Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
PAPER SESSION 1
Work, Employment and Economic Life
A005, GOVAN MBEKI BUILDING
The Effects of the Economic Crisis and Austerity in Individuals’ Life Course: Results from Narrative
Biographies in Spain and the UK
Lopez-Andreu, M.
(University of Manchester)
The paper presents results of a research that has the aim to analyse how individuals cope with the employment
changes that recession has provoked in the UK and Spain. The recession and its aftermath (austerity policies) imply
the reinforcement of previous existing trends towards more instability and insecurity in the labour market. This
increase of insecure employment and employment transitions interact with changes in social and employment policies
that deepen trends already existing since the 1980s towards a greater fragmentation of society. The research is
focused in the effects of the crisis as a turning point; that is it is interested in individuals who experienced a downward
move in their employment situation. The research uses narrative biographies to investigate how these individuals cope
with these employment changes in terms of the supports and resources they use and have access to reach their
employment, personal and social objectives. The research question that emerges is how individuals with different
social profiles and resources cope with these changes? And how are the changes affecting their living and working
conditions? Such a perspective requires an interaction between labour market trajectories and life course as options,
choices and projects in the labour market are closely linked to household and family situation, the institutional context,
community networks and personal and social orientations. We will present main findings of the biographies and we will
discuss the role of institutional changes in shaping life course and in eroding the material basis of citizenship (capacity
of being and doing).
Histories of Belonging, Relational Agency and Moving on after Job Displacement
Vieno, A.
(University of Helsinki)
Workers in Western Europe and North America embedded in the stable industrial structures created after World War II
are now confronting the displacing effects of automation, outsourcing and new management practices: what Richard
Sennett calls 'the specter of uselessness'. Aging workers in particular are disadvantaged by their long careers linked
to one industry and by modest, specialised or outdated educational credentials.
In my paper, I examine the trajectories of workers displaced from aviation ground services in Finland, an industry of
perpetual crisis in the past decade. Drawing upon interviews with workers and secondary data from corporate, union
and news sources, I first investigate how employment practices in earlier decades fostered workers' spatial, temporal,
social and affective embeddedness in the industry. Workers displaced by new practices of outsourcing face the
dilemma of holding on to disintegrating bonds of belonging to the industry, or looking for new employment in different
fields, which entails not only economic sacrifice but also re-evaluating what makes life worth living. Workers
responded in different ways to this dilemma, acting relationally in structures of constraint and opportunity formed by
intersections of age, gender, interpersonal bonds, different histories of embeddedness in the industry and by the
structure of the displacement process itself. In order to grasp the dynamics of displacement and its impact on lives
and livelihoods, I am working towards a perspective sensitive not only to workers' different positions, but to particular
historical formations of belonging in different industries and how agency is relationally constructed in displacement
processes.
Changing Careers?: Stories and Experiences of Significant Work-life Change
Potter, J.
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
This paper explores the personal experience of changing 'career'. It does so through a narrative lens; through the
accounts of men and women who have undergone dramatic career change. The literature on the changing structure of
career – including that on 'boundarylessness' and 'portfolio' work – tends to pay less attention to the way that people
deal with these changes. With this in mind my analysis is twofold: examining, on the one hand, the well referenced
notion that careers are less linear and predicable than previously theorized; while on the other, the way that career
change is enacted by individuals – how it is negotiated and experienced. Based on material from a forthcoming
Palgrave monograph, and drawing on empirical research involving 30 narrative interviews with individuals who have
undergone significant work-life transitions, the paper examines the more subjective, intimate, and interpersonal
aspects of careers that are unstable, or in transition. These more 'personal' insights highlight how focusing on the
83 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University