Career imprinting and boundary-crossing: Academic researchers as policy experts’

Abstract
This study explores how intersecting career imprints across different organizational and professional domains shape individuals’ professional orientations and knowledge activities. While existing literature on career imprinting often portrays individuals as passive carriers of skills and knowledge from past experiences, my research highlights their active role in creating environments conducive to leveraging their career imprints across boundaries. Focused on academic social scientists navigating between academia and public policy, my analysis demonstrates that early exposure to policy work significantly influences later knowledge transfer activities. Many pursue 'revolving door' careers between academic and policy fields, crafting job and career opportunities for professional continuity and knowledge redeployment. This intersection of career imprints enables academics to integrate knowledge production logics from both academic (scientific) and public policy (political) realms. Career imprinting and career crafting emerge as interconnected processes that facilitate the transfer and transformation of cognitive and relational resources. The findings draw from interviews with 40 UK-based social scientists and analysis of their biographical and bibliographical records.