I know not what the successe wil be my Lord, but the attempt I vow.
Shakespeare: All's Well that Ends Well
A cursory search of the literature yields literally thousands of books and articles about career success in one form or another. Even when the search is narrowed to social science journal articles combining 'career' and 'success,' well over 1000 'hits' can be obtained from sources such as ISI's Social Sciences Citation Index and PsycINFO. Perhaps this should not be any great surprise, considering how central the word 'success' is to life in Western society. Few questions stop one in one's tracks as effectively as: 'Am I successful?', 'Have I been a failure?', or 'What has been the price of my success?' Career success, then, looks as if it is much studied and well understood. So why this special issue? One reason is hinted at by the quotation at the head of this introduction. Shakespeare's use of the word 'success' is ambiguous, as befits its derivation from the Latin: succedere, to succeed or follow (Webster, 1996). This ambiguity has been with it since at least the sixteenth century (OUP, 1989). Success, in the sense of 'follow,' can be that which happens, in other words the upshot of events, either good or bad. But, also since the sixteenth century, it has also meant something more explicitly positive: '[t]he prosperous achievement of something attempted; the attainment of an object according to one's desire: now often with particular reference to the attainment of wealth or position' (OUP, 1989). Success, then, can either be a consequence or a favorable outcome, two very different things. Most people probably think of it in its latter sense, with the implication that lack of success is something they don't want to experience.
But it is important not to forget its broader meaning. It is well known that what is seen by some people as success in the sense of a good outcome can look quite the opposite to others (cf. Bartolome & Evans, 1980). So while it is certainly interesting to study the factors that lead to career success in the sense of prosperity, it is every bit as interesting, if not more so, to study how people decide that a given outcome was, indeed, 'prosperous.' Success as outcome, therefore, is arguably the meta-concept to success as prosperous achievement, and although 'success' will typically be used here in its sense as the antonym of 'failure,' the context in which the discussion takes place is of success as the outcome of one's career. Things happen to people in their working lives; the interesting thing is how they and others evaluate these outcomes as 'good' or 'bad,' and how these evaluations might shift over time.