Methodologies in organizational career research: Past, present and future

This chapter reviews how time has been addressed in classic career studies, and focuses on ways that the many different approaches to understanding time can contribute to a richer understanding of careers. If time is fundamental to the understanding of career, then it is somewhat surprising that it has not played a more notable role in career research since the early 1980s. Time is not only fundamental for careers, but it has also been conceptualized in many strikingly different ways in the social sciences. Time plays a crucial role in a number of disciplines in close proximity to career studies, in particular sociology, psychology, and organization studies. Time is essential for a psychological view on individuals and their context, since “no form of behavior could possibly be defined without reference to time, and no behavior could be observed if the time interval were limited to zero”.