Temporary Derailment or the End of the Line? Managers Coping with Unemployment at 50

Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted at the outset of the 2008 economic downturn, this paper examines the experiences of a group of unemployed managers and professionals in their fifties. Following a review of existing literature, the authors use a narrative methodology to explore how these people incorporate the experience of job loss into their selfimages and identities. They identify certain core similarities in the experiences of unemployed professionals and then discern three narrative strategies through which unemployed professionals tried to make sense of their dismissal and sustain their sense of selfhood. The term 'narrative coping' is proposed as a way of describing each unemployed professional's struggle to construct a story that offers both meaning and consolation. The study reveals that individuals expressing the most profound despair (those for whom job loss was the 'end of the line') were those whose stories had achieved 'closure'. By contrast, most of those who maintained more openended narratives, were better able to contain their emotions, either by holding on to the belief that unemployment was a temporary career aberration or by abandoning the idea that life is the same as career and by moving on to a new stage of experimentation and bricolage akin to an identity moratorium.

(Re)Constructing Career Strategies After Experiencing Involuntary Job Loss

“…The episodic interview yields context-related presentations about particular experiences that the interviewee remembers in the form of a narrative. Routine phenomena, such as job loss (Gabriel et al, 2010), can be explored with episodic interviewing as it invites respondents to examine their everyday knowledge about a meaningful issue (Flick, 2014). This allows the researcher to compare the knowledge of interviewees from different social groups, that is, as a social representation (Flick, 2014).…”

“…Ezzy, 2000) and narrative approaches have been used in such studies (e.g. Gabriel, Gray, & Goregaokar, 2010). These inquiries, however, tend to examine the perceptions of managerial and professional employees (e.g.…”

“…Using an under-researched aspect of job loss, the way people incorporate the experience of job loss into their career stories (Gabriel et al, 2010), the article charts how involuntary job loss impacts on the four participants' career experiences and interpretations of career success and career agency. Similar to other narrative studies on identity work rendering a small number of stories (e.g.…”

“…The second attends to narrative constructions of identity and career experiences (see e.g. Bujold, 2004;Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010), particularly focusing on the strategies employed by former professionals as they interpret and (re)construct their career experiences and career success stories in an attempt to make sense of their job loss (Gabriel et al, 2010).…”

Posttraumatic growth during unemployment: A qualitative examination of distress and positive transformation

“…Research has consistently shown unemployment to be a highly traumatic event, characterized by feelings of shock, loss, and extreme distress (Cottle, 2003;Darity & Goldsmith, 1996;Gabriel, Gray, & Goregaokar, 2010;Madonia, 1983;Paul & Moser, 2009;Schneer, 1993;Wanberg, 2012). Garrett-Peters (2009) argues that unemployment can create a sense of rupture in identity that assaults the deepest aspect of self.…”