Emancipation of Career : Careering within and Beyond Capitalism

This fascinating research monograph offers a new and comprehensive analysis of how career: 

• emerged as a social category 
• can be more rigorously theorised to support future analysis, and  
• can be reconceptualised to support new forms of living and working.  

Esteemed authors, Tristram Hooley and Rie Thomsen, explore the concept of career in contemporary society and sociology to establish career as an explanatory category for critical social analyses. They build on this analysis to argue that the concept of career can be used as part of a project of personal and societal emancipation.  

Drawing on historical, sociological and psychological evidence, the authors describe the contemporary environment for careers. In the process of conducting a thorough analysis of the forms and rhetorics of career, they reconceptualise the concept of career, untethering it from its origins in twentieth century capitalism and re-imagining it as an emancipatory and democratic concept. This re-conceptualisation prompts them to analyse how the career concept can be used to support people in the contemporary world; to rethink their lives and what they derive meaning from, to imagine better worlds, and to develop new forms of society.  

To date, work examining the phenomenon of career has confined itself to a particular strand of research. This has either focused on the experience of the individual and how to best support individual career development (in career studies), on the organisation (organisation and management studies), or, rarely, on how career fits into the political economy and ideal society (sociology, economics and political science). This ground-breaking book combines all these different strands and, in doing so, develops a new theory of career.