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Making Sense of Our Working Lives: The concept of the career imagination

Cohen, Laurie; Duberley, J.

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Authors

Laurie Cohen

J. Duberley



Abstract

In 2001 foot and mouth hit and obviously devastated the business completely. So it’s a honeypot village and literally it was as though somebody had put a gate against it. It was incredible. There were no cars, the kids were just riding bikes up and down the road, playing football. I don’t know if you remember but Blair said, ‘keep out of the country’ and they did! Sometimes it feels as though I’ve not been in charge of my own destiny to some degree. You know, you always seem to be overtaken by a series of events that lead you somewhere (Sylvia, hotel owner, Cohen, 2014))

Jill was all excited about the possibility of getting a modem that would enable her to work from home! Commenting on the modem story nearly twenty years later, Jill observed that ‘any firm is a technology firm now. It’s probably the biggest cultural shift of the last century’ (Cohen, 2014: 78, 79),

The notion of vocational public service has become passé through ‘managerialising’ and ‘targetising’ the service. What’s gone is the notion of voluntary effort and endeavour that went alongside what you were being paid for. There would have been no welfare rights service created in the 1980s if the people setting it up had just turned up at 9 o’clock and left at 5 o’clock. It came to be because people actually lived the creation. That’s impossible to achieve in an environment which is all about targets set from on high, and action plans on Excel spreadsheets (Pete, welfare rights officer, Cohen, Duberley & Smith, 2019).

These quotes, taken from our own research (Cohen, 2014; Cohen, Duberley & Smith, 2018) vividly highlight the ongoing evolution of our working lives and careers. As we write this essay, in Autumn 2020, this change feels more dramatic and closer than ever, fuelled not only by well-rehearsed, long-term social, economic and technological transformation (Grimshaw, 2020), but also by the shock of the Covid 19 crisis and impending Brexit. For some commentators such on-going change offers the potential to forge ‘boundaryless’ (Tams & Arthur, 2010) and entrepreneurial careers (Liguori, Winkler, Vanevenhoven and Winkel and James, 2020): as the Uber pitch to potential drivers goes, ‘no shifts, no boss, no limits’ (Kessler, 2018: 12). For others, though, the picture is far bleaker (Snyder, 2016), with increased insecurity and a lack of stable foundations from which to develop a work identity (Petriglieri, Ashford, & Wrzesniewski, 2019: 158) and make sense of effort as part of a meaningful, ongoing project of forging a meaningful career (Tweedie, 2013).

Citation

Cohen, L., & Duberley, J. (2021). Making Sense of Our Working Lives: The concept of the career imagination. Organization Theory, 2(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211004600

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 22, 2021
Online Publication Date Apr 28, 2021
Publication Date Apr 1, 2021
Deposit Date Mar 8, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Organization Theory
Electronic ISSN 2631-7877
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2
Issue 2
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211004600
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5380775
Publisher URL https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26317877211004600
Related Public URLs https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ott

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