Athens, Ga. – An article by Daniel C. Feldman, associate dean in the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, has won the 2012 Scholarly Impact Award from the Journal of Management.
The award recognizes scholarly works that leave a lasting impact within the academic world and beyond. Feldman’s article “Careers: Mobility, Embeddedness, and Success,” co-authored with Thomas W.H. Ng of the University of Hong Kong, captured the honor for its re-examination of the concepts of “career mobility” and “career embeddedess.”
“One reason that the article has endured is that it addresses issues that cut across a lot of different areas of academia,” said Feldman. “Career issues aren’t just studied by management scholars, but also by faculty in vocational psychology, sociology, economics and other disciplines outside management.
“Second, the article questions some basic assumptions about how people manage their careers or should manage their careers while questioning the validity of commonly held beliefs. For example, there is a lot of attention in the popular press about career mobility and ‘boundaryless careers,’ but if you look at the data, close to 80 percent of people in this country live in the same state they were born in, and changing jobs isn’t necessarily good for your career. Most of the research in the careers literature examines why people change jobs. In contrast, this paper looks at why people stay in their jobs even if there are better options elsewhere.”
Papers receiving the Scholarly Impact Award distinction must be five years old and are graded on four criteria: number of citations, breadth and quality of each citing paper, total download, and perceived quality and potential for continued impact.
“The committee explored who cited each paper-whether the papers are being cited by top journals, as well as whether the papers are having wide penetration-for example, macro papers being cited by micro papers, or citations from outside the papers’ core discipline,” said Journal of Management Editor Deborah Rupp in an email. “And then of course, the committee considered the strength of each paper and its potential for continued contribution.”
Feldman holds the Synovus Chair of Servant Leadership in the Terry College of Business and is the author of seven books and more than 150 articles on managing careers.
The article is available at http://jom.sagepub.com/content/33/3/350.abstract?rss=1.
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