No matter how hard managers try to achieve some self-control over their career paths, however radical their career moves, and whatever success they feel they experience, they do so within the confines of the very real but uneven constraints imposed by circumstances and opportunities. Managers' occupational and organizational environments are an important influence on the process of job change. We have seen evidence of this in preceding chapters, showing how career paths and adjustment processes differ widely across occupational and organizational types. We now want to look more closely at these types, and, through the eyes of the managers, examine the different qualities of career experience that are to be found in them.

In so doing it is our aim to complement an extensive literature on career development in management. Within this literature there is an abundance of rich case study reports and numerous prescriptive handbooks on how organizational careers should be managed by human resource specialists. Career development is also big business for management consultants offering guidance on personal and organizational development. Yet there is very little to be found in writings on the subject that tells us how managers experience career development or how much organizations are practising what the management scientists are preaching.