Revealing latent career scripts in a change context: analyzing the case of a Tunisian company

This paper explores how latent and invisible career scripts can be revealed and interpreted within a family-owned organization undergoing strategic, organizational, and cultural transformation. Drawing on a three-year intervention research project at the Tunisian industrial group SOTUPA, the study examines how employees construct and negotiate their professional trajectories amid shifting managerial paradigms. A qualitative single-case study combining forty-five comprehensive interviews with managerial employees and long-term observation of the transformation process identifies five coexisting career scripts (Expert, Strategic Manager, Protean Challenger, Stabilizer, and Social Humanist) that structure collective career sensemaking within the company. These scripts illustrate the paradoxical interplay between heritage and innovation, where inherited norms of loyalty and hierarchy coexist with emerging logics of autonomy, learning, and purpose. By revealing implicit scripts, the study contributes to the reflexive design of career management tools, providing collective spaces, where employees and managers co-construct shared meanings of success and progression. The paper advances scholarship on career scripts, and intervention research by conceptualizing careers as hybrid, evolving systems of meaning.