Abstract
Laurie Cohen’s book is about women’s careers and is structured around two occasions of empirical analysis which took place in 1993 and 2010. Women from the same group were interviewed on both occasions about their careers. The subsequent analysis provided a rich account of how the women think about, make sense of and enact their working lives. The book is organised in chapters which follow a series of themes. In much the same way as the women’s career narratives do, the chapters pay attention to what stays the same and what is different, across time and between individuals. However, I was left wondering what the book would look like if these were men’s careers under observation? What would remain the same and what would be different?
The initial series of interviews took place at a time of transition for the women from employment to self-employment. At the time, the women were young to middle-age and the study looked at their decisions to make the transition, their expectations, the interplay between life and work and the subsequent impact the decision had on their career paths. Fifteen or so years later, the women were re-contacted in order to discuss their original stories, discover what their experiences had been in the intervening years and to elicit their current future plans and aspirations. The theoretical perspective adopted in the empirical research is social constructionist. A useful elaboration of this perspective, applied in narrative-based research, is provided in an early chapter in the book. It summarises and develops through example how this methodology contributes to career theory. The book proceeds in a more or less chronological order by setting the scene for making a decision to transition from employment to self-employment based around the first set of interviews in chapter 4. In the following chapters, Laurie charts their lives along important themes as the women account for changes in the intervening years. Threaded through the book and opened to inspection for the reader are ideologies around careers, women’s careers specifically, as performed within institutions of work, relationships and family. What is demonstrated remarkably clearly in the book is a new way to consider careers as lived experiences. Work in the area of career theory has been recently criticised for the divisive and sometimes narrowly focused efforts which are reproduced in published empirical studies. Recent calls for new developments in career theory (Chudzikowski and Mayrhofer, 2011) and a plea to move beyond variable and measurement driven career research (Van Maanen, 2005) represent some of these criticisms. There is a very real sense of moving into a fresh way of locating the individual socially, culturally and contextually in this work. Other authors have been attempting to work in this vein for some time now; for example, Marshall (1995) looked at senior women managers electing to leave organisations, LaPointe (2010) investigated career identity as narrative practice and Smith (2012) used narratives to expose dominant ways of accounting for progression/lack of progression among teachers in UK senior schools.
This book provides a rare opportunity to consider how careers of a group of women are experienced from two time perspectives. It represents one of the very best examples of writing in the field of narrative, interpretive, analysis and the application of theory in order to better understand actual, subjectively experienced, careers. Laurie has managed to convey some sophisticated ideas around theory development and sociological concepts in quite simple terms while using engaging language. The voices of the participants in the two studies can be heard quite clearly.
In the final chapter, ‘The Career imagination’, Laurie draws parallels between the participants in the study’s dreams and her own in conceptualising and writing the book. She admits to perhaps asking the ‘wrong’ questions of the participants, despite which her careful analysis has led to the emergence of a new concept ‘the career imagination’. Through this concept, it is possible to attend to past sociologists’ concerns with career such as Barley’s ‘career script’ (1989) and Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ (1977) and draw upon them in order to consider the interplay of structure and agency as a local accomplishment, articulated within conditions of possibility in order to be legitimate and appropriate for the audiences, or interactants, of the career account.
I read this book in one sitting as it is clearly expressed and written with a compelling rhythm that takes the reader through the women’s lives. It will resonate, I feel, with many readers’ own lives and perhaps inspire more confident future imaginings.