Markets,Contingency and Preferences: Contemporary Managers' Narrative Identities 1

Sociological models of contemporary work and identity

The image of the ‘organization man’ is a key reference point for many analyses of identity formation in the new capitalism. Classic accounts, particularly as they are remembered today, tended to focus on the culturally supplied elements of the organization man's identity (eg, Mills, 1953; Riesman, 1950; Whyte, 1956). Managers internalised the norms, values and goals of the organization, thus becoming the living agents of its existence and future. In doing so, they linked themselves primarily to the local, directly experienced social contexts of the organizations in which they worked and the local communities where they lived. But a central aspect of the best of these analyses was the problem of how organizational (and societal) cultures in the form of norms, values and goals were integrated into personal identity through reflection on personal experience and imagined futures. Through all the analyses of ‘organization man’, the same ‘psychological contract’ is assumed to lie behind identity formation: commitment was traded for de facto lifelong employment and career opportunities. The new capitalism challenges these models because it breaks down the organizational side of the bargain. It disrupts the link between organizational cultures that demand adherence to substantive norms and values, and managers' reflective appropriation of these cultures through identification of their interests directly with those of the organization, or instrumental assessment that their interests can be furthered through it.

Some accounts of the new capitalism imply that it disrupts a second dimension of identity formation, one that tends to be implicit in most theorizing of identity formation at work. In accounts of the ‘organization man’, both the organizational norms, values and goals that constitute organizational culture and the reflectively formed elements of identity place individuals in local social settings that can be directly experienced. They result in managers orienting their self-images primarily towards the organization as they experience it and, sometimes, towards the local setting of the community in which the firm is located. In these analyses, work identities make few links between the individual and wider, societal social settings that cannot be directly experienced. ⁴ Some analysts have suggested that the new capitalism breaks down this aspect of established work identities too, particularly in its economic globalization. Local social settings, whether they are within organizations or in geographically localised communities, no longer have the ongoing predictability that is necessary to sustain the sense of directly experienced relationship to a stable social setting that grounded identity in the old capitalism.

We now turn to the major existing accounts of work identity formation in the new capitalism, showing how each emphasizes change in one moment of the two dimensions we have just identified.

The ‘culture of control’ model. This account suggests that the fundamental change in work identity formation in the new capitalism revolves around the elements that are culturally supplied. The new capitalism sharply undermines employment security and career structures, and much work is done without direct supervision, often requiring creative, non-standardised responses. For contemporary organizations, the primary problem is how to ensure that employees will act optimally when the required behaviours are constantly changing. Drawing largely on Foucauldian insights, this approach diagnoses a shift towards organizational cultures in which employees take responsibility for the diligent and dedicated monitoring and improvement of their work performance. Du Gay's influential study argued that the aim of a new ‘enterprise’ culture promulgated by top management was to produce ‘self-regulating, productive individuals whose sense of self-worth is inextricably linked to the ‘excellent’ performance of their work and, thus, to the success of the company employing them' (1996: 119). The ideal employee becomes the striving, self-improving individual who regards unthinking conformity as an indicator of insufficient initiative and a moral failure to take responsibility for one's own destiny. Whether the new organizational cultures are seen to be common across firms (du Gay) or developed somewhat independently in each firm (Casey, 1995), the resulting work identities are seen as continuing to operate primarily by establishing people's relations with the local social setting of the organization – the individual's directly experienced world of work.

In these analyses, managers at all levels are seen to be exemplars of the new cultures, though in somewhat varying senses. Senior managers have no doubts that the new cultures are the way to achieve business success. They see their own abilities to be ‘enterprising’ as parallel to those they attempt to instil in all employees, and as the central source of their contribution to the organization (du Gay, 1996: 123). Given their position, their ‘enterprise’ takes the form of developing business strategy. In du Gay's study, retail store managers “were redefined as skilled motivators of their staff, and encouraged to feel more personally responsible for the financial success of their own store” (1996: 129).

Employess are not simple cultural dupes in these analyses, but the reflective moment of identity formation is confined to limited, sporadic resistance to the ‘designer cultures’ (Casey, 1995) that organizations develop (see also du Gay, 1996: chapter 7). Whatever alternative identities they build appear as responses to the new cultures, rather than new ‘imaginings’ of what their role might be, and are often grounded in older organizational cultures. Because managers generally lead the promulgation of the new cultures, they appear to be the least likely to develop resistance to them. To repeat, then, the key change the new capitalism engenders is a shift in the kind of culture that organizations supply and that employees use to generate their work identities, and this change is drive by organizations' needs and interests.

The ‘reflexive modernization’ model. In this account, the new capitalism revolutionizes identity formation in general because it fundamentally alters the terms on which the reflective moment of identity formation operates. Contemporary societies are characterised by a generalised decline in the extent to which people are embedded in social institutions, and a consequent loss in power and legitimacy of authoritative norms (Beck, 1992, 2000; Giddens, 1991, 1994). ‘New capitalist’ work arrangements are one example of this shift. Actual and de facto employment guarantees disappear, labour market regulation is reduced, and welfare state safety nets are rolled back, so that individuals are much more left to their own devices when their own actions combine with economic processes to create labour market problems for them (Beck, 2000). The result is that ‘institutional conditions that determine individuals are no longer just events and conditions that happen to them, but also consequences of the decisions they themselves have made, which they must view and treat as such [emphasis in original]‘ (Beck, 1992: 136).

In this context, culturally supplied authoritative norms and values no longer provide the bedrock for identity formation. Instead, individualized reflection upon experiences, risks, and opportunities generates questioning and rejection of such norms and values at fundamental levels not previously possible. In Giddens' more sanguine take, identity formation becomes a life-long ‘project’ in which individuals reflectively choose and shape their central life experiences and commitments – work, family, community – to their ongoingly reshaped sense of themselves (Giddens, 1991: 75). At the same time, through the cultural systems of science (Beck) or ‘expert systems’ in general (Giddens), individuals increasingly understand themselves as actors in societal, or even global, social fields that they cannot directly experience (Beck, 1992: 36–44; Giddens, 1991: 21–3). In sum, theorists of ‘reflexive modernity’ suggest that reflective identity formation operates with newly expanded horizons under the new capitalism, and that it results in individuals increasingly linking themselves to societal social fields. The new capitalism is seen as a central aspect of ‘post-traditional’ societies.

Though neither Beck nor Giddens has applied this analysis to particular occupational groups in any detail, we may hypothesise several key patterns in managerial identities from this argument. First, managers' images of themselves and their careers should not be structured around any authoritative norms or values, whether they are generated through company cultures, family or community expectations, or even occupational images. Instead, they should involve reflective understandings of both the new realities of risk and uncertainty in the labour market, and managers' own goals and purposes in their careers. Adopting Beck's more critical stance, we might expect variation in people's ability to successfully negotiate the risks of contemporary managerial labour markets, and consequent variation in their self-images. Secondly, managers should bear out the claim that identities are becoming less locally and more globally oriented. The stages on which they imagine their career options might stretch beyond the local ones of the companies that currently employ them to a range of possibilities beyond their previous direct experience.

The ‘corrosion of character’ model. For Sennett (1998), the new capitalism is distinguished by the experience of work and the labour market that it forces on employees, and the consequent experience that is the basis for the reflective moment of identity formation. The new capitalism disrupts work experience to the extent that people are unable to see themselves as part of sustained, local social settings. In the recent past, the sustained development of ‘character’ for most employees has depended on the predictability of work routines, the capacity to develop and deepen skills through a long term occupation, the very possibility of a ‘career’. The loss of the ‘long term’ in the ‘new capitalism’ is therefore producing a crisis of character in the sense that many people find it impossible to develop a coherent and satisfying sense of themselves and their relations with others. For Sennett the new capitalism's effect is primarily to make ‘illegible’ the experience that he sees as always the basis for identity formation. For him, no culturally supplied meanings can overcome this effect.

Managers are amongst those widely regarded as most affected by the organizational and labour market change that Sennett says has ended the ‘long-term’. They previously conformed to the model of building ‘character’ and identity through long-term career experience and commitment (eg, Schein, 1978). Indeed, one of the vignettes Sennett uses to develop his argument is that of ‘Rico’, a consultant and former engineering manager, and his wife ‘Jeannette’, a middle manager. Both appear to have adapted successfully to the new capitalism's demands for flexibility and openness to change; they willingly take up the new challenges that are constantly thrown their way, moving around the country as necessary, and making good incomes. However, Sennett claims, they find themselves constantly adapting to a changing environment over which they have no control and whose dynamics they really do not understand. Like other workers in the new capitalism, they are unable to build the sustaining values into their lives that structured the work identities and narratives of their parents' generation. They too display the symptoms of the ‘corrosion of character’. ⁵ Thus, for Sennett it is not the imposition of new cultures that is the problem in contemporary workplaces, it is that the experience of work and career in the new capitalism makes it impossible for people to reflectively construct identity narratives that sustain them by providing coherent accounts of their long term connection to the local social settings of their daily work and community lives.

Our argument has been that divergent accounts of the impact of the new capitalism on identity formation arise as analysts focus on different aspects of the changing experience and context of work. Rather than being regarded as incompatible, these accounts can be seen as highlighting key social changes that impact on workplace identities, and as suggesting the direction of such effects. To move forward, we examine the work and career identities of managers, building on existing accounts while avoiding their somewhat one-sided emphases. With the ‘culture of control’ analysts and the ‘reflexive modernization’ theorists we pay attention to the nature of the culturally supplied material managers use, while at the same time listening to how they reflectively appropriate their career experiences and those of their colleagues. Influenced by the ‘reflexive modernization’ theorists we observe how managers' identities link them to societal social settings that cannot be directly experienced, while retaining a concern for how they place themselves in the local, directly experienced social settings that are the focus of ‘corrosion of character’ and ‘culture and control’ accounts. Our concern is to reinstate the sociologically familiar interplay between the poles of the two theoretical dimensions of identity formation we have identified.

Analysing managerial identity through career narratives

In this paper, we focus on the identities managers adopt in telling the stories of their careers. An analysis of ‘narrative identities’ provides a flexible, yet systematic, framework for assessing subjectivity and identity in contemporary work organizations. We take narratives to be characterised by the ordered arrangement of events that are constructed as being logically connected, and through which change occurs from one state to another (Franzosi, 1998). Put differently, narratives offer explanations for particular situations as outcomes of a series of connected events. In describing their careers and their future career expectations, the managers we interviewed provided narratives in exactly this sense. We analyze how managers placed themselves as narrative characters in relation to the other characters and the events and causal relations that propelled their career stories. Arising from the structures of the narratives they use and the ways they use them, managers' ‘narrative identities’ entail particular kinds of motivations, autonomy, and constraint (for parallel approaches, see Czarniawska, 1998; Ezzy, 1998; and Somers and Gibson, 1994). By focusing on what managers' career narratives tell us about how they understand themselves, particularly in their relationships to the labour markets and organisations of the new capitalism, we avoid the ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu, 2000).

Analysis of narrative identities has been used in studying a range of identities, particularly those that arise where individuals are confronted with major change or disruption, or contradictory forces and demands (eg, Polletta, 1998; Sparkes and Smith, 2002; Vila, 2000). Sociologists studying work have used the concept to understand responses to sudden work and career change such as retirement (eg, Gearing, 1999) and the reconstruction of aspects of the professional workplace (Woods and Jeffrey, 2002). We extend previous use of the concept by more systematically analysing how narrative identities are related to narrative structures, and by focusing on narrative identities that are a relatively settled accommodation to the experience of the new capitalism.

A focus on narrative identities is well suited to empirical examination of the issues raised by the conceptualizations of identity formation we discussed above. Indeed, Sennett, Beck and Giddens all explicitly consider that identities are constructed through the narratives people use to understand themselves and their experiences. The concept has the further advantage of avoiding pre-judgement of the issues which divide their approaches from those of analysts who regard identities as primarily supplied by cultures. First, it neither assumes nor rules out the connection of managers' self-images to wider organizational narratives of the kind seen by Casey or du Gay as characteristically imposed on employees in the work organization. It further allows, without assuming, the possibility that managers' career narratives can be connected to wider ‘public’ narratives, as is the case in analyses which suggest that managers merely repeat stories of their careers supplied to them and their companies by management gurus (Clark and Salaman, 1998; Somers and Gibson, 1994). But narrative identities may also be the mechanism through which managers reflectively reconstruct the selves they present, as theorists who emphasize the reflective moment of identity formation would assume. Finally, the method of narrative analysis of open-ended interview data requires no preconceptions about the content of the narratives found. Instead, we inductively examine interviews to discover the narratives managers use in telling the story of their careers.

The study

This paper focuses on the career narratives of 136 managers in six Australian based companies, three of which operate in the financial services sector and three in the manufacturing/engineering sector. The companies employed between 1,200 and 6,000 people in Australia at the time of the study. Half of the companies are subsidiaries or divisions of large European multinational corporations and the other three firms are listed Australian companies. Worldwide, the smallest of the multinationals employs just under 100,000 people, while the largest employs more than 400,000. To varying extents, the managers we studied were able to access positions and career paths in the multinational parent companies.

Our aim was to study managers in companies that were neither laggards nor pioneers in their history of organizational restructuring, but represented the broad ‘new capitalism’ experience. All six companies had undergone significant internal restructuring and some net loss of managerial positions, with four having taken over other companies in the decade before the study. They had all moved towards more flexible and team-based forms of work organization, while retaining important elements of a bureaucratic structure that allocated clear responsibilities to managers. Thus they reflected the most common patterns of contemporary firm restructuring.

The experiences of Australian managers in the private sector are highly comparable with those of managers in most other advanced industrial economies over the past 20 years. Australian firms have experienced high levels of organizational change during this period with concomitant significant changes in work arrangements (Littler et al., 1996; Morehead et al., 1997). They have seen forms of organizational change typical of advanced industrial economies such as downsizing, delayering, moves towards more flexible organizational structures, and the increasing use of team work. Australian managers in the private sector have faced fairly favourable labour market conditions since a sharp recession in the early 1990s, with earnings and job opportunities rising more rapidly than the workforce average (Martin, 1998).

We collected two forms of data within each company, interviewing between 18 and 26 managers in each, and conducting a mailback survey of 470 managers in the six companies. Names and contact details of managers to be interviewed were provided by the participating companies, largely relying on company definitions of managerial employees. We requested interviewees from a range of levels and locations within the companies. The resulting sample was not a random sample. Nevertheless comparing interviewees' characteristics with those of respondents to the mailback survey (effectively a random sample) provided no evidence of sample bias, either in objective characteristics (such as age, sex, income, etc.), experience, or attitudes and views about work and careers. Interviewing between late 1997 and early 1999, we completed interviews with 89% of those on the lists provided by companies, with scheduling problems explaining two-thirds of refusals. All managers in the sample were interviewed once. The bulk of interviewees were in the 30 to 50 age range, 106 were men and 30 were women. They ranged from lower middle to very senior managers, though no CEOs were interviewed. Their salary packages ranged in value from about A$40,000 to A$300,000 with nearly three quarters having packages between A$70,000 and A$179,000. Thus, the bulk of the sample consisted of middle and upper middle managers, with about 8 senior managers and the remainder being junior managers. The interview data is the focus of this paper.

Interviewees' narratives of their careers took up a substantial part of each semi-structured interview. Issues covered included why interviewees made important job changes, their sense of their own marketability, what their current positions entailed, what they liked and disliked about their jobs, what characteristics made them attractive to employers and any barriers to their careers. Questions and probes were framed to avoid dictating the narratives that interviewees would use in answering them. Interviews were taped and transcribed and analysis was assisted by the use of NUD.IST 4. On the basis of initial analysis of interview transcripts, a number of core narratives commonly used by interviewees were identified. A coding scheme was developed based on this inductively derived list of narratives, with a focus on how interviewees placed themselves in these narratives. Initial systematic coding was undertaken by two coders trained by one of the authors (Ryan and Bernard, 2000). A small sample of interviews was coded by both coders to assess coding reliability, with agreement found to be in the order of 90%. Interviews were then further coded and recoded in an increasingly iterative process which also involved elaboration and modification of the coding scheme itself.

The dominance of a ‘market narrative’

The dominant mode in which our interviewees told their career stories was through a narrative of market action and choice. Often, they pictured themselves as active agents in market transactions and other activities aimed at enhancing their position in such transactions. At other times, their stories placed them as essentially reactive to the market actions of more powerful actors. At the core of this narrative mode lies a familiar neo-classical image of market transactions in which needs and preferences, and costs and prices, are the forces that motivate action. When our interviewees used it, the market narrative tended to picture the social world as composed of a series of market interactions in which the horizons of markets were essentially unlimited. Organizational or institutional confines (such as those of the firm) did not define the boundaries of markets, and actors oriented themselves to whole markets, not merely the parts that happened to lie within particular organizations or institutions.

In the paradigm case, interviewees positioned themselves as buyers or consumers. They purchased goods and services which best satisfied their needs and preferences, given prices, their resources, other preferences, and the costs of satisfying those other preferences. Discovering the range of available goods and services, evaluating their capacity to satisfy needs and preferences, and consequent choice making were the critical moments that motivate the narratives. These moments constitute individuals' autonomy, and place them as ‘choosing selves’. Critical to the structure of this narrative is that the universe of available choices is essentially beyond the choosers' control, and that preferences are taken as given.

We focus on this narrative in this paper for several reasons. It was the dominant one in our interviews: all interviewees used it as a significant component in their accounts of their past and future careers, and almost all used it to structure their career stories. Moreover, this narrative was used irrespective of the characteristics of interviewees: it was the dominant mode in which men and women, people from varying ethnic and racial groups, those of varying ages, and those from differing class backgrounds narrated their careers. Indeed, we regard the ubiquity and dominance of this narrative as one of the major empirical findings of our research – we did not expect to find a single narrative strategy to be so encompassing. This is not to say that there is no variation in the use of the market narrative, or that other narratives were never evident. Indeed, elsewhere we have explored the tensions that arise when men and women managers use the same, virtually ungendered, market narrative in a social world where their domestic identities remain highly gender differentiated (Wajcman and Martin, 2002). Other narratives were far more fragmented than the market narrative when they appeared in our interviews, and were used by a minority of interviewees. Most appeared around accounts of career decisions and choices based on social connections to others, usually thematised as matters of trust, respect or responsibility that were not simple personal preferences, or around ethical or moral issues in which the interviewee was pictured as a moral subject.

Tales of the social world as market – the choosing and selling self

In using a market narrative to describe their careers, interviewees first pictured themselves as choosing selves – making decisions about what to consume – or as selling selves – as offering aspects of themselves for sale. Explanations for taking particular jobs were commonly presented as active choices so that expected roles were reversed: interviewees became consumers of jobs and their employers sellers of workplaces (71% positioned themselves like this). ⁶ As consumers of jobs, interviewees described what was attractive to them about a particular job (how it matched their pre-existing preferences) and their assessment of its ‘price’ (the time and commitment required from them). One respondent noticed the reversal of positions in such a narrative when explaining how he found a job in an area that was new to him on returning from a year overseas:

Narratives of the choosing self were motivated by preferences as pre-given, natural likes or dislikes. Interviewees almost universally (99%) expressed preferences for intrinsic aspects of jobs such as the ‘variety’ of tasks and lack of routine in the work, the challenge or autonomy the jobs offered, the opportunity to work with other people, to learn, to control or influence events or to take responsibility for them, the ‘fun’ of the work, the fact that the respondent found it interesting, and the sense of satisfaction that it offered. Said one interviewee:

Another indicated that the choosing self could be mobilised on internal as well as external labour markets:

Job moves were also often (64%) explained on the basis of the preferences or tastes that were unsatisfied or violated by the position an interviewee had chosen to leave.

Within the market narrative, being an autonomous ‘choosing self’ required market capacity, notably wealth and income or marketable skills and abilities. The idea that income and wealth were important routes to autonomy is almost axiomatic within the market narrative. Though income was rarely put forward as the primary motivation for career decisions, most (70%) mentioned it at some point in accounting for such decisions. A broader sense of market capacity over the lifecourse was also in evidence when interviewees talked about ‘financial security’, the accumulation of sufficient wealth that they would no longer be reliant on income from a job to be able to buy what they wanted (19%), and when a few worried about losing accumulated superannuation and other benefits if they left their current company. Here, wealth was taken as the basis for pure freedom and autonomy, minimizing the risks of the new career uncertainties.

The other common route to market capacity was to attempt to increase one's value on the markets where one found jobs. Here managers were essentially producers of a commodity – themselves – whose aim was to increase the market value of this commodity. In one such locution, around a quarter (24%) of interviewees explicitly placed themselves as making estimations of current and future labour market demands, and choosing jobs and careers accordingly. More interestingly, a large minority (36%) accounted for career choices and moves as relevant to self-development, understood as making oneself more skilled and experienced and therefore a more marketable commodity on cross-firm labour markets (c.f., Kanter, 1990). In several cases it was explicitly claimed that such market strategies have become more necessary as cross-firm labour markets have become more important in managerial careers, for example:

Though very confident of their ability to do the jobs they had or aspired to, many interviewees also maintained a distinction between the characteristics which would make them appealing to employers and their own sense of the skills and experience which were actually necessary to perform a job. Completing further formal education was often seen in this light. One interviewee noticed his colleagues undertaking MBAs because of the market advantage it gave them, but was sceptical about its actual effect on their work performance:

Here, there is a distance between the marketed self – the image of oneself that one sells to employers – and the market actor who strategizes this image to maximise personal preferences or economic gain.

Interviewees sometimes saw their ability to mould themselves to increase their marketability as enhanced or limited by personality traits or ability (17%). Like preferences, these were usually taken as fundamentally immutable. They included such things as drive, independence, reliability, adaptability, ability to think laterally, and vision. Rather than being characteristics of the self that could be developed, as du Gay's ‘enterprising self’ would construct them, our interviewees placed them as inherent personality traits that made them more or less marketable.

The market narrative we have described is certainly a culturally transmitted framework. The fact that markets are as much cultural constructs as economic ones has been an important theme of a recent cultural turn amongst some sociologists of work and the economy (eg, Du Gay and Pryke, 2002, Callon, 1998). However, contrary to the expectations of the ‘culture of control’ model, the market narrative used by managers across the 6 firms in our study did not arise from explicit organizational cultures. Indeed, most of the companies did have explicit cultures that contained substantive company values and goals, and were oriented towards engaging employees in these. ⁷ But our interviewees hardly referred to these, and certainly did not use them to frame their career stories. At the same time, rhetoric within the companies was infused from top to bottom with a focus on ‘business’, so that virtually all of the companies' relationship with their environment was framed in market terms, and, within the companies, much of the work of managers was discussed in these terms too.

In an environment where the substance of company cultures was no longer grounded in de facto employment guarantees and protection of managers from external competition, transferring the market image to their own careers offered a plausible framework for understanding their experience and projecting their future action. Of course, in the 1980s, with notions like ‘Me, Inc.’ and the ‘portfolio career’ popular business writers, and some companies, did encourage managers to adopt elements of the market narrative we have described (see Wajcman and Martin, 2001). Our argument is that managers effectively distanced themselves from explicit company cultures, and reflectively adopted a different cultural framework – that of the market narrative which already dominated the discourse about much of their day to day work – to give meaning to their own careers and career decisions. This story did shape the terms in which managers understood their individuality, framing it in terms of preferences when the self was narrated as ‘choosing self’ and skills or abilities when narrated as ‘selling self’. However, both possibilities allowed considerable real variation and autonomy in managers' reflective development of their market identities.

We have shown that the market narrative places managers in a market world that is, in principle, unlimited, certainly crossing firm boundaries. Here, the dilemmas of loyalty, so characteristic of organization man, break down. When presenting themselves to significant others, managers no longer focus on positioning themselves primarily in relation to the demands of strongly enforced company norms or bureaucratic politics (c.f., Jackall, 1988). Instead, they focus on constructing and presenting marketable images of themselves in universalistic terms. One interviewee, reflecting on how things had changed and on his view of loyalty, drew a contrast with career patterns of the fairly recent past to explain how he imagined his career. He emphasized his perception of contemporary firms' approach:

‘Other’ subjects – contingency and risk in market narratives

When managers told the stories of their careers as market narratives, they placed themselves as the subjects of those stories – as the active agents whose choices motivated the events they described. But they also had to explain the impact of events over which they had limited or no control. To do this, they made their market stories at least partially contingent on outcomes and events where others, rather than themselves, were the active subjects. Most significantly, the organizations within which our interviewees make their careers were usually positioned as the subjects of their own history and development. In this section we focus on how managers constructed these organizational narratives and their relation to managers' careers. We show that understanding how and when managers talked of organizational dynamics is central to accounting for the ways they construct and negotiate career risks.

A large majority of our interviewees explained some events in their careers in relation to the life of the organization in which they worked (64%). As the subjects of their own life stories, companies were particular kinds of actors with characteristic objectives, problems, structures and processes. The placement of companies as strategic market actors was the first common way interviewees positioned them as subjects (52%). Companies would take over other firms to enhance market position, reorganize their structure and processes to improve market performance, adopt particular courses of action because they had become the objects of other firms' takeover moves, strategically downsize to adapt to changing market conditions, divest themselves of some activities or businesses, and so on. This was the mode in which virtually all interviewees who had been made redundant during their careers explained their experience of redundancy. ⁸ By placing their firing as the result of companies' strategic market action, they explained it as the contingent outcome of the agendas of actors far more powerful than themselves. In a typical account, a senior finance industry manager explained one job move:

In fact, managers who admitted that they had not anticipated an employing company's strategic market actions, because they had not understood the motives that drove its actions, often regarded themselves as having failed. More generally, such events were usually presented as the context for a round of market action by interviewees, in which they responded to the shifting structure of the market environment.

A second narrative mode saw companies as acting to regulate their own internal processes in order to continue functioning smoothly (57%). In this vein, organizations might identify individuals with particular promise, train and groom them for particular future roles, and map out organizational careers for them. They might have in place, or change, periodic career and salary reviews for managers, usually in a framework of positional classification. They might construct new authority relations or reorganize existing ones to more effectively achieve the aims of a particular section of the company. Here, companies were placed as the authors of their existing internal structures and systems and as capable of controlling, altering or entirely rebuilding them. Interviewees' understandings of their location in these structures and processes were usually central aspects in their accounts of their likely future in their current organization.

Two examples illustrate how this could lead to either a classic ‘organization man’ positioning of oneself as simply subject to organizational processes over which one had no control, or a much more active response, in which the market narrative provided the logic for what one did. First, take the case of a rapidly rising young manager in a subsidiary of a large European multinational engineering/manufacturing company. As the company had well-developed global executive training programs, his career over the next 10–15 years was clearly mapped out. As he recognised, this meant that the company would effectively control his career, unless he exercised the choice of leaving it. By contrast, another, also rapidly rising, manager in a smaller regional BFI company placed himself in a more active role as he mulled over his options given his age (33) and length of tenure (10 years), and given the structure of the company:

Here, just as where managers anticipated a firm's strategic market actions, the juxtaposition of the narrative of internal company processes (like that of company motives) with that of the manager as market actor places him as able to comprehend and anticipate the actions of the company. This is the basis for establishing his own agency in a career story where he cannot control everything.

Company cultures, mentioned by many interviewees, were often discussed in this mode (29%). Cultures were thus placed as aspects of organizations that the organization could consciously control, and that had contingent impacts on managers' careers. Interviewees had little difficulty separating themselves and their own goals from those entailed in their experience of the company culture, whether it was formal or informal. A number expressed dislike of the contents of such cultures, especially with respect to a culture they saw as being superseded by a new or emerging one. Nevertheless, many regarded it as being essential to be able to live with an organization's culture if they were going to remain in the organization. One mid-50s male manager in a manufacturing/engineering company reflected on the openness to change this required:

Even in this willingness to adapt to the contingency of changing organizational culture, however, this interviewee retains his distance, focussing his judgement about the way such change provides ‘benefit’ to the organization. In maintaining their capacity for critical distance from company cultures, many managers constructed themselves as capable of choosing between them, much as they chose other aspects of their jobs. One successful strategic planning manager in a BFI company explained one job move on this basis:

The rigid culture of the company he left was essentially contingent – he could not change it – but by exercising his market agency he found a more conducive culture.

Combining their narratives of market choice with narratives of organizational life made the managers in our study optimistic about their career prospects and about their ability to control their work (Wajcman and Martin, 2001). The image of social life as market exchanges and market strategising provided a cultural framework for managers to apprehend forces beyond their control, while also demanding that they take responsibility for their own estimation of current market conditions, and their subsequent market actions. It provided space for both effective action and powerlessness, and it allowed uncertainty of outcomes without complete incomprehensibility. In allowing variation in managers' estimations of the extent of their capacity, it was a very different culture than that of the organization man or the cultures described by contemporary analysts of ‘cultures of control’. These cultures provided no space for risk assessment because of the substantive images of the ‘good’ employee they entailed.

Preferences and pleasures

Although the market narrative placed preferences as the ultimate motivators of managers' actions, it did not determine how they would be understood. However, as we probed our interviewees about their careers, their long-term goals, and the relation of work to other aspects of life, they generally used one or more of three forms of a ‘narrative of pleasure’. First, there was a narrative in which the search for pleasure motivated choice, with preferences representing beliefs about the route to pleasure. It placed the experience of work as, at least potentially, directly pleasurable. This was often closely combined with a second narrative in which work provided a route to better understanding oneself. We focus on these ‘pleasure stories’. In a third account, work was an instrumental route to obtaining other goods and services which were immediately pleasurable. Though this last account was used by about 70% of interviewees, it was virtually never presented as the primary motivation for career and job choices. We therefore leave it aside here.

As we have already noted, interviewees expressed a strong desire for interesting, challenging jobs, or jobs that offered opportunities to learn. While these qualities did not necessarily require that work be different from that undertaken in the past, our interviewees placed difference and variety at the centre of their assessment of whether work was interesting and challenging. One interviewee's description of the need for novelty succinctly demonstrated how far this orientation was from a coherent ‘project of the self’ or the lifelong development of ‘character’:

In line with this desire for any kind of novelty in work for its own sake, many interviewees located the contingency of organizational life as a source of attractive new opportunities which defined the choice sets for career decisions. Perhaps a reorganization would offer them new ‘challenges’ just when they were starting to feel stale, or a new project would appear when they felt they had mastered their existing responsibilities.

The search for direct, unreflective, individualized pleasure in the novelty and ‘interest’ of work was the basis for one ambitious young manager's account of her approach to the labour market:

If there was an ‘ethic’ that many of our interviewees held in common, it was that the search for this kind of pleasure should be the ultimate motivation in job and career choice. By providing a logic for the making of choices, such an ethic sits easily with the basic market narrative and its location of managers as choosing selves. While it may connect a series of choices with each other, it leaves the self and identity as the product of the interaction of given preferences for particular modes of pleasurable being with often contingent circumstances. In this respect, it is far from the reflexive project of self-formation. Indeed, the focus on choosing work which is directly pleasurable echoes one strand of contemporary management literature which has become particularly popular since the rise of such career images as the portfolio career (eg, Curnow et al., 1994).

However, the ideal of interesting, challenging work was occasionally contextualized differently – as a route to discovering more about oneself and one's capabilities (7%). One senior strategic planning manager explained what motivated him in searching for new challenges:

In this elaboration of the idea of challenging work, there is some direct pleasure through the sense of achievement in reaching a difficult goal. But the desire for challenge is also constructed as a way of discovering the extent of one's capacities. Though hardly the paradigm of the coherent, reflective self-formation Giddens envisaged, this story at least involves some element of self-discovery.

In principle it would be possible to derive market preferences from a ‘project of the self’ of the kind hypothesised by Giddens; or preferences might be derived from an image of the ‘good manager’ thus arising from an ‘ethical’ basis, as suggested by ‘culture of control’ analysts. In contrast to both these possibilities, we found that most preferences in managers' career stories are based on unreflected experiences or anticipations of pleasure. Only the narrative of exploring the limits of one's capacities hinted at a more sustained story of self-development, though even here it was remarkably curtailed compared to the open, self-reflective image of ‘self-actualization’. ⁹ Perhaps this is not surprising. The market narrative locates individuals' autonomy primarily in their ability to make choices on markets in ways that will satisfy their preferences. In thus requiring them to focus on choice making, it demands that they are able to minutely specify their preferences but does not place value on devoting energy to understanding or reflecting upon these preferences.

Discussion and conclusion

We began this paper by suggesting that existing divergent accounts of the effect of changing work experience on identity tend to focus on one or other end of two underlying theoretical dimensions. These are the dimensions of culturally supplied and reflectively constructed elements of identity, and the linking of individuals to local versus societal or global societal settings. They have long structured sociological understandings of the relation between work and identity. Our suggestion has been that resolving the apparent contradictions between existing accounts might be achieved by avoiding their one-sided emphases.

Our analysis differs from that of ‘culture of control’ analysts on several counts. First, while we did locate a cultural framework that managers found in companies and that they use to structure their work and career identities, this was not the framework companies actively promulgated and it does not always serve their interests. Instead, managers adopted a cultural idiom that was widely used to guide the everyday activities of companies – the idiom of market oriented ‘business’ – and applied it to themselves, effectively re-imagining themselves as businesses whose aims were to maximise satisfaction of their preferences. Second, we have shown that this re-imagining required a reflective appropriation of the market narrative, and that it requires ongoing reflective work on the part of managers as they attempt to understand their work and careers and make career decisions. The market narrative is no more than a cultural framework, it frames and influences how managers think about work and career while requiring their active reflection to provide it with content. Third, we have shown that the interplay between the market narrative and managers' reflections on their careers allows them to construct identities that propel them to act in ‘relative autonomy’ from companies. The managers in our study used the market narrative to respond strategically to company cultures, company politics and company processes, and to build a workable understanding of the opportunities (and their limits) that might be available to them on cross-company labour markets. This leads to our fourth departure from culture of control theorists – a rejection of their tacit assumption that workplace identities in the new capitalism operate primarily by linking people to local, directly experienced social spheres, just as they did in the old capitalism. Instead, we have shown that the market narrative allows managers to see an interplay between directly experienced and symbolically mediated social spheres through the image of societal or global labour markets, and that this is an important ground for their ‘relative autonomy’ from companies.

Our results sharply contradict Sennett's ‘corrosion of character’ analysis on a number of counts. First, the managers in our study did not regard the world in which they made their careers as ‘illegible’, nor did they show much evidence of feeling the deep unease about their lack of ‘character’ that Sennett's diagnosis would predict. At the same time, our sample of managers was far from the tiny elite of business leaders who Sennett sees as the only group that thrives in the new capitalism. Second, in finding that managers constructed central aspects of their work and career identities through the interplay between the cultural framework of the market narrative and reflections on their own career experience, we showed that Sennett's analysis was based on a one-sided view of identity formation. Indeed our research showed that the cultural framework of the market narrative was central to understanding how managers were able to make their careers ‘legible’. While Sennett had assumed that the local, directly experienced world of work was the only basis for building identities that would be viable and sustaining, our research indicated that managers used the market narrative to connect themselves to social fields beyond their direct experience and thus to make their careers ‘legible’.

The ‘reflexive modernization’ model captured important elements of the identity patterns we found. It was correct in emphasising the increasing significance of societal and global orientations in identity, as opposed to only local ones. Our research showed how such changing orientations assisted managers to maintain a sense of agency despite a real shifting of employment risks from firms to themselves (see Wajcman and Martin, 2001). We found important reflective moments in managers' identity formation, as the model emphasised, particularly in Giddens' version. However, we have also suggested that the reflexive modernization model overemphasised this aspect, neglecting the importance of culturally supplied frameworks such as the market narrative in framing and shaping the reflective moment in identity formation. Our research makes us sceptical of the general claim at the heart of this model – that culturally supplied elements have become much less important in identity formation in the new capitalism, while reflectively formed ones are more important. Instead, our study suggested important changes in the form and content of the cultural material managers used, and change in how the interplay between culture and experience plays out, but no wholesale shift away from cultural influences. Indeed, we found far less evidence of any sustained ‘project of the self’ than this model predicted, and we explained this partly through the influence of the market narrative.

Our argument, then, is that the market narrative both allows managers some real, but limited, autonomy from companies and their goals, and influences how that autonomy will be understood and acted upon. In the context of the work organization of new capitalism, the identities managers construct using this framework provide ways of dealing with the new risks and uncertainties of post ‘organization man’ managerial labour markets in which companies have repudiated the old ‘psychological contract’. Flexibly adapting and re-adapting a cultural framework largely based in the revivified ethos of business competition that oriented companies' thinking during the era of organisational restructuring, managers have been able to reconstruct their self-image in ways that provide them with real advantages. These undoubtedly provide companies with some payoffs too, since they encourage managers to orient themselves pragmatically to whatever benefits companies offer to them. But this very market based pragmatism is ultimately oriented to managers' own interests as they understand them, not to those of companies.

There is some irony in these developments. The most recent wave of research on how managerial careers have changed in the era of organizational upheaval of the last 20 years or so indicates considerably more continuity than was previously anticipated. There are many firms where, despite some change, managers' lengths of tenure, frequency of intercompany movements, and rates of career progression, remain rather similar to those of 30 years ago (eg, McGovern et al., 1998, Wajcman, 1998, Wajcman and Martin, 2001). The companies we studied fall into this category. Yet our research confirms that, even if career patterns themselves have not been revolutionized, managers view their careers as if they have been. They explain their career decisions and project themselves into the future as autonomous actors in a market world with no strong attachments to particular firms. While companies may once have unequivocally supported the cultural supply of this identity, it has now taken on a life of its own that firms are clearly incapable of controlling.

These results raise many interesting questions about work identities amongst other employees in the new capitalism and more generally. One is whether the market narrative provides a framework for less advantaged workers to understand their labour market and work experience, and to build a sustainable identity in their narratives of work and career. Such workers may display greater contradiction and tension in the interplay between the culturally supplied image of autonomous market actor and the experience of uncertain, unpredictable labour markets that offer little security in the long-term. Recent studies of disadvantaged groups do suggest that they are highly resistant to cultural stories of the meaning of work and career that bear little relation to their experience (Smith, 2001; du Gay, 1995). It may be that the labour market advantages possessed by managers in our study were an essential prerequisite for maintaining their self-image as autonomous market actors with the capacity to actively pursue their careers. For workers without these advantages, the ‘illegibility’ of the new capitalism may be a fundamental barrier to sustainable identity formation.

Overall, we believe that our most significant finding is empirical. We have shown that the influence of the globalising neo-liberal market discourse so dominant in much public policy-making, management literatures and private firms is not limited to the rhetoric of public debate. This ‘public narrative’ has been adopted by managers as a basis not only for reconstructing the companies in which they work, but also for their self-understanding. This has had the previously unrecognized effect of allowing managers to construct themselves as essentially autonomous from company cultures, as able to strategise around the new risks of more marketized career paths, and as attaching meaning to their work through its capacity to satisfy their individual, largely unexamined preferences. As powerful actors in the unfolding drama of contemporary corporate restructuring, senior and middle managers may be both the agents of structural reform and amongst the beneficiaries of it. In this sense, the market narrative, elaborated through understandings of preferences and pleasures, is both the frame within which their interests come to be constructed and the vehicle for pursuing them.