How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into RealityWhether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities.Through engrossing stories—from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist—Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can: Explore possible selves Craft and execute "identity experiments" Create "small wins" that keep momentum going Survive the rocky period between career identities Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition Make time for reflection—without missing out on windows of opportunity Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us.

Movements for social change are by their nature oppositional, as are those who join change movements. How people negotiate identity within social movements is one of the central concerns in the field. This volume offers new scholarship that explores issues of diversity and uniformity among social movement participants.

How identity influences the economic choices we make Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities—and not just economic incentives—influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people—facing the same economic circumstances—would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration—and of Identity Economics. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions—at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures—and much, much more. Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity—their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be—may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.

Bringing together the perspectives of an internationally renowned group of specialists, the collection addresses a range of issues associated with professional identity construction and 'being professional' in the context of a rapidly changing inter-professional environment. It explores traditional aspects of professional identity such as beliefs, values, in-group status and belonging, alongside themes of professional socialisation, workplace culture, group membership, boundary maintenance, jurisdiction disputes and inter-professional tensions with health, education and the police.

Social identity research is very much on the ascendancy, particularly in the field of organizational psychology. Reflecting this fact, this volume contains chapters from researchers at the cutting edge of these developments.

This book undertakes the most comprehensive and theoretically rigorous examination to date of Luis Rafael S¡nchez's work in the context of cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and of the international and regional dimensions of S¡nchez's work in relation to

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 20 million copies sold! Translated into 60+ languages! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; design your environment to make success easier; get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

`The authors bring a spark of vitality and life to an area that could be cynically viewed as a series of conflicting fads and fashions....I would recommend anyone in the process of reviewing or designing an entrepreneurship development course to consider the benefits that this book would bring to the teaching process′ - Entrepreneurship and Innovation `Using fiction in the classroom as an approach to stimulating the study of people in organizations is well-established. What this book contributes is a way of exploring some of the existential elements of life in organizations, which are typically difficult to study. It will be on my reading lists. Hopefully, this example, and regrettably few others which exist, will contribute in the long term to the reformulation of how the lived experience of organizational life may be explored in the classroom′ - Leadership & Organization Development Journal Based on courses taught by the authors over many years, this innovative text is a lively and accessible analysis of people at work and the problems they have to confront. The student is introduced to a range of key themes in management such as: power and identity; consumption and bureaucracy; rational choice and meaning all through the medium of characters and situations in contemporary literature. The clear theoretical framework, supported by footnotes, summaries and further reading guides, makes this an introduction to management the student will find useful as well as enjoyable.

Using historical evidence as well as personal accounts, Tracy C. Davis examines the reality of conditions for `ordinary' actresses, their working environments, employment patterns and the reasons why acting continued to be such a popular, though insecure, profession. Firmly grounded in Marxist and feminist theory she looks at representations of women on stage, and the meanings associated with and generated by them.

The realms of consumption have typically been seen to be distinct from those of work and production. This book examines how contemporary rhetorics and discourses of organizational change are breaking down such distinctions - with significant implications for the construction of subjectivities and identities at work. In particular, Paul du Gay shows how the capacities and predispositions required of consumers and those required of employees are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Both consumers and employees are represented as autonomous, responsible, calculating individuals. They are constituted as such in the language of consumer cultures and the all-pervasive discourses of enterprise whereby persons are required to be