CAREER

Career

Career

Introduction

Careers are always careers in context. Being central to individuals, organizations, and society, they cannot be restricted to the narrow view of individuals moving up corporate or professional hierarchies (Mayrhofer, Meyer, & Steyrer, 2007, 66). The nonprofit sector presents a specific mix of forms of organizing. It combines both traditional organizations with strong hierarchies (e.g., Red Cross, hospitals) and project-based employment (e.g., cultural projects or relief organizations). Somewhat counterintuitively, these specific forms of organizing do not necessarily imply specific forms of careers. Rather, careers in the nonprofit sector tend to oscillate between different forms of organizing, for example, working for an established social care organization may be one career step and participating in a drug prevention project the next. A common and crucial feature throughout the sector, though, is that funding limits employment contracts—even in traditional organizations.

From an individual point of view, the nonprofit sector thus constitutes a career field in which many jobs have an expiration date. Furthermore, we find a specific structure of human resources (HR) in nonprofit organizations (NPOs): Persons regularly employed work together with volunteers, members of religious orders, and civil servants. The share of part-time employees is considerably high. A career field with such characteristics is interesting for two reasons:

In the future, career fields are unlikely to present the either—or of project careers or organizational ones (e.g., the film industry as opposed to public administration [Jones, 1996, 11]). It is rather more likely that in the majority of cases, permanent and temporary forms of organizing will coexist. The nonprofit sector can be studied as a testing ground of such forms of organizing society.

With around 10% of the average Western economy's workforce employed in the nonprofit sector, this sector already constitutes a career field of considerable economic importance and academic interest. In spite of that, careers in the nonprofit sector have not been systematically researched so far.

Two Faces of Success

Career research has distinguished between an objective and a subjective career (Hughes, 1937, 52): The former is defined as directly observable, measurable, and verifiable by an impartial third party when looking at attainments such as pay, promotions, or occupational status. The latter is experienced directly only by the person and defined by an individual's reactions to his or her unfolding career experiences. In other words, the subjective career is “the moving perspective in which the person sees his life as a whole and interprets the meaning of his various attributes, actions and the things which happen to him” (p. 63).

Thus, careers and career success are Janus-like: There is an objective (or external) dimension, often measured by salary levels, rank of promotion, and occupational status (Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999, 23); as well, there is a subjective (or internal) side, for example, expressed in career satisfaction (Gattiker & Larwood, 1986, 63). For a particular work context, industry, and strata of the workforce, certain objective criteria of success apply. All these measures are somehow linked with an individual's contribution to the success of the organization, be it through ...