Book Review: "Encyclopedia of Career Development, Volumes 1 and 2"

‘Career’, describing an individual’s series of work activities, stems from the Latin carrara for a carriage traveling along a road. The latest stage in the journey of the career discipline and its literature is a proliferation of handbooks and collected readings and the growing wealth of material accessible through on-line initiatives such as Google Scholar, Wikipedia and soon Citizendium, which enable researchers to connect quickly with key definitions and works. Despite, or perhaps because of, this explosion in knowledge and research, there is a need for easy access to concise and current reviews by recognized experts in the career field. This task has been enthusiastically undertaken by Jeff Greenhaus and Gerry Callanan and their team of six editors (Nancy Betz, Tim Hall, Kerr Inkson, Phyllis Moen, Mark Savickas and Rosalie Tung) and some 300 authors who have contributed over 400 entries in two Encyclopedia of Career Development volumes. The late John Kenneth Galbraith claimed there are three types of encyclopedia readers – those who use them merely to look things up, those who seek to acquaint themselves with a subject to be able to have conversations about it, and those who use them to learn things. All three users will find value in this substantial work.