The generation of brand new data seems to be an unwritten rule of much social research and the career field is no exception. However, in these austere economic times, we need to urgently reconsider our research norms and to think of creative ways of doing more for less. We would argue that given the "ordinariness" of the career concept…

John Bardeen worked on the theory of solids throughout his physics career, winning two Nobel Prizes: the first in 1956 for the invention of the transistor with Walter Brattain and William Shockley; and the second in 1972 for the development with Leon Cooper and J Robert Schrieffer of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity.…

In an age when American newspapers reported on US-Indian Relations in a sporadic and biased manner, Northern Paiute educator, translator, author, and activist Sarah Winnemucca produced sustained, specific, and often sympathetic coverage. She was well aware of newspapers' power, as demonstrated by the more than four hundred newspaper items by or…

This study investigates the experiences of academics who became department heads in a post-1992 UK university and explores the influence that being in the position has on their planned future academic career. Drawing on life history interviews undertaken with 17 male and female heads of department, the paper constitutes an in-depth study of their…

This paper presents evidence from the biographies of samples totaling 1,215 young adults in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, who all reached age 16 between 1986 and 1992, and whose subsequent life histories coincided with their countries' transitions from communism. The evidence is used to examine whether new classes are being created in the new…

This paper deals with the professionalization of human service work. It analyses learning processes and identity development in the emerging profession of child care with concrete examples from empirical research, based on a life history approach. It discusses examples of careers mainly based on students' life experience, pointing out that their…