“Immobile careers”: A challenge for management! The advantages of an understanding based on actual work and wage-earners’ expectations

By Lætitia Pihel ,
Laboratoire d’Économie et de Management de Nantes-Atlantique (LEMNA), Nantes University.

Immobile careers - of persons looking for stability in the position currently held and not being attracted by mobility - are a challenge to human resources, its strategy, tools and, more broadly, conceptions. This article is based on seventeen months of field work in a private clinic, where management claimed it had to cope with “contagious immobility”. The program for managing careers, though based on good practices, had not had the hoped-for results among registered nurses. Our research tried to answer three main questions: a) What were the origins of this immobility? b) What processes underlaid it? c) What were the blind spots in management’s way of thinking that led to this blockage? This immobility came out of a complex, dynamic process with several dimensions: initial training, the organization of work, and the individual (their attachment to their own career plans). These factors were chained and overlapped in actual, everyday work activities and relations at the workplace. The turbulence of work, with its demands on time and energy, imposed mobility but within this job category and allowed some nurses to benefit from informal promotions. Behaviors related to career management must be handled as closely as possible to the context and individuals’ backgrounds and plans. Immobility is not coupled with the absence of career plans or ambitions, which, quite contrary to expectations, can bolster immobility. Besides the recommendations formulated for management, this article shifts academic and practical discussions of this topic toward shared reflexes in career management.