At this stage in my study it is time to turn away from some of the terminology I have introduced and follow Ingold back to basics: ‘the hunter and his spear’ (1981, 1986: 1-15). Let us take his advice and consider the simple situation of a lone hunter out in the forest and taking decisions about which game to hunt. It is also time to make life a little more complicated by addressing the archaeological record. Has my polemic as to the need to invoke individual decision making for adequate explanations in archaeology been simply rhetoric and have my lengthy discussions of ecological, psychological and ethnographic data been distractions from my stated aim? Or are we now sufficiently equipped with a qualitative model of decision making to make progress in explaining the variability and patterning in the archaeological record? Now is the time to tell!

It is, of course, the latter. Well, it nearly is. I believe we have an appropriate theoretical framework, but so far lack the methodological tools to operationalise this with the mute stones and bones of the archaeological record. In this case study I am going to use mathematical modelling and computer simulation to play this role. In doing so we must heed Bertrand Russell and view these methods in thier correct guise. I do not pretend that they will provide any magic answers.

My intention in this work is to argue that a focus on the individual decision maker is the stance for developing adequate explanations in archaeology. Let me make the tentative assumption that you have found something of value in my study of Mesolithic foraging and society, that you feel my focus on individual decision making has indeed made a contribution to explaining the variability and patterning in that archaeological record, whether or not you agree with my specific arguments. However, I can hear you asking if this was so as a result simply of the particular character of those data rather than of any inherent virtue in my individualistic eco-psychological decision-making approach. Can we find the individual and use our growing understanding of decision-making processes when we have an archaeological record of a markedly different character, for instance when faunal assemblages are large and complex, deriving from ‘multiple authors’ (Gamble 1984: 239) and co-operative hunting and without the fine chronological resolution of the Mesolithic? And what if our principal problem does not immediately refer to hunting behaviour but to cognition? Does an individual decision-making approach enable us to develop our studies of, say, prehistoric art and ritual? My answer is of course an emphatic yes. To demonstrate this, I will take a step backwards from the Mesolithic to the late glacial and tackle problems posed by Upper Palaeolithic art.

Archaeologists studying the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic may use the ethnographic record of historically documented hunter-gatherers in a variety of ways. Some seek cross-cultural generalisations for theory building or hypothesis testing. Others focus on the relationships between behaviour and its material consequences for middle-range research. Alternatively archaeologists may use it simply as a source of analogies for supporting inferences drawn about past behaviour. When we have written and photographic records of hunter-gatherers ‘in action’ it would indeed be perverse to ignore them. But it would be equally foolish to forget that we are seeing modern and not ‘Stone Age’ society.

It is readily apparent that historically documented hunter-gatherers provide poor analogies for the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherers represented by the archaeological record alone. Often these are dependent upon state societies; they make extensive use of modern technology; hunting and gathering may be pastimes rather than providing essential sustenance and are often pursued only in response to the goading of anthropologists. Some, perhaps many, ‘modern’ foragers have switched from an agricultural lifestyle. As a result the foraging problems they face, the goals they choose, the information sources exploited, the way such information is processed, and the consequences which may occur, probably bear little if any relationship to those of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

This is all true but of little consequence for my ends. One of my principal arguments is that the decision-making processes of any group or individual possess unique characteristics whether our subjects are alive today or forgotten in prehistory.

This book has been developed from my Ph.D. thesis which I completed in December 1987. Yet its roots lie earlier and can be pinpointed to two not unrelated events. The first was on a hot and sticky day during the summer of 1978.1 sat with my brother in a shady spot near Les Eyzies and pondered the paintings of Font de Gaume after the first of many visits to that cave. How mysterious the prehistoric past appeared. What beauty the hunters must have found in their icy world, and within themselves, to make such art. The second occurred a couple of years later in the midst of a Yorkshire winter - the ice age had returned with a vengeance! Now an undergraduate at Sheffield University, I sat reading in my damp bedsit and was transfixed by Transformations, Renfrew and Cooke's book on mathematical approaches to culture change. I understood as little of the mathematics as I did of the French guide's descriptions of the cave paintings. But what an intriguing idea! Can the coldness of equations and computer programmes really help in studying the complexities of culture and the warmth of the human spirit as so perfectly expressed in the smudge of ochre and mark from a burnt stick on the walls of Font de Gaume? Now sitting in my positively post-glacial Cambridge study and with this book before me, I can still confess to ignorance, but also to a continuing fascination with the idea.

For having the chance to explore this idea I must first thank those who taught me archaeology at Sheffield, particularly Robin Dennell, Andrew Fleming, Robin Torrence and Richard Hodges.

Now comes the crunch – to make a connection between the simulated archaeological record, i.e. the faunal assemblages generated by the computer model, and the real world. I'm not sure which of these might be termed the prose and which the passion but certainly if a connection is made the value of both will be exalted! This connection must, however, be meaningful. To show that the computer model can produce patterning which is similar to that in real assemblages is insufficient in itself. Many very different models may produce patterns which cannot be distinguished between – like the echoes in a Marabar cave – and all of which may bear a resemblance to the real data. This is the problem of equiflnality, which haunts those using simulation and has scared some away. Similarly, we can never be absolutely sure that patterns in faunal assemblages are not purely the result of preservation and excavation. My solution to these problems is that we must examine whether the model producing the simulated pattern, and in this case the type of decision making that is implied, is useful for explaining other aspects of the same archaeological record which initially appear unconnected with faunal assemblages.

In his poem Seamus Heaney reflects upon his father digging potatoes: By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.’ He, however, chose to work with the pen. Times had changed for the Heaney family as indeed they have in archaeology. Not long ago, when archaeologists were faced with the types of problems I have outlined in the previous chapter, their reaction would have been to ‘dig more sites’. More recently an alternative reaction has been to seek a total immersion in theory. We now realise that more data and theory do not necessarily bring more understanding and explanation by themselves. We need the link between these, new methodology. Tools other than picks and shovels are required. So, with apologies to Heaney: ‘Between my finger and my thumb the computer programme rests. I'll dig with it.’ Of course I am not implying that there isn't a need for new excavations. Just as poets need potatoes, simulation models need good archaeological data and both must continue to be dug from the ground.

The simulation model, which I see as a methodological tool, will follow the idealised encounter foraging system I proposed above. It can be divided into three components: a model for the hunting process, a model for the post-glacial environment and a model for decision making by the hunters.

We live in times of change – rapid and radical change – and much of it centres on our working lives. Even if we lived in times of tranquil stability we would still be confronted with the task of adjusting to transitions, compelled by the perpetual motion of the life cycle. People would still have to undergo training and socialization to acquire occupational competence at the start of the life/career cycle, have to maintain and reform skills in the middle years to be able to fill the slots vacated by departing seniors, and eventually move on into retirement, renewing the cycle by passing on their positions to junior successors. Transitions are, to this degree, inevitable, but, as we shall be seeing in the pages that follow, such orderly and measured change is not the normal experience of most managers.

What do we know about how people adjust to the demands of change? Within the various literatures on people at work, change is too often treated as a troublesome aberration – an external force that disturbs the stable patterns of daily life. The snapshots of survey designs and case studies are often used to deduce and uncover these patterns, for example, in the search for law-like relationships between such factors as job characteristics, personality, work satisfaction, and performance.

Why do people change jobs? We have already reviewed in general terms how transitions are the product of various sources of turbulence and forces for change: people's unfulfilled needs, occupational opportunity structures, and organizational processes. But if we look to the literature of the applied behavioural sciences no coherent or integrated view of job change is to be found, which is perhaps surprising given how ubiquitous, radical and significant an event it seems to be. This is not because job change has been of no interest to social scientists, but because it has been viewed from the highly separated vantage points of different sub-disciplinary fields. Each has commented on distinctive aspects of mobility, but with quite different assumptions and methods. The result has been diverse and generally non-complementary insights.

Writers on careers constitute one group for whom mobility is a central concern, but their interest in transitions has almost exclusively focussed on early career choice processes, and beyond that they have looked for broad patterns in the development of careers (cf. Brown and Brooks, 1984; Watts et al., 1981). Their analyses, deriving from the traditions of counselling and differential psychology (the study of measurable individual differences), have focussed on how relatively stable individual factors such as personality, interest, social class, and gender, influence the career course.

In preceding chapters we have seen how managerial work and careers could be described as a rewarding struggle. Frequent and radical job changes are often made, and for most people these provide psychological and material benefits. Yet we have also seen how the patterns and outcomes of change differ according to managers' circumstantial, biographical and psychological characteristics. One of these, gender, has been repeatedly identified as cutting across other dimensions and exerting a major influence on job change and its consequences. We are particularly fortunate here to be able to give this close attention through our access to a large sample of women managers, probably the largest in any detailed survey of this kind in the literature. So now we shall pull together all our main findings on sex differences to try to answer some important questions about women in management. For example, is gender a critical variable in managerial experience, or is it only significant as a ‘carrier variable’, i.e. because it is linked with other significant factors, such as occupation or status. And how do women differ from men in their career situations and orientations?

Much has been written recently about women in employment. They have constituted a growing proportion of the labour force, and are increasingly represented in areas of employment that have been traditionally dominated by males.

If transitions are turning points then clearly some are more redirecting than others. At one extreme, transitions can be the changes that keep one on a steady course, like the adjustments a driver has to make to keep on the road or the budgetry changes a household initiates to maintain a steady state in the quality of life. Alternatively transitions may be junctures at which the entire balance and direction of the life-course shifts. Our interest veers toward the latter, though it is important to recognize that such far reaching effects may not always be immediately visible to the person undergoing the change. Fundamental life changes may initially only be apprehended as small movements; the significance of a change may not be appreciated for some time; successive minor developments may accumulate into major new branches of growth, and so only be perceptible as turning points when one is looking back over a lengthy period of time.

The theory of transitions we considered in Chapter 5 illustrates how a number of different outcomes may flow from the adjustment process, and we have seen how role innovation is a fairly constant adaptive strategy in managers' work lives. But we have also seen how the job changes managers experience are, more often than not, radical in the altered situations they represent and the new demands they make.

We chose to focus this investigation on a national sample of middle to top ranking managers for practical and theoretical reasons. First, managerial roles are growing in number, complexity and influence, and how they are discharged is of central importance to the health and wealth of society. Second, the variety and richness of their experience of change makes them ideally suited to testing and developing ideas about the relationships between the causes, processes and outcomes of transitions. These two premises embody the highly interdependent interests of practice and theory in the study of change.

It is also apparent that the issues of job change and career development at the heart of our study are of great personal importance to the managers we have surveyed. Much has been written about these topics in the management literature yet there has been a shortage of reliable and empirical data on them. We have sought to redress this deficiency, and at the same time to specify and substantiate the theoretical links between cause and effect in the Transition Cycle. In this final chapter we shall summarize the results of the research in three ways. We shall overview what we have learned about management in transition, then evaluate how this contributes to our theoretical knowledge about the transition process, and finally we shall consider the wider implications for theory and practice in a number of academic fields.

If careers are journeys which begin at the point of entry into working life and end at retirement, then it would seem that researchers and personnel specialists have devoted their main efforts to the study of the starting points, destinations and major routes. Far less attention has been paid to the individual turning points and decisions that determine the direction of the journey. How these connections – job changes – are experienced has the power to shape the tangled course of careers, so insights into how people anticipate and respond to job changes has the potential to unlock our understanding of longer-term patterns of change. It is therefore our aim in this and the next chapter, to look at the process of changing jobs and its outcomes.

In Chapter 3 we saw how most managers can expect to change jobs at least once within any three year period and that most of these changes make radical new demands on their adaptive capacities. It would thus hardly be surprising if the process of job change were a major focus of managers' thoughts throughout their working lives. The very positive response to our interest in job change from the managers and organizations involved in our research confirms this.