5. Discussion and conclusions
Our results add to the previous studies on part-time workers’ career development (Benschop et al., 2013; Dick, 2010, 2015; Durbin & Tomlinson, 2010; Lane, 2004; Tomlinson, 2006) by revealing the temporal dimensions of institutionalised norms that both hinder and support part-time workers’ career development and by showing organisational actors’ roles in reproducing or changing these institutionalised norms. We introduced the concept of ‘timing ambition’ and identified its four dimensions: timing ambition over the course of a lifetime; timing in terms of the number of weekly hours worked; timing in terms of overtime hours worked; and timing in terms of visible working hours. This approach helped us to understand why the normative perceptions of part-time workers as being less committed to work and career are persistent, despite evidence to the contrary, and to show how organisational processes and the actors who are involved contribute to the recognition and realisation of part-time workers’ ambitions and, hence, their career development. On the one hand, the dominant template of timing ambition implies that ambition is realised by articulating and pursuing it early in life, working fulltime, devoting extra office hours, and being present at work for face hours. We found that both supervisors and employees reproduced these institutionalised norms that fail to include part-time workers’ ambitions and hinder their career development. In contrast to Dick (2010), who found a mismatch between the beliefs of part-time workers and their managers, we found that both groups enact the dominant template in discussions about part-time workers’ ambitions. On the other hand, however, organisational actors who articulate and pursue ambition later in life while they work at large part-time jobs or in the context of comprised working weeks [4 9 h per week] and devote extra hours at home are able to gradually change the dominant template of timing ambition, thus enabling part-time workers’ career development. That is, both employees and supervisors regularly criticised and, sometimes, changed these institutional norms. Our findings are further discussed below.
