Abstract
The task of responding to these reviews is bittersweet. It is sweet because in this world of Association of Business Schools (ABS) lists, impact cases, league tables, performance management and never-ending new initiatives, it is not easy to find the time for old-fashioned things, like reading books and writing reviews. I am touched that Melissa Tyler, Christine Coupland and Deirdre Hughes accepted Daniel Nyberg’s invitation to review Imagining Women’s Careers, and grateful for the time and effort they committed to the task. Bitter might be too strong a word for the other side of the coin, but the slightly scary part of this process is confronting the reviewers’ concerns, reflecting on the text’s shortcomings and framing suitable answers. Of course criticism is part and parcel of our job and we face it on a daily basis. Although it makes us better academics and in many important ways is one of the joys of academic work, it is nevertheless an intellectual and emotional challenge. More so, I am finding, when the object is quite personal and heartfelt.
When I first read Christina Nippert-Eng’s (1996) Home and Work, I was struck by her comment that she ‘likes sociology so real [she] can taste it’ (p. xiv). The idea of tasting academic research has stuck with me ever since. Embarking on Imagining Women’s Careers, I wanted readers to be able to sense how careers hold people and contexts together. Although the careers literature is illuminating and deeply engaging on many levels, in my view, it often lacks this connection. For reasons of confidentiality I did not divulge the city in which the research took place. However, I nevertheless sought to give readers some flavour of the kind of place it was, and why this mattered to respondents’ unfolding careers. Given this ambition, I appreciate Hughes’ comments about the relevance of local and national setting, and Coupland’s about my depiction of careers as lived experiences. Furthermore, although work is central to the career concept, it is a curiously absent presence in much of our research. In their interviews, respondents and I did not typically talk about career building, but about doing jobs. I wanted to convey something of these working lives. Hughes recognized this, and I am pleased that the point came through.
I see career as a way of conceptualizing the evolution of people’s working lives through time and space, a vehicle for exploring the nexus between social structure and individual agency, and a means of retrospective accounting. The construction of career narratives is immensely valuable in shedding light on people’s career sensemaking and action. The two-phase approach I took in Imagining Women’s Careers gave respondents the opportunity to reflect on their first transcripts in light of the second, confirming or challenging their original stories in light of subsequent experience. Interestingly, Tyler points out that in this process of creating coherent accounts of self, ‘contradictions, concealments and so on’ were ironed out. But, she maintains, it is the researcher’s job to recognize people’s desire for coherence, and to encourage critical reflexivity. This important point certainly gets to the essence of the researcher’s roles and responsibilities.
On one hand, I take issue with Tyler’s interpretation and could point to the many instances in which discord and disguise are revealed. However, I do agree that the dominant discourse is one of correcting and smoothing rather than dissonance. I offer two explanations. First, echoing Alvesson (2003) I consider these interviews to be local, contingent accomplishments rather than accurate pictures of respondents’ inner worlds. A compelling aspect of such performances is that they provide insights into what is seen as legitimate in particular times and places, and my research design enabled me to see how this changed, or stayed the same, over two decades. The second point is a bit more sensitive, related to what I saw as my duty to my respondents. As in the case with much qualitative work, we covered some challenging ground and issues like sexual abuse, infertility and marital strife emerged, even though women had not expected to talk about them. The dilemma was that these revelations, often made off the record, sometimes seemed to hold the keys to unlocking thorny problems or inconsistencies. However, because of their accidental divulgence, I felt uncomfortable interrogating them too deeply. It could be that this caution led to what Tyler describes as a certain lack of reflexivity on my part.
I am interested in Tyler’s comments about the bluntness of the ‘career helper’ typology. I understand that the ‘helper-hinderer’ dichotomy might appear to be reductionist and a bit jarring. However, the framework did an important job in two key ways. First, much of the research into the role of others focuses on enablement, but constraint was a salient feature of the data, and I wanted to draw attention to it. This is not to suggest that people or roles are necessarily experienced as enablement or constraint. Rather, the concepts are mutually constitutive and the richness of the typology derives from appreciating their inter-relationship. Second, Tyler questions my application of the hinderer category to loving family members. Indeed, women’s personal lives were partly about love, but they were also characterized by stereotypical assumptions about women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities, and some explained how attention to career was interpreted as neglect of family. In such cases, tough sanctions were imposed for rule breaking. Tyler seems to suggest that because home is a place of loving relationships, care and emotional support, there is something transgressive about speaking of home life in ways usually restricted to work. I did not intend to directly compare controlling husbands with workplace bullies, but nor did I want to ‘protect’ the domestic sphere from critique.
From a policy perspective, Hughes raises some highly pertinent questions about the implications of Imagining Women’s Careers. As she points out, policy was indeed an important element of the context in which the study was set and it mattered to women’s careers in a myriad of ways. However (without wishing to totally duck the issue), my analysis did not extend to policy recommendations. That said, I might take this opportunity to highlight some possible avenues for consideration. The first empirical chapter of the book considers respondents’ reasons for leaving their organizations and embarking on self-employment. Although they made this move 20 or more years ago, some of the challenges they highlighted then persist today, and offer food for thought. First, the lack of women’s representation throughout their organizations, which in the data contributed to marginalization and limited mobility, is something that organizations and policy-makers continue to address, although with questionable success (Hausmann & Tyson, 2013). While opinions still vary widely about the effectiveness of hard versus soft measures, there is a consensus that any change must be led from the most senior organizational members, and that men must be centrally involved (Fagan et al., 2012). Second, in 1993 as today, many organizations were still not affording women equal opportunities for advancement. Several respondents spoke of opacity of promotion practices, and the inappropriateness of established criteria. In a range of sectors, from legal services to research-intensive universities, these problems, too, are on-going. Finally, a minority of respondents left their organizations in part because of their lack of family-friendly arrangements. While the discourse of work/home dynamics has changed significantly since the first phase of the study, we have not yet solved the problems. Work intensification continues to mean ever-longer working days. Even now there is a lack of high-quality, affordable childcare in the United Kingdom, and the cumulative effect of women’s loss of valuable career capital while on maternity leave still makes a difference to their career prospects.
On a more abstract level, the concept of the career imagination elucidates how we come to see certain career trajectories as viable and legitimate, while others remain shadowy, impossible or even proscribed. In other words, people’s career choices are circumscribed by what they can imagine. These prescriptions are, of course, socially inscribed: reinforced, reproduced or maybe resisted and even transformed by those involved in managing or guiding others’ careers. It is therefore imperative that career practitioners, educators, human resource professionals, managers and so on recognize their roles as career sense-givers, the need to become aware of unconscious bias and the significant implications of unreflexive practice.