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A work orientation represents a person’s beliefs about the meaning of work – the function work plays in the person’s life and the constellation of values and assumptions the person holds about the work domain. Research has suggested that adults tend to favor one of three primary work orientations: job, career, or calling. Empirical studies have shown that adults with different primary work orientations tend to experience different work and career outcomes; however, scholars have not analyzed how or why an individual first develops a work orientation. In this study, we take a first step toward investigating the origins of adults’ work orientations.

We propose hypotheses drawing on extant literature on the development of work values and occupational inheritance. We test hypotheses using a retrospective research design and survey methodology, with a sample of working adults.

Work orientations are developed through socialization processes with parents during adolescence. There are different patterns of development across the three work orientation categories: stronger calling orientations are developed when both parents possess strong calling orientations; stronger career orientations develop in accordance with fathers’ career orientations; and job orientations are related more to the nature of the adolescent’s relationship with parents than with parents’ own work orientations.

This research provides the first empirical study of the origin and development of work orientations.

This research offers insight into ways generations are connected through the perceived meaning of their work, even as the nature of work changes. We encourage future scholars to use this as a starting point for research on the development of work orientations, and to continue exploring these questions using additional methods, particularly longitudinal study designs.

Continued identification with a former employer may provide valuable self‐enhancement during transition, or it may highlight unsettling self‐discontinuity. This study seeks to develop and test competing hypotheses regarding the extent to which continued organizational identification relates to psychological well‐being following involuntary job loss.

The author conducted a two‐wave survey study spanning six months during the recent financial crisis in 2008 to test these hypotheses. Results are presented for 86 employees in two samples, 45 who were unemployed at the beginning of the study and 41 who lost their jobs during the study.

Continued organizational identification positively related to psychological well‐being in both samples. In a post‐hoc analysis, this relationship held only for employees who attributed their job loss to themselves, rather than to external factors such as their organizations.

The results are based on a limited sample both in terms of size and scope; accordingly, they are best used to explain the relationships for the sample from which they were drawn, professional employees in the USA with a business education, about half of whom worked in the financial services industry.

Being identified with an employing organization is not only beneficial for current employees and their organizations, but also helps employees whose jobs have been terminated. Managers and counselors should advise people to reflect upon, rather than distance themselves from, aspects of their identities based in former employers.

This is the first study to examine the role of organizational identification in individual response to involuntary job loss.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a novel method for performing content analysis in managerial research – crowdsourcing, a system where geographically distributed workers complete small, discrete tasks via the internet for a small amount of money.

The authors examined whether workers from one popular crowdsourcing marketplace, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, could perform subjective content analytic tasks involving the application of inductively generated codes to unstructured, personally written textual passages.

The findings suggest that anonymous, self-selected, non-expert crowdsourced workers were applied content codes efficiently and at low cost, and that their reliability and accuracy compared to that of trained researchers.

The authors provide recommendations for management researchers interested in using crowdsourcing most effectively for content analysis, including a discussion of the limitations and ethical issues involved in using this method. Future research could extend the findings by considering alternative data sources and coding schemes of interest to management researchers.

Scholars have begun to explore whether crowdsourcing can assist in academic research; however, this is the first study to examine how crowdsourcing might facilitate content analysis. Crowdsourcing offers several advantages over existing content analytic approaches by combining the efficiency of computer-aided text analysis with the interpretive ability of traditional human coding.

The primary purpose of this article is to raise awareness about the need for additional research on job loss. It also aims to provide an introduction to the special issue, and a description of the articles in it.

The article highlights some of the important research on job loss since the early 1990s.

Additional theory and research is needed to assist the well‐being and the job search process of the unemployed.

This article offers suggestions on advancing new research ideas that can be used to assist individuals who have lost their jobs and to organizations that have been involved in a layoff.

The article argues that knowledge related to the effects of job loss can be used to assist organizations in promoting programs to enhance the well‐being of laid‐off individuals.

Research on job loss is needed to address the problems of laid‐off individuals.

The article provides a contribution to the social issues literature as it raises awareness of the need for additional research on job loss.