(Postponed) Maintaining a Mandate of Meaningfulness: The Occupation of Career Advisers in Business Schools

Date: 

Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Room 1550

Curtis Chan, Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, Carroll School of Management at Boston College

Every occupation requires an occupational mandate to uphold its legitimacy. The mandates literature focuses on nascent occupations constructing mandates through the enactment of occupational values. However, even for mature occupations, mandates require maintenance, and this maintenance might be challenged when the occupation exists in an organization whose values misalign with occupational values. We examine career advisers in undergraduate business schools, a mature occupation whose values around helping students achieve purpose and fit in careers misalign with organizational values held among business school students around pursuing careers for wealth or prestige and conformity. We conduct an ethnography of career advisers at an undergraduate business school, combined with an interview study of such advisers throughout the U.S. We find that advisers maintain their mandate through several practices, differentiated by interactional setting and audience. In one-on one advising sessions, career advisers discerned the alignment between the student’s ambitions and advisers’ values. Advisers enacted value-moderating practices when they perceived student misalignment with advisers’ values, and they engaged in value-magnifying practices when they perceived alignment or openness. In group settings where assessing value congruence was infeasible, advisers engaged in valuemasking practices, where they obfuscated values that could conflict with values of students, students’ parents, or business school administrators. Overall, this study shows how members of a mature occupation—whose values misalign with organizational values—actively maintain their mandate by discerning between audiences and occasionally concealing rather than revealing their values.