Abstract
In the author’s own words, ‘this is a book about women’s careers, how women think about and enact their working lives, and how these patterns of sense-making and action change, or stay the same, over time’ (p. 1). With this as its starting point, Imagining Women’s Careers begins by explaining how the inspiration for the book came from Laurie Cohen’s long-standing fascination with the different ways in which people consider and enact their working lives. This interest is both academic and personal in so far as, in the early 1990s, much of the emphasis within the careers literature was still with understanding career as a progressive, linear trajectory within a large organizational setting. Reflecting on her own circumstances and those of her family, including her role as a wife and mother, Cohen’s awareness of alternatives to this normative model drove her to explore other ways of experiencing careers. Hence, for her doctoral research in 1993–1994, she interviewed 17 women, focusing on their transition from being employed within a range of organizational settings to self-employment of various forms. Remarkably, Cohen maintained contact with all of the women who took part in her original study, interviewing them again 17 years later. The focus this time was on the women’s reflections on their earlier interviews, taking account of trajectories and transitions in the intervening years, and exploring their thoughts about the future. Imagining Women’s Careers is the product of these overlapping stories. With the women ‘narrating their own transition’ (p. viii), the discussion culminates in a detailed consideration of the career imagination—a ‘conceptual vehicle’ (p. 178) guiding how careers are envisioned and enacted by individuals within their particular social contexts.
Explaining the methodological approach she took, Cohen positions the project as a textual version of the Dear Photograph project, a blog (dearphotograph.com) in which people post old photographs taken against the same setting, and styled in the same way, many years later. Cohen recalls how, collecting the interview data, she was fascinated by recurring evocations of change and continuity. Like the Dear Photograph images showing dated snapshots against a much changed background, she carefully places the largely inter-personal focus on relationships in the women’s own accounts within the context of the broader social, political, and economic contexts shaping changes and continuities in people’s working lives over the last two decades or so. In doing so, Cohen deftly traces the lived experience of shifts from one recession to another, the emergence of so-called post-industrial, knowledge-based economies, and the social impact of a neo-liberal ideology of enterprise. She focuses in particular on Richard Sennett’s (1999) commentary on the cumulative impact of these organizational and socio-economic changes, highlighting a contemporary preoccupation with flexibility, ‘quick wins’, and a glorification of risk-taking. Embarking on the second phase of the research, Cohen was concerned to investigate the extent to which the experiences of the women she interviewed were resonant with Sennett’s critique, as well as with Arthur and Rousseau’s (1996) concept of the ‘boundaryless career’.
Perhaps not surprisingly given its thematic focus, Imagining Women’s Careers explains its adoption of a social constructionist approach to understanding how careers are narrated highlighting the potential of these narratives to elucidate otherwise occluded aspects of lived experience such as structures of feeling, social context, and identity. Careers are understood throughout the book not as ‘objective facts, but as social constructs’ (p. 11). The longitudinal methodology emphasizes the importance of understanding careers reflexively and over time, ‘as individuals reframed and reinterpreted their stories in light of their lived experiences and their involvement in the research process’ (p. 11).
Questioning the downplaying of the material significance of work in women’s lives in the academic literature on careers, a particularly interesting part of the book considers women’s career narratives as they move into retirement. Here, the analytical gaze focuses on the accounts provided by the eight oldest women in the study (those who were ‘over 55 at the time of their second interview’, p. 121), in order to consider the heterogeneity of older women’s work experiences, as well as their career transitions in later working life and retirement. Reflecting on all of the 17 women’s accounts of career development throughout their working lives, and drawing on insights developed by Bosley et al., (2009), the analysis in the penultimate chapter distinguishes between ‘helpers’ and ‘hinderers’. This particular typology, it has to be said, feels rather blunt compared to the care with which lived experiences and analytical concepts are treated throughout the rest of the book. ‘Helpers’ are those, such as role models, counselors, facilitators, and advisors, who help to keep ‘the show on the road’ (p. 155). In contrast, ‘hinderers’ are described as those ‘dependents who pose both ideological and material constraints [through] to bullies who undermine, marginalize and exclude’ (p. 12). Not only does positioning those whom we love and care for as an ideological and material hindrance, and then bracketing them together with workplace bullies, seem a little harsh, this distinction between ‘helpers’ and ‘hinderers’ reads as rather static and overly simplistic in a book that, elsewhere, focuses on fluidity and multiplicity.
It is not until the final chapter, on the ‘career imagination’, that Cohen begins to develop a more theoretical engagement with her material. Prior to this, concepts such as authenticity, spatiality, and embodiment are introduced, but only with relatively light brush strokes. In contrast to these earlier hints, it is in this last chapter that the elasticity and instability of the concept of career is really emphasized, in a discussion that moves well beyond the comparatively narrow rigidity of more traditional, patriarchal models of career outlined earlier in the book, or the conceptual typology referred to above. Here, Bourdieu’s (1977) field theory and C Wright Mills’ (1959) sociological imagination are mobilized to convey ‘the relationship between the social career imaginary and one’s own career-making’ (p. 169) as a source and process of struggle set against a broader ‘career landscape’ (p. 170). The latter describes the constellation of occupational sector, social background, and political and economic ideologies that provided some of the women in the study with an appreciation of self-employment as a viable career option. What is perhaps surprising, however, is that in mapping out the ‘key dimensions of the career imagination’ (p. 171), including occupations and trajectories, values, connections with other aspects of life, career identity, and so on, only a relatively brief paragraph is given over to material reward and the need for financial security as factors shaping the career landscape.
In contrast to this relatively under-developed aspect of the analysis, what remains a particularly strong thread throughout Imagining Women’s Careers is a sustained focus on the ways in which meanings and experiences of career are shaped by dynamic interactions between individuals and their families, their wider social networks, their organizational or self-employment settings, and the social context within which these intersections are made meaningful. Drawing on LaPointe (2010: 2), career is framed as ‘co-constructed, socially situated and performed in interaction’ (cited p. 176). Emphasized throughout the book, then, is an understanding of career as performative and embedded—as something that one does rather than has, but in this sense, the analytical focus is placed firmly on meaning rather than materiality, or on how the relationship between the two shapes lived experiences, and narratives, of careers.
Drawing all of this together then, what is produced here is a rich, detailed, and reflective account of women’s careers. Throughout the book, respect and admiration for the women whose lives are the focus of the study, referred to as ‘the cast’ (Chapter 3), is clearly demonstrated as the women’s own words and the author’s commentary on their stories are meticulously woven together with academic citations and references, forming the basis of a compelling whole and a carefully crafted narrative. What is particularly interesting about this is the way in which, through numerous citations of collaborative research, the author narrates her own analytical journey alongside the career development of the other 17 women in the story. Imagining Women’s Careers constitutes an invaluable reference point for scholars interested in developing critical, reflexive accounts of lived experiences of career development. But more than that, it provides an insightful example of how longitudinal qualitative research can be undertaken, evaluating some of its many opportunities, but also its challenges, for researchers and participants. While some may find the recurring self-references stylistically unusual, these have the rhetorical effect of including the author’s own career development, and that of her co-researchers, in the narrative that unfolds. Overall, then, the account of lived experiences of career making that is provided is rich and reflexive, emphasizing how we all ‘narrate our careers into being’ (p. 19).
Compared to the performative understanding of careers within the book, the way in which narrative is framed within Imagining Women’s Careers is, however, arguably less reflexive, as readers potentially come away with the impression that a narrative constitutes a reasonably coherent story, with a discernible beginning, middle, and end. This is because, notwithstanding the re-interpretations cited above, the participants’ lives appear to be narrated as a relatively linear, chronological tale. Inevitably, in any given research account, the complexities of lived experience, their contradictions, concealments, and so on become conflated as we are compelled to give an ‘account of ourselves’ (Butler, 2005). Whether these seemingly coherent accounts are given to employers, family and friends, or academic researchers, arguably the role of the latter is to encourage research participants to reflect on the compulsion to narrative our lives coherently, recognizing the challenges and compromises involved in doing so. Without this critical orientation, the approach to narrative in Imagining Women’s Careers is perhaps more reflective than it is reflexive, at least in this aspect of the analysis. While not necessarily any weaker for it, this is an aspect of the project that could perhaps have been developed more, by considering the role that the career imagination plays in shaping narrative performativity, and in compelling us to give particular accounts of ourselves and our careers, whether on our curriculum vitae (CVs) or in research interviews.
In sum, this is a book about the changing context of work and organization; it is about changes and continuities in career development. It is a book about class, gender, and community, and about narrative-based, longitudinal research. But at its heart, it is a book about a group of ordinary women and the ways in which they have experienced and made sense of their working lives. In this sense alone, it is a very welcome antidote to the ‘heroic tales’ of struggle, sacrifice, and success that seemingly characterize much of the current biographical literature on careers. If the career imagination is ‘a repository of history and experience’ (p. 180), then so too is Imagining Women’s Careers.