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Individual careers have been transformed by new ways of working within organizations and beyond, and specifically the imposition of market models on employment, the intensification of competition, and flexible employment contracts. As a result, the study of job mobility (i.e., individuals changing jobs within or between organizations) and career transitions (i.e., how the change is understood and managed by individuals and organizations) has become an increasingly important subject of study, with causes and implications that span multiple disciplines and subfields of management, such as careers, human resources management, organization theory, organizational behavior, and strategy. Although the roots of academic inquiry into job mobility and career transitions go back to the beginning of modern management studies, the past twenty years have seen an upsurge in these studies, enabled by new data sources (e.g., online resumes) and methods (e.g., text analysis and big data methods) that track individual careers, as well as recognition that job mobility and career transitions are important social phenomena. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Management article “Career Studies” by Yehuda Branch, especially the section on Contemporary Careers. The perspective of this article is primarily based in careers and organizational studies, but other Oxford Bibliographies in Management articles that cover related phenomena from different theoretical perspectives are “Turnover” by Peter Hom; “Human Capital Resource Pipelines” by Anthony Nyberg, Dhuha Abdulsalam, and Ingo Weller; and “Strategic Human Capital” by Rhett Brymer, Janice Molloy, and Clint Chadwick.

Job moves are common in most careers these days. Accordingly, the past two decades have seen a rapid accumulation of research in the management and related literatures on job mobility, that is, the movement of individuals between jobs, organisations or types of work.1 This research has primarily been situated in for-profit business firms, but the questions, methods of inquiry and findings could apply more broadly, specifically, to healthcare contexts. For example, when doctors change hospitals, or move from private practice to hospital or health system employment (or vice versa), how does it affect their career success or their patient care outcomes? Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals experience job mobility in their careers, and these moves could have important implications for them, their patients, their employing organisations and even healthcare policy. The rise of the boundaryless career, where job moves to new employers and even new occupations is considered normal,2 and the rupture of the traditional loyalty-based employment relationship between workers and employers3 have given rise to less stable careers, making questions around job mobility and career change more interesting than ever. In addition, advances in methods4 and availability of mobility and career history data for a wide variety of occupations and industries from matched employee–employer datasets and online sources such as LinkedIn5 6 have enabled new ways of investigating job mobility and careers. Healthcare is not immune to the larger institutional trends: the imposition of market models to healthcare systems and other changes to healthcare institutions around the world have made career mobility questions increasingly relevant to the healthcare sector. Certainly, job mobility is common for health professionals, and studies of mobility are already present in healthcare research.7–9 Rather than being a comprehensive review of mobility research,10 11 our focus will be …

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by (a) a process of accretion, wherein people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or (b) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession.

The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.

As employee mobility drastically increases for the modern workforce, returning to one’s previous employer (“boomerang” employment) is increasingly becoming a career pattern pursued by both job seek...

This symposium showcases research by human resource management and strategy scholars on information asymmetries in the hiring context. The papers featured in the symposium offered nuanced perspecti...

Research summary: This study examines the abandonment of organizational practices. We argue that firm choices in implementing practices affect how firms experience a practice and their subsequent likelihood of abandonment. We focus on utilization of the practice and staffing (i.e. career backgrounds of managers), as two important implementation choices that firms make. The findings demonstrate that practice utilization and staffing choices not only affect abandonment likelihood directly but also condition firms' susceptibility to pressures to abandon when social referents do. Our study contributes to diffusion research by examining practice abandonment—a relatively unexplored area in diffusion research—and by incorporating specific aspects of firms' post-adoption choices into diffusion theory. Managerial summary: When do firms shut down practices? Prior research has shown that firms learn from the actions of other firms, both adopting and abandoning practices when their peers do. But unlike adoption decisions, abandonment decisions need to account for firms' own experiences with the practice. We study the abandonment of corporate venture capital (CVC) practices in the U.S. IT industry, which has experienced waves of adoption and abandonment. We find that firms that make more CVC investments are less likely to abandon the practice, and are less likely to learn vicariously from other firms' abandonment decisions, such that they are less likely to exit CVC when other firms do. Staffing choices also matter: hiring former venture capitalists makes firms less likely to abandon CVC practices, while hiring internally makes abandonment more likely. Plus, staffing choices affect how firms learn from the environment, as CVC managers pay attention to and learn more from the actions of firms that match their work backgrounds; i.e., firms that staff CVC units with former venture capitalists are more likely to follow exit decisions of VC firms, while those that staff with internal hires are more likely to follow their industry peers. Our results suggest that firms wanting to retain CVC practices should think carefully about the implementation choices they make, as they may be inadvertently sowing seeds of abandonment.

What do talented employees carry with them as they move across organizations? How portable are their expertise, resources, and performance? As organizations’ needs for talent grow and individuals’ career trajectories become increasingly diverse, these questions become more important. In this chapter, we draw from career-mobility research and develop a framework that considers the human capital, social capital, and identity issues in talent movement. We also provide implications for organizations as talent enters and exits an organization. In sum, we suggest that intake of talent per se does not necessarily lead to successful acquisition and utilization of the talent’s capital. Conversely, departure of talent does not mean an absolute loss to organizations—losing talent can potentially bring organizations unexpected gains, such as new social resources.

Social ties to colleagues on other work teams can spur creative ideas and workplace innovation by exposing an individual to diverse knowledge. However, for external knowledge to be recombined into innovation, the knowledge must first be recognized as potentially valuable. Going beyond traditional structural explanations, we predict that the use of diverse knowledge to generate creative ideas and solutions will depend in part on employees’ psychological attachment to the organizational groups to which they belong, i.e., their social identity, and the strength of their social ties. We test our hypotheses in an R&D division of a global high-technology firm, finding that social identity influences the creative generativity of boundary-spanning ties. Specifically, stronger team identity renders interactions with colleagues on other work teams less generative of creative ideas, while identification with an overarching, superordinate group (e.g., a division) enhances creative generativity. We also hypothesize and find that tie strength attenuates the negative effect of team identity.

A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design. In this essay, we overturn the ontological assumption that social order is inherently stable, drawing on Anselm Strauss’s concept of negotiated order to analyze the persistence of a dominant design as a social accomplishment: an outcome of ongoing processes that reinforce or challenge a socially negotiated order. Thus, we shift focus from battles over standards to periods of normal innovation. We extend the technology cycles model to explain social dynamics in periods of incremental change, and to make predictions specifying how contextual conditions in standards-setting organizations affect social interaction, leading to reinforcement or challenge to a socio-technical order.

Strategic human capital represents a key asset for firms in innovation-driven industries, which commit extensive amount of resources to attract and train human resources. However, unlike other type...

When moving into new business areas, it is helpful to have alliance partners to share risk and learning; however, potential partners may be unwilling to join an inexperienced firm. In this study, w...

The movement of personnel between firms has been shown to have important implications for firms, yet there has been little direct investigation of the underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to their human capital, mobile individuals carry social capital, affecting the outcomes of the firms they join and leave by altering the patterns of interaction between firms. In this study, we examine how job mobility affects firm influence in a technical standards setting committee for U.S. wireless telecommunications. We hypothesize and find that hiring individuals who are richer in social capital increases firm influence in technical standards setting committees by increasing the hiring firm's social capital. We also find the benefits of hiring social capital are attenuated when an interfirm relationship is maintained by multiple individuals. In contrast, we find that the loss of personnel does not affect a firm's social capital or influence over standards directly but that it does have an effect on firm social capital and influence contingent on changes in the firm's business strategy. In advancing these arguments, we address the broader question of individuals as carriers of social capital and the conditions under which interpersonal connections are appropriable by firms.

As individuals change jobs more frequently, it is increasingly important to understand what they carry from their prior work experience that affects their performance in a new organizational context. So far, explanations about the imperfect portability of experience have primarily been about firm specificity of knowledge and skill. We draw on psychological theory to propose additional sociocognitive factors that interfere with the transfer of knowledge and skill acquired from prior related work experience. As we hypothesized, we find that task-relevant knowledge and skill mediates the relationship between prior related experience and job performance and that it acts as suppressing mediator of a negative direct relationship between prior related experience and current job performance. We also find that the positive effect of prior related experience on task-relevant knowledge and skill is attenuated by higher levels of experience within the current firm.

The article examines the extent firm social capital depend on the agency of individuals who represent it in the context of a multi-firm technical standards setting committee for the wireless teleco...

An important area of investigation in the field of entrepreneurship examines how people and organizations exploit technological opportunities. Prior research suggests that alliances, the mobility of experts, and the informal mechanisms associated with geographic co-location can present firms with useful opportunities to source technological knowledge. This paper uses insights from strategic management and organizational theory to suggest that organizational size may have an important impact on the extent of external learning, since it differentially affects the likelihood of learning via formal and informal mechanisms. Examining a cross-section of semiconductor startups, we find that external learning increases with startup size. With regard to the specific mechanisms of learning, we find that firms learn from alliances regardless of their size. For the informal mechanisms of mobility and geographic co-location, however, learning decreases with firm size. These results suggest that as startups grow, they may have increasing opportunities to access and exploit external knowledge, but their motivation (and hence ability) to learn from more informal sources may decrease.

Joblessness can have long term effects on wages, but less is known about why these effects persist and whether they affect men and women differently. We investigate skill perceptions as the mechani...

When organizations adopt new practices, the practices are often modified to fit the new context. We argue that managers who implement new practices modify them, and that the extent of practice variation is determined by these managers’ career experience with the practice itself, and career experience that enables fit assessment between the practice and the adopting firm. We test these arguments by observing information technology firms’ modification of venture capital practices within corporate venture capital units. This study contributes to diffusion research by developing and testing a framework for understanding the role of individuals in practice variation.

How does career boundary-crossing affect an entrepreneur’s new venture? When entrepreneurs cross industry or functional boundaries to lead startups, they may lack specific experience needed for performance. Conversely, the diverse experiences they carry can enhance exploration and lead to the emergence of innovation in startups. We highlight important consequences of career boundary-crossing, using a multi-industry longitudinal sample of high-technology firms. We find that entrepreneurs who cross functional boundaries are more likely to lead their startups into new product areas. We also find that entrepreneurs’ industry boundary-crossing is associated with startup failure, but it also increases the probability of an IPO.