مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله اسکاندیناویایی مدیریت – Scandinavian Journal of Management

Working reduced hours is often considered to indicate lower career ambition. It has further been perceived as an obstruction to the career development of women workers in particular (Edwards & Robinson, 1999, 2001; Hoque & Kirkpatrick, 2003; Lane, 2000, 2004; Pas, Peters, Doorewaard, Eisinga, & Lagro-Janssen, 2011; Román, 2006; Tomlinson, 2006). However, several studies have shown that part-time workers do not consider working reduced hours to imply reduced career ambition (Durbin & Tomlinson, 2010; Lane, 2004; MacDermid, Lee, Buck, & Williams, 2001; Tomlinson, 2006). In view of these somewhat contradictory findings, several authors have explored how organisational processes “structure full-time and part-time workers’ access to rewards and opportunities” (Tomlinson, 2006: 68). These studies have mainly found organisational processes that hinder career development for part-time workers, such as cultural norms on gender, working hours and ambition (Benschop et al., 2013Benschop, Van den Brink, Doorewaard, & Leenders, 2013; Dick, 2010; Sools, Van Engen, & Baerveldt, 2007). In contrast to such findings, some organisations seem to support rather than hinder part-time workers’ career development (Lee, MacDermid, & Buck, 2000; Tomlinson, 2006). Furthermore, the roles of organizational actors in either of these processes remain under-researched (Dick, 2015: 16). In view of this gap in the literature, this paper contributes to the scholarly and societal debates on the career development of part-time workers in two ways. First, we show how institutionalised norms concerning working hours and ambition can be considered as temporal structures that are both dynamic and contextual, and that may both hinder and enable part-time workers’ career development. Second, we reveal four dimensions of what we will label ‘timing ambition’ to show how organizational actors (managers and women and men part-time employees) actually approach these temporal structures in their organisations. On the one hand, they may reproduce these institutionalised norms, but, on the other hand, they may change them, thereby opening up new possibilities for part-time workers’ careers.

In the next section, we will elaborate on the unresolved issues in the literature on part-time workers’ career development that we have briefly sketched in this Introduction. Thereafter, we will explain the methodology of our empirical study. Then, we will present the analysis of our data. In our concluding section, we will summarise our findings and discuss the contributions of our study to the scholarly and societal debates on part-time workers’ career development, and we will present the study’s limitations and implications.