Exploring biographies in a rapidly changing labor world

Abstract

The field of work and employment is among the most rapidly changing fields in current societies. The sociology of work attempts to map these changes, developing concepts that seek to grasp the transformations of labor. Currently, the discussion revolves around two main topics: (a) the ‘normality of non-normality’ expands on the flexible, insecure, and precarious forms of employment, while (b) the ‘subjectivation of work’ has been introduced in order to reflect the newly observed trend in which entrepreneurial strategies and rationales colonize the whole spectrum of an employee’s personal life and the self. It is a paradox, however, that while all these transformations in the labor world are taking place, interest in biographical research on the field has declined. This article aims to show the ways in which biographical narrative research has studied the changes that have taken place in the world of labor and to highlight new research possibilities. We especially wish to highlight ways in which reconstructive biographical research can contribute to the corpus of knowledge generated on this topic. We argue that, through biographical case reconstruction, paths by which transformations of the labor world become biographically significant for individuals and their social life worlds can be grasped in a dialectical manner. Employing systematic reconstruction of the ways in which social actors construct their work experiences biographically can serve a twofold purpose. First, it reveals how social rules, dominant discourses, and social conditions form new workers’ subjectivities, and second, it identifies biographical sources of resistance on the part of the actors.