Resuscitating Careers

Abstract

It was in the early 90s, when Britain entered its second serious recession in a decade, that corporate leaders came out of the closet and admitted secure careers were no longer on offer. A few put forward a substitute policy: ‘employability’. This meant that their organisations would at least go on training people, so that when they were axed they could be mobile.¹ In the USA, with its stronger free-market culture, these tendencies emerged sooner and were taken further. ‘No long term’ became a kind of slogan, coined by Richard Sennett in his 1998 book The Corrosion of Character. He argued that the absence of long-term relations at work made employees as well as employers into opportunists and undermined trust and commitment. It was widely noted that staff purges continued widely in the USA even in the booming 90s and in thriving companies.² Yet there have also been strong reassertions of the importance of long-term careers, including by US companies familiar in Britain, such as Wal-Mart (owners of Asda) and Citibank. Both are cited in a 1999 article by Sanford Jacoby, in which he concludes that the unexciting reality is ‘less long term’ rather than ‘no long term’.