Identity and career

The issue is making sense of identity and career as mutually contouring. I look at that contouring through a conceptual framework which constellates narrative theory, social theory, and existential theory as three related but significantly different ways of understanding human life and human action. That framework constitutes an advance upon thinking about identity and career in Modernist terms, in that each of the constituent theories goes beyond the duality of subjectivity and objectivity to reconceptualise the subject as entangled, inscribed, and involved. Given that conception, we begin to see why the achievement of a coherent identity through career is inherently problematic. To reach that way of seeing, I analyse the narrative accounts of two research partners: accounts of their lives and careers. The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate the illuminative potential of the combined theory that is developed in the first part of the thesis: a potential which is partly realized in the ways that the analysis reveals a mutual contouring that had not been fully recognised by the research partners. Finally, I conclude that career can be fruitfully seen as a nexus of opportunity for the construction and expression of narrative identity, social identity, and existential identity over time.