This article is based on case studies of two organisations: an India-based information technology (IT) services company and a financial services company located in the UK and India. Although they operate in different sectors and have some notable contrasts, both can be seen as typifying aspects of India's new economy. Our article explores the lived experience of working in this economy-a perspective that has been relatively neglected in the extant literature. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's notions of ambivalence and mimicry, and V.S. Naipaul's powerful illustrations of these concepts in his fiction and non-fiction works, we report on how respondents talked about their aspirations within India's emerging economy, and examine their mobilisation of particular discursive resources as forms of accommodation and resistance to the demands they face at work.

The use of music in organizational management is a rare occurrence. IBM in the United States is an exceptional case. IBM managers routinely and successfully used songs from the IBM songbook to engage, enthuse, and inspire employees during a number of decades in the mid-20th century. In this article, the authors locate the songbook in its organizational setting and present a detailed analysis of the lyrics and the music of the songs contained in it. Using a metaphor of musical resonance, they offer explanations for the prolonged use and then subsequent decline of the IBM songbook. The authors assess the ways in which understanding this exceptional case can help explain why music has been so rarely used by managers to engage workers.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size We wish to acknowledge the support of the following: the ESRC in funding our seminar series ‘Critical Perspectives on Careers and Family-Friendly Policies’; all of our seminar convenors, presenters and participants; Jennifer Kidd and the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling; all the contributors and reviewers who worked closely with us on this symposium; and last but not least our administrator, Tracey Preston. Thank you. Notes 1. We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for the support of our seminar series ‘Critical Perspectives on Career and Family-friendly Policies’ (RES-451-26-0002) on which this symposium is based.

Despite growing interest in the adoption of metaphor analysis as a method of studying organizational and working life, there have been few, if any, empirical studies of career metaphors. Although career scholars have imposed their own metaphors to help illuminate their conceptions of career, the metaphors employed by those having careers and the conceptual insight this might generate has been all but ignored. This paper seeks to address this gap. Drawing on the career accounts of graduate level employees within a large blue‐chip corporation, the metaphors they employ are analysed. The dominant metaphors contained within the careers literature – spatial, journey, horticultural, and competition metaphors – are drawn on heavily by participants. So too are other groups of metaphors not acknowledged within the literature. These are revealed as imprisonment, military, school‐like surveillance, Wild West and nautical metaphors. An analysis of these metaphors generates fresh insights into the concept of career and leads to the ‘unlocking’ of important, but to date neglected features of career. On the basis of this metaphor analysis, the paper argues that career may be better understood in terms of a politicized process in which discipline and control are key dimensions.

Those engaged in conducting qualitative research frequently acknowledge the presence of contradiction in their data. However, within the organization studies literature little attention is paid to teasing out these contradictions and subjecting them to critical analysis. This article advances our knowledge of contradiction in accounts of organizational life. Drawing on new empirical evidence from a qualitative interview study of employees working in a large blue-chip corporation, we critically assess a number of instances of contradiction or ‘doublethink’ within this particular organizational setting. We challenge the assumption underpinning much of the existing literature that individuals are uncomfortable with contradiction and seek to resolve it whenever it arises. We argue that doublethink provides a means of containing contradiction such that it is neither acknowledged as contradiction nor experienced as uncomfortable. We consider the findings in relation to notions of role positions which reflect/constitute different ways of ordering an individual’s experience, the mobilization of an overarching idiom to ‘contain’ the contradiction, and the privileging of practice over reflexivity.