Abstract
The chaos theory of careers was applied to identify the connections between multiple jobholders’ careers and societal change. Multiple job holding is a form of employment that consists of two or more overlapping jobs. Six interviews with men born in the 1960s in Finnish North Karelia, whose multiple job holding included agricultural and forestry work, were analyzed. Our results showed that multiple job holding career development has societal connections and that the experiences of multiple job holding varied across individuals. Moreover, multiple job holding experiences and further career development endeavors were influenced by whether the multiple job holding career developed in line with or counter to societal changes. The study contributes to the chaos theory of careers by showing that self-similar fractal shapes can be identified both in individual careers and in societal changes by studying connective metaphors.
Introduction
Today’s rapidly changing technical and economic environment not only challenges working life practices, but challenges the ways in which we understand, study, and develop careers. Career theorists and researchers have expressed growing concern over the tendency of traditional career theories to ignore the role of the societal context, and have questioned whether these theories can account for changes in work and society (Bland & Roberts-Pittman, 2013; Peake & McDowall, 2012).
According to Pryor (2016), in the twentieth century, two perspectives dominated theorizing in vocational psychology. The first, the developmental perspective, e.g. lifespan and life-stage approaches (Super, 1980), emphasizes a stage model of career development. This perspective assumes that an individual passes in a linear trajectory through phases, from education through employment to retirement (Pryor, 2016). In this individually focused understanding, the career is a linear sequence comprising all the employment-related positions, roles, activities, and experiences that occur during the life span. In line with this tradition, both the person-environment fit model and lifespan or life-space theories typically concentrate on individual characteristics, such as skills and interests, while the complexity of the work context and changes within it remain unexplored (Peake & McDowall, 2012; Pryor & Bright, 2003).
The second dominant perspective focuses on choice (e.g. Holland, 1959). Here, the emphasis is on decision-making, usually conceived of as occurring either at the time of initial training for the career or during the transition from education into the workforce. The goal of this decision-making is to match individuals’ characteristics with the requirements of specific occupations (Pryor, 2016). Decision-making is seen as a rational and controlled process influenced only by a narrow range of relevant factors. While these approaches continue to have a significant impact on career research and practice, they have been increasingly criticized for their potentially limiting perspective (Peake & McDowall, 2012; Pryor & Bright, 2003).
The limitations of many previous and predominant “classic” career theories are due to their reductionist scientific paradigms, which assume that finding and isolating all of the different components will lead to an understanding of the total or sum of knowledge about a phenomenon, yielding reliable predictions and interventions (Bloch, 2005). The advocates of reductionism appeal to the unavoidability to simplify the complex world in order to understand and explain it (Sayer, 2010). However, the results of such positivist-reductionist endeavors have been criticized, as by using a few limited variables they might describe a population as a whole, they also might fail to capture the most important influences at the individual level. In particular, complexity and inter-connections are neglected (Pryor & Bright, 2003).
In addition, more research on salient influences, such as chance events, planned happenstance, spirituality, serendipity, and synchronicity, and a comprehensive framework that could better recognize the complexities of the careers of modern working life, have been called for. In response, some modern and constructivist career theories have been developed, which, for example, recognize careers as self-realization, as a reflection of the accumulation of experiences, as context conceptualization, or as narratives (Peake & McDowall, 2012).
In this study, we applied one holistic career theory, namely the chaos theory of careers (CTC; Pryor & Bright, 2003, 2014), to shed light on the connections between individual career development and its context. Our study focuses on the connections between the careers of Finnish male multiple jobholders, that is, persons simultaneously holding more than one occupation or job (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012), and change in Finnish society. We chose to study multiple job holding (MJH) careers in North Karelia, a region, which, since World War II, has undergone enormous changes in its economic and working life structure, shifting from being an agrarian to an industrial (forest) economy and, today, an information society. Exploring the cases of men born in the 1960s, who, alongside their agrarian occupations, also work in other fields, offered us an opportunity to identify the connections between individual career development and societal development. The results contribute to the CTC by highlighting the notion of fractal, which is an under-researched area (Pryor, 2016). We also contribute to the scarce literature on multiple jobholders by illuminating the diverse ways by which people end up working in more than one occupation or job and the connections of multiple jobholders’ careers and their experiences to societal changes, thereby responding to the call to move beyond the binary oppositions and individual approaches dominant in the MJH literature (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012).
The CTC as the holistic theoretical framework of our study
Pryor and Bright (2014) developed the CTC when they observed that the prevailing theories of career development did not adequately explain the realities beyond the immediate challenge of making career decisions. Their aim was to incorporate into this process the whole of the rest of a person’s life and the context in which these decisions are made (Pryor & Bright, 2014). The traditional career development theories were found to be excessively static, reductionist, fragmentary, myopic, and rational. They were criticized for neglecting changes in individuals, working contexts, and societies, and failing to take more emergent influences, such as culture, economics, politics, and the family, into account (Pryor, 2016).
These researchers sought an approach that would provide a coherent account of career development in terms of context (holistic), complexity, connections (recursive), continuousness of change (non-linearity), and the role of chance (limitations of control and knowledge). They found an answer in chaos theory, which fundamentally conceives of the world as composed of complex dynamical systems. They applied the idea of complex dynamical systems to individuals’ career development and to the contexts in which it occurs. The resulting theory of CTC is informative not only about the number of influences but also the complexity that results from their simultaneous impact (Pryor & Bright, 2014).
Chance, for example, has a significant role in career development and can be experienced as a new opportunity or as a barrier to overcome. Chance as opportunity enriches people’s working careers, while chance as problematic happenstance may threaten people’s identity (Pryor & Bright, 2011, p. 118). For example, according to Anthony Giddens (1991), giving up one job in favor of another is a fateful moment that seals a person’s destiny. Thus, the role of chance in career development merits closer investigation (Pryor & Bright, 2014).
In the CTC, individuals and their contexts are conceptualized as multi-level complex dynamical systems from which careers emerge. The functional characteristics of these systems are self-organization, boundedness, aperiodicity, and sensitivity to change. In the CTC, career is an emergent property of individuals’ interactions with their environment in which they typically function. Career development, in turn, is conceptualized as individuals’ patterns of behavior and variations in these along with and the experiences they accumulate in the course of their lives (Pryor, 2016).
The CTC sees individuals as self-organizing systems who seek both survival and purpose or meaning in their careers. Therefore, an individual’s career development is the outcome of the interaction of one complex system (the person) with a series of other dynamical complex systems, such as other people, organizations, and the law (Pryor & Bright, 2014). The CTC also offers a holistic (Bland & Roberts-Pittman, 2013) and non-linear (Bloch, 2005) approach to career development. From this perspective, focusing on relationships and nonlinear dynamics, the career is a complex adaptive entity that enables career researchers and practitioners to explain the variety of life happenings by revealing the underlying order in what otherwise appears to be a series of random events (Bloch, 2005).
Chaos theory defines reality as a combination of order and disorder. At the heart of chaos theory is an understanding of sensitivity to change in the initial conditions of a system, a notion that has given rise to the well-known butterfly effect drawn from meteorology. The butterfly effect is the perception that small changes in complex systems can lead to disproportionate non-linear changes in other parts of the system. For careers, even minimal changes occurring somewhere in the individual’s social environment may have marked effects on a specific vocational structure or on individual careers. When change is understood as non-linear, the unplanned and the unexpected are not exceptions to the stability and order of reality but a crucial part of its very nature (Pryor & Bright, 2007).
The concept of attractor is one of the main concepts posited by the CTC. Attractors refer to characteristic trajectories of a system, its feedback mechanisms, end states, boundaries, vision of reality, and balance between equilibrium and fluctuation in individuals’ career development (Pryor & Bright, 2014). In 2005, Pryor and Bright postulated four general categories of attractors that describe how, in developing their careers, people respond to working life challenges. These four categories of attractors are:
Point attractor: Goal-directed thinking and behavior, such as focusing on a specific goal-like gaining promotion. Pendulum attractor: Dichotomous thinking, approach-avoidance, role conflict, and priority balancing, such as seeking to meet the demands of two or more jobs. Torus attractor: Thinking and acting in accordance with set, organized, often very disciplined patterns, including routines, set procedures, habits, traits, and dispositions, such as trying to control the course of one’s career through repetitive behavior. Strange attractor: Thinking and acting in light of both the predictable and unpredictable dimensions of reality (being logical and rational in planning and decision-making while at the same time taking into account, utilizing and adapting to and recovering from unplanned events), such as being creative and resilient in an uncertain world.
According to Pryor and Bright the point, pendulum, and torus attractors are different ways of seeking to gain control over the reality of career development that are based on false assumptions about predictability, the fairness of life, human control, and forecasting the future according to history. The problem with these assumptions is that they do not apply to all situations at all times (Pryor & Bright, 2014).
Fractal is another important concept in chaos theory. A fractal is a map, representation, or trace of the functioning of an attractor. In mathematics, fractals are numerical in content. Computer technology, however, has enabled mathematical formulations to be translated into images revealing their shapes. Screen savers are an example of this (Pryor & Bright, 2007). A crucial feature of fractals is their self-similarity in shape. Each fractal, irrespective of size, has the shape of the other fractals in it (Bloch, 2005).
In the human sciences, fractals are described as patterned means by which people seek to understand human behavior. They are self-similar at different levels of generality, and display networked interconnections (Pryor, 2016). Fractals also have been perceived as the habits, traits, abilities, and reality visions of individuals (Pryor & Bright, 2014). In the career development context, the concept fractal provides a framework to depict the unpredictability of careers that includes both expected and unexpected patterns of human behavior (Pryor & Bright, 2011).
In the CTC, the application of fractals is challenging and a better understanding of them has been called for (Pryor, 2016; Pryor & Bright, 2014). Instead of concentrating on categorical abstractions, as is usually the case in the human sciences, researching fractals means exploring the ambiguities of metaphorical connections between individuals, their careers, and their environment. Attention to the self-similarity of patterns in the functioning and responses to changes of various complex dynamical systems is needed. The exploration of metaphors may allow study of the space between the usual ways by which people understand the world. In other words, metaphors can reveal similarities between apparently diverse entities (Pryor & Bright, 2007).
Empirical research applying the CTC is scarce, which might be due to the relative novelty of the theory. In addition, several scholars have criticized the application of systems thinking to the human and social sciences (Peake & McDowall, 2012). However, case studies and other qualitative methodologies, which enable pictures to be formed of how the networked interrelationships and nonlinear dynamics of phase transitions and attractors function in the complex adaptive entity of the career, are needed (Bloch, 2005). Further, studies exploring career transitions in the context of general life events and experiences across different populations and generations are also reported to be scarce (Peake & McDowall, 2012). Moreover, there is a need to identify fractals that represent emergent patterns of a person’s interaction with the world (Pryor & Bright, 2014). It has been stated that theoretical developments in the CTC should be focused on seeking to explicate the relevance of the concepts of fractals, emergence, recursiveness, and non-linearity, and feedback and feed-forward to decision-making on career development. The impact of culture has been said to be understudied, as have chance-related effects. Empirical work is needed to validate many of the claims that have been made (Pryor, 2016).
Our study contributes to the CTC by exploring fractals and pendulum attractor careers in the empirical context of MJH. We assumed that the careers of multiple jobholders who derive their livelihood from agriculture or forestry would be likely to shed light on fractals (i.e. self-similar patterns in career development and in societal change), as these individuals and their societal environment share a self-similar starting point (initial conditions).
MJH as an under-researched form of employment and career
Only a few studies have been conducted on MJH (i.e. on having several overlapping jobs; also known as dual job holding, second job holding, extra work, and moonlighting), despite the fact that that the current labor market situation pushes people to take on extra work (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012). In many OECD countries, the proportion of multiple jobholders of total employment is estimated to range between 5 and 10%, and is assumed to be growing (Andrews, Sánchez, & Johansson, 2011). In Finland, statistics do not give a complete picture of the phenomenon.
Research on MJH has focused on dual career holders such as farmers (Goodwin & Mishra, 2004; Robertson, Perkins, & Taylor, 2008; Weersink, Nicholson, & Weerheva, 1998) and artists (Lindström, 2016; Scott, 2012; Throsby & Zednik, 2011). The main research topics have been the motives and the consequences of taking on additional jobs. Binary oppositions are typically applied in MJH research as it is seen as either plight or pleasure. An important distinction is made between workers with main jobs, seen as hours-constrained and equated with an inability to increase hours and thereby optimize income, and workers who choose an extra job because it offers enhanced enjoyment, greater challenge and variety, opportunities to learn or train for new occupations, or enhanced employment security. The personal costs of MJH include long working hours, increased stress, increased work–life conflict, reduced satisfaction and commitment in the first job, and increased work overload. The discussion around binary oppositions, like plight vs. pleasure, has been claimed to be narrow. Bamberry and Campbell (2012) have stated that cognizance should be taken of the diversity of motives behind MJH.
MJH has been found to have a role not only in individual career transitions but also in societal structural change. Robertson et al. (2008) found that, in New Zealand, MJH has increasingly been used by people as a strategy to cope with changing rural conditions associated with neoliberal economic restructuring. Rural restructuring has provided both the need and the opportunity for increased levels of MJH. In their study, many rural multiple jobholders had positive experiences of their MJH (Robertson et al., 2008).
Bamberry and Campbell (2012) concluded that the tendency in the research literature to treat the decision to work in a second job as an individual choice dominated by rational decision-making and aimed at securing personal benefits (financial or non-financial) is too narrow. In their study, many people cited more complex considerations. The decision to add an extra job was not purely an individual solution but was embedded in the context of the household and the broader network of friends and colleagues. Expectations of mutual aid were an important reason for taking on an extra job. Social relations, building trust, or a sense of reciprocal obligation helped to explain why workers stayed in an extra job. Most interviewees felt that they had achieved an accommodation with their situation that was sustainable and consistent with long-term MJH (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012).
Research aims, questions, and context
Our main research aim was to broaden understanding of fractals and research on fractals in the CTC. We explored fractals by analyzing our research participants’ metaphorical expressions, which both form and reveal connections between individuals’ career development and their social environment, including family, region, and society. We focused on MJH, which has been found to be connected to changes in working life structures, but has seldom been researched in its societal context. We also studied whether the concept of a swinging pendulum attractor is adequate to describe multiple jobholders’ careers. Our research questions were as follows: What connections exist between our sample of male multiple jobholders’ career choices and transitions and their social contexts? How have these men ended up in MJH? Do they experience their MJH careers as plight or pleasure, or as something else? Are these experiences somehow connected to the fractals identified?
The data comprise interviews with six male multiple jobholders born in the 1960s in Finnish North Karelia. North Karelia has a long history of high rates of unemployment, cardio-vascular diseases, and poverty that differentiates it from other parts of Finland. The region is in the eastern part of the country in close proximity to Russia. During World War II, Finland fought two wars against the Soviet Union: the Winter War (1939) and the Continuation War (1941–1944). The impact of these wars was greatest in North Karelia.
From the beginning of the 1960s, urbanization intensified in Finland, including in North Karelia, which came to form one center of the Finnish forest industry. The traditional socio-economic system based on a combination of small-scale agriculture and forestry no longer provided enough income for many families, and thus many young people moved to urban areas in search of a better standard of living. At the same time, in line with the other Nordic Countries, the building of the welfare state was initiated.
The North Karelia Project, carried out from 1972 to 1995, brought North Karelia to international attention owing to its high rates of heart disease. The project was a large-scale health policy intervention directed, in particular, against the excessive consumption of animal fats. Its effects on ordinary people’s lives coincided with those of the industrial modernization process.
This era of modernization, urbanization, the North Karelia Project, the beginnings of the welfare state, as well the closeness and impacts of World War II, characterized the societal environment in which the men interviewed in our study grew up and made their first career decisions. The expanding welfare state gave certainty as well as free education and job opportunities to this generation right up to the massive recession of the 1990s.
Methods and material
For this study, we chose six interviews from the original 12. We have previously studied the careers of all 12 men in relation to all four categories of CTC attractors (Järvensivu & Pulkki, 2019). The career development of six of the research participants exemplified pendulum attractors. These men were multiple jobholders with agricultural jobs as their extra job. They had grown up at the same time in the same region, which made it easier to identify the social environment and changes in it and take account of the similarities and differences in the participants’ vocation- or career-related “initial conditions”.
The interviews were conducted in 2015 during the research project Class Photograph of Health. Participants were recruited by an announcement published in Karjalainen, the main North Karelian daily newspaper. They volunteered to be interviewed on their childhood, career, health, and the North Karelia Project. All had been born between 1960 and 1968. Each interview lasted about an hour. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and anonymized. The research project was deemed by the ethical committee of the University of Helsinki to have no particular ethical concerns and approved. Owing to the small size of the population of North Karelia and to ensure their anonymity, we have changed some of the participants’ occupations and details in our case descriptions. We debated whether to mention the suicide described by one participant in the results, and concluded that this was necessary as it was a crucial connective element in that specific case.
We applied abductive content analysis to the data, meaning that we moved back and forth between inductive (data-driven) and deductive (concept- or theory-driven) approaches (Graneheim, Lindgren, & Lundman, 2017). Both authors read all the interviews several times with the CTC framework in mind. We then constructed the participants’ career paths, including their different jobs, education, and periods of unemployment. We sought to determine the reasons for MJH and analyzed how the interviewees described and experienced it, and what characterized their individual pendulum between their jobs.
We found that some careers showed more contradictions between the jobs done, whereas in others the jobs were “in balance”. Some participants were more satisfied than others with their MJH. For example, several participants described forestry and agricultural work positively as a “hobby”, whereas one used the negative expression of “fate”. To describe our participants’ careers, we constructed a continuum of pendulum attractor types from balanced to contradictory (see Table 1).
The descriptions, fractals, and continuums of experiences and pendulum attractor careers of multiple jobholders.
Next, to identify fractals and expressions of these as connective metaphors, we chose three interviews for a closer analysis. We chose the two careers situated at the poles of the continuum and one that was not easy to interpret as a “pendulum”, as the different jobs were tightly intertwined.
In these three interviews, we focused our analysis on finding metaphorical expressions connecting the participants’ careers with their societal environment. In so doing, we found the caveats expressed by Bleijenbergh, Booysen, and Albert (2018) useful. They reminded us that qualitative researchers not only need reflexivity but also a creative imagination. We consider that having lived our whole lives in Finland and knowing its culture and history, not only as researchers, but also as participants, was an important resource in finding the relevant connective metaphors and understanding their ambiguous meanings and connections to different systemic levels. In addition, we found reflecting together on our interpretations beneficial.
We considered that the structural changes in North Karelia over the past few decades, manifesting a developmental path from an agrarian through industrial and service society to an information society, could be interpreted as fractal. Moreover, we noticed self-similarities between these structural changes and the MJH-based careers of the research participants. After finding and discussing the metaphors and connections we had found between the participants’ careers and their environment, we compared the three cases. We observed that not all were in line with the development fractal found at the level of the whole society. We further specified our findings on the societal changes relevant to our cases by adding in the short-term economic cycles that had occurred. Finally, we explored the remaining cases, applying the comparative case study method (Campbell, 2012). The results showed that our findings on the self-similarities between the “development fractals” on the levels of society and career, and the connections between these and the participants’ experiences of MJH (balance and contradictions of the pendulum), were valid for these three cases as well.
We present our results below, first in the table showing all six cases on the continuum from a balanced to contradictory pendulum attractor form of career. We then demonstrate the logic of our interpretations of the fractals we identified by introducing and analyzing the three cases more closely.
Findings
The continuum of pendulum attractor careers
In Table 1, the MJH careers of our six research participants are presented on a continuum from the pendulum attractor careers experienced as balanced, to the pendulum attractor careers experienced as contradictory. The continuum resembles the binary opposition often made in the MJH literature between MJH as plight or pleasure (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012). We found, however, that instead of being binary opposites, the plight and pleasure career types and experiences were not dichotomous but continuous.
In the cases where MJH was considered more as a pleasure (four cases), agriculture was described as a “hobby”, while also offering extra income. For these men, agriculture balanced or complemented the other job. In one case, the jobs were so tightly intertwined that it was difficult to perceive a “pendulum”. The other case was considered a contradictory pendulum. This man was especially unsatisfied with his MJH.
A balanced pendulum between research and forest work
Our first case was a man who worked as a researcher, but combined this with work on his smallholding. For him, forestry work was particularly important. Although he perceived his identity as much more attracted and connected to agricultural society and work than to research society and work, he succeeded in balancing his pendulum career and was rather satisfied with it.
This interviewee described the “traditional Finnish man”, one who does arduous forestry work and hunts for food for his family. He sought to identify with that kind of a man, and to the skills and competencies, society, and physical places associated with it. He described the location of his childhood home, with its forests and lake, as the “fixed point” of his life, and even as a reason to live.
He also described extensively the way of life in the agricultural community of his childhood and the modernization process he had subsequently witnessed. He had dreamed of working as a farmer, but knew that achieving his target living standard would be impossible. His less enthusiastic attitude to his work as a researcher became evident when he refused to talk about a “career”. He was just “good with books”, and that was his reason for going to university. He reported feeling an outsider at university and described himself as someone who wouldn’t become a “traditional university person”. Notwithstanding, the interviewee was satisfied with his salary, occupational security, and the meaningfulness of his job as a researcher.
“Chance” and “by chance” were words often used during his interview. He stated that he had chosen his main subject in university “by chance”. He described obtaining a permanent job at the university as “happenstance”, as most vacancies in Finnish universities are temporary. He spoke about researchers who sometimes worked for pay and were sometimes on unemployment benefit, but nevertheless continued working unpaid.
Finding a balance in MJH for this participant was based on connecting continuities and balancing supplements. His continuing interest in books and reading, which had lasted his whole life, could be interpreted as a connecting metaphor in his career. Through it, his work as a researcher was connected to his “fixed point”, to his childhood and his life in a rural community. His agricultural “hobbies” also formed a continuing connection.
The other elements balancing this man’s career were supplementary. He valued the security of his job as a researcher and mentioned the many accidents he had experienced when engaged in agricultural and forestry work. He explained that his skills were not quite up to forestry work and fixing machines, and that he was better off using his research skills; a conclusion that could be interpreted as a self-description in line with the changing needs of society. In their respective physical and mental requirements, he saw his two jobs as forming a functional combination.
Clear self-similarities were observed between societal change and this interviewee’s career development. His integration into the information society through his permanent position in the academy as a researcher reveals how he had “moved forward” in his career in line with the changes in society. However, in accordance with his perceived “fixed point”, and in line with the economic structure of North Karelia, which continues to be heavily based on the forest industry, he also continued to practice his forestry work. The connecting metaphor was his “interest in books”, which had started in his agrarian childhood and continued into his adulthood in the information society. As a result, neither North Karelia nor the interviewee’s career has been fully overtaken by the information society. The outcome was an ambivalent but nevertheless satisfying MJH career.
The intertwined nature of agricultural and construction work
In the second case example, the interviewee’s MJH career was also connected to societal change, but more clearly manifested the back-and-forward movement of the economy. This carpenter-agriculturist had numerous jobs during his career. His career showed periods when he mainly worked in agriculture and others when he made his living in carpentry and construction work. Both occupations were tightly intertwined and supported each other. Specifically, both stemmed from the interviewee’s family history and his roots, and both were based on many similar skills and competences. These factors could be interpreted as initial conditions for his career development.
This carpenter-agriculturist still lived in his childhood home on his parents’ farm where his parents once worked as farmers. He continued to work on the farm after his father’s death in 1980, as his siblings were not interested in farming. The farm was “automatically left to him”. He explained that he did not feel farming was an obligation, but something he wished to do.
He had run the farm on both a larger and smaller scale over the past decades, in keeping with economic and societal change. However, even during the times when agriculture was his main occupation, the farm did not yield an adequate income. Hence, he had also worked as an employee in various local and regional administrative and educational positions related to agriculture. His agricultural career had comprised a wide range of formal and informal activities. At the time of the interview, he was growing some food crops for sale, but on a very small scale “owing to lack of time and inspiration”.
Like farming, his other occupation was also inherited: he was a fourth generation carpenter and saw it as important to continue the family craft tradition. In this occupational line, he also had numerous different jobs and job descriptions. At the time of the interview, he had been working for a few years in a construction firm on an open-ended employment contract.
He had been unemployed during the economic recessions of the 1990s and 2000s. At the beginning of the year 2000, he had decided to move to Helsinki for work, but returned to North Karelia when another economic downturn, starting in 2008, found him out of work once again. During his bouts of unemployment, he continued to work on the farm, because “there’s always something to do”. This remark could be interpreted as a metaphor connecting his MJH career and the cyclic processes of society: he had both the attitude and skills needed in a changing society where there is always something to do.
Agriculture and construction work are both periodic in nature. In Finland, they have also been closely connected to economic cycles and fluctuations. For this carpenter-agriculturalist, having his own farm offered continuity, but insufficient income, while construction work, although periodic, was a way of boosting his income. Despite his doubts about living off the farm and its future, the pendulum attractor was more balanced than contradictory: he seemed to have become accustomed to confronting uncertainties during his working career. This resilience may be due to his habit of responding actively to changes in society and to his initial conditions ‒ with his inheritance of a combination of vocations and skills, there was always something for him to do. His career had developed flexibly in line with the economic cycles, which could be interpreted as fractal self-similarity.
The contradictory pendulum between the occupations of electrician and agricultural worker
Whereas the rural community and forestry constituted the attractive fixed point and continuum for the two men described above, these aspects were perceived by our third interviewee as aversive. However, he had to accept working in agriculture as a part of his career. Combined with his other occupation of an electrician, it formed a pendulum attractor replete with contradictions. This interviewee used the term “fate” to describe his and his family members’ experiences. Fate is like chance in the sense that it just happens; however, while chance leaves space for opportunities and activity, fate leaves little room for alternatives. Fate can also be interpreted as more negative than chance.
This man did not have to become a farmer, as his sister continued with the family farm and he had educated himself as an electrician. He got a good job immediately after graduation. These initial conditions were in line with the changes in Finnish society: the interviewee had, like society, left the agricultural era behind him.
However, a fateful event changed the course of his career. His sister suicided and he then promised his parents that he would continue the farm, although on his own conditions, which would have meant modernizing the farm in line with ecological and ethical trends and continuing with his occupation as an electrician. Unfortunately, the interviewee’s father rejected these conditions. The situation was complex. The man was forced to “move backwards” in his career, contrary to the onward movement of societal change. In addition, having a suicide in the family was a social stigma. During the interview, the man described another suicide. His father had told him about a man who had shot himself in the train going to the front during World War II. This suicide was open to interpretation as refusing to do his duty for his country. The suicide of the interviewee’s sister also carried these meanings of refusing to do one’s duty, leaving her brother with the obligation to “clean up the mess”; and hence his fate of returning to farming. However, two full-time jobs proved too much and caused him severe stress. His solution was to quit his paid job as an electrician and instead to work for himself. Moreover, after his father’s death, he was able to make the changes in the farm that he had earlier wanted.
For this participant, MJH was his social duty and hence his fate. It was the outcome of his father’s attitudes, the social stigma of his sister’s suicide, and the culture of silence dominant both in his family and in the rural community in general. The interviewee spoke about his father as “a man who has been in the war”, an expression widely used in Finland to refer to men who were unable to handle their war experiences, became emotionally cold, and fall silent; yet, work extremely hard for their families. The interviewee wondered whether these traits of his father were connected to his sister’s suicide and indirectly to his own backward career transition and being forced into farming. “A man who has been in the war” metaphorically connected his career and the history of Finnish society in an extremely negative way. The man was forced to take a step backwards both in his career and in relation to the societal change. Modernizing the farm and continuing as an electrician offered some compensation.
Conclusions and discussion
One of our main research aims was to broaden the understanding and study of fractals within the CTC, with special reference to MJH. We found, first, as expected in line with Pryor (2016) and Bloch (2005), evidence of inter-connected fractals, meaning self-similar shapes in societal development and change, and in development and change in MJH careers, including work in the agricultural sector. Second, we found that fractals could be identified with help of connective metaphors and expressions. This research theme has rarely been explored (Pryor, 2016; Pryor & Bright, 2014). Third, in this study, we found that the self-similarity of fractals seemed to be connected to people’s experiences of MJH careers and career pendulums. This complements previous research, in which MJH has been studied mainly by applying a reductionist paradigm and binary oppositions (Bamberry & Campbell, 2012). Fourth, we found that there was a tendency to adjust one’s work and career to the shapes of fractals on the societal level. This is a new but logical result that may form a promising basis for career development interventions.
We understood the exploration of fractals in line with Pryor and Bright (2007), focusing our analysis on the research participants’ metaphorical expressions, which we expected to both form and reveal connections between individuals’ career development and their social environment. We termed these expressions connective metaphors. We found that perceiving and interpreting them required an in-depth understanding of society and the changes within it. We therefore drew the methodological conclusion that studying fractals and applying holistic approaches to careers require contextual understanding and a sociological imagination.
Our results show that MJH is a flexible form of work that contributes to resilience in changing situations in inter-connected societies and individuals. The findings support Bamberry and Campbell (2012), who stated that MJH appears to be a diverse form of employment that can serve individuals in varied ways, and that the decision to add a job is not purely individual and rational. Instead, decision-making has complex connections to the decision maker’s societal environment and changes in it.
In our study, the researcher-agriculturist’s (Case 1) MJH career had developed in line with the development of North Karelia, where structure and economic basis of working life is a combination of a diminishing role of agriculture, a still strong forest industry, and a shift towards an information society. Our interviewee’s occupational combination helped him face up to the contradictions of his perceived identity with respect to job requirements and changes in the labor market. He was quite satisfied with the careers’ balanced and complementary aspects, and with his career, which was full of “chances” and “happenstances”. In turn, in the case of the carpenter-agriculturalist (Case 2), the patterns of the interconnected fractals were self-similar at the levels of short-term economic cycles and his individual career transitions. This man had “inherited” two occupations, a combination which contributed to his resilience in facing economic fluctuations. Overall, he was satisfied with his career development. In contrast, the electrician-agriculturist experienced returning to his family smallholding as an involuntary obligation, and hence his MJH as stressful. The fractal shape of his career development was in alignment with that of society, but “fate” forced him to reverse his steps. He sought to strike a better balance by following modern agricultural trends and remaining in his other job.
We conclude from our data that self-similar fractals on individual and societal levels had an influence on individuals’ experiences of MJH. When individuals’ career development resembles, for example, the structural development or economic cycles of their society, and they encounter opportunities (chances) thrown up by social change that they can take advantage of in developing their work and careers, multiple jobholding is likely to mainly be experienced as positive. MJH of this kind can be described in terms of (positive) chance or happenstance. MJH may offer individuals a possibility to continue in a traditional occupation that they perceive as important for their identity or for their social environment, and combine it with other occupations that may have greater labor market value or better match their interests. In contrast, if forced to move backwards during one’s career or in a way counter to societal development, the risk exists that MJH will be experienced negatively. MJH of this kind can be described as fate. However, also in these situations, developing one’s work can mitigate this situation. We suggest that fractal shapes, and the similarities and contradictions between them at the levels of individual careers and societal environment are worth exploring when seeking to understand and develop MJH careers. In practice, understanding and anticipating working life and other societal changes including economic cycles are important for career development activities.
In sum, our results emphasize the importance of taking into account the contexts and connections of overlapping dynamic systems in which careers are embedded, as called for by critics of reductionism. The CTC is one potential approach to forming a holistic picture of career development (Pryor & Bright, 2014). Further research is needed to verify our conclusions on fractals and yield more information on the connections between individual careers and societal change in other countries and regions, in other forms employment, and among different generations and genders. Experiences of MJH in different career and occupational contexts also merit further research. An urgent question is how to develop and support individuals’ careers, given that the growth of MJH is connected to expected major changes in working life structures.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the rest of the research group, headed by Lauri Kokkinen.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received support from the Kone Foundation for implementation of this research.