Boundaryless careers in the gig economy: An oxymoron?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12265
• Author: Sut I Wong,Dominique Kost,Christian Fieseler
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020

PROVOCATION PAPER

Boundaryless careers in the gig economy: An

oxymoron?

Dominique Kost

1

| Christian Fieseler

2

| Sut I Wong

2

1

Oslo Business School, Oslo Metropolitan

University, Norway

2

Norwegian Business School, BI, Norway

Correspondence

Dominique Kost, Oslo Business School, Oslo

Metropolitan University, Pilestredet 35, 0166

Oslo, Norway.

Email: domkos@oslomet.no

Funding information

Norges Forskningsråd, Grant/Award Number:

247725/O70

Abstract

Advocates of the boundaryless career perspective have

relied to a great extent on the assumption that actors take

responsibility for their own career development and that

they consequently take charge of developing their career

competencies. In this provocation piece, we debate the

obstructions to and potential ways to promote boundary-

less careers in the gig economy, which—despite appearing

on the surface to offer suitable conditions for boundaryless

careers—suffers from numerous conditions that hinder such

careers. Thus, boundaryless careers in the gig economy

could be an oxymoron. In particular, we conjecture that

intraorganisational and interorganisational career bound-

aries restrict gig workers' development of relevant career

competencies and thus limit their mobility. We then put for-

ward the notion that we have to consider moving away

from traditional, employer-centric human resource manage-

ment and introduce new forms of network-based and self-

organised human resource management practices (in the

form of collaborative communities of practice) in order to

diminish these boundaries.

KEYWORDS

Boundaryless career perspective, career boundaries, competency

development, human resource management, gig economy

Received: 4 July 2017 Revised: 4 September 2019 Accepted: 21 September 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12265

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which

permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no

modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2019 The Authors. Human Resource Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

100 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj Hum Resour Manag J. 2020;30:100–113.