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This study aims to understand how employability capitals’ dynamics foster self-perceived employability (SPE) among students and graduates, which is still being empirically explored. Building upon the Employability Capital Growth Model and the Social Cognitive Career Theory’s career self-management model, we aimed to understand how different capitals associate by testing a serial mediation model connecting career identity (reflecting career identity capital) and SPE through the serial mediation of cultural capital and job interview self-efficacy (ISE) (an element of psychological capital).

We adopted a two-wave design involving 227 Italian University students and graduates. We recruited participants through multi-channel communication. The hypothesised relationships were analysed employing the structural equation modelling approach with the SPSS AMOS statistical package.

The results indicated that career identity, cultural capital, ISE and SPE are meaningfully related. In particular, in line with our expectations, we observed that career identity predicts cultural capital, which is positively associated with ISE which, ultimately, impacts SPE.

Our work adds to existing research by advancing the understanding of employability capitals, explaining how they interact and influence SPE, which is crucial for a sustainable transition into the workforce. At a practical level, our findings call upon, and guide, efforts from various stakeholders in the graduate career ecosystem (i.e. universities and their partners) to offer students and graduates meaningful experiences to form and use their employability capitals.

Interprofessional collaboration and coordination are critical to developing solutions to complex problems, and many workplaces engage in coordination and collaboration across organizational boundaries. This development changes work conditions and workplaces for many people. The ethnographic study of workplaces needs to re-configure the toolbox to adjust to such changes. The purpose of this study was to explore how the ethnographic study of dispersed workplaces can benefit from the analytical concept of boundary work.

A multi-sited ethnographic study was conducted in two health promotion programs, introducing new collaborative relations across sectors and professions. The concept of boundary work was applied as the conceptual frame and introduced the diagnosis of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) as a boundary object.

Professional boundaries are key to understanding interorganizational and interprofessional collaborations. The ethnographic study of complex, multi-sited settings using boundary work as a conceptual framework can enrich workplace ethnographies by demonstrating how professions position themselves through framing. Such framing strategies are used to construct, defend or contest boundaries. Boundary objects may potentially bridge devices connecting people across boundaries.

The traditional ethnographic notion of “following” an object or a subject is difficult in a workplace environment dispersed across multiple sites and involving many different actors. This suggests that workplace ethnographies studying interorganizational workplaces would benefit from a shift in focus from place-based or group-based ethnography to a field-level ethnography of relations using boundary work as an analytical frame.

Drawing on the whole-life perspective of career development and the conservation of resources theory, the authors consider whether self-initiated expatriates' (SIEs’) cultural intelligence (CQ) is a general, cross-domain resource that helps SIEs gain resources in the work and nonwork domains. The authors contend that CQ will be associated with greater levels of organizational and community embeddedness, which in turn will facilitate their career satisfaction. The authors also propose the role of perceived host country community diversity climate as an environmental condition that, when low, strengthens the relationships between CQ and organizational and community embeddedness.

The authors examine the study hypotheses based on two distinct samples of SIEs (Sample 1: 169 Asian SIE professionals; Study 2: 147 SIE academics).

SIEs' CQ positively relates to their organizational and community embeddedness, which in turn is associated with greater levels of career satisfaction. The authors also find that SIEs with high CQ are more likely to experience community embeddedness and career satisfaction when they perceive that the host country community diversity climate is low.

First, this study goes beyond existing literature that rarely examines nonwork inputs to SIE career success. Second, extending previous CQ research with a strong organizational focus, the authors investigated how CQ influences SIEs' work and nonwork embeddedness. Third, the authors found that the absence of a peripheral ecological condition, perceived host country community diversity climate, may strengthen the direct relationship between CQ and embeddedness and the indirect relationship between CQ and career satisfaction.