Career communities: a preliminary exploration of member‐defined career support structures
探索了职业社群这一概念，即提供职业支持且常超越单一组织边界的社会结构。通过对三个潜在职业社群成员的调查和焦点小组讨论，发现职业社群通常是混合类型，能促进职业支持、意义建构和学习，对组织行为和人力资源管理有启示。
Abstract This paper explores the concept of career communities: social structures that provide career support and frequently transcend the boundaries of any single organization. The theoretical background notes the convergence of a number of different perspectives from both career development and organization studies, pertaining to the social contextualization of careers. The methodology involved eliciting expressions of the (individual) subjective career from the members of three potential career communities, and then exploring (communal) inter‐subjective interpretations in focus groups. Our results suggest that career communities typically involve a hybrid of types rather than any one pure type. Preliminary support is found for the view that career communities facilitate career support, sensemaking and learning. The results invite further research into career communities and have implications for organizational behavior and human resource management, suggesting greater appreciation of the extra‐organizational as well as intra‐organizational communities in which careers develop. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.