Disaffection rising? Generations and the personal consequences of paid work in contemporary Canada

Abstract

Spanish

French

This article highlights the ‘personal consequences’ of contemporary employment relations in Canada, characterized by increasing precarity, shifting gender relations in families and in the workforce, the expansion of post-secondary education and an intensifying polarization of wealth. It connects these consequences to perceptions of intergenerational differences and conflict at and around work. Drawing on qualitative, narrative data from 52 interviews conducted between 2009 and 2011, the author proposes that younger people (or ‘generations’) are more likely to construct and be associated with narratives of disaffection about work. In contrast, what the author terms ambivalent and faithful narratives are largely associated with and constructed by workers who entered and experienced a far different world of work.

Keywords

Canada discourse employment generations narrative

There is a long, eclectic sociological tradition of examining the ‘personal consequences’ (Sennett, 2011) of changes in the world of work. From Weber’s wrestling with the different ‘economic ethics’ and ‘motivations’ confronting one another in his time (Weber, 1920), through Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) reflections on the ‘hidden injuries’ inflicted by the class structure of the late 20th century, sociologists and their interlocutors have sought to understand how shifting economic relations – between workers and employers (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005); among producers, production and products (Braverman, 1979); within and across families (Pahl, 1984); and between work and the life course (Marshall et al., 2001) – impact our selves and identities (Doherty, 2009; McDaniel et al., 2013; Siltanen et al., 2009).

Lately, the focus has been on the influence of (usually ‘post-industrial’) capitalism, globalization and neoliberalism on working conditions and employment relations, and the kinds of people produced by these realignments of market, state and civil society (Somers, 2008). Within the last 20 years we have met the ‘entrepreneur[s] of [the] self’ (Foucault, 2008: 226; cf. McNay, 2009) created by a new ‘enterprise culture’ (MacDonald, 1996), the ‘corroded characters’ of ‘the new capitalism’ (Sennett, 2011), the ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2003) produced by global capitalist relations and the ‘mythical’ ‘reflexive worker’ who emerges from precarious and transitory work relations and conditions (Atkinson, 2010).

It is also now widely accepted that the effects of localized economic shifts and wider political economic restructuring are unevenly distributed across social groups. One of the most popular social divisions to come under the microscope is age. Studies in this area have consistently shown that young workers and recent graduates are the hardest hit by economic crises and the last to bounce back in economic recoveries (Scarpetta et al., 2010); they tend to bear the brunt of downturns, first in higher unemployment (ILO, 2010), and subsequently in long-term ‘wage-scarring’ (Oreopoulos et al., 2006). Sometimes, such studies have been framed as studies of different ‘generations’, although this concept and the perspective it encourages on social life have recently and rightfully been subject to major criticisms (Foster, 2013a, 2013b; White, 2013; see also Kertzer, 1983; McDaniel, 2004; Pilcher, 1994; Riley et al., 1972).

This article focuses on the ‘personal consequences’ of contemporary employment relations in Canada, characterized by increasing precarity, shifting gender relations in families and the workforce, the expansion of post-secondary education and an intensifying polarization of wealth. It connects these consequences to perceptions of intergenerational differences and conflict at and around work. The intent is not to identify distinct generational experiences, consequences or identities, but rather to show how people’s encounters with changing labour markets and employment relations are affecting their perspectives on employment, their approaches to ‘making a living’ (Watson, 2009) and the way they narrate (i.e. make sense of) their working lives, and how these are in turn connected, discursively, to the idea of generations. While the empirical focus is on Canada, and no attempt is made to generalize to other contexts, the insights offered here are worth carrying to other places and times (Flyvbjerg, 2006).

Drawing on narrative data from 52 interviews conducted between 2009 and 2011, I propose that younger people who entered the labour market after the pivotal political economic changes outlined here were well under way are more likely to construct and be associated with narratives of disaffection about work as we know it. This narrative is not a new way of narrating and ‘relating to work’ (Foster, 2013a), but it does appear to strike people of all ages as ‘new’, ‘young’ or ‘generational.’ In contrast, what I term ambivalent and faithful narratives are largely associated with and constructed by workers who entered and experienced a much different world of work – before documented increases in precarity, the rise in women’s labour force participation, the expansion of post-secondary education and the massive polarization of wealth post-Second World War had moved to the centre of popular consciousness about Canada’s economic situation.

I argue that these three competing narratives about work are basic to understanding the surge in ‘generationalist’ thinking (White, 2013) over the last five or so years. But they also offer insight into the ontological impacts of economic restructuring – specifically, the kinds of people (i.e. subjectivities, biographies) who have been produced by these realignments of employers, workers, education and families. I begin by briefly presenting these shifts as they have played out in Canada. Following that, I introduce the study on which this article is based, reflecting on the implications of taking a narrative and discourse-focused approach to studying work. Then, I show and analyse the three narratives introduced above, building the argument that they are discursively connected to generation and underlie what many recognize as ‘(inter)generational’ differences and tensions. I conclude with reflection on a question often raised in response to research on generations: are the differences and dynamics explored in this article a function of generation, or ‘just’ age?

Context: Political economic change in Canada

There is no social scientific consensus about the severity, scope and nature of changes in paid and unpaid work over the last half-century, but there is general agreement that things have changed, locally and globally, when it comes to the way societies organize and complete the work of sustaining and reproducing themselves.

In Canada, four changes dominate in social scientific accounts of work-related shifts over the last 50 years; all are visible at the national level, but are also embedded in wider transnational or global political economic transformations. Importantly, key shifts in all four of the political economic dynamics outlined below are traceable to one common period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

The ‘partial eclipse’ of the standard employment relationship

The first transformation marking the narratives in this study is the creation, rise, zenith and subsequent decline of the ‘standard employment relationship’ or the SER. Although debate simmers around the angle of this decline, there is convincing evidence that the SER – a constellation of job permanence, working on-site for a single employer and the 40-hour work week – has given considerable ground to non-standard employment relationships, characterized by temporary contracts, freelance, home-based or agency-mediated work and irregular or part-time schedules (Vosko, 2009; but cf. Fevre, 2007).

Beginning around the 1970s, the percentage of full-time paid employment (as a portion of total employment) declined in Canada, the US, Australia and the majority of European Union (EU) countries (Vosko, 2009: 74–75). Regulations upholding the SER as the dominant employment relationship relaxed, there was a concomitant decline in union activity (Jackson, 2010: 225) and new technologies allowed businesses to operate (and capital to flow) in patterns that were increasingly ‘disembedded’ from time and place as conventionally understood (Giddens, 1991).

Statistical evidence around this shift is mixed. Some Canadian data suggest that job stability and tenure have remained relatively steady over the last 40 years (Heisz, 2005), and even critical research documenting declines in full-time and permanent employment shows they have not been particularly steep. In Canada in 1983, 78% of all paid jobs were full-time positions; by 2006, this had fallen to 72% (Vosko, 2009: 75). From 1986 to 2006, the percentage of jobs that were permanent full-time dropped from 67% to 63% (Statistics Canada, 2010). However, the incidence of temporary work grew ‘rapidly’ from 1997 to 2005 (Statistics Canada, 2010), and more rigorous examinations show that temporary, casual and contract work has spread into more sectors, risen in key industries and among certain populations, and is difficult for conventional survey instruments to capture (Vosko, 2006). In interviews, moreover, the perception of declining job stability was widespread, and affected the way participants thought about work. Taking into account both statistical ‘realities’ and perceptions, a jagged historical fault-line around the late 1970s and early 1980s separates the world of paid and unpaid work of the immediate postwar era from the one we know today.

Importantly, the evolution of the SER depends on the age of the workers in question. From 2006 to 2010, the over-25 age group experienced gains in full-time employment, while the 25-and-under group experienced losses; all ages saw increases in part-time work (Statistics Canada, 2010). Data from the 2012 Labour Force Survey, meanwhile, show that the rates of non-permanent and part-time employment among younger Canadian workers far exceed those for older workers, even excluding students and others who opt for temporary and part-time jobs in order to pursue their studies (Foster, 2012). Thus, declines in job security and tenure have not been distributed evenly across age and likely other social divisions.

Women’s labour force participation

A second, related change commonly identified in social research is the rise in women’s labour force participation. Canadian statistics show a mostly steady increase in the percentage of women in the labour force (versus those who are not working or looking for work). In 1953, fewer than one-quarter of all Canadian working-age women (14 and older at that time) were in the labour force. By 1975, this had doubled, and in 1993 it was 57% (Basset, 1994). The percentage of women aged 15 and over in the labour force has continued this climb, sitting around 62% in 2012 (Statistics Canada, 2012).

As Vosko has documented, the influx of women into the workforce has deep roots in earlier political and legal struggles over the place of women vis-a-vis paid employment, and the role they ought to play in social and economic reproduction. One significant piece of this historical story is that the changes in employment regulations that allowed or encouraged women’s increased participation neglected to address who would be responsible for social reproduction – if women began working outside the home for pay in greater numbers, who would bear the responsibility for domestic work and childrearing (Vosko, 2009: 69)? This neglect has increased the pressures on families and governments (which often download the burden to families) to figure out how to raise children while minimizing the social and monetary costs of full or partial labour market withdrawal (cf. Gerson, 2009). This is acutely felt by young families seeking to raise children and nurture two careers.

Higher education

Women’s increasing labour force participation was accompanied by their enrolment in post-secondary institutions in greater numbers, but there has actually been a rise in post-secondary enrolment across the board. This is part of the third political economic dynamic of relevance to the working life stories in this article. Enrolment in universities and colleges has doubled in Canada since 1980 (AUCC, 2011) with the restructuring of the economy away from manufacturing and primary industries towards service sector, information and high-tech industries. University budgets have also risen, even through the recession of 2008 and beyond, and are only now beginning to show signs of contraction (Usher, 2013). At the same time, there are rising doubts about the ‘payoff’ to higher education, with scores of master’s and doctorate-holders underemployed in jobs that do not technically require an advanced degree (HEQCO, 2013).

Rising inequality

The fourth area of change marking the lifetimes of participants is the rapid polarization of wealth in Canada over the last three decades. According to Conference Board of Canada (2011) statistics, income inequality began to increase sharply in the mid-1980s, reached a pinnacle in 2004, and levelled off somewhat after 2005. Although the ‘average Canadian’ is ‘better off’ today, the richest quintile of Canadians (the wealthiest 20%) own nearly 40% of the country’s national income, while the bottom quintile have just 7.2% (Conference Board of Canada, 2011; Yalnizyan, 2010).

Thus, within the lifetimes of most of the people in this study, a set of salient shifts have occurred in the Canadian social, political and economic landscape, as the normative model of employment (full-time, continuous work for one employer) has given way to new forms (part-time, casual, agency-mediated and self-employed); as women have entered the workforce in increasing numbers; as post-secondary education has become the dominant mode of moving from mandatory schooling to the labour market; and as incomes have rapidly polarized and wealth has concentrated in the hands of the country’s richest inhabitants. As I argue below, the intersection of participants’ lives with various points along this historical timeline shapes their narratives, and the ‘generationalist’ thinking they inspire (White, 2013).

The study

The narratives included here come from a qualitative study conducted from 2009 to 2011 in three Canadian cities and their surrounding areas. I interviewed 52 people (30 women and 22 men) aged 25 to 86 – an intentionally wide age distribution, with participants in each decade from twenties to eighties. Their past and present occupations varied widely, from public servants to aestheticians, research scientists to fiction writers, factory workers to delivery truck drivers; some were retired, some worked part-time, some were unemployed and some were on paid parental leave. Together, they form a ‘statistically nonrepresentative stratified sample’ (Trost, 1986) with wide variation in terms of education levels, and some variation in terms of ethnicity and language. Accordingly, I make no claims to formal scientific generalizability. But I maintain, following Flyvbjerg (2006), that ‘formal generalization is only one of many ways by which people gain and accumulate knowledge’, and that the insights gained from ‘carefully chosen cases’ are no less important than those gleaned from large numbers of observations (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 227).

Interviewees were found through posters in community centres, contacts in specific occupations and local large institutions, and a story in a community newspaper, but most were secured through extended networks of professional, community and social contacts. Interviewees often put me in touch with one or two others whom they believed would have something ‘interesting’ to say, or had had noteworthy careers, but many also connected me to friends and family members with more ordinary stories, whom they simply believed would be willing to participate. All knew the study was about work and would involve talking about their experiences with paid, domestic and volunteer work over the course of their lives.

Interviews opened with a simple request: ‘Tell me your working life story, beginning with your earliest memory of work – your own or someone else’s – and leading up to the present.’ Thus, interviewees knew that the focus of the study was work, so work was the thread to which all of their stories clung. Still, very little intervention was needed to braid personal, ‘non-work’ stories into the narrative. All interviews were recorded except one. They lasted anywhere from 30 minutes (in the case of the youngest participant) to two hours, but most took around one hour. All were transcribed and analysed using the Listening Guide (Doucet and Mauthner, 2008) and Atlas.ti.

Narrative and discourse

My analysis and interpretation of participants’ stories is rooted in a set of epistemological assumptions about the relationship between narrative, discourse, subjectivity and sense-making. Specifically, narratives are built on and contribute to discourses that are available in limited supply, and narratives allow us as humans to understand, make sense of and in turn act in the world(s) around us (Somers, 1994). They can help researchers come to understand something of the people or subjectivities induced by (and inducing) changes in the world they inhabit. While the epistemological and ontological questions of how much we can actually know is beyond the scope of this article, my position, following the work of Doucet and Mauthner (2008), is as follows:

… there may well be something ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ or outside narrative; nevertheless, all we can know is what is narrated by subjects, as well as our interpretation of their stories within the wider web of social and structural relations from which narrated subjects speak. (Doucet and Mauthner, 2008: 404)

In other words, narratives are one, and possibly the best, way we can come to know research subjects as subjects. However, in the words of Ken Plummer, the narrative ‘is not the life’ – nor the subject – ‘which is in principle unknown and unknowable’ (Plummer, cited in Doucet and Mauthner, 2008: 404).

The ‘world(s)’ or ‘wider webs’ around us are, of course, bigger and prior to our personal narratives; key to my approach to combining discourse and narrative is that our experience and location in those worlds have a profound (and reciprocal) effect on the discourses available to us, and the kinds of narratives we produce (Foster, 2013a). Discourse, meanwhile, is understood here as ‘a vehicle for thought’ which ‘allows certain things to be said and impedes or prevents other things from being said’, although it ‘channels’ more than it ‘controls’ (Purvis and Hunt, 1993: 485). In other words, the narratives analysed in this study are the complex products of people’s experiences and the discursive (and ideological) resources they use to construct meaningful and coherent stories about those experiences.

People’s personal narratives are already well established as a unit of analysis in studies of people’s working lives. In fact, prominent sociologists of work have recently called specifically for a revival of worker narratives ‘as a means of understanding social questions’ (Schoneboom, 2011: 132; Taylor et al., 2009). In this study, narratives are taken as a source of data with much to say about the intersection of lives/biographies and their times/histories (Mills, 2000); more specifically, the ‘working life stories’ (Foster, 2013a) featured here are particularly insightful about the personal impacts of shifting economic relations on the lives of working people in Canada, how these people interpret and position themselves in relation to the changes taking place around them, and what kinds of discursive and ideological resources are available for them to draw on. ‘Generation’ is treated here as a powerful discourse that makes sense of and shapes social relations and social action, rather than an age-based category to which people belong.

Disaffection, ambivalence and faith

Although every story was unique, there were consistent and striking themes connecting some narratives and distancing others. After fieldwork completed, I organized all 52 narratives into three groups based on the patterns in the way in which participants talked about working life. I later came to understand the three groups as representing a threefold typology of work narratives (Foster, 2013a). Specifically, participants shared stories characterized by either faith, ambivalence or disaffection towards paid work as they experience it, in ‘post-industrial’, capitalist Canada.

Although my argument regarding the ‘generational’ qualities of these narratives does not hinge on their overlap with specific age groups, it is worth noting that narratives of disaffection tended to come from interviewees younger than 40, ambivalent narratives came solely from interviewees over age 45 and faithful narratives were most common among interviewees over 40 years of age. There were some exceptions and, in some instances, ‘traces’ of one narrative type visible in narratives dominated by another type. The fact that the older participants are divided between two narrative types, while the younger participants tend towards just one, could be a sign of decreasing heterogeneity, but it could also be a function of the small sample size and the types of people interviewed. A fuller exploration of this possibility, while interesting, would be beyond the scope of this article.

I describe and present examples of each narrative type below, focusing on just one ‘exemplary narrative’ that aptly conveys the characteristics of the type it represents, and pointing to smaller details and general themes across the other interviews.

Faith

Five basic themes connect faithful narratives to one another: a reverence for work, respect for conventionally successful people, belief in the parity of work effort and reward, a strong connection drawn between personal and organizational goals and an emphasis on financial independence.

In narrating her life and career as a human resources professional, 65-year-old Lynn emphasized all of these. She rooted her working life story in what she described as a humble beginning: her father owned a men’s clothing store, and his approach to work had rubbed off on her early. ‘[I] never ever got the sense that work was drudgery – always that there was something interesting or new or different’, she recalled. ‘He had a reputation as being someone who had quality goods so … the enduring message was “go for quality”.’ She said she learned two main lessons from her parents: first, ‘ “if you want something, you need to work for it” ’, and second, ‘ “take responsibility for yourself” ’. She said, ‘there was always a sense from my parents that the effort was worth it’.

These lessons were constructed in Lynn’s narrative as biographical elements, rooted to family values and very personal experiences, but their believability (and the achievability of the priorities they espouse) hinges on where Lynn’s life intersects with larger historical and economic timelines.

For example, Lynn came of age just as the rise of women’s labour force participation was becoming evident. She was among the first big wave of middle-class women flooding into universities in the 1960s, earning an undergraduate degree in psychology. She married, had two daughters, and then began taking classes at a business school. When she returned to paid work after focusing on her children and school for a few years, she got a job at a new, booming computer company. Because her husband was self-employed and ‘flexible’, Lynn’s family followed her career ever since.

Like others with faithful narratives, Lynn described her work as a ‘collective’ effort; she narrated her experience at the computer company in the ‘we’, and the approach she described taking was always centred on the company’s success, and not her own personal advancement. This is not to say that she neglected her individual success, but that she framed her well-being and the company’s growth as one and the same. When asked about her work ethic – and what constituted a ‘good’ one, in her view – she said it was a matter of ‘being prepared to see the bigger picture’: asking ‘what’s the goal here? How much can I do to make sure that we as a collective reach the goal?’ Lynn’s self-positioning vis-a-vis the organization that employed her was similar to many others who shared faithful narratives. William (60, retired public servant) described his career as a ‘contribution’ to his occupation and employer; Marsha (55, consulting business owner) said that her personal work philosophy was to help ‘excellence prevail’ in Canadian industry. In these and many other faithful narratives, what was good for the employer was seen as good for the worker, and vice versa.

Most faithful narratives involved a certain constellation of biographical and historical factors. Like many others, the faithful lessons Lynn inherited from her parents – whose working lives unfolded during the heyday of the SER – actually rang true in her own life. She worked hard and was rewarded, and this she regarded as a necessary foundation for a strong commitment to the workplace and the internalization of organizational goals. Lynn also rode a wave of women’s increased labour force participation and benefitted from her access to a post-secondary education. Finally, she retired just before the computer company she worked for imploded, laying off thousands of workers nationwide. Therefore, unlike many others in my study, Lynn was not impelled to find another job with an outdated diploma. Her faith in work was never significantly challenged by what happened in her own life and career, for a combination of biographical and historical reasons. This experience, and the narrative with which it aligns, is what sets Lynn and the other ‘faithful’ apart from those who shared narratives of ambivalence or disaffection.

Ambivalence

The major economic shifts identified earlier cut right through 57-year-old Ken’s early career in the 1970s and 1980s, and have had lasting ramifications for his working life story. The ambivalent narrative he shared exemplifies the theme common to all ambivalent narratives: the sense of feeling two ways at once about work – seeing it as an essential moral and practical obligation, and thus being unable to imagine life without it, but failing to find the satisfaction, security, recognition and fulfilment others seemed to find in just doing it.

When we met, Ken was nearing retirement – sort of. Born and raised in a small fishing town, he earned pocket money delivering newspapers and doing yard work for his neighbours. When he was around 13, he got a ‘real’ job at a fish processing plant. He knew early on that he did not want to be a fisherman like his father, who died at sea of a heart attack when Ken was in his early teens. Moreover, he wanted to get out of his hometown.

This desire was spurred – and rendered realistic – by the timing of Ken’s entry into the labour market: it was the late 1960s, and social and geographic mobility were more commonplace and widespread than they had been in the interwar years and earlier. Rising national wealth meant that Canadians could expect or hope for greater prosperity than any could remember at that time. Although many (women, visible minorities, people with disabilities) were excluded from this hope, the conditions were set for a growing number of people to do (or expect to do) economically better than their parents. It was possible and culturally encouraged for young men in rural places to imagine moving on.

So, when he finished high school, Ken started looking for jobs that would take him away. He had his sights set on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but he couldn’t wait the year until he turned the requisite 19 years of age. When the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) came through town, as they did each year, recruiting young men, Ken signed up, seeing it positively as ‘the next best thing’ to the RCMP.

His career with the Air Force was a steady upward climb. He progressed through the ranks faster than most – which caused him to lose a few friends along the way – until he was commissioned as an officer ‘ahead of my time’. He managed to get posted back on the east coast, where he wanted to be, and he and his wife had three children. Up to this point, the message from Ken’s narrative is that the military took care of him; he committed to them and they returned the favour. Then, in the early 1990s, Ken experienced some chest pain and, having lost his father to a heart attack, went to the doctor. Although he was active and health-conscious, he was told that his arteries were clogged and he would need a bypass. It was successful, and he continued working and playing sports as usual. Then it happened again. And again. Still, he continued to work and was in top form after the bypasses. As he remembered it,

I proceeded to do all the things they’d asked me to do, I had my medicals and after however long it was they gave me pretty much a clean bill of health with the exception of … they downgraded my medical category just a bit, uh I wasn’t fit for service all the way around but I could still go up in the air and do my normal job. I couldn’t go into extreme conditions … I mean I kinda wouldn’t want to do some of the stuff anyway! But anyway I had a clean bill of health, I was uh, considered fit for air, I had a job to go air training, I was already earmarked to go.

But this unfolded as the Canadian Air Force was undergoing restructuring. Members were shuffled in the ranks and across the country, and Ken received a letter. ‘My medical category was such that I was considered unfit. So I got the message saying that, you know, you’re outta here in however many months. In 1995, November.’

Here, Ken’s biography intersects with a key moment in Canadian economic history, and it impacts his working life story and the discourse underpinning it. The public service, including the military, underwent massive layoffs and restructuring through the 1980 and 1990s ‘neoliberal’ reforms (Clark, 2002). Ken was an easy target for layoff. When it happened, he worried about his livelihood, his family and his future. While he missed certain things about his job – ‘the camaraderie, the goings-on, the community’ – these were secondary to the basic need to provide for his family, and the concern that being ‘44, going on 45’ with no post-secondary education would make it difficult to find a job.

However, within a year, an old Air Force connection came through, and Ken was asked to join the office of an air engineering testing facility – a great match for his skill-set and experience. He was still working this job when I interviewed him. He liked it, and found parts of it rewarding. But Ken admitted that the rewards of his job were harder to define now than they had been in the military. It took some thought for him to pinpoint what he was working for or toward. ‘Other than better pay?’ he asked, chuckling. ‘I still get a pay raise every year whether I did enough work for it or not.’

Without a sense of a greater purpose, he admitted that, lately, he sometimes woke up not wanting to work, something he did not ‘recall ever feeling like’ before, in the Air Force. He had also entertained new doubts about what his work did for the world around him. ‘At times’, he said, ‘I mean, I think about the end result if the weapons were ever fired in anger. Yeah. Or, you know, if we were ever doing something other than just trials, tests and trials. Yeah it would have a serious impact on a number of people.’ But doing his job, day to day, Ken said, ‘I don’t think about it – whether I’m contributing to the greater good.’ He recognized that he worked ‘in a war-mongering field’, but he saw it as necessary to ‘protect’ other people. Still, he admitted, ‘if you want to follow the missile to where it ends up … it’s not a pretty picture’.

Throughout his narrative, Ken seemed to say what many other ambivalent narratives conveyed: a ‘job’s a job’. Jobs could be boring or unfulfilling or unfair; they could do damage and pose danger to others, like the military, even though it also protected people; they could be dirty, like the fish plant; but they had to be done, and no one could argue with that. Moreover, Ken shared the same general feelings about retirement as most of the people with ambivalent narratives – he was not sure if he would ever really do it. There were practical concerns about ‘how much is enough [retirement income]’, but the more pressing question for Ken was, ‘do you really want to stop working?’ He continued:

If you quit doing what you’re doing here … what are you going to do? Are you going to find something else to do or are you going to sit on your thumbs? I don’t want to sit on my thumbs but I don’t want to work [here] either.

Like his ambivalent peers, the prospect of ‘doing nothing’ was hard for Ken to grasp, if not downright appalling. And retirement highlighted an additional significant difference between ambivalent and faithful narratives. Specifically, many who shared ambivalent narratives looked forward to retirement as a time to reclaim their lives, even as they worried about what life would be like without paid work. Victor, an 82-year-old retired factory worker, said he woke up the day after retiring with the feeling that ‘the whole day was mine’. Unlike in faithful narratives, where work time and personal time were almost indistinguishable, in ambivalent narratives, work time belonged to the boss, the organization, the workplace. Reflections on retirement brought this relation to the fore, highlighting the way that work was constructed as a necessary evil in ambivalent narratives. As Stacey (54, public servant) put it, work was ‘all foreplay to retirement’: advisable, maybe even necessary, but not the main event. It was not the ‘essence of life’, the way it was in 60-year-old William’s faithful narrative, but it was absolutely essential, for sustenance and to fulfil a vague obligation to pull one’s weight through productive, paid activity.

Ambivalence makes sense in lives like Ken’s, where the promises of rewards for hard work, and reciprocal loyalty and commitment between employers and employees, were believable in the beginning, but are eroded by the evidence of personal experience. This is a common feature of working lives that begin near the pinnacle of the SER and span its long and gradual decline, but direct experience with layoffs and restructuring was certainly not necessary. The construction of an ambivalent narrative seemed only to depend on the narrator’s creeping doubt that they would always be rewarded for their efforts with a dependable paycheque, and their inability to find enough non-monetary rewards in their jobs to make up for the lack of certainty. The same challenges underlie the next narrative to be discussed – that of disaffection – but the stories take shape differently, drawing on different discourses and supporting different approaches to the task of making a living.

Disaffection

The general themes connecting disaffected narratives to one another were apparent long before I found the right word to encapsulate them. What I heard were narratives that took up critical or pessimistic discourses about social change and upward mobility, and revolved around experiences of the detrimental impacts of the four historical changes identified earlier. The people sharing disaffected narratives were sceptical about the point of a life dominated by work; thus they emphasized ‘work–life balance’ or ‘work–life blend’. Overall, they expressed a desire for one of two things: to find total fulfilment through work that aligned with personal values, but could be divorced from conventional (materialistic and careerist) notions of success; or to find a job that did not clash with personal values, paid just enough, and left the person with enough time and energy to devote to pursuits of passion outside paid work. Generally if they could not find the former, they would settle for the latter. The only thing they were not willing to do was feel ambivalent about work; it had to have a higher purpose than money or advancement for advancement’s sake. A job was never ‘just a job’. Finally, the disaffected narrative was almost always about a ‘black sheep’ – a person whose approach to paid work went against the grain, confused other people, and made life difficult but more fulfilling. I had all of these themes in mind, but no word to describe them, until I stumbled upon French Marxist social philosopher Andre Gorz’s (1989) writings on disaffection:

Disaffection with waged work has been on the increase over the last twenty years or so. … Particularly prevalent among young workers, this attitude finds expression not so much in a lack of interest or a refusal to work hard but rather in a desire that work should fit into life instead of life having to fit into or be sacrificed to one’s job or career. Workers, particularly young workers, aspire to (re)gain control of their lives.

Gorz makes clear that the object of these workers’ disaffection is not work itself, either as an abstract notion or a specific job, but with the conditions that exhort workers to devote their lives and tie their identities to jobs that do not enrich those lives or shore up those identities. Both Gorz’s formulation and the emergent themes from my research are exemplified well by 31-year-old Bettina’s narrative. The daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants to Canada, Bettina grew up working in her parents’ restaurant in small-town Ontario. As a child – ‘free labour’, she joked – she brought patrons their bills, cleared tables and helped with other small but essential tasks. When she graduated from high school, she moved away and worked a series of creative jobs, interspersed with jobs in the service industry when she couldn’t find work as a writer or photographer. She would concentrate work in short, intense spurts and then use the money she earned to travel, taking photos at music events, interviewing interesting people and posting the results online.

Eventually, she was noticed by a major newspaper and was asked to produce content on an ongoing basis. This relationship provided at least some security, but she continued to scrape by with short work contracts. Her parents, she said, were disappointed, worried and confused by her decision to pursue photography and writing. Bettina figured their worry stemmed from a much different approach to work:

I think they’re more concerned about money and making sure you’re settled in the end, whereas I’m more concerned with kind of a day-to-day sort of existence and making sure that I’m enjoying what I do when I wake up in the morning, um and I didn’t see that with them. I don’t wanna poo-poo their lives at all, but I could tell that they were suffering on some days. And it’s not that I’m lazy but I … don’t wanna wake up doing something I really don’t wanna do just so that 40 years down the line I’ll have enough money to do whatever I want or even like buy a house ’cause that’s … not my goal at all and I think that’s what my parents’ goals are: … to buy a property and make sure you have cars and stuff like that and I have a minimalist approach to what makes me happy in life I guess.

This complicated relationship between concerned parents and value-driven kids was a distinguishing trope in other disaffected narratives. Maia (35, independent book store owner), for example, confronted the same desire on the part of her mother, who tried to dissuade her from opening her store because ‘she wants me to have an easy life’. ‘What she just wasn’t understanding was that easy didn’t mean happy for me’, Maia explained. ‘And, in fact, easy meant really boring and unfulfilling to me.’

Maia, Bettina and others who shared disaffected narratives believed that the ‘job for life’ was an anachronism, and in its place, the best one could do was find work that aligned with one’s values. Specific jobs and paycheques could come and go – and thus getting too attached to material things was unadvisable – but integrity and passion were depicted as things a person had some control over. The key was maintaining some sense of agency around work, which usually meant passing up (or at least claiming to) seemingly lucrative opportunities in favour of ‘what really matters’.

This attitude is arguably a rational response to the features that have dominated the Canadian political economic landscape during the lifetimes of today’s youngest workers: the increasing emphasis on post-secondary education, alongside the decreasing value of the actual degrees earned; the new challenges associated with balancing aspirations in dual-earner families; and the rise and expansion of contract and temp-work, and the concomitantly increasing instability and precarity of wage labour (Standing, 2011). Bettina was intimately acquainted with this new world, having turned to temp agencies at various times, and working freelance in a field that once might have offered a full-time, permanent job. Others, like 30-something new parents Jodi and Brad, confronted the question of who would stay home with the baby, and all of the expectations and stereotypes that go along with such a decision, at the same time as they struggled with the uncertainty of Jody’s year-to-year nursing contracts and Brad’s intermittent work in the trades. Many others, who’d earned bachelor’s degrees and were already coming close to their horizons of possibility, considered returning to school for a graduate degree, but could not figure out where the jobs would be by the time they finished. For some, the solution was to pursue a passion and simply hope against the uncertainty that sustenance would follow.

Disaffection, generation and work today

The disaffected narrative was more common among the younger participants in this study – the 20-, 30- and even 40-somethings – who often self-identified as ‘the younger generation’ and set themselves apart from their ‘parents’ generation’. The themes conveyed in narratives of disaffection were also consistently linked to ‘young people’ and ‘the younger generation’ in older participants’ interviews. Many older participants, and some younger participants, were concerned about the consequences of disaffection around work, worrying that not enough people would want to move into management positions, and disparaging ‘entitlement’ – the word they used to describe seemingly ‘generational’ behaviour they did not understand, such as short job tenure or diminished ‘commitment’ to employers relative to older workers.

Thus, participants seemed to see the differences between ambivalent, faithful and disaffected narratives as generational differences. But in conferences and conversations about this study, questions have been raised as to whether disaffection is really a ‘generational’ thing, or just a ‘youth’ thing. People over 50, who remember espousing similar (although I would argue different in important ways) values around work in the late 1960s – referencing the ‘dropout culture’ of the period, and its resistance to ‘the man’ – wonder if today’s ‘disaffected youth’ will become tomorrow’s managers and employers or diligent, devoted workers, taking on more faithful narratives if they’re successful, and ambivalent ones if they fail to advance. On that point, I admit that this study’s snapshot design cannot attend to the ways that narratives may change over time. However, I argue that even if disaffection is ephemeral, it is still generational in the sense that generation is always about fleeting intersections of lives/biographies and times/histories; it is only when it is used as a container for actual people that it needs to be fixed, rigid and lasting in order to count.

Disaffection is aligned, in people’s narratives and in their reflections on the world around them, with a particular generation, and with experiences that are assumed to be shared among workers of a certain age who are confronting a particular political economy at a particular time; it is these connections that make it a generational matter. To assert that generation need not have static, permanent and fixed effects is merely to assert that lives and times develop relationally. It is to say that we must pay heed to both biography and history in order to know something of the slow, ongoing and historically contingent formation of the selves, subjectivities and worlds we seek to understand, and the narrative resources that offer us the chance to do so.

Thus, beyond being partly an argument for a particular, discourse-focused conception of generation, this article has attempted to say something about the ‘personal consequences’ of work in our contemporary alignment of civil society, market and state (Somers, 2008). This alignment, which is not unique to Canada, but is coming to be characteristic of many countries in the West and elsewhere, is what provides the conditions for the changes emphasized throughout the foregoing: withering job security, the near-hegemonic status of higher education as imperative to conventional success, the rise of women’s labour force participation (and with it, new challenges and opportunities for families and couples) and the decreasing economic returns to workers relative to their productivity and the earnings of their employers. These changes have clear consequences, not just for the raw, inventoried data of income, purchasing power, job tenure, mobility and employment relationships, but also for the kinds of people we are able to be, to be coherently, and for the kinds of narratives we are able to hold together.

The narratives presented here suggest that it is increasingly difficult to have faith in the conventional model of career success – work hard, commit to an employer and be rewarded – and increasingly undesirable to be ambivalent about paid work, especially when the paycheques and benefits that once might have enticed people to endure jobs and working conditions they found tolerable at best are increasingly unstable and gobbled up by inflation and rising costs of living. Without the reliable promise of a decent, ongoing paycheque, and with withering or non-existent benefit plans and pensions, it appears that working people are looking for other kinds of rewards. Whether they accept meagre pay or higher levels of insecurity in exchange for fulfilling work that aligns with their values, or seek work that ‘stays put’ and leaves them with time and energy to develop their values and pursue fulfilment outside the employment relationship, those who are disaffected with wage work in our contemporary economy are reshaping our collective sense of what is ‘normal’, advisable, realistic and acceptable when it comes to making a living. And none of this – the consequences, the narratives, the self-understandings and narrated subjectivities – can be understood without reference to the intersections of biography and history at play.

Footnotes

Funding

This study is based on the author’s dissertation, which was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship.

Author biography

Karen Foster is a Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario in 2012, and is the author of two books, including Generation, Discourse and Social Change (Routledge, 2013) and Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives: Work, Social Assistance and Marginalization (2012, with Dale Spencer). She is currently writing a new historical-sociological book on the concept of productivity in economic discourse and policy.

References

Atkinson

(2010) The myth of the reflexive worker: Class and work histories in neo-liberal times. Work, Employment and Society 24(3): 413–429.

AUCC (Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) (2011) Trends in higher education. Volume one: Enrolment Ottawa, ON. Available at: www.aucc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/trends-2011-vol1-enrolment-e.pdf (accessed 4 October 2011).

Basset

(1994) Declining female labour force participation. Perspectives on Labour and Income 6(2): 36–39.

Bauman

(2003) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, 1st edn. New York: Polity.

Boltanski

Chiapello

(2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Braverman

(1979) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: NYU Press.

Clark

(2002) Neoliberalism and public service reform: Canada in comparative perspective. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 35(4): 771–793.

Conference Board of Canada (2011) Hot topic: Canadian income inequality. Available at: www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/hot-topics/canInequality.aspx (accessed 4 October 2011).

Doherty

(2009) When the working day is through: The end of work as identity? Work, Employment and Society 23(1): 84–101.

10.

Doucet

Mauthner

(2008) What can be known and how? Narrated subjects and the Listening Guide. Qualitative Research 8(3): 399–409.

11.

Fevre

(2007) Employment insecurity and social theory: The power of nightmares. Work, Employment and Society 21(3): 517–535.

12.

Flyvbjerg

(2006) Five misunderstandings about case study research. Qualitative Inquiry 12(2): 219–245.

13.

Foster

(2012) Youth Employment and Un(der)employment in Canada. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

14.

Foster

(2013a) Generation, Discourse and Social Change. New York: Routledge.

15.

Foster

(2013b) Generation and discourse in working life stories. British Journal of Sociology 64(2): 195–215.

16.

Foucault

(2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador.

17.

Gerson

(2009) The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

18.

Giddens

(1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.

19.

Gorz

(1989) Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. Summary available at: %20Critique%20of%20Economic%20Reason.pdf (accessed 3 November 2011).

20.

Heisz

(2005) The evolution of job stability in Canada: Trends and comparisons with U.S. results. The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d’economique 38(1): 105–127.

21.

HEQCO (Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario) (2013) So you want to earn a PhD? The attraction, realities, and outcomes of pursuing a doctorate. @ Issue Paper No. 15. Available at: bit.ly/ZLE4JU (accessed 12 June 2013).

22.

ILO (International Labour Organization) (2010) Global Employment Trends for Youth. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Available at: www.ilo.org/empelm/what/pubs/lang–en/docName–WCMS_143349/index.htm.

23.

Jackson

(2010) Work and Employment in Canada: Critical Issues. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.

24.

Kertzer

(1983) Generation as a Sociological problem. Annual Review of Sociology 9: 125–149.

25.

McDaniel

(2004) Generationing gender: Justice and the division of welfare. Journal of Aging Studies 18(1): 27–44.

26.

McDaniel

Gazso

(2013) Generationing relations in challenging times: Americans and Canadians in mid-life in the Great Recession. Current Sociology 61(3): 301–321.

27.

MacDonald

(1996) Welfare dependency, the enterprise culture and self-employed survival. Work, Employment and Society 10(3): 431–447.

28.

McNay

(2009) Self as enterprise dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics. Theory, Culture and Society 26(6): 55–77.

29.

Marshall

Heinz

Kruger

. (2001) Restructuring Work and the Life Course. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

30.

Mills

(2000) The Sociological Imagination. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

31.

Oreopoulos

Von Wachter

Heisz

(2006) The short- and long-term career effects of graduating in a recession: Hysteresis and heterogeneity in the market for college graduates Working Paper No. 12159, National Bureau of Economic Research. Available at: www.nber.org/papers/w12159 (accessed 4 June 2013).

32.

Pahl

(1984) Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

33.

Pilcher

(1994) Mannheim’s sociology of generations: An undervalued legacy. The British Journal of Sociology, 45(3): 481–495.

34.

Purvis

Hunt

(1993) Discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology… The British Journal of Sociology 44(3): 473–499.

35.

Riley

Johnson

Foner

(1972) Sociology of Age Stratification. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

36.

Scarpetta

Sonnet

Manfredi

(2010) Rising youth unemployment during the crisis: How to prevent negative long-term consequences on a generation? OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 106, OECD Publishing.

37.

Schoneboom

(2011) Workblogging in a Facebook age. Work, Employment and Society 25(1): 132–140.

38.

Sennett

(2011) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

39.

Sennett

Cobb

(1972) The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

40.

Siltanen

Willis

Scobie

(2009) Flows, eddies, swamps and whirlpools: Inequality and the experience of work change. Canadian Journal of Sociology 34(4): 1003–1032.

41.

Somers

(1994) The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach. Theory and Society 23(5): 605–649.

42.

Somers

(2008) Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

43.

Standing

(2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

44.

Statistics Canada (2010) Full-time and part-time employment by sex and age group. Available at: www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/labor12–eng.htm (accessed 4 October 2011).

45.

Statistics Canada (2012) Labour force characteristics by age and sex – seasonally adjusted. Available at: www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/120810/t120810a001-eng.htm (accessed 20 August 2012).

46.

Taylor

Warhurst

Thompson

Scholarios

(2009) On the front line. Work, Employment and Society 23(1): 7–11.

47.

Trost

(1986) Statistically nonrepresentative stratified sampling: A sampling technique for qualitative studies. Qualitative Sociology 9(1): 54–57.

48.

Usher

(2013) More money than you think. Higher Education Strategic Associates ‘One Thought Blog’. Available at: higheredstrategy.com/more-money-than-you-think/ (accessed 15 July 2013).

49.

Vosko

(2006) Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

50.

Vosko

(2009) Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

51.

Watson

(2009) Work and the sociological imagination: The need for continuity and change in the study of continuity and change. Sociology 43(5): 861–877.

52.

Weber

(1920) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge and Sons.

53.

White

(2013) Thinking generations. The British Journal of Sociology 64(2): 216–247.

54.

Yalnizyan

(2010) The Rise of Canada’s Richest 1%. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.