Work Identity in Crisis? Rethinking the Problem of Attachment and Loss at Work

Abstract

The identity and meaning people obtain from their work is a central issue in contemporary sociology. There is a debate between those suggesting that we have witnessed either great rupture or continuity in the way employees engage with their jobs. This article reframes the question posed, developing a critical theoretical framework for understanding narratives of change derived from a range of theorists using concepts of nostalgia, tradition and generations. This framework is then used to read a set of work/life history interviews and autobiographical material from mainly older male workers in the UK railway industry who lament the erosion of their workplace culture and the sustainable moral order of the past. The article seeks to move beyond dismissing such accounts as simple nostalgia and instead suggests that these narratives can be understood as valuable organic critiques of industrial and social change emergent from work culture.

‘Flat-capping it’: Memory, nostalgia and value in retroactive male working-class identification

“…I argue here that the explicit recourse to collective memory by certain male participants in my research has resulted in the flowering of a nostalgic relationship to an industrialized past (see also Strangleman, 2012). However, in this particular context, I suggest that this type of remembrance is a critical arena in which identification takes place -or a type of retroactive strategy -as opposed to mere regression.…”

Contemporary patterns of career construction of a group of urban workers in São Paulo (Brazil)

“…Richardson (1993) concluded that there is a fragmentation of professions as a social basis of careers, as also stated Friedson (1986). Castel (2009), Grote andRaeder (2009), Heinz (2002), Kirpal (2004) and Strangleman (2012) indicated a feeling of crisis among those who must work without clear career direction because of destabilizing discontinuity in employment. Moreover, Blustein (2011), Touraine (2007) and Young and Collin (2004) highlighted processes of career co-construction between the person and the working world (Duarte, 2009;Savickas et al, 2009).…”

Belonging from afar: nostalgia, time and memory

“…All three types of nostalgia say as much about the present as they do about the past (cf. Popov and Déak, 2015;Strangleman, 2012;Pickering & Keightley, 2006). When we remember a past time or place, our consciousness actualises that particular memory as something that is of import to the present moment (Bergson, 1988(Bergson, [1896).…”