Rupture and reclamation in the life story: The role of early relationships in self-narratives following a forced career transition

Sally Maitlis

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022, vol. 169, issue C

Abstract: Narrative approaches to the self suggest that forced career transitions disrupt individuals’ self-narratives and motivate their efforts to re-establish narrative coherence. To craft and rework their self-narratives, people draw on a range of relational resources, including relationships with family, friends, and other important people in their lives. In this paper, I explore the link, within individuals’ self-narratives, between people’s working lives following a forced career transition and their early parental relationships. I investigate this through a longitudinal narrative study of 21 professional dancers forced to change career after an injury, drawing on three waves of interviews over an eight-year period. I identify three types of self-narrative – Immersed-Striving, Oppositional-Seeking, and Supportive-Settling – that link a kind of early parental relationship to a kind of post-injury relationship to work. In each of these narratives, dance acts as a transitional object with a specific relational meaning – connection, agency, or direction – that was enacted in participants’ early relationships, and that they sought to re-establish through their post-injury working lives.

Keywords: Narrative; Forced transition; Career; Meaning; Transitional object; Parent; Relationship; Qualitative; Psychodynamic; Injury (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:169:y:2022:i:c:s0749597821001114

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.104115

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