Abstract
In this article, I draw from the culture-centered approach to explore contemporary negotiations of career and work, positing career as a form of cultural practice. Rooted in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, the culture-centered approach examines the active accomplishment of culture through everyday communicative practices, amidst the structural conditions that frame lived experiences, and focusing specifically on marginalized groups. I first trace how culture is conceptualized in extant career studies, in the psychological, sociological and communicative streams. Identifying both key gaps and paradoxes in the literature, I outline the culture-centered approach, suggesting four key principles to reconceive career as cultural practice. Specifically: career draws on both structure and action; career agency is hybridized across individuals/collectives; career agency is layered and contested; and career is both discursive and material. The framework is illustrated using an example from an ongoing study on the negotiation of subsistence careers by Native Alaskans in the US Arctic.
The interdisciplinary field of career scholarship examines how individuals make sense of the various sequences of work over their lifetimes, across different organizational and (increasingly) geographical contexts (Adamson, 1997; Arthur, 2008; Moore et al., 2007). Culture becomes key in these negotiations, as a personal characteristic in the psychological tradition and as a structural formation that influences organizational practices in the sociological perspective (Stead, 2004; Thomas and Inkson, 2007). In this article, I draw from the culture-centered approach (CCA) to foreground both the ‘doing’ of culture through everyday communicative practices and the complex agencies at stake − especially the voices and actions of marginalized or subaltern groups. Career is reconceived here as a form of cultural practice, privileging particular subjectivities and downplaying others, even as culture itself is taken to be a complex system of ideas, values, beliefs and customs that reflects and sustains a particular way of life. Stemming from postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and a constitutive view of communication, the CCA notes the interplay of structure, culture and agency in everyday life (Dutta, 2008, 2011). It urges researchers to reflexively adopt an activist stance while studying social phenomena, and recognize the voices of subaltern actors, so that alternative forms of agency may be (re)privileged. The goal of CCA is not top-down intervention by career counsellors or practitioners, but engagement with and ‘deep transformation’ of the mainstream career structures that silence alternative voices.
In line with the CCA, I view culture as practice-based, dynamic and fluid, even as it draws from stable conventions − rather than an entirely fixed physical, psychological or contextual condition (see also Shome and Hegde, 2002a). In contrast to both the personal characteristic and structural formation views of culture, the CCA takes it to be actively accomplished in everyday social interactions, which then permeate the collective consciousness of a community, influencing subsequent social actions. Communication plays a key role in both reiterating and challenging culture; thus, interpersonal exchanges, narrated stories and myths, broader discourse frames of morality and legitimacy, nonverbal communicative acts − all of these are implicated in the ‘doing’ of culture, so that culture is both grounded in the communicative interaction at hand and forms the broader context surrounding it (see Table 1).
Comparing the culture-centered approach to careers with extant perspectives.
Conceptualizing career via the CCA as a form of cultural practice suggests some key implications for career studies. First, it de-normalizes practices and artefacts of dominant careers (e.g. linear advancement), recognizing the cultural enactments that constitute it. The CCA’s scope is thus not restricted to career practices of minority and/or international workers, but those from a variety of gendered, national, racial and occupational backgrounds. Second, even as career researchers tend to be divided between those studying the ‘objective’ aspects of career and its ‘subjective’ facets (Tams and Arthur, 2010), the CCA notes the dialectical interplay of discourse and materiality, so that the material (objective) conditions of careers (e.g. salary, hours worked) shape and are, in turn, shaped by the ongoing meaning-making (subjectivity) of work (e.g. meaningfulness). Third, the traditional individual-versus-collective dichotomy of career agency is disrupted, because CCA posits a ‘hybridized’ and liminal form of agency (Bhabha, 1994), so that career meanings are negotiated in an ongoing, contested manner by both individual workers and communities of practice. Fourth, the CCA emphasizes engaging with subaltern actors, highlighting not only a more diverse set of agents rather than the mainstream white collar careerist, but also alternative forms and expressions of career agency (e.g. Counsell, 1999). Finally, the CCA advocates an activist stance for researchers guided by principles of social justice, encourages a deeply situational approach to knowledge creation, and critiques traditional standards of theory development that espouse objectivity and generalization.
This article is comprised of three parts. First, I trace how culture is conceptualized in extant career scholarship, in the psychological, sociological and communicative streams. Identifying both key gaps and paradoxes in this literature, I then outline the CCA, suggesting four key principles to reconceive career as a cultural practice. Specifically: career draws on both structure and action; career agency is hybridized across individuals/collectives; career agency is layered and contested; and career is both discursive and material. Third, I draw from an ongoing study to illustrate these principles, in the context of Native Alaskan negotiation of careers.
Culture in career research
My objective in this section is not so much to review how culture is used as a study variable in extant research (for such a review, see Thomas and Inkson, 2007), but to trace how it is conceptualized as a social phenomenon. Noting that the psychological and sociological perspectives dominate career scholarship (Moore et al., 2007), I focus on these two streams, but also outline the newer communicative perspective. Given the enormity of this literature and journal page limits, I do not list every study dealing with culture below, using instead recent and prominent examples to foreground some dominant assumptions in the field.
Psychological perspectives
The impact of workers’ social identity on their career outcomes is predictably a key theme in this stream of research. Cognizant of the global economy, so that workers from different countries both compete and collaborate with each other, researchers have compared career enactments in the global North with those in other regions. Lee (2001) examined how parameters of career maturity − defined as ‘individual levels of career progress relative to a given set of career-relevant developmental tasks’ (p. 43) − differed between Korean and American high school students, so that while Americans were more goal-oriented, confident and independent than Koreans, they scored lower on preparation. Gentry et al. (2008) linked mentoring habits with national cultures that privileged ‘performance orientation,’ defined as the extent to which leaders set ambitious goals, communicate high expectations for subordinates and intellectually challenge them.
The influence of acculturation on foreign workers’ career success is another popular research theme, relevant in the age of the ‘global career,’ encompassing ‘more than one region of the world, either sequentially or concurrently’ (Pieperl and Jonsen, 2007: 351). Acculturation is typically defined in this scholarship as ‘the process of adopting the values and behaviors of a new culture’ (Yakushko et al., 2008: 370). Notably, Arthur and Popadiuk (2010) examined how an Iranian college student negotiated her major subject and subsequent career in light of her cultural identity and developmental stage, while Shinnar (2007) conducted a qualitative study on the barriers and drivers of career development for Mexican immigrants, identifying the interplay of psychological, cultural, life-stage and geographical factors. Although acculturation has often been celebrated because of its positive link with educational achievement, career decision self-efficacy, occupational values, job satisfaction and stress, Yakushko and Chronister (2005) have highlighted its ‘dark side,’ in provoking cultural and familial tensions. Most of the scholarship in this vein focuses on relatively privileged managers and expatriates from the global North, working in private sector companies (e.g. Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1992; Stahl and Cerdin, 2004). This research highlights the work demands of high-level expatriates, such as outlining a global vision for team members, work–life balance and strategic resource management (Morley and Heraty, 2004). Personal characteristics and psychological development of global managers over time, such as cultural and linguistic negotiations within nonnative contexts, have also been studied (Inkson et al., 1997).
The moniker of culture has been used to describe not only workers’ traits and behaviors, but also organizational environments, to ascertain whether particular workplaces are a good fit for individuals. Harris and Mossholder (1996) traced the congruence of individual values and organizational culture under conditions of organizational change, noting that congruence of employee perceptions of culture and their ideal culture influenced organizational commitment. Meyer et al. (2010) classified organizational cultures along two parameters of control/flexibility and internal/external focus, resulting in a typology of human relations (flexible, internal), open systems (flexible, external), internal processes (control, internal) and rational goal-oriented (control, external) cultures. They found that employees’ commitment to stay was strongest when their perceived fit with organizational culture corresponded with actual culture in the case of rational goal and internal processes cultures, while perceptions of culture were more important than fit in the case of human relations and external processes cultures (p. 469).
Finally, the psychological perspective has broached culture to examine issues of social justice in everyday workplaces, usually in the global North, such as the ‘glass ceiling’ for women’s career advancement, and resistance to diversity initiatives (Creed, 2006; Mighty, 1997; for an extensive review, see Prasad et al., 2007). Studies have probed ‘aversive racism’ (Dovidio and Gaertner, 2000), lying outside individuals’ conscious awareness, which manifests itself when individuals who otherwise pride themselves on lacking prejudice ‘are quite quick to derogate and exclude members of many socially marginalized groups without using openly demeaning language’ (Prasad et al., 2007: 178). Affirmative action hiring/promotion policies are often reframed by opponents as unfair for the majority, or encouraging identity politics and ineptitude, leading to deep psychological and social harm for co-workers (Crosby and Cordova, 1996).
Summarizing, the locus of culture in the psychological tradition is both internal (i.e. culture is part of the individual’s makeup) and external (i.e. culture is an environmental factor the individual worker must consider) in these examples − but rarely do these studies broach the complex negotiation of these loci. For instance, in the recently developed cultural formulation approach to career development, practitioners are urged to consider not only how individuals view their own cultural identity, but also how career problems are defined culturally, the surrounding cultural and psychosocial environment, and cultural dynamics in the client–counsellor relationship (Leong, 2010). Nevertheless, intersections and paradoxes among these factors are not probed in depth. The psychological perspective contains other blind spots. Stead (2004) argued that it tends to focus overly on the objective aspects of careers, and how individuals’ personalities and/or behaviors fit with particular situations (cultural and otherwise), neglecting the subjectivities of meaning-making that careers necessitate. Thus, culture is conceptualized in relatively dichotomous and static terms, with scant attention to how norms evolve over time, shaping career enactments. For instance, although career theorists increasingly view acculturation as bilinear, most empirical studies operationalize it in unilinear terms (i.e. home or host culture) (Miller and Kerlow-Myers, 2009). Critics have also urged for greater reflexivity, in both data selection and analysis, to avoid biases favoring US and European conceptions. Critical and feminist epistemologies, attuned to the intersections of race, gender and class, have been suggested to extend the psychological perspective and encourage scholars to be more reflexive rather than prescriptive (Heppner and Fu, 2010).
Sociological perspectives
Concerned explicitly with the relationships between self and society, agency and structure, the sociological perspective views career as a ‘social form,’ negotiated by individuals in response to the structural institutions that characterize human society, such as the family, the profession, government agencies and the modern day corporation (Adamson, 1997; Hughes, 1937; Manning, 1982). Career agency is thus not located wholly in the individual, but in the ongoing negotiation of social institutions that enable and constrain particular types of career decisions and outcomes (Barley, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997). That being said, research in this tradition has been critiqued for focusing overly on institutional structures, classes and practices, at the cost of individual meaning-making and resistance to such social forms. For instance, Mills (1956) saw the American ‘white collar’ as a peculiarly hapless collective caught between the petty bourgeoisie and proletariat, toiling away to generate profits for their bourgeois masters, with little say in working conditions, and aspirations to not fall into the ranks of the proletariat.
In this stream, culture is largely a manifestation of the structures that order social reality, influencing both how organizations operate and how individuals (re)act. Cohen and El-Sawad (2007), examining the lived experiences of offshoring among Indian and British employees, traced how respondents drew on dominant understandings of culture as discursive resources to make sense of their work and role. They found that culture shaped respondents’ work ethics, notions of competence and expertise, and restricted particular courses of action, through layperson themes like ‘the language barrier.’ Similarly, Wong (2007) argued that mid-level managers in Taiwan drew from their cultural ethos and geopolitical economy to adopt particular stances on the importance of career independence and work–life balance. Basing their understandings of a ‘better life’ on these two parameters, as well as a network of government regulations, they emphasized entrepreneurialism as a key career discourse. Fernando and Cohen’s (2013) study of Buddhist women in the Sri Lankan workforce traced how culture operated as ‘career capital,’ enabling and restricting them. Respondents could utilize Buddhist precepts to argue for particular trajectories of career advancement, counter to patriarchal discourses of the workplace, but they were also hemmed in by these same principles at times.
While these studies mainly view culture as national origin or ethnicity, fixed characteristics or demographics, even others focusing on occupational and organizational cultures tend to view it as fairly stable − a structural formation. At the occupational level, Griffiths et al. (2007) noted how women professionals in the British information technology (IT) industry were hampered by the rampant masculinization of IT work and found their career prospects limited by mainstream societal images of (male, white) IT workers (see also Brown et al., 2010; North, 2009). Specific firm-level cultures are also seen to encourage or disable individuals’ career aspirations and enactments. This might occur for both traditional corporate ‘linear advancement’ by privileging particular career scripts (Cappellen and Janssens, 2010), and for trade union careers by downplaying participants’ home-lives or having different standards for people of color (Kirton, 2006; Kirton and Greene, 2002). Problematically, there is little indication in these studies of any potential action on the part of respondents to be able to change the dominant cultures at stake.
Two key issues stand out. First, even as recent scholarship in the sociological perspective notes how institutional structures are closely linked to the actual practices of career negotiation, culture remains conceptualized as a macro-level structural formation, rather than an everyday practice. For instance, although career structuration theory notes an ongoing shift across structure and action by workers, using career scripts that allow them to create a ‘vocabulary of motive’ related to work (Barley, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997), it never considers culture explicitly, and ignores how the constitution of structure through action might form particular organizational and occupational cultures. In a revised version of the framework, Cappellan and Janssens (2010) approach culture as a form of political economy (or structure), so that the global economy functions as an alternative career referent to the traditional organization-centric script. But even here, despite emphasizing free movement across nations and organizations, the global economy or institutional variations across different locations remain unaddressed. In the effort to produce generalizable knowledge about how social structures influence meaning-making, the situated nature of culture and localized implications of career are lost. A notable outlier is Pio’s (2005) study of the working lives of female Indian immigrants in New Zealand, where career and culture are noted to be comprised of ‘knotted strands,’ shaped through lived experiences.
Second, the sociological perspective downplays opportunities for revisioning social reality. Both feminist and critical scholars have urged the recognition of alternative meanings and enactments of careers, such as lateral movement or even ‘standing still’ instead of linear advancement, and advocated research on marginalized groups, such as immigrants and workers in the informal economy (Henry and Pene, 2001; Marshall, 1989; Prasad, 2003). However, as Bannerjee and Linstead (2004) argue, a drawback many of these projects share is the unreflexive attribution of alternative paradigms to an arbitrary, seemingly rigid stance on culture, without probing the socio-historical and economic flows at stake − so that everything may be explained by the ‘cultural issue,’ Orientalizing the other as exotic, different, entirely virtuous or even at a marked disadvantage (Said, 1978). Required, then, is a shift both analytically, in what culture is − from structural formation to everyday accomplishments − and epistemologically, in how we approach self and society − from an external, objective ‘other,’ to a complex hybrid.
Communicative perspectives
Adding to our understanding of career agency is the communicative perspective, concerned with the ‘meso’-level interaction of social actors, arguing that it is in these conversations (and their subsequent accumulation) that career meanings are formed. Scholars using this perspective are attuned to the role of messages, discursive formations (e.g. metaphors, colloquialisms, synonyms, narratives), media (e.g. face-to-face discussions, broadcast media, online social media) and also nonverbal performances (Ashcraft, 2013; Buzzanell and Goldzwig, 1991; Cheney et al., 2010; Clair et al., 2008; Inkson, 2007).
In this perspective, culture is noted to be a practice, rather than a rigid contextual feature or structural formation. For instance, Buzzanell (1995) and North (2009) argued that the glass ceiling was constituted and resisted through everyday communicative practices, centering co-performed agency among organizational members across managerial levels, instead of purely individual or structural factors. Moreover, LaPointe (2010) noted that the appropriation of cultural ideals to construct what career meant for a Finnish participant depended both on the researcher’s express agreement and her probing questions, not just in the participant’s prior (‘actual’) experience. Even as the participant sought to construct a story of heroic identity at work, this storytelling exercise depended on the researcher’s participation − framing questions, leading with probes and tacitly agreeing to the role sought to be constituted. In these examples, the distinctions between structure and action are porous, compared with the psychological or sociological perspectives; culture is accomplished in the everyday through communication.
Much of this research is attuned to the power relations underlying work and career, so that professional selves are never neutral, but privilege some (e.g. white collar, male, financial sector) over others (e.g. blue collar, female, retail) (Cheney and Ashcraft, 2007). Macro-level discursive formations, like managerialism or entrepreneurialism, not only shape workers’ meaning-making, but operate as ‘a kind of systemic logic, a set of routine practices, and an ideology’ (Deetz, 1992: 222), creating particular ways of being. Even as workers draw on institutional and societal legitimacy via their communicative performances of these discourses, their professional and organizational selves are raced, gendered and sexualized in particular ways (Cheney et al., 2010). Addressing the resistance to diversity programs in the workplace, Ashcraft et al. (2012) posited a dialectical perspective to understanding marginalized social identities at work. They argued that, rather than adhering to a stable in-group versus out-group distinction, organizations could more successfully address diversity when relations of ‘inclusion/exclusion’ were recognized to be enacted through everyday communication by both individual workers and organizational branding initiatives. Branding not just the organization itself, but also collaborating with other actors to brand the occupation, as welcoming of diverse perspectives would further encourage social minority talent to apply for jobs in these organizations (see also Ashcraft, 2013).
The communicative perspective also traces the intersection of organizational and occupational cultures, emphasizing the constitutive role of communication, which may sometimes change the broader structural formations at stake. For instance, Meisenbach (2008) showed how fund-raisers employed multiple discursive frames to make sense of their work (i.e. financial, relational, educational, mission, coordination frames) through everyday conversations at work, often simultaneously. Similarly, Tracy and Scott (2006) compared the professional identities of correctional officers and firemen, noting how the former perceived their role as feminized ‘dirty work,’ while the latter hyper-sexualized their professional identities, despite the mundane nature of their actual work.
Several studies adopt an intercultural and comparative tone. For instance, Bradford et al. (2001) examined how different messages about career success received by black and white women during childhood influenced their future career goals and understandings about race. While there was little difference in the actual content of these messages (e.g. ‘you can succeed if you work hard’), black women were more cognizant of possible gender and race-related limitations than white women were. Others have studied the negotiation of work and career discourses across countries, such as Berkelaar et al. (2012), who noted that, although science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers were highly prized in the US, Chinese children often saw it as ‘dirty work,’ owing to the memorable messages received everyday (e.g. at school and home) about the hands-on labor and low financial compensation, compared with managerial jobs. Shenoy-Packer (2014) extended western notions of work and career as ordained spiritually (e.g. the ‘Protestant Work Ethic,’ Clair et al., 2008) to understudied cultural and occupational contexts, such as female priests, house-workers and garbage-workers in India. Work for these women was both a duty to one’s fellows, in line with Hindu principles of karma (one’s fate through reincarnation), and helped build self-identity.
To summarize, the communicative perspective views culture as a practical accomplishment, achieved everyday through communication. It is intersectional with, but not reducible to, demographic indicators like gender, ethnicity and nationality. Nevertheless, there are few studies that critique the cultural implications of dominant career practices and explicitly probe alternative meanings of career by examining subaltern actors not directly implicated in the global economy (Ganesh et al., 2005). For instance, although Pal and Buzzanell (2008) deconstruct the influence of neoliberalism on career meaning-making among Indian call center workers, these transnational workers are relatively privileged compared with the vast majority not directly connected to US and European economic interests (e.g. subsistence agriculture in India). Probing such contexts and actors would open new avenues for career research, showing how different cultural practices might foreground fluid and contested meanings of career agency, so that, in some cases, the notion of a choice-driven, sequential pattern of work arranged by paid labor might ‘disappear’ altogether (Buzzanell and Lucas, 2013; Counsell, 1999).
To explore these marginalized contexts, I draw from the CCA to outline a theoretical framework of career as cultural practice below.
Career as cultural practice: The culture-centered approach
In the preceding section, I reviewed three prevailing perspectives in career studies exploring the influence of culture − psychological, sociological and communicative. Here, I overview the main precepts of the CCA and suggest how it might apply to career research.
Principles of the culture-centered approach
Drawing from postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and a constitutive view of communication, the CCA engages with marginalized subjectivities, noting how subaltern actors may resist hegemonic knowledge structures through communicatively enacted cultural practices on the ground (Dutta, 2008, 2011). Subalternity is understood to be the relations of subjugation and subordination in terms of class, caste, age, gender, sexuality and wealth, so that indigenous knowledge and ways of work are stripped of legitimacy by hegemonic forms (Chaturvedi, 2000; Spivak, 1988). It is through communicative practice − both as vocalized articulations and nonverbal performances of resistance − that dominant institutional structures are contested, so that the CCA’s goal is to radically transform socially unjust systems, by (re)privileging subaltern perspectives, foregrounding alternative politico-economic paradigms and recognizing researcher privilege vis-a-vis communities of practice (Dutta, 2012). Rather than being concerned with reified ‘culture in a box,’ the CCA traces how culture is enacted every day, and agency is exercised by both individuals and collectives, in ways that may differ from traditional understandings of rationality and choice.
The CCA rests on a triad of culture, structure and agency. It views culture as a dynamic web of shared meanings, continuously constructed, reified and challenged through communication in local contexts, as participants draw from circulating macro discourses. While similar to Geertz’s (1994) conception of culture as complex ‘webs of significance,’ the CCA notes that this everyday accomplishment occurs through communicative interactions (e.g. conversations, narratives, metaphors). This perspective allows CCA scholars to continually critique cultural norms, rather than take them for granted, tracing how social inequities may be embedded within cultural traditions (also Shome and Hegde, 2002b). Not only does culture transcend personal behavior and/or characteristics, it is profoundly material in its embodied performance − and transforms over time into more stable macro relations among actors. Since culture is always performed in situ, CCA scholarship advocates close engagement with actors and locations to decipher alternative communicative practices, whereby structural injustices may be combated over time.
Second, for the CCA, structure refers to the systems of organizing that both constrain and enable human agency (Dutta, 2011). Structures are both material and discursive, relying on each other for meaning; for instance, resource access is an important (material) constraint for subalterns to negotiate, made sense of through ongoing deliberation, as are various organizational and civil society (discursive) norms of policy debate, which are influenced by the material resources available (e.g. space). Structures are both local and global, permeating everyday experiences, and helping link actors to subaltern and elite stakeholders in other locations, through socio-economic-technological connections (e.g. websites, social media, funding/sponsorships) (Ganesh et al., 2005). While some structures are more stable than others, they are not beyond transformation. In fact, the CCA recognizes only ‘deep’ structural transformation as real social change, rather than piecemeal efforts that co-opt subaltern voice.
Finally, the CCA uses agency to refer to the ability of individuals and groups to make sense of their environment and act accordingly. The framework focuses on subaltern agency to articulate concerns and resist the hegemony of powerful, structurally aligned practices (e.g. Ramadurai et al., 2012). Logics of organizing and work that seem alien or ineffective to US-based researchers, judged by our standards of rationalism, might well be crucial sense-making frames among indigenous populations and ought to be recognized on par with our own systems (Simonds and Christopher, 2013). At the same time, the CCA cautions that much meaning is lost in the translation of subaltern voices through academic speech, necessitating ‘deconstructive vigilance’ (Dutta, 2011) to guard against epistemic erasure, and critiques inauthentic modes of dialogue that co-opt subaltern agency without enacting structural transformation.
CCA principles for career research
Owing to the disciplinary location of its chief architect in health communication, the CCA has been largely used to address health-related concerns among marginalized groups (e.g. Horner et al., 2008; Khan, 2014; Simonds and Christopher, 2013). This article adds to the emerging body of work using CCA to examine organizational phenomena, such as the consequences for social development owing to the increasing privatization of global communication (Wilkins and Enghel, 2013), corporate social responsibility in developing nations (Mitra, 2012), community meaning-making and coping in response to rural food insecurity (Ramadurai et al., 2012), and the influence of policy documents regarding international business (Dutta and Ban, 2012). In fact, the CCA is well-positioned to examine contemporary organizational and economic issues, as culture becomes key in the local/global intersections underlying the world economy (Shome and Hegde, 2002a). The CCA adds to extant understandings of culture in career scholarship on three main accounts (briefly noted at the start of this article): (1) it de-normalizes mainstream career practices and vocabularies (e.g. ‘choosing’ a particular career) by noting alternative paradigms and logics used by subaltern actors in various locations; (2) it traces the ongoing dialectic between materiality and discourse, structure and action, through communication in the exercise of career agency; and (3) it centers social justice and systemic transformation of career practices, rather than urge subalterns to assimilate with the mainstream. These contributions become clear below, as I discuss four key CCA-inspired principles to understand career as a cultural practice.
Career as cultural practice draws on both structure and action
The CCA sees culture − as both structural formation and practical accomplishment − constituted into being by everyday communicative acts. The culture/structure/agency triad offers a concrete way of grasping how this ongoing shift between structure and action might occur, especially in the context of career negotiations.
The triad might be compared to the career structuration model, which also addresses structure-action relations (Barley, 1989; Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Duberley et al., 2006). The structuration model notes institutions (a form of structure) and individual action to form a duality, negotiated by individuals with the help of precise career scripts. Individuals then use these scripts to encode institutional norms, fashion individual actions, enact ‘new’ scripts through these actions, and constitute institutional structure via them. Communication itself is split here, between the codified or informal career scripts (i.e. text) and individual (inter)actions that interpret and implement these scripts (i.e. conversation). Despite subsequent revisions to this model (e.g. the intersection of global and organizational career scripts; Cappellen and Janssens, 2010), culture remains a largely hidden, static, macro-level, structural formation. In Thomas and Inkson’s (2007) variation, culture is conceived of as ‘knowledge systems’ (p. 455) transcending race and nationality, and shaping local and global contexts, yet questions of how it is formed remain unpacked.
To address these questions, the CCA highlights the messy overlap of culture, structure and agency − centered on communication. If institutional structure consists of the rules and resources that order social reality, then cultural artefacts, values and assumptions become critical to forming these rules and resources. Moreover, this process of forming structures and accomplishing culture, is influenced by the agencies at stake, potentially reiterating or resisting the dominant formations, both overtly and covertly, in different ways. Communicative scholars have also shown that the distinction between text and conversation is not practically meaningful (e.g. Taylor et al., 1996), so that new (or modified) career scripts may be taken to frequently evolve from everyday conversations (whether formal or informal), and vice versa. Communication, then, is not restricted only to the realm of (inter)action, or codified career scripts, but also constitutes structure and cultural meaning.
Consider an example of how ‘best practices’ of writing curriculum vitae (CVs) might operate both as career scripts, obtained through self-help books and other textual resources (e.g. organizational website), but also refined through conversations with different actors (e.g. family members, informants at the particular organization, teachers, consultants). Norms of organizing the CV in particular ways, ‘proper’ language usage in the text, or even how to ‘talk up’ the CV with prospective employers, are likely to be more accessible to native (i.e. culturally dominant) individuals than nonnatives, for instance. Importantly, these communicative practices draw from and contribute to institutional structures (e.g. CV ‘best practices,’ or applying for a specific job with a particular codified role), and are ‘cultured’ in turn, depending on the type of resource we may refer to (e.g. friends and family in a specific cultural network, or texts obtained from ethnic media) and the interpretive frames we use to gauge the (cultural) value of these practices.
Career agency is hybridized across autonomous/collective
Recent reviews of career research (e.g. Arthur, 2008; Moore et al., 2007; Tams and Arthur, 2010) indicate that the age-old debate about the autonomous versus interdependent nature of career agency is far from settled. Notwithstanding Barley’s (1989) argument that the Chicago School of Sociology understood career meanings to be derived from a broader community, rather than only the site of paid labor, mainstream scholarship (even structuration research) has focused on individual actions in the job context. Feminist scholarship stands out for its emphasis on community-based meaning-making, collaborative relations among actors (instead of valorizing competition) and the material/discursive interdependences at stake (e.g. Buzzanell, 1994; Kirton, 2006; Marshall, 1989). In turn, this has prompted an emerging body of research that probes how career agency is shaped by underlying social relations and networks (Ibarra and Deshpande, 2007), forming what Parker et al. (2004) termed ‘career communities.’
The CCA adds to this work by drawing from its postcolonial roots to theorize hybridized forms of agency. For postcolonial scholars, hybridity is a pervasive social condition resulting from the colonization of the discursive and material life-world by imperialist powers, through tactics such as conquest, trade policy or information management, designed to create a more ‘civilized’ version of the subaltern native in the image of the colonists (Bhabha, 1994; Chaturvedi, 2000). Nonetheless, the product of such (neo)colonial policies is not so much an identical copy of the colonist as it is a hybridized subject, also capable of enacting agency and resisting subjugation through tools like ‘mimicry.’ The continual flow of information, capital and humans (especially in the current global era) enable subalterns to ‘mimic’ dominant interests, ostensibly adhering to the mainstream, yet effectively exposing the false performances that lie at the core of a seemingly natural social order. The hybrid, then, is not merely a simplistic mixture, but a continually shifting subjectivity that alters the meaning of social forms, like ‘career.’ This liminality distinguishes career agency in the CCA from revisionist feminist (or even structurational) understandings of interdependent agency; while the latter argues that individual career actions attain significance precisely because of the broader career community, hybrid agency continually shifts across self and other, rather than perpetually residing in either.
Career agency is layered and contested
The CCA notes how both subalternity and career agency are layered and fractured. Subalternity is intersectional, always partial and ongoing, rather than restricted to inequities on the basis of race, age, gender or class alone (Dutta, 2008, 2012). Even as this aspect of subalternity follows from the constant hybridization of dominant and marginalized knowledge systems in everyday life, this means that career meanings and negotiations by subaltern actors are, in turn, complex, layered and contested. That is, along with strong linkages between subaltern and elites, subaltern groups themselves are characterized by hierarchies of power and knowledge that legitimize some entities more than others (Chaturvedi, 2000; Shome and Hegde, 2002b).
Consider Mies’ (1982) postcolonial treatise on the women lace-makers of a small village in India (Narsapur), where the women workers reap few benefits from their commerce, and the beneficiaries are mostly upper-caste male financiers and middlemen who take their product to the global market. This patriarchal situation on the ground is complex, she demonstrates, with different actors ordered along varying hierarchies of gender, social class and caste (to mention a few), in terms of the benefits derived. For instance, the husbands of the lower-caste women lace-makers are also subaltern − both destitute (because most of them were landless laborers) and marginalized in social settings − compared with the richer, higher-caste middle-men. But they are also subaltern vis-a-vis the upper-caste women workers, who enjoyed a higher standard of living, although confined economically, geographically and socially (in ‘purdah’) to the homestead by their patriarchs, in turn. Career agency of the subaltern is thus layered, rather than formulaic with someone ‘having’ and someone else ‘lacking’ it. In fact, one of Banerjee and Linstead’s (2004) major critiques against mainstream organization research that seeks to extrapolate managerial styles, significance of work and community organization patterns from indigenous groups to urban capitalism in the global North, is that such efforts rarely acknowledge the rich tensions and layers of subalternity, influencing the capacity for action in response to cultural and structural formations. Rather, subalterns are often levelled as uniformly ‘good,’ in merely another form of Orientalization (Said, 1978).
Moreover, agency is layered and contested in the very narration of career stories to researchers for academic purposes. Postcolonial theory and subaltern studies acknowledge the many ways the subaltern is re-presented, or made to speak, assuaging colonial guilt and sugar-coating the epistemic erasure of indigenous groups (Spivak, 1988). The CCA draws from this rich tradition to argue that, as long as scholars examine marginalized contexts, they ought to put aside the pretense of ‘rapport’ and engage with the subaltern on their own terms (e.g. Simonds and Christopher, 2013). Indeed, Marcus (2001) critiques traditional notions of researcher rapport to elicit full disclosure, as ‘a very American way of thinking about attaining a steady state of friendship in instrumentally driven relationships (such as fieldwork) through the attainment of “trust” in the most superficial, one-sided sense’ (p. 520), without adequately interrogating scholarly privilege or social subjectivity.
Thus, in contrast to the bulk of career research, where the goal of intervention is objective research to emancipate the marginalized other (e.g. Bradford et al., 2001; Creed, 2006; Shinnar, 2007; Yakushko et al., 2008), the CCA is concerned with empowerment and rehabilitation of the subaltern’s voice − while recognizing the possibilities of hybridization of researcher/participant agency in this venture (Dutta, 2012). ‘Deconstructive vigilance’ is urged to help prevent the researcher’s voice from overpowering and silencing the subaltern, claiming privileges of location, age, race, ethnicity or any other base s/he might not even be aware of. Recognizing this hybridization may also shed light on hidden aspects of career negotiation that a purely objective stance might have missed. Accordingly, Marcus (2001) talks of ‘complicit reflexivities’ through research interventions grounded in dialogue and a commitment to vulnerable communication, whereby participants, scholars and the contexts at hand might co-create relevant narratives − building on, rather than subsuming, the other’s voice.
Career as cultural practice is both discursive and material
The CCA foregrounds the dialectical intersection of discourse and materiality in career negotiations. By ‘materiality,’ CCA scholars focus on the embodied aspects of actually performing work on the ground, the spatial and geographical locations that shape particular understandings of career, and the resources that enable or constrain particular courses of action. Materiality assumes special significance, because CCA scholars draw from their postcolonial roots to note how colonial control of the means and modes of production, ownership of raw materials and definitional power drastically influenced people’s sense of social reality (Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1988).
Discussing the drivers of career agency, Buzzanell and Lucas (2013) focus on four bases that both construct and constrain choice − the meaningfulness of work, leisure, money and security. Each of these bases highlight how materiality and discourse give each other meaning. Noting career to be a cultural practice, scholars might focus on how security − involving employment stability, physical/embodied safety and psychological well-being − is constructed and challenged for subaltern actors. For instance, revisiting Pio’s (2005) study on the working lives of Indian women migrants in New Zealand, we might trace how security is a key construct both in their negotiations of the labor market, putting themselves ‘out there’ to pursue work, as well as their definitions of career success in terms of the physical security (e.g. nutrition, shelter) it can provide their family. The CCA can also be used to probe the pragmatic complexities of the ‘boundaryless career,’ whereby workers from across the world connect with each other for global commerce (Tams and Arthur, 2010), by highlighting the material implications of space and time. This goes well beyond considering how global career scripts might constrain or advance career agency (Cappellen and Janssens, 2010), to exploring the influence of office space, geographical context and temporal span on workers’ lived conditions. For instance, CCA scholars might revisit scholarship on offshoring and call center work, exploring the physical and discursive layout of the boundaryless workplace and how it is designed to augment global connectedness with clients in the global North, while appealing to local discourses of social mobility and cultural mores, through the placement of workspaces, foodstuffs and recreation/socialization areas. Pal and Buzzanell (2008) address this peripherally, with glimmers of how call center work at night (rather than day) carries both social stigma in the local context, as well as a sense of pride of being upwardly mobile in the global economy.
To summarize, this section introduced the core tenets of the CCA, and argued how they might inform research on career negotiations and understanding. Specifically, I outlined four key implications of viewing career as a cultural practice: (1) noting how structure and action intersect in everyday work-life through communicative interaction, as texts and conversations coalesce; (2) tracing hybridized career agency, shifting continually across individual and collective loci, and contesting what it means to work; (3) acknowledging the fractures and hierarchies among subaltern actors, so that career agency is complex and fragmented, requiring deconstructive vigilance; and (4) exploring the discursive and material complexities at stake, or the negotiation of places, bodies and artefacts that construct and constrain career agency. In the final section of this article, below, I illustrate this framework with a brief vignette from an ongoing study on the negotiation of environmental, economic and cultural change by Native Alaskan communities in the US Arctic − specifically, around the key issue of ‘subsistence.’
The example of subsistence in the US Arctic
The broader study is based on in-depth interviews, field observations and analysis of various official documents (e.g. white papers, brochures, pamphlets, meeting agendas, emails). In the example recounted in this article, I focus on a week-long policy deliberation ‘tour’ across three rural hubs in the US Arctic, in Nome, Kotzebue and Barrow. The exercise brought together federal and state government officials (e.g. Coast Guard, Department of the Interior), local governments (e.g. hub and village municipalities), Alaska Native corporations (i.e. regional companies set up by an Act of Congress, responsible for tribal resource development and management), civic bodies (e.g. community colleges, nonprofits) and cultural institutions (e.g. museums, heritage centers). Comprised of briefing presentations, listening sessions, workshops and other deliberative formats, a key concern was framing policies for the US’s impending chairmanship of the Arctic Council − a body constituted by the eight arctic nations of the world. Overwhelmingly, the focus turned toward Alaska’s indigenous people, the neglect accorded by both federal and state governments to their socioeconomic wellbeing and the necessity of subsistence for their sustained existence. Defined by Alaska’s state legislature as the ‘customary and traditional uses of fish and game populations,’ subsistence includes the harvesting and management of wild resources for food and raw materials, and is legally protected by the Department of Fish and Game. Not surprisingly, this formal definition guided federal and state officials at the start of these deliberations. However, as time progressed, they came to realize that subsistence was indicative of a broader way of life, intrinsic to native Alaskan culture, and providing a deeply situated meaning of livelihood and career.
Local leaders (mainly Iñupiaq in these regions) resisted the notion of subsistence as being archaic, or something that ought to be erased because it implied day-to-day existence rather than integration with the contemporary economic order. They pointed out that, given the underdeveloped infrastructure, cold climate and difficult terrain of the arctic, subsistence was the most efficient form of livelihood, if allowed to flourish by state and federal government. As the talks progressed, the Arctic Council team increasingly began to see subsistence as being more complex than merely ‘hunting and gathering,’ and sought to categorize it in terms of food security and risk management for the local population. Although a significant improvement, this frame too was deemed problematic by native leaders, who noted that it downplayed local/collective connectedness with the environment and to the spiritual − not just material − health of the community. As one public testimony read, ‘For our children and their children, we know how important it is to feed from our land . . . Our foods define who we are, connect us to the land, and keep our culture alive.’ Decrying international treaties on whaling and polar bear hunting that were ratified by the federal government without listening to native concerns, for instance, leaders pointed out that subsistence was key both for the survival of the entire community and to the young Iñupiaq male’s role as provider. Another public testimony recounted a saga of subsistence whaling in these terms, ‘The men drove the pod into shallow water and caught beluga, then divided all the meat. No one was ever left so all our ancestors were able to store and preserve beluga muktuk.’
Subsistence exemplifies the notion of career as cultural practice proposed in this article. It transcends formal spaces of paid labor, and spans different social and institutional sites, such as the family, hunting/whaling groups, village square, schools and native corporations. This is especially true when noting how practitioners often occupied multiple overlapping roles, working for/in the community. For instance, the Mayor of Nome worked full time as the Community Relations Director for the area’s village corporation. Even as she was part of the Leaders Roundtable session in her capacity as Mayor, detailing the projects her council had undertaken, she later approached the Federal Listening Session as spokesperson for the village corporation, articulating Iñupiaq concerns for the Arctic Council team. Similarly, the Mayor of the North Slope Borough, consisting of Barrow, seven smaller villages and the vast Prudhoe Bay oil reserves, was married to a prominent whaling captain. With whaling an integral part of the region’s culture − for example, Barrow High School’s football team is named ‘The Whalers’ (‘We ♥ our Whalers’ signs were painted throughout the village) − there was little wonder that she sharply criticized whaling and hunting restrictions imposed legally, which did not consider local sentiments.
These instances highlight the liminal, hybridized nature of career roles. Moreover, they emphasize the intersections of career and culture, the grounding of culture in everyday practices of work (e.g. the connections between whaling and cheering for the home football team) and nod to the fragility of culture, especially as government mandates and changing environmental conditions increasingly make difficult the ‘doing’ of culture through subsistence work. In Kotzebue, for instance, Iñupiaq leaders noted how delayed cold seasons meant that caribou herds were migrating south later than usual, which affected the people’s hunting quota for winter storage. Meanwhile, shrinking sea ice meant that hunters had to venture further out to sea for walrus, which put them in harm’s way with polar bears − and possible imprisonment by the federal government, should they exceed the new polar bear quotas, by killing any in self-defense or for lack of other prey. Culture, in these situations, becomes closely connected to the accomplishment of particular activities ingrained in the community psyche as formative of personal career. These practices depend crucially on the materialities at hand − the shrinking sea ice, availability of animals and even the material enforcement of public policy, whether it is through the Federal Marshall’s guns, or the document itself that restrains action.
It is important to note the active resistance in native leaders’ articulation of subsistence careers. Not only did they counter governmental narratives of subsistence as overly abstract ‘traditional hunting’ and ‘food security,’ they also identified ongoing political apathy toward and ignorance of native concerns. As one leader remarked in Kotzebue, the tour had demonstrated that there were ‘difficult conversations we need to have,’ sooner rather than later, which included talking about race, the tensions of mainstream ‘white’ culture vis-a-vis native heritage and the colonial role of the federal government in Alaska prior to statehood − and arguably still continuing. Community leaders expressed suspicion and dismay about the role of external researchers, deemed to be both insufficiently aware of subsistence and often interfered − albeit not on purpose − with key events (e.g. research helicopters were blamed for disturbing caribou herds). Younger members − part of a youth forum held at all three locations − also critiqued mainstream understandings of subsistence and career as being inimical to their everyday lives and future prospects. While they acknowledged the high rate of youth suicide in rural Alaska, they rejected mainstream narratives of government ‘handouts’ causing apathy and debilitating youth, and instead pointed to the broader societal devaluation of native roles and identities. Even as the youth forum noted that far more Iñupiaq girls were likely to finish high school and head to college than boys, it urged the recognition of subsistence hunting − mainly by men − as a form of work in its own right, not an archaic custom.
Two final issues bear mentioning. First, true to the complexities of culture/career as active accomplishments, these subaltern articulations of subsistence work were themselves contested by others within the community, rather than being monolithic structures. While the Iñupiaq agreed unanimously on the spiritual, economic and cultural implications of subsistence, some argued that subsistence should be conducted the ‘traditional way’ (e.g. whaling on canoes rather than gasoline-powered boats), although most acknowledged the unavoidable influence of modern technologies (e.g. GPS, gasoline). Second, this study required significant attention to my own deconstructive vigilance, especially as discussions frequently turned to the potentially destructive role played by ‘outsiders,’ even researchers who might believe they were there to help local communities. This was especially true for me; although my research interest in community engagement in climate-change-sensitive and fragile ecosystems took me to Alaska, I was neither Alaskan nor native. Thus, stressing my long-term commitment to the project and research site, rather than being a temporary ‘tourist,’ and adopting a participatory mode of data collection and analysis, such as using referrals and member checks, helped legitimize my identity and motives (Dutta, 2011). Even as I gained access to these talks via my association with the organizing institution, based in Anchorage, I nevertheless had to be careful not to be too focused on these connections. Anchorage, situated far to the south, was in some respects an ‘outsider’ to the rural communities of the deep arctic, so that I had to navigate this tension of association/autonomy, also seeking out people not directly connected to the organization.
Conclusion
This article proposed a culture-centered approach (CCA) to career studies, which envisions career as a form of cultural practice − enacted, accomplished and contested by social actors through communicative practices on the ground. Specifically, it draws attention to the socio-political-historical nature of career meanings and negotiations, urging attention to subaltern actors, and how they are ventriloquized by, yet speak back to, dominant institutional structures in their negotiations of work and livelihood. To illustrate this framework, as an indicator for future work in this vein by career scholars, I used the example of subsistence careers negotiated by native Alaskan communities in the US Arctic.
The CCA framework extends career research in several ways, not hitherto probed by the psychological, sociological and mainstream communicative perspectives. While the CCA draws on the latter for the role of everyday communication in constituting culture and structures, it further deconstructs the very basis of dominant career cultures by explicitly recognizing the subaltern voice. That is, it is mainstream career practices that are de-normalized by the CCA, instead of the subaltern other being held to the dominant standard. Such an alternative paradigm has important consequences for our conceptualization of career agency and outcomes. Scholars should then ask: how might actors’ careers unfold in different contexts? What institutional, individual and collective forces determine this process? Can individuals exert agency (and how) over this unfolding, and how can they reshape what they mean by ‘career’?
Second, career agency is problematized by the CCA as liminal and hybridized across structure and action, collective and individual, and discourse and materiality, rather than residing solely in either. Agency is ephemeral, yet powerful, as in the example of the Iñupiaq, whereby they resist mainstream definitions of subsistence to articulate a career deeply tied to both self and society, work and life, and ecology and economic security. Thus, questions that should guide career scholarship include: what alternative perspectives to work may be voiced in response to mainstream understandings? How are they tensional, and how are they silenced by dominant structures? How is materiality (e.g. place, embodied action, resources) implicated in both this silencing and ongoing resistance? Moreover, given that subaltern actors are aligned in complex patterns that are formative of social power relations, definitions of career − subsistence or otherwise − are bound to be changing, as these power relations shift over time. Accordingly, the CCA advocates a long-term view of careers and work-lives, cognizant of the complex and layered links among actors over space and time. Career scholars might consider: what materials and discourses shape the ‘objective’ realities of career, and how are they also (inter)subjective? How do practitioners see their work and jobs as local, global, or both? How are they implicated in ongoing labor relations and policies, material extraction, place-based disputes, etc.?
Finally, the CCA destabilizes conventional norms of knowledge generation and researcher objectivity by highlighting the need for vulnerability with and to the subaltern communities at stake. Feminist, critical and postcolonial scholars have long argued for the ‘radical robustness’ of scholarship that engages on a deeply intersubjective level with one’s participants, and is open about the overlaps between self/other (Marshall, 1989; Mohanty, 2003). Nevertheless, the CCA cautions us against infusing too much of our own interests and voices in this co-creation of meaning: deconstructive vigilance is urged, so that the subaltern can indeed speak − and be heard. Thus, career scholars should ponder: how may we help empower, rather than emancipate, subaltern actors in their negotiations of career and work? What strategies and tools might help ensure the robustness of research, without reducing contextual specificities to universal generalizations? How may we be vigilant for ours and others’ wellbeing, taking care to not emotionally compromise ourselves irreparably while working with subaltern groups? How may subaltern concerns and careers be re-presented ethically in mainstream research formats?
Footnotes
Funding
The research on native Alaskan community negotiation reported here was funded by the Dean’s Creative/Research Grant from Wayne State University’s College of Fine, Performing & Communication Arts, and by a Humanities Center 2014 Fellowship.