Markieta DomeckaMarkieta DomeckaAdam MrozowickiAdam Mrozowicki

CAREER PATTERNS AS THE OUTCOME OF INDIVIDUAL

RESOURCES, PERSONAL CONCERNS AND STRUCTURAL

FORCES

markieta.domecka@gmail.com

adam.mrozowicki@wns.uni.wroc.pl

Introduction

• Biographical approach as a method for scientific research and a tool for career counselling and vocational training – the analysis of career patterns;

• The thesis about career fragmentation and the increasing role of reflexive choices in late modernity (Bauman, 1999; Sennett, 2006);

• Structural factors influencing career patterns in the context of current transformations of the European economies;

• What is the role of reflexivity, resources and changing structural circumstances in shaping career patterns?

• Empirically grounded typology of career patterns based on biographical research on workers and business people in Poland;

• Practical implications for career counselling and vocational training;

Linking biography, career and counselling

• The Leonardo project INVITE run by four European universities (Helsinki, Magdeburg, Łódź and Bangor) and vocational training institutions & job centres in Finland, Germany, Poland and UK (Wales), Italy and Austria;

• Linking the needs and expectations of bureacratic institutions and individual human beings;

• Dealing with biographical turning points (career change, illness, changing family dynamics);

• Work experiences: identification vs. alienation;

• Transforming institutions (new approaches applied) and individual life courses (biographical metamorphosis);

Careers and reflexivity

• Career as a concept linking structural influences and agential powers:• objective mobility among jobs & posts and subjective identity

transformations;• the role of resources (social, economic, cultural, biographical);• reflexive work at biographical experiences and social positioning;

• Occupational biographies documenting the sequence of career patterns:

• biographical work “carried out in the service of actor’s biography” (Strauss, 1993)

• reflexivity (Archer) as the mechanism of selecting among personal concerns in relation to objective circumstances leading to action

Concerns Projects Practices

Objective circumstances and individual resources

Reflexivity and biographical work

Careers and social change

• substantive context: global restructuring at work and the emergence of new career patterns, e.g. “boundaryless careers”;

• subjective and objective aspects of careers and resources• resources re-evaluation (economic, social, cultural)

• new intrusive career discourses affecting subjective careers

• Continuity in change: European Working Conditions Survey 2010 (Eurofound)

• 80% of employees in the EU27 are employed on ‘indefinite’ contracts• 60% of the respondents were working in the same company for 5 years or more and around 40% have been there for 10 years or more. • 15% are self-employed (of which around 60% are genuine self-dependent entrepreneurs)

Changing occupational lives in Europe

•New challenges: fragmented careers •14% of the EU27 employees – temporary contracts / (highest in PL (27%), ES, PT, SI) •5% working with ‘no contract’ in EU27, the highest in Cyprus, Greece•high variation in the scope and the meaning of part time work (NL- almost 50%, much less in A8 countries)

•The scope and the meaning of career fragmentation varies

depending on institutional conditions and economic situation of countries: labour market deregulation, flexicurity (flexibility & security) arrangements; overall economic situation;

Youth (15-24) unemployment rates – EU27 (Eurostat)

ES, GR +/- 50%

Typology of career patterns

Single-track careers

Multi-trackcareers

Conditioning

Planning ANCHOR

objective opening & subjective closure

CONSTRUCTION

objective opening & subjective opening

DEAD-END

objective closure & subjective closure

PATCHWORK

objective closure & subjective opening

Anchor

• intentionally shaped single-track patterns; contextual continuity;

• workers: communitarian experience, work on craft resources, reflexive self-limitation of aspirations to protect contextual continuity

Leszek: “This factory is my whole life. I was connected with this factory throughout my whole life. I lived in a workers’ hostel, I got hitched with a girl from the factory (…) [Nowadays] they left only those, who’re worth something, because those, you know, dimwits who cannot do anything and knock off trash, were kicked out”

• business people: anchoring as a conscious choice (despite the dominant discourse), emphasis on professional development, but also attachment to locality and work-life balance

Paulina: “It’s absolutely sufficient for me to be a branch director, because I know how hard the work of the regional director is, who has to move around all branches. At this moment, it would collide too much with my family life. I’m ready for some sacrifices, but not to the extent [which would make me] to neglect my family. I’ve got a small child.”

Construction

• intentional multi-track career; the idea of self-determination accompanied by marketable resources

• workers: educational & entrepreneurial construction; hybridization

Maciej: “Although I work here, I also have a private business (...) Through some relations, there was a bus for sale in the factory (…) I had a driver, they were driving and when something happened [to the bus], there was no money, so I was lying under [this bus], so in the morning it could go. (…) I worked for a year, I earned a bit, I bought another bus, a better one. (…) It was working and earned again. And I bought another one, a little better, [and] I extended the business to trips.”

• business people; “the effect of spread wings” and gradual structure closure; “boundaryless careers” limited to the top positions

Eryk: “Speaking about professional career, I’m really, really the God’s chosen one, because even when I was working in that socialist firm, even when I was the head of the team they didn’t dare to come to me and persuade me to join the party (…) Later on, the whole American adventure, extremely nice, and later the whole managerial career, after coming back from the States (...) I assess it... what happened... exactly in this way, as amazingly positive… with a deep conviction that I had a direct influence on it, that it’s been created by me, worked out.”

Patchwork • chaotic, multi-track, ‘torn’ career, insufficient resources or

unhappy micro-events

• workers: unsuccessful anchoring, forced flexibility and work intensification; low-skilled jobs; feminization; young precarious workers

Aleksander: “At the first job, my contract expired, they didn’t want to prolong it (…) Second job, as I said, in this storehouse, [arranged] by an acquaintance of my father (…) He didn’t pay for social security, which was crap, so I gave up this job. Afterwards there’s a transportation firm (...) And I had to go on the dole, ‘cause the firm was closed. Then, a petrol station (…) And after military service, I sat firmly on these chairs for the unemployed and now I work here [in a supermarket]”

• business people: unsuccessful construction; entrepreneurial patchwork; forced changes of business profile

Mirosław: “One needs to stay somehow on the market. Now, there’s a crash (…) and one cannot foresee what will happen. Me too, I was changing the profile of my business many times. I had some commerce, a tax consulting company, I had pawnshops, second-hand shops, electronics commerce, construction business, many things, catering. Now, we’re looking for some solution to maintain what we already got,

Dead end• single-track patterns of involuntary immobility; the limitation of

resources and market constraints

• workers: collective trajectories; ‘historical traps’ of industrialism & meritocracy - precarisation

Weronika: “I decided to go to grammar school in economics, because in 2000 this field was a very…topical issue, you could’ve earned a lot of money (…) I intended to go for university but I’ve…we were in such difficult financial situation, so I didn’t. (...) I came to O. (…) I began to work as a picker [in a printing shop] When I started a school, I didn’t even think that I’d end up in O. and I’d work as a picker”

• business people: dead-end as a challenge to overcome, personalization of dead-end; “missed opportunities”

Bogusław: “I didn’t develop the firm, so I’m an individual providing different kinds of services connected with electronics, working on my own (…). When it fall out that there are big undertakings, then I employ some people, but now there is less and less of these big undertakings. So, everything is getting blurred and I asses these occupational perspectives as very bad, it’s a weak point that I can’t move”

Conclusions • Successful or unsuccessful attempts to enter or to leave certain

career pattern cannot be explained by individual capabilities or structural mechanisms only – both factors need to be taken into account;

• The role of resources in making reflexive choices: the vulnerability towards unintentional fragmentation connected with less “marketable” resources;

• Career course as a potential biographical resource that can be activated via biographical work of an individual and occupational counselling;

• Career counselling and vocational training incorporating some elements of biographical counselling: taking the perspective of the other; taking into account the totality of biographical experiences, identification and alienation in the work sphere, identity changes, individual concerns, projects and practices;