Job loss and its aftermath among managers and professionals: wounded,fragmented and flexible

Abstract

Based on longitudinal fieldwork with unemployed managers and professionals in their 50s, the article examines the meaning of job loss to these people and charts their subsequent efforts to restore their lives. The article identifies core similarities in their experiences and discerns different narrative strategies through which they have tried to make sense of their dismissal and sustain their selfhood. For all, job loss was a considerable trauma leading to a fragmentation of identity; this was compounded by subsequent rejection and perceived discrimination. Few were able to resume their earlier careers; the majority had to adjust their expectations downwards and opt for either virtual deskilling in less well paid and less demanding jobs or for an assortment of part-time, casual and voluntary work. Best ‘adapted’ (and least fragmented) were those who were prepared to forsake hopes of a return to high-powered jobs and display flexibility, resourcefulness and opportunism in adapting to their reduced circumstances.

Keywords

flexibility job loss narratives professionals storytelling trauma unemployment

Introduction

The much awaited first report of the large UK household longitudinal study confirms that the current economic crisis has hit young people disproportionately, raising talk of another ‘lost generation’ in the labour market (McFall and Garrington, 2011). Unemployment rates are highest at 15 per cent among workers under 25. This has rightly prompted calls to help young people as they try to enter the labour market. An equally interesting finding of the survey, which drew data from 40,000 UK households, however, was that being out of work by itself does not substantially affect the physical or mental well-being of young people. By contrast, unemployment has a severe effect on the reported well-being of people over 55. While these people are less likely to be directly hit by the recession, when they do lose their jobs the effect can be catastrophic for their personal and family lives.

Prompted by concerns about the effects of unemployment on this age group, the UK government has sponsored a number of coaching programmes aimed at helping mature professionals and managers cope with unemployment and re-enter employment. On the back of one such programme, the authors of this article followed closely over a period of two years a small group of mature senior executives and professionals who lost their jobs shortly before the current economic crisis in 2008. These were people who had held powerful positions and enjoyed high salaries as senior managers and information systems professionals, but were then dismissed under more or less acrimonious circumstances.

In an earlier publication, the authors examined how these professionals responded in the immediate aftermath of job loss in 2008 and how they incorporated this traumatic experience into their life stories (Gabriel et al., 2010). It was found that their narratives fell into distinct categories and the authors proposed the term ‘narrative coping’ as a way of describing each unemployed professional’s struggle to construct a story that offered both meaning for their predicament and consolation for their loss. This article is the product of a longitudinal study in which the authors traced the trajectory of these professionals over the next two years and assessed the long-term effects of lob loss on their careers and their identities. In particular, the article addresses the much trumpeted discourse of ‘flexibility’, seeking to identify whether policies and exhortations aimed at helping the unemployed reinvent and repackage themselves have been effective in helping them restore their lives (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2009; Gardiner et al., 2009; Lippmann, 2008). The study reveals considerable variation in the respondents’ trajectories over two years. In general it was found that those who were most determined to retrieve their earlier careers were less successful in reorganizing their lives than those who were prepared to move into new jobs and adopt different outlooks towards their careers. Nearly all, however, had to contend with much less well paid and less powerful positions than they had held earlier. Flexibility may give some advantage to some individuals in re-entering employment but is generally accompanied by a lowering of expectations and a degree of resignation over restoring a derailed career.

Literature review

Job loss is a painful event for most people, especially for those who have invested a large part of their time, effort and identity in their careers. Unlike younger people who are capable of deriving satisfaction and meaning from different experiences and dreams, older professionals tend to anchor their identities and values on their working lives and career success. There is evidence that losing a job is more unsettling and painful for them than for younger employees (McFall and Garrington, 2011). As Martin (1987) argued 25 years ago, job loss for a professional represents a ‘dramatic vote of no confidence’ capable of bringing with it shame, disillusionment and depression. Fineman (1983) and Letkemann (2002) argue that unemployment among white-collar employees and professionals carries a disproportionate stigma and is more liable to be experienced as a personal assault than among younger or working-class employees, a view consistent with research by Andersen (2009) indicating that middle-class people are psychologically worst hit by job loss.

In recent years, academic interest in job loss among managerial and professional employees has increased, in part as a result of what is variously referred to as the ‘new economy’ (Lippmann, 2008) or ‘new risk economy’ (Mendenhall et al., 2008) with its emphasis on flexible employment patterns and contingent workforces (Clarke et al., 2009; Matusik and Hill, 1998). In his widely read book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Sennett (1998) argues that new flexible work arrangements promote a short-term, opportunistic outlook among employees, one that undermines trust and loyalty. Careers become fragmented, their different steps failing to generate cohesive or integrated life-stories. There are no objective measures of what it means to do a good job and those celebrated for their achievements one day easily find themselves on the receiving end of redundancy packages the next. Opportunism, flexibility and constant reinvention of the self, what Sennett terms ‘the chameleon self’, are the chief characteristics of the new economy, in which managerial and professional staff are as likely to be victims of downsizing as are blue-collar employees and must, therefore, learn to live with periods out of regular employment.

A substantial part of the literature has addressed how different individuals cope with job loss and what factors can reduce its ill effects. Existing work suggests that coping is enhanced by supportive family and social networks (McKee-Ryan et al., 2005); less conclusive is research on the job search strategies of unemployed professionals themselves. Researchers have long suggested that ‘problem-focused strategies’, i.e. attempts to deal with the practical consequences of unemployment in a business-like manner, are more effective than ‘emotion-focused strategies’, i.e. attempts to deal with the suffering and pain resulting from job loss (see e.g. Latack et al., 1995; Leana and Feldman, 1992). It may, however, well be that such findings are the result of post facto rationalizations by those who manage to resurface from job loss rather than descriptive of coping strategies during the period of unemployment. Likewise, research indicating that job loss can be viewed as a blessing in disguise (Fineman, 1987; Zikic and Klehe, 2006) may well be the result of retrospective sense-making and defensive posturing, once the profound shock and dejection of job loss have been overcome (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2009; Vickers, 2009).

As with all traumas, losing one’s job in late career lends itself to all kinds of different and confusing expressions, sudden mood swings and contradictory feelings, all of which undermine confidence in any coherent picture reported to researchers. Since the pioneering early studies of the unemployed by Eisenberg and Lazarsfeld (1938) and Jahoda et al. (1971 [1933]), unemployment scholars have sought to identify different stages which a person suffering job loss goes through, such as shock, denial, anger, acceptance, resignation, etc. (see e.g. Bennett et al., 1995); however, evidence from scholars who have looked in detail at different experiences of grief and mourning over loss of work suggests that virtually every individual laid off must discover his/her own path towards the future (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2009; Fineman, 1983; Vickers, 2009). Similar to other traumas in life, losing one’s job prompts a very wide variation in responses, conflicts, actions and experiences.

Reactions to the experience of being laid off in late career have a bearing on public policy and government initiatives to support the unemployed. Intensive programmes of coaching and job-search may well be ineffective with people who are suffering from deep depression as a result of job loss; overemphasis on CV writing, interviewing and other job hunting skills may be counter-productive with professionals who have long sat on the other side of the fence in appointment panels. Coaches, in spite of their best intentions, can sometimes find themselves scapegoated by laid-off professionals who transfer their frustration and anger onto the coach. At these moments, the coach’s containment of the coachee’s anxiety becomes critical for the outcome of the coaching relationship (De Haan, 2008). Tailoring public policies to the wide range of complex needs of different groups of unemployed people is therefore important in ensuring the effectiveness of these programmes.

Literature on the unemployed is rather short of studies that combine a longitudinal approach (Bennett et al., 1995; Jackson and Taylor, 1994; Strandh, 2000; Taylor and Walker, 1994) with a narrative methodology (Ezzy, 2001; Russell, 2011) and a focus on the professional (Allan, 1990; Letkemann, 2002; Platman, 2004; Powell and Driscoll, 1973). This is what the study reported here sought to accomplish, especially in relation to the fragmenting effects of job loss and the varying degrees of flexibility through which the unemployed seek to put their lives together again. More specifically, the article contributes to two important contemporary discourses – the discourse of narrative identity (and especially the strains that unemployment inflicts on it) and the discourse on flexibility as a much vaunted but questionable key quality to ensuring employability in mature capitalism.

Methodology

This research was undertaken on the back of a government-sponsored programme aimed at helping unemployed executives and professionals revive their careers following lay-offs; the programme involved a number of group coaching and skill-development sessions as well as 10 hours of individual coaching sessions which each unemployed professional undertook with a coach of his/her choice. Of the 28 participants in the coaching programme, 13 were approached and agreed to participate in research aimed at assessing the effectiveness of the coaching programme but, more significantly, developing a richer and more detailed understanding of their experiences. These 13 individuals (see Table 1) were monitored over a period of two years by the researchers with a view to exploring how their experiences of unemployment changed over time, how successful different job search approaches proved and the extent to which unemployment and job search had affected their identity. They each had a long (two to three-hour) interview at the outset of the research and eight of them participated in two focus groups. The authors subsequently stayed in touch with them through informal face-to-face, telephone and email conversations and, two years later, all but two of them (who had returned to stable employment) were interviewed again. Twelve of the participants were male and one was female, a proportion consistent with that of the participants in the scheme and reflecting the far larger number of senior male managers among this group, aged between 49 and 62 at the start of the research. Respondents fell into three distinct occupational types. Some had been employed by a single or a small number of organizations (mostly but not exclusively private sector) and had very successful careers until they were laid off. A separate sub-group were senior information systems professionals whose careers had been linked with expertise in their particular domains. Finally, there were two individuals who had frequently and successfully changed jobs and occupations, spending time self-employed as successful entrepreneurs; at some point in their 50s, they discovered that the ‘next’ job failed to arrive or that their earlier entrepreneurial successes came to a halt.

Table 1.

The participants

Name	Age at the time of first interview	Last well paid job	Position at the time of second interview
Peter	51	Manager in local government council	Changed several jobs; currently unemployed
Matthew	56	Self-employed entrepreneur/inventor in the tourism industry	Got and lost high paying job; just started a new job of dubious quality
Neil	50	IT consultant at an IT company	Mostly unemployed; very casual work
Gerard	55	Marketing lecturer	Downshifted in job at 1/3 of earlier salary
Michael	49	Advertising executive at a leading advertising firm	Unemployed, but does a variety of jobs, including self-employed
Raymond	61	Auctioneer at a global auction house	Mostly voluntary work, self-employed
Robert	50	IT analyst at a large insurance company	Downshifted to less well paid but permanent job in same area
Stanley	53	Accountant at global industry body in the energy sector	Returned to full-time professional work in same field
Mick	48	Manager at an asset management company	Moved sideways to well paid job in other field
Gordon	54	Accountant at a managerial level in a large insurance company	Mostly unemployed, trying self-employment
John	60	IT manager at a large IT company	Found new well paid job and lost it; currently unemployed, slipping into retirement
Bill	44	Accountant in a large insurance company	Returned to slightly less well paid job in same field
Heather	52	Manager at a national charity	Moved to part-time, poorly paid, non-professional work

Researching individuals who are going through a traumatic experience raises many practical and moral issues (Crossley, 2000; Stein, 2007; Vickers, 2009). Respect for a person’s grief and despondency may inhibit researchers from asking direct questions that may unsettle them, unleash irreversible and potentially damaging emotions and lead to a breakdown of the research relation. At the same time, researchers seeking to understand the experiences of such people must often penetrate a more or less well constructed facade made of rehearsed and ‘safe’ answers, wishful thinking and evasions. During their field research, the authors repeatedly noticed invisible barriers that came down between unemployed people and those who were perceived as drawing comfortable salaries in safe jobs as researchers, academics or coaches. Throughout the research, the authors sought to develop relations of trust with the respondents through extensive familiarization with them, informal conversations and a genuine desire to learn from their experiences. In addition, the participants’ involvement in a prolonged group experience, where they tried to support each other as well as learn from their successes and reversals, encouraged several of them to open up and share some very private emotions and concerns (cf. Kitzinger, 1994). During the lengthy interviews and focus groups, the authors provided a sympathetic audience, one that sought to honour their predicaments, but at the same time encourage them to articulate potentially threatening issues.

The approach in these conversations followed a narrative methodology substantially based on Gabriel’s (1998, 2000, 2004) research into organizational storytelling and McAdams’s (1988) work on life stories. The use of such narrative methodologies is now fairly widespread in many areas of organizational research, including the study of unemployed people (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2009; Ezzy, 2001; Willott and Griffin, 2004). Avoiding direct questions which would have raised defensive attitudes, the authors reached out for stories and narratives which summed up the respondents’ experiences at different points of their journey through unemployment. The term ‘journey’ was itself used extensively in the interviews and focus groups and it turned out to be one that delivered results – it seemed to open up ways of discussing what could be deeply unsettling episodes by turning them into incidents or features of a longer narrative, a bigger story. This enabled the participants to discuss a wide range of emotions, from hope to despair, disappointment, enthusiasm, envy, anger, anxiety, boredom and resignation and to give voice to experiences ranging from extreme powerlessness to moments of taking control.

Findings: wounded, fragmented and flexible

In interviews shortly after their job loss, the respondents expressed a considerable sense of trauma and disorientation. Being made redundant in their 50s after achieving professional success was felt to be cruel, insulting and unjust – being cast into the wilderness after a lifetime of committed service. Yet, the stories they told about their experiences, their life choices and attempts at putting their lives together with the help of professional coaches varied widely, from bitter resignation to full recuperation or, alternatively, to the discovery of new modes of living which did not rely on the trappings of a regular and well paid job. Their narratives fell into three distinct categories described as ‘temporary derailment’, ‘end of the line’ and ‘moratorium’. The first group saw unemployment as a temporary disruption, a setback, but one from which a career would eventually recover. The second group saw job loss as a blow from which their career was unlikely to recover; job loss marked the start of a new, usually dismal, phase in their life. Finally, there were some who presented themselves as being in a kind of limbo-land, not knowing what lies ahead, whether the disruption of their career was a permanent or temporary one, but seeking to make the best out of their current situation. The term moratorium seemed appropriate – living in the present rather than being overburdened by the past or seeking to be in control of the future.

During the two years following their original job loss all the unemployed professionals had worked at some point. Five of them (Bill, Mick, Stanley, Matthew and John) had re-entered the fast lane with high paying corporate jobs but two of these (Matthew and John) had subsequently been made redundant again. Of the others, three (Raymond, Peter and Neil) were now doing occasional voluntary work; one (Robert) was working full-time but in less well paid work and two (Gerard and Heather) worked part-time in low paid jobs. The remaining two (Gordon and Michael) had started their own businesses but they were both struggling in the current economic downturn.

The financial and family circumstances of these professionals varied widely; some had received handsome severance payments and were still comfortably off, though not in comparison to their earlier affluence. A few were in severe financial straits and could only make ends meet through ‘counting the pennies’.

Psychologically too these professionals experienced very differing emotions – depression and rejection, simmering rage, stoic acceptance and unrestrained optimism. Several displayed extreme mood swings within a single interview. What was consistent, even long after the original event, was the recollection of their experience of being laid off as a very traumatic event. Of the 13 respondents, only one recognized job loss as a blessing in disguise, a much debated issue among scholars (Gardiner et al., 2009; Zikic and Klehe, 2006), which enabled him to make a profitable career move (Mick), but even he recollected his experience of job search as the time when he hit ‘rock bottom’; only his coach had helped him overcome a feeling of being ‘a total disaster’.

Two years after the original interviews, each of the respondents had a unique story to tell, almost as if job loss swept them away from orderly career paths into unpredictable terrains where they had to cope as best they could. In objective terms, two of the respondents could be in very similar situations (for instance, in part-time work and applying for better paid full-time work) and yet, subjectively, their experiences as revealed by their stories could be very different. The meaning of words like ‘self-employed’, ‘employed part-time’, ‘employed’, ‘unemployed’ and ‘retired’ seemed to be able to stretch in different directions to make them ‘fit’ different stories.

In order to help understand their experiences the article now focuses on three respondents who sum up very different paths following job loss. These three were chosen after prolonged discussions among the authors and represent three different behavioural responses to unemployment – feverish search for a new job, resigned downshifting to a low-skill, part-time job and a positive reinvention of the self in doing many different jobs, some paid and some unpaid. Each subject related a different type of narrative identity – wounded, fragmented or flexible. Emotionally too, these respondents were very different, representing anger, depression or stoicism (without resignation). In all three examples, the focus will be on the concluding part of their interview when, maybe, some of the more defensive and predictable facades had slipped and they invited the authors to share some of their inner thoughts.

Matthew – wounded soldier hoping to return to former glories

Matthew was someone who had had much success in his earlier career as, among other things, a stage performer, an impresario, an inventor and an entrepreneur and company director, decorated by the Queen for his services to leisure, tourism and the heritage industry. One of his ventures, when in his 50s, went badly wrong forcing him to remortgage his house. Thereafter, Matthew found himself unable to restart his career or get another job, in spite of writing numerous applications each week.

Already deeply frustrated in the early stages of this study, he was even more so two years later, in spite of having held one executive job for a certain period of time. He frequently used the cliché of being a square peg unable to fit in a round hole and was a man who was staging a kind of war with his CV, an obsessive reference point throughout his interview. His CV, it seemed, in spite of numerous adaptations and much money spent on attempts to smarten it up, had failed to get him interviews or a lasting job. Importantly, Matthew did not disclose his unemployed status to his social and professional networks. ‘I don’t particularly want to expose myself either to their sympathy or to their ridicule,’ he said.

The authors’ impression of Matthew was that of wounded soldier, robbed of his bygone glory. Arrogant, domineering, surviving on memories of an extravagant lifestyle (jewellery, personalized shirts and lavish stories of success), while nursing his dented pride. Since the earlier meetings with him, his flamboyancy had declined and he offered the authors fewer stories of earlier achievements; instead, his frustration and depression were complemented by a simmering rage. Angered at the system, the government, the employers, the banking industry and the ageist society, he felt ‘conned’ and ‘used’. Filling in application forms had become his ‘job’, as he pointedly refused to describe himself as ‘unemployed’ – he claimed to have sent out in excess of 700 applications since the earlier interview.

Towards the end of the interview, Matthew offered a story of an incident that had happened earlier that day and that presented the chance of a turning point in his current situation:

Interviewer:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Matthew:

Do you want the positive or the negative?

Interviewer:

Whichever you feel is appropriate.

Matthew:

Well there are moments when I feel very negative and it looks like I’m never going to work again but there are some when I feel positive, it’s, you know, I will find the next job. As it happens, today, I received an email from a chap in Bristol where I had applied for a job some four months ago. I didn’t get that job but he sent me the information about a new job which has yet to be advertised … So you know, this was incredibly positive because he’s obviously a person who has influence in the matter of selection and he’s taken the trouble to send me the information … so that restores one’s energy and when I’ve finished with you, today, that’s obviously what I’ll be spending my time on. But … they don’t happen very often.

A referral from an earlier unsuccessful application had raised Matthew’s spirits, motivated him and offered him hope. What made this referral ‘incredibly positive’ is that it offered him a validation of himself as a credible candidate for a job, since it came from ‘a person who had influence in the matter of selection’.

Matthew’s response above revealed a paradoxical predicament shared with some other respondents – the simultaneous belief that ‘people of my age don’t get jobs other than stacking shelves in supermarkets’ and the hope that the next job application would restore their career to a new position of power and status. Maintaining these two beliefs and the sharp alternation of moods described above was not easy after two years of disappointments. Matthew was one of only two (Gordon being the other) who displayed it in such an extreme form. He seemed locked into his anger and frustration. He was the only one of the original respondents whose narrative had not shifted from ‘temporary derailment’ – two years later he was still seeking to rejoin the fast lane. And yet, his anger, far from being irrational, was a perfectly understandable response of a man full of life, energy and ideas but unable to find work, let alone work commensurate with his abilities.

Heather – broken and fragmented, trying to put the bits and pieces of her life together

In 2008 Heather had been one of the most deeply depressed of the people interviewed. An introspective person who had undergone a conversion to religious faith that required her to cover her head, she had been made redundant from her position as training manager of a charity and subsequently found herself profoundly isolated and lonely. She sought solace in regular meetings with her spiritual guide but this further alienated her from members of her family, with whom she had had several painful encounters. Two years later, Heather’s was in the view of all three researchers the saddest interview, her self-esteem and self-confidence depleted, dreams of career long gone and working part-time in a job way beneath her skills. On top of that, she experienced serious financial deprivation, her modest savings exclusively devoted to foreign trips to meet her spiritual guide. Yet, in spite of the almost unremitting gloom, Heather maintained a positive impression of her coach whom she credited with piecing the different parts of herself together, a metaphor of fragmentation and reparation that recurred throughout the interview.

[The coach] helped me to gather all the bits and pieces and to fit them together so that there was substance to it rather than kind of being fragmented by my life experience.

Earlier Heather had employed the metaphor of a puzzle with missing pieces to describe herself. Speaking in a very low voice, interspersed with long silences, her interview was a slow and painful process in which misfortunes and humiliations accentuated her isolation and loneliness. Yet, the conclusion of the interview opened a certain window into her attempt to articulate a turning point in what at first seemed like a slow descent to hopelessness.

Interviewer:

Is there anything else you would like to add to this?

Heather:

Well I think [yes] it stands out as a kind of a milestone … a bit of a life-changing experience to be honest because … it gave me a kind of an endorsement if you like that I’m OK … Labradoodle – have you heard this word?

Interviewer:

It’s a mix between Labrador and poodle?

Heather:

That’s right, so [the coach] kind of brought this out, I’ve heard it since actually and I hadn’t heard it before but I suppose it’s a bit like the ugly duckling thing and all those stories. You think you’re this or you’re supposed to be this but actually – hey! you’re this you know, what you are is OK … I still struggle with that incidentally at times when I’m lonely but it’s OK, no it’s absolutely fine. Yes, he definitely did help me to become stronger in accepting myself .

Interviewer:

Yes. Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Heather:

Well I’d like to say that I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity and you know – thanks for persisting with me and pinning me down.

Like Matthew, Heather volunteered a story which involved a milestone or a turning point; this happened when her coach offered her the Labradoodle metaphor as one describing her predicament. This was a casual utterance perhaps, but one that had a strong effect on Heather. Like Matthew’s story this one too offered the teller a sense of validation from an external source but here it went far deeper. It was a kind of validation of self as an unusual, unconventional but valuable person. This was reinforced by Heather’s invocation of the ugly duckling story, another case of an unconventional being that turned out to be valuable and unique. Like Matthew’s view of himself as a square peg, Heather saw herself as unconventional and unusual, only her self-doubt reached far deeper than his. Hers was not an anxiety about being able to get another paid up job but an existential anxiety about being a whole and a wholesome person.

The end of the interview with her thanking the interviewer for ‘persisting with me and pinning me down’ offered an acknowledgement of her awareness of how difficult the situation had been both for her and for the interviewer, but also acknowledged that in coming up with the Labradoodle story she had discovered something that was important yet elusive. This was a clear instance of reflexivity – a moment when the telling of the story fundamentally redefined the storyteller. Until this point Heather had portrayed herself consistently as a victim – the Labradoodle story enabled her to recast herself as an object of value and, maybe, a survivor. How long would this last for? Had Heather, in the course of the interview, made a decisive move beyond her experience of fragmentation?

Michael – Jack of all trades for whom no job is too lowly

If Heather displayed little hope and Matthew interspersed hope with extreme despair, Michael gave a consistently upbeat interview. Two years earlier, Michael had cut a dejected figure, quiet and withdrawn during the focus group and subdued at his interview. Michael’s earlier story had been a classic one – an advertising executive who had been responsible for promoting many famous brands had, in his 50s, become ‘too expensive’ for his employer, in an industry dominated by young people. Michael was someone who had identified strongly with the brands that he had promoted and his final downfall had been especially poignant. Having masterminded the successful reinvention of a well known brand of beer, the company came under pressure from a rival brand of beer, also a client, which saw itself threatened by Michael’s brand. This second brand threatened to take its huge custom to another agency, whereupon the company dropped Michael’s brand and offered him a redundancy package.

An advertising man through and through, Michael had, two years later, accomplished a remarkable transformation. He had set up his own consulting business in marketing which was surviving but scarcely prospering. So Michael had been willing to take on a variety of jobs and tasks, some paid and some unpaid. The conclusion of his interview was especially revealing.

Interviewer:

Have you changed in any way?

Michael:

No I don’t think I’ve changed that much; I’ve probably got broader outlooks now whereas before I was made redundant I did what I did very well but just that. I didn’t think of looking around and doing other things or looking at other options whereas since I’ve been unemployed and since I set my own company up, I’ve done, you know, various jobs – anything and everything. The Christmas before last when I first set the company up, somebody I knew runs a distribution company, they distribute wine to restaurants and November and December is their busiest time … and I knew November and December were going to be fairly quiet for me, so I went and I drove a white van delivering wine for two months.

Interviewer:

OK –

Michael:

Somebody else I know who’s a builder phoned me the other day and said, ‘I’ve got to sell a property and it needs painting inside by Friday – are you busy?’ So I went round and did some painting for him –

Interviewer:

Yes, right. Um, where do you see yourself in the next five years or so?

Michael:

If only I knew! I don’t know. Um, it depends what happens with my company, if something comes along, if something else happens I might change, I might do the same, I might do something – I mean I’m just very open to suggestions at the moment – because I will try and make a living any way I can which is why I called the company Broadly Speaking because, broadly speaking, I’ll do anything!

It is noticeable at the beginning of the extract that Michael was denying having changed. Noticeable too is the word ‘broader’ at the start which echoed the name of his company ‘Broadly Speaking’, a name upon which Michael as an advertising person had spent much time and effort. ‘Broadly speaking,’ Michael said, he would do anything and the way he consistently talked about it, devoid of self-pity, indicated that he had managed to reinvent himself, almost like the brands that he had been adept at reinventing. Having been an organization man who identified with his company and the brands he promoted, he now looked at himself as someone who was willing to do any work without it being a reflection of his inner worth.

Like several other professionals in the group, Michael acknowledged that since he had lost his job, the dynamics within the family and domestic labour had changed – he now spent much more time than he used to on household chores, in acting as a ‘taxi service’ for his daughters and so forth. Yet, Michael expressed no resentment about it. He saw it as part of a new phase in his life in which ‘career’ with all its trappings was no longer a feature and yet this did not alter his fundamental character. In this regard, his narrative was remarkably different to that of another professional, Gordon, whose ‘objective situation’ was very similar to Michael’s, but whose anger and frustration were almost on par with those of Matthew.

What set Michael apart from almost all the other unemployed professionals was his flexible approach. Michael’s stoic attitude about his job loss and the sociological explanation of its cause (‘I was too old and too expensive for my employer’) contrasted sharply with those of Heather, who felt victimized by a bullying manager, and Matthew, who blamed both society and himself for his predicament. Where Matthew and Heather clutched at an outsider’s validation of self, Michael seemed to have taken greater responsibility in reshaping his life. What made Michael different was the degree of flexibility he was prepared to display. Matthew had never been an ‘organization man’ and had found many different jobs and ventures but throughout the study displayed the most persistent inflexibility in seeking to kick-start his career; by contrast Michael, who had been an organization man, was willing to let go of his earlier narrative, ‘I am a successful advertising man with a long series of successful campaigns behind me’, for a much less focused one: ‘I am willing to do anything without shame and who knows what the future holds?’

In his extreme flexibility, Michael was unique among the respondents – flexibility had helped him move from a temporary derailment narrative to a moratorium one, whereas both Heather and Matthew had stuck to their earlier narratives, end of line and temporary derailment respectively. Two years after the original interviews, it seemed that the positions that were identified earlier, temporary derailment, end of the line and moratorium, had proved remarkably robust and enduring, with the one qualification to be mentioned just below. The ‘temporary derailment’ was the hardest position to maintain over such a period but Matthew was someone who had done so. By contrast, Michael had moved from the derailment to a moratorium position which he could live with, whereas Heather remained firmly in the ‘end of the line’ position. In contrast to Matthew who persisted inflexibly in perceiving himself as a square peg aiming for a round hole and refused to redefine himself, and in contrast to Heather who was struggling with inner fragmentation and feelings of worthlessness, Michael had redefined himself and had moved on. He had recovered by accepting that doing bits and pieces of work did not imply that he was a bits and pieces character. But the price for this had been his ‘virtual deskilling’, in other words his engagement in work that made use of only a small fraction of his professional competences.

What the authors came to realize in the second phase of the research was that moratorium stories were not as consistently positive as in the earlier phase. Instead, they ranged from Michael’s and Raymond’s upbeat accounts to the more resigned accounts of John, Gerard and Neil who were gradually drifting toward retirement, to Gordon’s frustrated and angry account. Moratorium or quest narratives, in contrast to the authors’ earlier observations, assumed several different emotional hues and offered no guaranteed solution to the frustrations of temporary derailment or the depression of end of the line narratives. Moratorium then represented an unstable position – one that offered no permanent promise of security but a qualified acceptance of an insecure state.

Discussion and conclusion

Two years after the original research, the authors came to appreciate that the narratives told by the respondents represented three different responses of people whom the authors now described as ‘exiles and refugees’ from the corporate world. Not all of the respondents were business managers (there were also local government and charity managers as well as IT professionals) but they had all grown up and shaped their careers in a world dominated by large organizations. All of them tasted success by serving these organizations and attained positions of considerable power and status, to say nothing of the substantial remuneration.

Exiled from the world of what several referred to as ‘the corporates’, their experiences and outlooks varied considerably. A few managed to gain re-entry, often with greatly reduced privileges, a price they saw as worth paying. Some, like Matthew, desperately yearned to return to the corporate world, not only as a re-admission to a domain of privilege and power but also as a re-affirmation of identity and authority; they were willing to endure endless frustrations in order to achieve it. Others, like Heather, felt that the corporate gates had shut forever for them and no re-admission was possible. They seemed to spend much time putting the fragments of their lives together, with greater or lesser success. Finally, there were those, like Michael who decided that life was possible and even desirable outside those gates, though lacking many of its privileges and obligations, but it required opportunism and flexibility.

Would it be possible to predict each professional’s path following their early job loss? Clearly some of them had more skills and other resources than the rest. What the authors found surprising, however, is that some of the professionals with the strongest resources in terms of qualifications, social networks, communication and other skills and even money, seemed to be less successful in refashioning their lives than some others with far more meagre resources. Two years earlier, the authors (along with participants in the focus group) would have expected Matthew to quickly restore his life and career and Michael to sink into depression. A happier development might have been anticipated for Heather with the help of her guru and her religious faith to support her. The authors would have expected Gordon, with his considerable financial assets, his Senior Finance Officer experience and extensive social network, to have been able to move sideways to another major financial institution. Some of the others had more predictable paths, remaining more or less in the same narrative in which they had been encountered earlier, but overall there were unpredictable elements of luck and serendipity but also of inner resourcefulness which affected each one of the respondents and whose influence should not be under-appreciated. Even when opportunities and choices seemed limited, the effects of job loss for late career professionals were neither predictable nor entirely beyond their own control. Like other exiles and refugees, it would seem that exiles and refugees from the corporate cage require some luck as well as resourcefulness and flexibility in order to maintain a degree of control over their fate and discover a new chapter in their lives.

Opportunism and flexibility were far more significant than what much of the literature on unemployment rather grandly refers to as ‘strategy’. None of the respondents sought to retrain or retool in an attempt to get a new type of work, none moved home and none seriously contemplated a major new start to their working lives. They could all be classed as ‘survivalists’ in Parry’s (2003) terms, having short-term, tactical, opportunistic outlooks rather than a ‘strategic’ approach to job searches. To the extent that they had a strategy, they adopted what Mendenhall et al. (2008: 185) term ‘a “free-agent” mentality in the face of declining employer loyalty and deprofessionalization to manage perceptions of age bias’. Strategy, it would seem, is for the corporations planning downsizing rather than for the downsized executives.

In conclusion, it seems that individuals like Michael, who are best adapted to their reduced status, are those who have embraced both dominant discourses on age identified by Ainsworth and Hardy (2009) – the physical discourse of irreversible decline as well as the psychotherapeutic discourse which claims that there is a ‘solution’ to be found in ‘retuning’ the minds of older workers. By contrast, individuals like Matthew and Gordon who refused to drink Kool-Aid and raged against the forces stacked up against them (including ageism, discrimination and stereotyping) may appear determined to contest the identities issuing from the dominant discourses (see e.g. Riach and Loretto, 2009) and refuse to lie down quietly or look forward passively to retirement. Yet, such resistance was individualistic to the point of not even disclosing their unemployed status to their friends and networks; it was also contesting neither ageist stereotypes nor the assumption that a fine-tuning of the CV and a little bit of luck is all that is needed to reverse the situation. It is a measure of the triumph of the discourses of flexible workplaces, casualized employment relations and the omnipotence of markets that expectations for job security and dignity can only be seen, even among managerial and professional employees, as a relic of a bygone age. A discourse capable of helping such employees channel their anger and frustration, one capable of generating an institutional infra-structure that will not merely seek to mitigate the effects of casualization but to contest it, remains to be articulated. Equally, a government policy that will not merely seek to re-integrate highly skilled professionals into the workforce through depressing their expectations and naturalizing their deskilling continues to evade politicians and policy-makers.

When all is said and done, when CVs have been re-written, interview skills honed and selves reinvented, there are only so many jobs to go around and so many new enterprises to be started. Discourses individualizing unemployment and extolling flexibility, lifelong learning and so forth as the recipes for return to work may alternately offer some people hopes of restitution and others a reason to blame themselves, but ultimately they do not address the structural causes of unemployment and its differential impact on different age groups.

Footnotes

Funding

The project was funded by the South East England Development Agency, and Surrey County Council, UK.

Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at the School of Management, University of Bath. He is known for his work on organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning, psychoanalytic studies of work and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader-follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. Recently he has carried out research on patient care in the hospital sector and on the dark side of organization captured in the concept of organizational miasma. He is the author of 10 books, has been editor of Management Learning, associate editor of Human Relations and is currently senior editor of Organization Studies. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.

David E Gray is Professor of Management Learning at the University of Surrey. His research interests revolve around the roles and impact of learning development practitioners such as coaches and mentors in the management learning process, the emerging social identity of coaches and the place of reflective practice in the development of both managers and coaches. He is a member of the International Coach Federation’s global research committee and the author of several books including Doing Research in the Real World, 2nd edition (Sage, 2009) and Business Coaching for Managers and Organizations (HRD Press, 2010).

Harshita Goregaokar is a researcher at the School of Management, University of Surrey. Her research interests focus on executive coaching and mentoring practices, gender diversity in executive coaching, the impact of unemployment, social identity of coaches and managers and social learning theories. She is currently researching European mentoring practices in vocational education and training and the relationship between mentoring and entrepreneurship among unemployed executives.

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