Content area
Full Text
Let us begin with the first time the term "boundaryless career" was used in a public meeting. The occasion was the Academy of Management Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1993. The conference theme was "Managing the Boundaryless Organization," fashioned after the term popularized by Jack Welch, then-CEO of General Electric (GE). The broad idea was to break down boundaries, so that GE employees were encouraged to go where they needed to go, and talk to whomever they needed to talk to, in order to get things done. Robert DeFillippi and I felt that the same kind of sentiments might be applied to people managing their own careers, and convened a group to join a symposium proposal on "The Boundaryless Career." The proposal was accepted, and in turn led to a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Arthur, 1994a) and a wider collection of articles in a book edited with Denise Rousseau (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996a). The term proved evocative, first in attracting a range of established US scholars to contribute to the book, and later as a reference point for more global conversations.
What has happened in the time since that first symposium? A search on google scholar in early 2014 for the combined term "boundaryless career" brought up over 5,000 publications, including over 1,000 for 2012 and 2013. The 1996 edited book has been cited over 1,500 times, and the 12 most popular articles have each been cited at least 200 times. What lies behind these numbers? What kind of research and debates have we witnessed? Let us examine these questions under a series of headings concerned with the meaning of boundaryless careers, an extended section on the influence of the MIT group, interdisciplinary approaches, and re-energizing career studies. Let us then close with a series of ideas that look to the future, and build on the earlier sections.
The meaning of boundaryless careers
In our original symposium initiative Robert DeFillippi and I sketched out the overall idea for potential contributors, as well as providing our own definition in the symposium contribution that we made. The DeFillippi and Arthur (1994, p. 307; 1996, p. 116) definition of boundaryless careers was "sequences of job opportunities that go beyond the boundaries of single...