Imagining Women's Careers PDF
Preview Imagining Women's Careers
Imagining Women’s Careers Imagining Women’s Careers Laurie Cohen 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © L. Cohen 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935043 ISBN 978–0–19–969719–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. To Hannah, Izzy, and Grace. Imagine big. Preface The inspiration for this book came from my curiosity about how peo- ple think about and conduct their working lives, and how this devel- ops as they respond to—and shape—the world around them. As an undergraduate in the United States it was the depiction of these lives through fiction that most compelled me. Upon moving to the UK, I began to notice the different ways in which people consider and enact their careers. The gradual realization that the rules of the game were not quite the same here as they were back home encouraged me to turn to the social sciences for my postgraduate work. There I found riches that simultaneously helped me to answer some questions, while unsurprisingly raising many more. My interest in women’s careers was both academic and personal. On the academic side, when I began my doctoral work in the early 1990s gender and gendering had become a focus of debate within organi- zation studies. Careers scholars were starting to take note—examin- ing the applicability of the growing field to the realities of diverse women’s lives, the empirical settings in which existing understandings were grounded, and who was doing the asking. On a personal level, as a mother of three young children I reflected on how the expecta- tions and challenges I faced, the resources to which I had access, and my notions of what constituted a legitimate career were very different from those of my husband. Another curiosity about the careers literature was its emphasis on large organizations—indeed the term career itself seemed almost insep- arable from the hierarchical pathways and complex systems of rules and rewards that enabled people to travel along them. Coming from a family of small business owners I knew that there were alternatives and was keen to examine these other trajectories, and especially transitions between them. The study at the heart of this book focuses on the careers of seven- teen women between 1993 and 2010. Prior to 1993 the women had all moved from positions in organizations and set up their own businesses. I interviewed them twice, once in 1993/4 where I focused primarily on that career transition, and again 17 years later where discussions vii Preface ranged from reflections on that earlier transcript to what happened in the interim and thoughts about the future. This monograph is an exploration of these overlapping stories. In addition to the move from employment to self-employment, themes include career-making in changing contexts; career development over time; late career and retirement, and the role of others. In the last chapter these strands culminate in the concept of the career imagination. My sincerest thanks go to the seventeen women who so graciously and generously gave up their time to talk to me about their careers, nar- rating their transition the first time we met, and 17 years later working with me to revisit this account—challenging, recasting, and sometimes confirming it in light of their subsequent experience. Their voices per- meate the text that follows, but their names have been changed to preserve their anonymity. I am grateful to David Musson for his enthusiasm for the project and Clare Kennedy for her steadfast guidance on the process, and Anne Halliday for her meticulous attention to detail. I would also like to thank Jo Duberley and John Arnold for our many years of collabo- ration and friendship. Finally, my love and thanks to my family: Ed, Hannah, Ben, and Izzi. Izzi and Hannah, your contributions to the final stages were invaluable. viii Contents 1. Women’s Career Lives: 1993–2010 1 2. Telling Career Stories 13 3. The Cast 24 4. The Transition from Employment to Self-Employment 44 5. Changing Contexts 73 6. Developing Careers through Time 95 7. As in Work, so too in Retirement 120 8. The Importance of Others 145 9. The Career Imagination 164 References 181 Index 189 ix
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