ABSTRACT
Time is both fundamental and, for the past nearly 40 years, the least studied of major constructs associated with career. It is fundamental because, as Arthur et al. (1989: 8) point out when proposing their widely used definition of career (“the evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time”):
A central theme in this definition is that of work and all that work can mean for the ways in which we see and experience other people, organizations, and society. However, equally central to this definition is the theme of time, along which the career provides a ‘moving perspective’ (Hughes, 1958: 67) on the unfolding interaction between a person and society.
(emphasis added) In a previous handbook, Gunz and Peiperl (2007: 4) note that “whichever way one looks at it, career and the passage of time are inextricably entangled.” Viewing career involves the simultaneous application of three perspectives (Chapter 2, this volume; Gunz and Mayrhofer, 2018). One is interested in the condition of the individual (the ontic perspective), the positions they occupy within their social and geographic space (the spatial perspective), and the time over which the career happens (the temporal perspective). In the absence of the temporal perspective, no career is visible. Time figures in pretty much any definition of career, either explicitly, for example in Arthur et al.’s (1989: 8) definition cited above, or implicitly, for example in Hughes’s (1958: 63) “moving perspective in which the person sees his life as a whole.”