Why academics attend conferences? An extended career self-management framework

Academics, like many other professionals, such as accountants, lawyers, and medical doctors, are primarily responsible for their own ongoing professional development. One of the ways academics are expected to pursue their professional development is by attending conferences structured around their professional associations. However, professional development is a broad construct and we lack a framework for understanding the numerous, specific motivations and goals related to why professionals choose to attend these conferences. To address this issue, we extend King's (2004) career self-management framework in three ways: a) we apply and extend the positioning behaviors of King's model for the situation of academics, b) extend the antecedents of these positioning behaviors from a single to a multi-level framework (including individual, university, and national level antecedents), and c) discuss cross-level effects of these antecedents. Implications and guidance for HR practitioners and future research are also discussed.