Biographic Genesis of Vocational Success or Failure of Neurodivergent People

Abstract

This article focuses on understanding the pathways of vocational success or failure of people self-identifying as neurodivergent. Following a grounded theory approach, 16 narrative biographical interviews were conducted. From these interviews, pathways towards vocational success or failure were extracted that differed in the resources, strategies and contextual conditions within biographical phases of the interviewees. Two paths led towards vocational hardship and failure: interviewees with relatively poor starting resources were mostly situated in neuronormative contexts, following the pathways of (a) extensive self-adaptation and (b) self-conflicting opposition. Two other paths formed around neurodivergent people with better resources to cope with vocational challenges due to their social position, which rather placed them in neurotolerant or neurointegrative contexts in which they were able to follow the pathways of (a) sustainable self-adaptation and (b) context shaping. The results of the study show that traits and resources of the individual interact with properties of the context, shaping chances for vocational success biographically.

Lay Summary

This study investigates why some neurodivergent individuals—such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism or high sensitivity—experience vocational success, while others face persistent struggles. Using a grounded theory approach, the researcher conducted 16 narrative biographical interviews to explore how personal resources, strategies and life contexts shape career trajectories over time. The study identified four main pathways. Two were associated with vocational hardship: individuals with limited starting resources, often in rigid, neuronormative environments, either attempted extensive self-adaptation—suppressing their needs to meet expectations—or engaged in self-conflicting opposition, resisting norms in ways that harmed their career prospects. Both paths often led to exhaustion, exclusion or long-term unemployment. Conversely, two other paths led to more positive outcomes. Individuals with greater personal or social resources were more often situated in neurotolerant or neurointegrative environments. They either practiced sustainable self-adaptation, balancing personal needs with job demands, or engaged in context shaping—actively creating work environments that supported their neurodivergence, such as through self-employment or niche roles. Key influences included early needs-based support from families, schools and institutions, as well as socio-economic background and major life events. Successful individuals used their strengths intentionally, communicated boundaries and sought environments where they could thrive. Those who lacked support or worked in rigid environments were more likely to face hardship or exclusion. The findings highlight that career outcomes are shaped by the interaction between individual traits, available resources and the inclusiveness of the environments encountered over time.

Introduction

This article focuses on understanding the pathways towards vocational success or failure of people self-identifying or being identified as neurodivergent within the neurodiversity movement (Dyck & Russell, 2020; Kapp, 2020; Russell, 2020; VanDaalen et al., 2025) and in the scientific discourse around neurodiversity and work (Coplan et al., 2021; Doyle, 2020; Kuhn & Meier, 2024); Lowy et al., 2023; Schneider, 2024; Szulc et al., 2021; Weber et al., 2022). When reviewing the literature around vocational success of neurodivergent people, seemingly contradictory findings can be found. On the one hand, neurodivergent people with and without cognitive disablement seem to suffer severe vocational discrimination. For instance, the employment rate of neurominorities in the United Kingdom (Doyle, 2020; Lippi et al., 2024) and Germany, for which only data on autistic individuals is available (Riedel et al., 2016), is significantly below average. They often switch jobs and seem to have problems obtaining their jobs over longer stretches of time (Holwerda et al., 2013). On the other hand, studies point out that neurodivergent people can be extraordinarily vocationally successful. Relatively high rates of successfully self-employed (Hatak et al., 2021; Patton, 2022), elite athletes (Han et al., 2019) and people in scientific, technology, engineering and mathematics vocations (Wei et al., 2013) as well as medical practitioners (Shaw et al., 2023) seem to carry neurodivergent traits. How could that be, if their neurological traits are expected to undermine their chances for vocational success?

Many previous studies analysed aspects of the working life of neurodivergent people as explaining factors or conditions for their vocational success or failure, like knowledge about one's own neurological condition (Thomas et al., 2022), severity of symptoms (Chen et al., 2015, 2023; Fredriksen et al., 2014; Fuermaier et al., 2021), adequacy of coping strategies (Beer et al., 2014; Hotte-Meunier et al., 2024; Livingston et al., 2019), medication (Lachenmeier, 2023; Simoni, 2018; Simoni & Drentea, 2016) and the possibility of applying individual strengths at the workplace (Black et al., 2020; Hendricks, 2010; Hotte-Meunier et al., 2024; Sedgwick et al., 2019). On an organizational level, counselling, hiring and on-boarding processes, working conditions and job requirements were identified as having an impact on the sustained employment of neurodivergent people (Baldwin et al., 2014; Beer et al., 2014; Black et al., 2020; Cooper & Mujtaba, 2022; Diener et al., 2020; Doyle, 2020; Goldfarb et al., 2019; Harvery et al., 2021; Hayward et al., 2019, 2020; Hendricks, 2010; Hotte-Meunier et al., 2024; Khalifa et al., 2020; Lorenz et al., 2016; Maras et al., 2021; Oscarsson et al., 2022; Sharpe et al., 2022; Waisman-Nitzan et al., 2020). Societally, intersectional stigmatization and discrimination processes were also researched in their effects on vocational chances of neurodivergent people (Anker et al., 2019; Black et al., 2020; Doyle et al., 2022; Eilenberg et al., 2019; Mellifont, 2020; Raymaker et al., 2023; Thomas et al., 2022), as well as socio-demographic factors like income of family of origin (Roux et al., 2013), marital status (Anker et al., 2019; Barneveld et al., 2014) and educational level (Anker et al., 2019; Barneveld et al., 2014; Ohl et al., 2017). However, hardly any studies put their findings into the socio-biographic context of the individuals researched (Deacon et al., 2022; Macdonald, 2012; Tan, 2018), and none of them focus on vocational biographies. This lack of focus on biographical processes leads to limited insights into how these challenges emerge over time. This article aims to show that contextual conditions influence the career paths neurodivergent individuals take in the same ways as individual conditions do, shaping pathways towards success or failure through their temporal interdependence. It asks: What are vocationally successful neurodivergent people doing or experiencing differently in their vocational biographies than those predominantly experiencing vocational hardship and failure? Which strategies are they applying, and which conditions influence their vocational careers?

This article builds upon a sociological definition of vocational success reaching back to sociological discussions of success by Mannheim (1964), Ichheiser (1930, 1943) and König (forthcoming), which is used in the field of sociology of work until today (Droste, 2025; Neckel, 2008). Vocational success is thus defined as the successful achievement of social status in a vocational context. The article further proposes a sociological understanding of neurodivergence based on stigmatization theory (Aranda et al., 2023; Becker, 1963; Goffman, 1998; Link & Phelan, 2001) as the stigmatized deviance of an individual from current mental functional norms. This definition builds upon existing definitions (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020; Chapman, 2021; Goldberg, 2023; Huijg, 2020) and expands them by integrating the term of “deviance” into the definition. Sociologically, deviance describes a societally sanctioned behaviour or attribute of a person who does not correspond to societal norms, values or rules (Franzese, 2015), from which mental functional norms are part. In this study, people who label themselves and are labelled as deviating from the mental functional norms of our time are called “neurodivergent”, while people who are labelled as apparently fitting the norm are coined “neurotypical”. Recursing on the works of Tebartz van Elst (2017) and Doyle (2020), the definition of neurodivergence followed here includes mental disorders and norm variants of autism, attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (AD(H)D), dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia as well as differing degrees of expression of general learning disabilities, depression, anxiety disorders, differences in the functionality of the nervous system and brain acquired through illness or accident, Tourette's syndrome, Down syndrome, bipolar disorder and epilepsy, as long as they constitute a deviance from current mental functional norms within a social context. However, it also covers high emotional sensitivity and high perceptual reactivity, for which no formal diagnosis is yet established, but which shares the criterion of encompassing neurological traits that diverge from mental functional norms of our time. As a means of controlling the high variability between neurodivergent people while still covering as much breadth and depth as possible, the study presented here was restricted to people self-identifying as carrying traits entailed within the phenomena of ADHD and autism. Individuals with high emotional or perceptual sensitivities were added to the sample to expand the study beyond the boundaries of neurological diagnoses, as is indicated by the definition of neurodivergence used in this article.

Method

Methodologically, the work presented here in this article is based on a qualitative interview study conducted in 2023–2024 in Austria. It follows the grounded theory methodology (GTM) in its pragmatist tradition of Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin (Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1996, 1998). Pragmatist GTM researches how individuals solve problematic situations like “being employed” procedurally through consecutive strategic and routine actions in a certain context. It was chosen because of its strong focus on uncovering social processes, as the primary research question is aimed at procedural aspects of the emergence of vocational success or failure for neurodivergent people during their biography. To improve the capacity of pragmatist GTM to capture biographical processes, it was combined with the data collection strategy of the biographic method of Rosenthal (2001, 2019), which strongly focusses on dense biographic narrations. This combination of methods maximizes the benefits of the study regarding the understanding of vocational biographies of neurodivergent people while minimizing potential harm to participants through applying a set of built-in and added-on protective techniques. To protect the participants from potential harm through narrative compulsion effects that can occur during narrative interviews, they were instructed to refrain from going into detail on traumatic situations before the interview started. Narrations were planned to be stopped or paused and then deviated to the next stage of their vocational biography, if the participants showed signs of strong negative emotional overwhelm when recounting a difficult situation. Additionally, mitigation strategies were prepared in case of unintentionally revoking traumatic experiences following Rosenthal (2002).

To ensure the trustworthiness of the study, the researcher engaged with the participants over an extended period to build up trust and rapport. The researcher also practiced open-mindedness and self-reflection regarding potential interpretation bias regularly through self-interviewing and reflexive journaling. The research process was rigorously documented via log files and supported by extensive use of memo techniques as well as peer debriefing. Although an official ethics approval was not required by institutional mandate, strict ethics protocol was followed as detailed in Appendix 1.

Data Collection

After establishing informed consent, ensuring voluntary participation and explaining the right to withdraw from participation at any time without negative consequences for the participant as well as guaranteeing data protection, each interview was conducted following the biographic method. The interviews started with a short general explanation of the aim of the study, which was stated as “understanding vocational biographies of people with autism, ADHD or high sensitivity”. A short explanation of how narrative interviews work was also given, so participants were able to understand that lengthy and detailed narrations were expected from them. Then the narration was initiated through the following narration impulse:

Please think back on your life, what was the first vocationally relevant event you can remember? Can you first describe it to me and recount what happened after this moment in your vocational biography until today?

During the interview, constant encouragement to deepen the narration was given. Following her advice, the interviews were closed with a summarizing question focusing on the most positive experience they had during their vocational biographies.

Data Analysis

The analysis of the interviews followed the principal coding techniques of pragmatist GTM and was performed in MaxQDA. It used open, axial and selective coding to break open the data and uncover procedural connections between concepts. The concepts were then ordered according to the coding paradigm of the pragmatist Grounded Theory, which was slightly adapted to the procedural character of the research subject (see Figure 1). Instead of distinguishing between causal conditions and consequences, it put so-called problematic situations in the neo-pragmatist sense of the term (Joas, 1992) into sequence. This better represents the various amounts of circumstantial elements of biographies, as they do not necessarily form around cause and effect.

Figure 1.

Procedural Adaptation of the Coding Paradigm of the Grounded Theory Approach of Strauss and Corbin (1996, 1998) by Eva-Maria Griesbacher.

Problematic situations represent situationally challenging phenomena that are to be solved through applying certain strategies under a certain set of conditions. Thus, they do not necessarily refer to a negative emotional evaluation of a situation by the individual.

To further enhance the procedural analysis and emancipate from too-strongly code-oriented work, the situational mapping approach of Clarke (2005, 2011, 2012) inspired the procedural mapping of recounted situations within vocational biographies for a comprehensive comparison analysis. Each case was graphically mapped, sequentially distinguishing vocational phases and problematic situations that were encountered during these phases (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Situational Mapping of Vocational Phases and Problematic Situations within a Biography.

For a more generalized analysis, each vocational phase was assigned to a color code and was visualized as an arrow of about the length of the duration of the phase within the biography of each case (see Figure 3). ¹ This way, each recounted biography was condensed into a sequence of phases of their biography, in which their employment status, other occupancies like military or civil service, apprenticeship, childcare and care for elderly family members as well as activities in the shadow economy and phases of being sick or receiving therapy were distinguished. The analysis constantly switched between the more detailed and more generalized depictions of biographies to gain a profound understanding of dynamics on the small scale of a situation as well as its implications for a whole biography and vice versa.

Figure 3.

Sequential Depiction of Biographical Phases, Central Biographical Incidents, Subjective Perceptions of Success and Life Satisfaction as Well as Individual Identifications of Cases.

Sample Description

In total, 16 people with neurodivergent conditions were selected through theoretical sampling according to Strauss and Corbin (1996) and interviewed biographically between March 2023 and February 2024. They were recruited from organizations supporting different neurominorities in Austria, as well as at events of business representatives on the topic. The interviews lasted two hours on average, ranging from half an hour to about four hours. The sample was evenly spread between sexes and contained participants from age groups between 20 and 70 years, with a slight bias towards participants aged between 39 and 59 years, throughout rural and urban Austria. It included three people with frequent migration backgrounds of the country, two people with different gender identities and sexual orientations, as well as two people regarding themselves as carrying multiple mental disabilities. Ten interviewees graduated from university, five more finished secondary higher schools and two succeeded in their vocational training, a form of education unique to Austria, Germany and Switzerland comprised of alternating school and apprenticeship phases. Of the ten interviewees who completed a university degree, five were in a professional position corresponding to their degree throughout their working lives. The other five interviewees held professional positions far below their level of education.

The interviewees included six people who self-identified with having AD(H)D, five people who described themselves as autistic and four people that perceived themselves as highly sensitive. Nine of the respondents classified themselves as professionally successful overall. Seven struggled with their professional situation for large parts of their biographies, were often dissatisfied with their career and did not speak of themselves as vocationally successful.

The interviewees worked in a wide range of professional fields during their vocational biographies, spanning all major business sectors. They held positions as entrepreneurs and managing directors, senior and ordinary employees or public servants during their vocational careers, experienced being on leave or retired for various reasons. Six interviewees had experienced periods of unemployment, four engaged in activities at the edges or within the shadow industry and one recounted passages of his life in which he followed a career as an ultimately convicted criminal.

Pathways

When comparing the vocational careers of the interviewees in terms of their vocational success, four different types of career pathways emerged (see Figure 4). Two of these pathways led towards vocational success, and two towards vocational hardship and failure. The pathways were defined by the sequentiality of the interplay between the strategies and resources of the interviewees to cope with their vocational lives and the properties of their vocational context during their biographies.

Figure 4.

Pathways of Vocational Success, Hardship and Failure and their Representation in Interview Cases (Multiple Assignment of Cases: Experience of Different Pathways for Different Phases of the Biography).

The two pathways that led towards vocational success for neurodivergent people were characterized by early stabilization tendencies in their careers towards a certain employment or job profile through applying long-term sustainable individual strategies within a neurotolerant or even neurointegrative context (see Figure 5). Neurotolerant contexts hereby indicate contexts in which different neurologically determined mental and behavioural traits of people are accepted and respected and no discrimination happens. Neurointegrative contexts go one step further, insofar as they do not only tolerate neurodivergent traits, but actively integrate neurodivergent as well as neurotypical individuals into context-specific processes according to their neurologically determined strengths and weaknesses. Interviewees on one of the two pathways towards vocational success applied partly extensive context-shaping strategies, while limiting self-adaptation to an amount that was sustainable over long periods of time.

Figure 5.

Strategies, Initial, Intervening and Contextual Conditions Towards Experiencing Vocational Success, Hardship or Failure.

The pathways towards vocational hardship and failure shared strong discontinuation tendencies, like frequent and fast changes in employment and big career breaks. For most of the interviewees experiencing vocational hardship and failure, the orientation towards upwards mobility of their family of origin combined with them being mostly placed in neuronormative contexts created tensions and conflicts. Neuronormative contexts hereby entail contexts with a strong orientation towards currently predominant mental and behavioural norms. Interviewees who were trapped between the demands of their family to move up the social ladder, while not being equipped with adequate resources and contextual possibilities to do so, started down two different paths of discontinuous vocational biographies: one of extensively adapting themselves to the demands of family and society that was taken mostly by autistic interviewees in this group and one of opposing those demands and seeking shelter in marginalized or deviant communities early in life, a path rather taken by interviewees with AD(H)D or mixed conditions.

When looking at non-contextual conditions influencing the course of the vocational biographies of neurodivergent people, initial conditions shaping their childhood and young adulthood as well as intervening conditions that came into effect during their biographies came into play. Especially, the social status of the family of origin shaped the pathways taken by equipping the neurodivergent individual with quite different resources, support and starting positions for their vocational careers. Interviewees stemming from high social status families were more likely to have received an early diagnosis of a neurological condition, followed by a set of support mechanisms that enabled them to shape contexts to their needs, accompanied by placements in highly regarded schools and an initial placement in an at least neurotolerant vocational field. However, if interviewees came from families with middle to low social status, they mostly did not receive diagnosis until late in their lives—and if they did, diagnosis was often severely limiting their life chances, as adequate support was not achievable or not sought by their parents, leading to exclusionary educational practices, placements in special needs schools and neuronormative contexts.

Sustainable Self-Adaptation in Neurotolerant or Neurointegrative Contexts

Sustainable self-adaptation refers to strategies that focus on adapting the self to the context by suppressing some traits and trying to enhance others, without exhausting oneself over time by constantly denying one's own needs and wishes. This strategy was primarily applied by successful autistic interviewees. As a prerequisite to being able to apply sustainable self-adaptation, they gradually steered towards contexts which they perceived as familiar because they were occupied by people carrying similar traits to themselves. As the context was also shaped to be neurotolerant, they did not have to constantly bridge wide gaps in trait-expectancy, making their self-adaptation efforts sustainable over relatively long stretches of time. One case became a specialist in adapting to the vocational context, which allowed her to work successfully in academia for decades. Through her capability of analysing social patterns and dynamics, she learned how to adapt almost perfectly despite her autistic traits: “I mean, my Asperger's certainly helped me too, to analyse social situations well and to find my way around them. That may be a contradiction, but I think it's true. I approach the social context a bit like how I approach everything [she here refers to her scientific way of thinking], and ask myself, how does that work? More of a blueprint approach than you might sometimes think” (F16-1/1779-1779).

An important condition for the vocational success of sustainable self-adapters was that most of them engaged in regular opportunities to calm down, relax or quit all masking efforts for some time. Within work, they temporarily isolated themselves from their surroundings to recharge their energies by retreating into their individual office or another place where they could be by themselves. Some allotted breaks as appointments with themselves in their calendar or built another break routine. In their spare time, they attended groups of like-minded people with high mental and behavioural fit or engaged in relaxing activities with no social expectations, like reading and hiking alone. If relaxation from self-adaptation was not possible and the stress grew unbearable, interviewees in this group even quit leadership positions, industries or occupations before they reached a state of prolonged exhaustion due to extensive efforts to cope.

Context-Shaping in Neurotolerant or Neurointegrative Contexts

Context-shaping strategies intervene into the properties of the context to fit it to the neurologically determined needs of the individual. Such strategies were preferred by, if not limited in their usage, to interviewees with AD(H)D. One self-adaptation strategy that nearly all the successful interviewees applied regardless of their form of neurodivergence, was keeping their activation levels high. They did this by engaging in high-interest and high-workload projects, doing multiple things at once or operating several businesses or lines of business simultaneously, although the latter two strategies were more likely to be applied by interviewees with AD(H)D. What all the successful interviewees shared was the goal to avoid inactivity and boredom through applying this strategy, so: “It does not get boring (laughs)” (F5-1/123).

For shaping their work contexts, some interviewees in this group applied the strategy of explaining their neurologically determined needs to sympathetic people in their vocational context, when necessary. One case, for instance, has developed strategies to keep themselves focused that others cannot imagine managing themselves, like conducting a differentiated discussion or following a complicated lecture while working on a detailed work of art. Thus, they repeatedly experienced the necessity to explain themselves and now made it their rule to clarify their condition in anticipation: “I tell them from the beginning that I have ADHD. I tell them, that I cannot listen to them as well without [simultaneously doing my arts] because my brain would lose focus” (F6-1/444-445).

Of equal importance for the successful context-shaping interviewees was delegating weaknesses or tasks that are difficult for them to complete because of their neurodivergence. One case, for instance, had problems filling in forms and found a secretary who took over such chores (F6). Another one stated: “I always need a henchman, so to speak, someone who takes over work I am incapable of doing, like sustainably implementing ideas I have” (F5-1/43). Now he delegates such chores to his employees.

An ongoing process for all successful interviewees was to constantly keep their boundaries by saying “no” to tasks, contexts or contacts that they felt were not good for their integrity: “[…] I do very little bullshit. […] I say no’ to people or something if I'm not convinced that I want to work with them somehow” (F6-1/713-716). They also reject contexts or contacts that exceed their possibility to cope.

Some interviewees actively set actions so that others were unable to ascertain power over them through moving themselves into positions of authority or independence. That way, they ensured their power of action to shape their context to their needs. They created an area of expertise and independence, placing themselves outside strict hierarchies and thereby reducing the possibility of being controlled by others. Holding the highest executive position in an organization constitutes the highest position the successful interviewees in this study had reached during their biographies. This position seemed to immunize them from being determined by the wants of others very effectively and enabled them to realize self-efficacy.

Exhaustive Self-Adaptation in Neuronormative Contexts

The interviewees applying exhaustive self-adaptation strategies predominantly originated from lower to middle-class families with low resources for securing their economic existence.

Through intensely analysing social situations in their working life, they tried to refine their self-adaptation efforts. They found that neurotypical behaviours like acting socially and team-oriented, being constantly attentive and highly stress resistant, performing self-marketing and subordinating oneself to group dynamics were strongly demanded of them and enforced by colleagues and superiors. This created serious problems for these interviewees because they lacked the capabilities and resources to constantly follow all these expectations.

In trying to adapt to a very high degree, they constantly denied condition-specific neurologically determined needs and pushed themselves through overly demanding situations because of severe existential fears. This dynamic even plays out consciously, as the following statement shows: “I have to force myself to do this, so I can secure my existence” (F3-4/325-329). One interviewee expressed her inability to set boundaries pointedly when she says: “I wasn't able to defend myself against anything and I didn't set any boundaries and didn't tell anyone, listen, that's not how it works” (F17-1/220). Interviewees in this group tended to constantly overwork themselves because of existential fears, a strong orientation towards helping others regardless of one's own well-being, or the wish to be acknowledged by others as a valuable member of the team. One interviewee recognized this dynamic, when she said: “I have perfected exploiting myself” (F7-1/597). The consecutive push towards extensive self-adaptation efforts, combined with not upholding own mental and social boundaries, led to repeated experiences of complete exhaustion.

Self-Conflicting Opposition in Neuronormative Contexts

The interviewees deploying predominantly oppositional strategies started their lives under difficult conditions, either experiencing severe childhood crises or growing up with parents unable to accept diverging paths of life. Their low to middle-class background seemed to partly play a lesser role than not being able to adapt to societal ideals of normality without harming themselves mentally.

Being unable to achieve self-adaptation at acceptable costs to themselves, they first engaged heavily in oppositional behaviour against given structures, rules and regulations. Sometimes, opposing was the only option left to rescue the self and stabilize self-worth but came with the cost of losing acceptance in the so-called recognized society and subsequent self-conflicts. They tended to engage in hidden or open subversive actions to cope with unfitting vocational contexts throughout their life. One interviewee, for instance, took great liberties in the way she engaged with disabled people under her supervision, like bringing them on mutually fun trips or vacations while ignoring rules like where to go or how to design the toilet break that she deemed “stupid” or “inhumane” (F10). Another interviewee engaged in art projects designed to irritate and polarize, while ostensibly stating it to be a project of self-help (F13).

Being Gifted

Special dynamics were observed for interviewees that were especially gifted in their occupational field. While most of the successful interviewees come from high-status families, two started their life in labour class families. These interviewees stand out by an extraordinary intellectual capacity or giftedness in areas of rare and societally highly valued skills, which allowed them to complete high educational degrees and to use their special talents in their subsequent employments. By excelling in their special area of interest, they gained prestigious occupational positions despite placing among those interviewees with the most severe expression regarding their neurodivergence compared to the other interviewees or being disadvantaged intersectionally. What the interviewees in employed excellence careers shared was that they were occupied in contexts that were highly tolerant towards neurodivergence. Their vocational success seems to stem from a combination of being gifted and being in a neurotolerant context. Both worked in an environment, in which they were able to develop and expand their skills and strengths, as well as build up supportive work relationships. Through that, they were enabled to achieve a sustainable effort of self-adaptation, started shaping the context to their needs and experienced a series of vocational successes.

Changing Pathways

A path once taken was not fixed for the whole vocational biography of an individual, since most interviewees changed pathways eventually (see Figure 6). Hereby, self-induced change in pathways happened, especially if circumstances developed to be unbearable. Circumstantial change rather happened if interviewees encountered contexts that allowed them to follow other pathways. Events that especially enhanced the possibility of pathways to be changed were learning about one's own condition through self-reflection or formal diagnosis, receiving disability pension or retiring.

Figure 6.

Repeated Experience of Vocational Success, Hardship and Failure during a Vocational Biography and Potentials for Changing Pathways.

When fitting contexts were experienced, they became catalysts for personal development, as one interviewee exemplifies. When she entered beekeeping, she had an entirely new experience despite having worked successfully in academia for years before: “The first time in my life I recognized the conditions I need in my working life, and the first time in my life […]—I was able to break out of the usual work routine, in which I was caught and with which I had also struggled with a bit” (16-1-1/274-277). Like others in this group, she found that work settings featuring a high amount of self-responsibility and above-average recuperation time fit her neurodivergence and thus stabilized her vocational productivity. This insight brought her to question her previous working conditions and to evaluate new working commitments more closely regarding the match between her needs and the conditions at the workplace. Through these experiences and insights into her neurologically determined needs and how well she feels in the right context, she shifted the weight of her strategies for coping with working life from self-adaptation to context shaping. When interviewees whose biographies were dominated by vocational hardship and failure finally experienced working conditions that fit their neurologically determined needs, it was more by the way of finding them coincidentally than by shaping those conditions by themselves. However, some of them privately paid for psychological and occupational help to propel them into neurologically fitting jobs, since state-financed aid was unable to give adequate support. When finding such contexts, they were better able to keep or even expand their boundaries as well as perform their strengths, sometimes leading to longer phases of vocational success compared to earlier phases in their vocational biographies.

Discussion and Conclusion

The findings of this article suggest that whether neurodivergent people succeed vocationally and see themselves as successful is conditional on their social position. A high socio-economic status enables them to conquer the difficulties arising from a lack of fit between their neurological traits and contemporary mental–functional expectations through providing resources to shape their vocational context to their needs or to adapt to it sustainably. This then influences whether they can find a fitting vocational niche during their biography and can stabilize their vocational career in those niches. Additionally, in which contexts they try to build their vocational career strongly influences the consecutive experiences of success or failure they make during their vocational career. Finding themselves in neurotolerant or even neurointegrative contexts enables them to fulfil their abilities, strengths and competences, leading to consecutive experiences of smaller and larger moments of success. However, being less well-equipped with resources because of a low to middle-class family background and hence more probably being vocationally placed in neuronormative contexts puts a heavy burden of constant, partly overly extensive self-adaptation on neurodivergent people, leading to exhaustion and being concerned with adaptation more than with the realization of their capabilities. A series of experiences of vocational hardship and failure deteriorates their self-esteem, driving them ever deeper into self-adaptation and exhaustion.

What also became clear is the variability of paths neurodivergent people follow in their vocational biographies. There is not just one path towards success, as there is not just one path towards failure, as both can be found in different biographical phases of many interviewees. Paths can (and were) changed by the interviewees, jumping from one into another, eventually breaking cycles in which they were trapped. Learning about one's own neurologically determined needs seems to play a crucial role in changing paths or breaking out of a spiral of path dependencies that affects the individual negatively, since self-labelling and formal diagnoses that were in accordance with one's own perceptions of own neurological traits acted as catalysts for starting context-shaping behaviour, guiding themselves towards more neurotolerant contexts. Traits and resources of the individual interact with properties of the context, shaping chances for vocational success. With this, the explanation goes beyond seeing success as the performance of a singular individual to seeing success of neurodivergent people as something that is constructed through the interplay of individual traits and contextual conditions.

This is one of the first biographical studies on vocational careers of neurodivergent people. However, previous studies using different research methods found comparable dynamics, like the adverse effects of exclusionary educational practices and discriminatory workplace practices on the development of self-worth and self-esteem of neurodivergent people, consecutively impacting career chances (Deacon et al., 2022) or leading neurodivergent people towards criminal careers (Macdonald, 2012). While, in this study, severe existential crises were found to be catalysts for psycho-social dynamics that often led into vocational situations of hardship or even failure, a recent study from Möhring et al. (2021) found that creating meaningful transitions can help overcome the negative effects of earlier psychological trauma, initiating positive vocational developments. Since the study presented here did not primarily focus on the effects of childhood and youth psychological trauma on later vocational development, this remains to be explored by further research.

On the effects of social class on vocational biographies, a study by Atkinson (2022) shows similar dynamics to those outlined in this article, although he did not use neurodivergence as a concept. Atkinson shows that social status has strong restraining effects on vocational chances of people via restricting their habitus to be only accepted without irritation within certain fields. As habitus is strongly bound to social, economic and cultural resources obtained during the life course, and especially in the context of the family of origin, Atkinson's study supports the findings of the study presented here on the effects of different kinds of resources on vocational development. The results regarding sustainably or exhaustively adapting to contexts relate to research on masking (Fox-Muraton, 2023; Pearson & Rose, 2021). Masking is shown to be counterproductive for a neurodivergent person in contexts that demand overly extensive adaptation efforts, while possibly being beneficial in contexts that allow a sustainable and healthy amount of self-adaptation, but more research is needed. Sustainable self-adaptation may also be related to the concept of impression management, as Schneid and Raz (2020) pointed out for masking. A systematic literature review from Hotte-Meunier et al. (2024) on strengths and challenges of people with AD(HD) in employment underscores the importance of person-environment fit that was also found in this study. Furthermore, the findings correspond with Goldfarb et al. (2019) results on the importance of motivation through interest for neurodivergent people.

Limiting to this study is that no neurodivergent people with low educational level or no completed education could be recruited, despite extensive efforts to reach them. The dynamics found here only extend to neurodivergent people with at least a completed apprenticeship. Furthermore, interviews were only conducted in Austria, although major migrant backgrounds are represented in the sample. Results may apply to other countries with comparable cultural and historical background like Germany but may differ for other cultural areas. It could be beneficial to examine pathways across different samples in terms of socio-economic, cultural and educational composition as well as dynamics of intersectionality. Furthermore, one limitation is the lack of individuals self-identifying as “neurotypical” as a possible comparison group. Further studies may strive to put neurodivergent vocational biographies into a larger societal picture. Additionally, further research could examine differences between vocational pathways of various neurominorities and the role of self-labelling and formal diagnosis to broaden the picture.

This study adds a procedural biographical understanding of different influences on vocational pathways of neurodivergent people to the research discourse. For research, it underscores the importance of including a procedural perspective into a research design for understanding vocational chances and challenges for neurodivergent people. It may also direct the perspectives of practitioners towards a procedural understanding of the problematic situations their clients encounter during their vocational biographies.

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sj-docx-2-ndy-10.1177_27546330251379268 - Supplemental material for Biographic Genesis of Vocational Success or Failure of Neurodivergent People

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-ndy-10.1177_27546330251379268 for Biographic Genesis of Vocational Success or Failure of Neurodivergent People by Eva-Maria Griesbacher in Neurodiversity