The Individual, the Organization, and the Career: A Conceptual Scheme

This paper presents a set of concepts about the nature of the organization, the nature of the individual, and the nature of the career-the set of events which tie the individual and the organization together. The purpose is to provide a frame of reference and a set of concepts to make it possible to think in more empirical terms about a variable like "career," yet which relate this variable both to organizational and psychological variables. Concepts such as "organizational boundaries," labile and stable "social selves," career stages and transitional processes are used to generate some hypotheses about organizational influences on the individual (socialization) and individual influences on the organization (innovation).