“Narrative Continuity/Rupture: Projected Professional Futures amid Pervasive Employment Precarity.”

2022

Work and Occupations

As working conditions change worldwide, employment precarity is increasing, including for groups for whom such conditions are unexpected. This study investigates how members of one such group—educationally advantaged young adults—describe their professional futures in a context of unprecedented employment precarity where their expected trajectories are no longer easily achievable. Using 75 interviews with young university graduates in Madrid, Spain, I find that most young graduates drew on a longstanding cultural narrative, which I call the “achievement narrative,” to imagine future stable employment. Simultaneously, most denounced this narrative as fraudulent. To explain this finding, I draw on the concept of hysteresis: the mismatch between beliefs that are dependent on the past conditions that produced them and the available opportunities in the present. I argue that hysteresis can extend into future projections; projected futures can be guided by beliefs based on past conditions more than by lived experiences in the present. Further, I argue that the achievement narrative itself reinforces hysteresis in future projections due to its resonance and institutional support. The paper offers new insights into projected futures and employment precarity by analyzing the future projections of a privileged cohort facing unexpected precarity, further develops the concept of hysteresis, and extends the study of cultural narratives.

The Self in Action: Narrating Agentic Moments

2024

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

with Shira Zilberstein, Mari Sanchez, and Derek Robey

This article develops a cultural and contextual approach to studying agency that attends to variation in how people narrate their experiences. Drawing on the large-scale, nationally representative American Voices Project data, the article uses computational methods to test patterns in agentic expression and qualitative methods to examine how respondents narrate agency and passivity as they describe their lives. This analysis captures agentic moments, widespread narratives through which people emphasize their agentic selfhood as they recount specific situations. Moreover, individuals use narrative moves—such as shifting their focus and drawing on subtypes of agency—to craft agentic moments despite constraints. We argue that narratives of agency are variable, situational, and often co-occurring with narrative passivity, which enables people to narrate themselves as agentic even in challenging situations.

Adler, Laura* and Elena Ayala-Hurtado.* “A Little Help from My Friends? Navigating the Tension between Social Capital and Meritocracy in the Job Search through Situational Alignment.” (forthcoming at Administrative Science Quarterly) (equal authorship)