity to live beyond managerial control to create spaces of creativity and solidarity and alternative modalities of work in an organizational context, can actually contribute to the entrepreneurial process.

Time to change: the added value of an integrative approach to career research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to call for an integrative approach to career research aiming to avoid both fragmentation and closure of the field through the discussion of a wide range of perspectives on career or career situations. The paper discusses the specificity of this integrative approach vs others, like the traditional approach or the multi or transdisciplinary approaches. Design/methodology/approach – The work is based on a review of the career literature, and an analytic comparison of existing research approaches across this body of literature. Findings – The paper shows the tendency of career theory to stick to narrow views of a career. The paper highlights the importance of taking into account the wide variety of career situations, which results from the fact that careers are necessarily located in time and space. The paper provides examples that invite to better explore career differences and seek for alternative explanations to career experiences. Because career dynamics are marked ...