ABSTRACT
Research on careers has a long and distinguished history. However, contemporary research on organizational careers can usefully be traced back to the work of a group of scholars based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard in the mid-1970s. During this time, three seminal books were published by Hall (1976), Van Maanen (1977), and Schein (1978) integrating previous work focusing on careers within organizational contexts and setting the cornerstone of the popular view of careers as a “sequence of promotions and other upward moves in a work-related hierarchy during the course of the person's work life” (Hall, 1976, p. 2). These might be played out in a single organization or sometimes across a number of organizations.
