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This paper aims to introduce a collection of papers about careers in cross‐cultural perspective, which contributes to the growing body of literature that addresses careers from different locations around the world.

Introduces the topic, providing some background and discussion of the main concepts.

Briefly introduces the papers and their main findings – differences and similarities among careers and career attributes in different cultural and national contexts.

Contextualizes the issue and extends the overall knowledge in the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to bring together job design and career theory in the examination of how proactive employees optimize their well-being (i.e. job satisfaction and perceived health) through job crafting and career competencies. This study offers an integrated account of the pathway from proactive personality to well-being.

Data were collected by a cross-sectional self-report survey study among 574 employees working in various organizations.

The results of structural equation modeling analyses supported the proposed double mediation model: job crafting and career competencies both mediated the positive relationship between proactive personality and well-being. The findings suggest that proactive employees can enhance their well-being both through proactive job redesign and the development of career-related skills and abilities.

This study precludes causal explanations. Future research should further investigate the role of employee proactivity related to contemporary work topics, including temporary contracts and self-employment.

Managers and HR practitioners can optimize employee well-being by focusing on HR policies related to job redesign, as well as investing in training and development of career competencies.

This paper integrates two research domains by exploring how proactive employees take a proactive stance toward their job as well as their career, and investigates how this proactive approach contributes to their well-being. In addition, the authors demonstrated a link between the development of career competencies and employee health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of pay in the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior, and its subsequent effects on employee career satisfaction.

A two-wave quantitative investigation was conducted among alumni of a large public university in the Netherlands.

The results show that taking charge behavior mediates the positive relationship between employee ambition and career satisfaction. They also show that pay positively moderates this mediation, such that the relationship between employee ambition and taking charge behavior is stronger when ambitious employees receive an increase in pay, leading to increased career satisfaction. Conversely, a decrease in pay does not moderate ambitious employees’ taking charge behavior and the impact on their career satisfaction.

The study draws on self-report data collected in one country: the Netherlands.

The study highlights the importance of pay for higher job involvement, demonstrating its impact on taking charge behavior among employees with higher levels of ambition.

This is the first empirical study to examine the impact of pay on employees’ taking charge behavior and the subsequent implications for career satisfaction.

This study seeks to explore the key themes in identity play during unemployment and the potential obstacles faced by unemployed individuals.

This qualitative study is based on 23 interviews with unemployed individuals in Germany.

The authors identify three obstacles to identity play during unemployment: a lack of psychological safety to explore possible selves, a lack of opportunity to try out possible selves and a lack of social validation for possible selves. Several interviewees highlight the impact of social context, creating an absence of institutional support and a limited identity “playspace.” As such, the authors illustrate that when faced with these obstacles, the unemployed individuals of this study predominantly focus on identity work instead of identity play. Only a few interviewees seem to engage in and sustain identity play. The authors propose that the elaborate nature of their possible selves and their focus on future opportunities may overshadow the present self and immediate obstacles.

The authors argue that identity play is not readily available to all individuals in all situations. Instead, they suggest that some psychologically and socially threatening contexts such as unemployment are characterized by obstacles that constrain individuals' identity play and prevent the adoption of new work identities. Hence, the authors call for a more balanced and localized understanding of identity play.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of identity play process by including the stories we live by in depth. Over the past decade, identity play literature has placed more emphasis on the role of self-narratives. Yet, the “stories we live by”, including the told or untold stories of past and imagined events of the future, have not been considered in depth in these self-narratives.

This conceptual paper draws on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures and attempts to include the stories we live by in scholarly conceptualizations and explorations of identity play processes.

Drawing on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures this paper offers a comprehensive conceptual model of how the stories we live by infuse individual identity construction processes. The model highlights the inter-connectivity among stories we live by, identity play, identity work, sensemaking and social validation. Looking through the lens of the personal construct theory and taking these inter-connectivities into account lead to the observation of temporality in identity construction and the plurivocality of self-narratives.

This paper looks at identity play through the lens of the personal construct theory. However, self-narratives are seen as a medium for manifestation of personal constructs. Thus, this paper also draws on the narrative identity literature and dialogical-self concept, which helps access the multiplicity of the self-narratives to widen our grasp of personal constructs. This paper combines discourse of deconstruction with the dialogical-self concept and provides more means for the explication of identity play.

This article aims to introduce the special issue entitled “the role of career shocks in contemporary career development,” synthesize key contributions and formulate a future research agenda.

The authors provide an introduction of the current state-of-the-art in career shocks research, offer an overview of the key lessons learned from the special issue and present several important avenues for future research.

The authors discuss how the special issue articles contribute to a better understanding of career shocks' role in contemporary career development, focusing on (1) conceptual clarity of the notion of career shocks, (2) career outcomes of career shocks, (3) mechanisms that can explain the impact of career shocks and (4) interdisciplinary connectivity.

This article offers a synthesis of the critical contributions made within this special issue, thereby formulating key ways to bring the field of career shocks research forward. It also provides new avenues for research.

Responding to the call for more research on the consequences of grit, this study aims to examine the relationship between grit and employees’ perceived employability. Drawing on the self-determination theory, the authors hypothesize that job involvement and team member proactivity sequentially mediate the relationship between grit and employability.

A time-lagged research design with a one-month interval was conducted to collect data from three public sector organizations in China (N = 484). The model was tested using confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis and the PROCESS bootstrapping program in SPSS25.0 and AMOS21.0 software.

The findings reveal that the positive effect of grit on employability is mediated by job involvement and team member proactivity sequentially.

The authors contribute to the literature on the employability outcomes of grit. It is also one of a few studies that use a job perspective on the grit−employability relationship.

This exploratory research aims to unravel how Chinese international students form their decisions regarding the school-to-work transition (sometimes also referred to as the university-to-work transition) when studying abroad.

The authors use the concepts of school-to-work transition and cultural approaches to investigate how Chinese graduate students make career decisions to navigate the school-to-work transition in the context of international mobility. The authors' empirical study is based on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with Chinese graduate students studying in the Netherlands.

The authors discovered four patterns with two major subgroups among Chinese students studying in the universities in the Netherlands based on their initial intentions: return-return, open-return, open-stay and stay-stay. These patterns made sense when navigating the school-to-work transition: participants experienced varied international experiences, cultural perceptions and acknowledgment influences when enhancing employability and shaping their career decisions. Participants in the return-return and stay-stay groups indicated strong resilience and consistency in achieving their goals and strongly focused on long-term objectives. However, participants' open-return decision demonstrated a thoughtful alignment of personal goals and knowledge of the possible beneficial influence they may have in their home country. Open-stay participants utilized the overseas study opportunity to finalize their decisions and increase their employability in the local labor market, thereby creating a transition from university to work in the host country.

The authors highlight the way Chinese graduate students manage their international experience and provide novel insights into the role played by the cultural characteristics of their home country and host country.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.

The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.

The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

The paradigm “think entrepreneur–think male” continues to prevail in entrepreneurship education (EE). Aiming to explore how EE educators and EE students engage with this paradigm, this paper examines how students’ beliefs about entrepreneurship are shaped within the classroom.

This study is based on a single case comprising 32 interviews with EE students and educators from a variety of higher education institutions in the Netherlands. Observations were conducted in a learning environment where undergraduate students from a range of EE minors (general, social and tech entrepreneurship) collaborated on projects under the guidance of entrepreneurship educators.

Our findings reveal that gendered constructs are deeply embedded in EE, shaping perceptions of entrepreneurship. However, these constructs are changing and challenging the “think entrepreneur–think male”.

This study contributes to gender and entrepreneurship literature by challenging the existence of the prevailing paradigm “think entrepreneur–think male” in EE. We emphasise the importance of acknowledging individual entrepreneurial motivations while recognising gendered constructs in entrepreneurial support and resource access.