ABSTRACT
If you have ever met a carpenter, anywhere in the world, you know in general what their job entails in any other part of the world. The same goes for a nurse, a teacher and so forth. Right? Or maybe not? Hopefully your mind immediately challenged the first two sentences as you read them. Different occupations and the careers associated with them will vary across cultures. Despite the implicit assumptions about a strong universalist element in careers discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, we argue here that contextual settings linked with cultural or institutional specifics of a society play an important role in describing and explaining careers. Yet there is little systematic insight available about commonalities and differences of career patterns as well as the relative importance of career antecedents and career outcomes in different societies. Our text has both a conceptual and an empirical emphasis. Conceptually, it looks at major arguments for the importance of cultural and institutional factors for explaining careers. Empirically, it reviews available studies and suggests directions for future research.
