Abstract
This research monograph is notable, though not completely novel, for its methodology. It resists the contemporary fascination with the collection of interviews and the presentation of their contents as if they were more-or-less faithful accounts of ‘experience’ in which the actual discursive construction of the talk were a transparent medium of reportage. In contrast, the authors here treat interview data as accounts, focusing on the discursive resources through which their participants constructed autobiographical narratives. Their analytic perspective is drawn primarily from discursive psychology. The materials are drawn from three complementary studies of ‘creative’ workers at different stages in their career, from aspiring novices through to mature practitioners. Chapters explore the discursive repertoires that are drawn on to construct career-narratives that include recurrent tropes that furnish biographical resources.
Early-career biographies include a repertoire of accounting devices that stress the early emergence of talent or a propensity towards creative interests. The biography is therefore, in part, constructed in terms of the revelation of creative talent – sometimes developed in the home, with supportive parents in childhood. This sense of continuity can be a significant aspect of identity-work, legitimating career-choice and aspirations. Accounts of biographical trajectories and career contingencies emphasise the actuality or possibility of good fortune and a ‘big break’, but also of the importance of continuing hard work. Participants also construct a contrastive rhetoric that distinguishes their ‘real’ creative work from more mundane paid employment. It is good to have such biographical constructions subjected to a thoroughly analytic gaze, rather than celebrated (as is so often the case with ‘narrative’ research). There are some irritating aspects to the studies, however. In the first place, the reader has absolutely no idea what these ‘creative’ types actually do, and the term is notoriously broad. Secondly, the authors are so thoroughly committed to a discursively analytic approach that they present only brief, fragmentary extracts from their interview transcripts. Consequently, the reader is unable to glimpse how the various discourse strategies and tropes are put together to construct biographical narratives, and how ‘creative’ lives are thereby accomplished.
As I have suggested, the book is refreshing in maintaining a discursive approach to the interview materials. It therefore deserves attention from analysts, irrespective of the empirical content of the study. It is not without limitations, however. The authors might have looked a bit further afield in seeking out comparable analyses. Oddly, Mishler’s narrative study of craft-artists’ biographical narratives gets only the most cursory of mentions and the casual reader would have no idea of how close the two studies are. My own brief analysis of opera singers’ biographical work contains similar analytic points. There are some potentially fascinating parallels and contrasts to be drawn with the analysis of scientists’ accounts of scientific discovery, as explored by Gilbert and Mulkay. While the authors insist that theirs is an analysis grounded in discursive psychology, they could and should have made more effort to acknowledge the equivalent work of sociologists on accounts, vocabularies of motive and the cultural repertoires of narrative genres: Ken Plummer’s work would surely deserve attention in this context. Riessman’s narrative work is not acknowledged at all. Nor is Cortazzi’s on teachers’ biographical narratives. There is also a bit of a paradox in the overall structure of the book. The research is, as I have already noted, couched in terms of discursive psychology, but much of the intellectual context is presented in terms of sociological studies of art-worlds (Becker) and creative occupations (McRobbie). But more relevant work on the discursive construction of identities, and associated methodological texts are oddly neglected: surely the contributions of Gubrium and Holstein deserve at least some attention?