With or without you: Family and Career-Work in a Demanding and Precarious Profession

Abstract

Family arrangements are crucial to people's abilities to meet the high demands of professional careers; but most scholarship has examined stable, highly remunerated professions. To understand the relationship between career and family within the increasing number of precarious professions, we analyse interviews with 102 journalists. We discover two broad types of career-work practices these professionals employ to engage family in their careers: career-family positioning (i.e., crafting a narrative of how career and family relate) and career-family resourcing (i.e., generating resources from family for career or vice-versa). Together, these practices touch more family members – spouses, children, parents, siblings, and extended family members – and involve a wider range of resources than documented in stable fields. By piecing together variations of these practices, professionals construct career strategies that address their difficult context in different ways. Two strategies largely accept the demands and precarity, by prioritizing career and drawing on family, or prioritizing career and forgoing family. A third, prioritizing family over career, involves defying the demands. Gender does not clearly influence which career strategy people pursue. These findings advance scholarship on career and family in the professions, social-symbolic work, and contribute to careers research more broadly.