Agency in different work organizations: Narratives of

entrepreneurs and researchers Jaana Saarinen

University of JyväskyläIAEVG 3.-5.6.2009

Introduction

• The aim of this study is to explore agency of post-doctoral researchers and entrepreneurs. Former are working as a contract researchers and latter are working as private counsellors and work life developers

• Post-structural theoretization (agency, subjectivity, gender, power and emotions)

• Researcher’s/entrepreneur’s subjectivity is partly constructed and reconstructed through the social interaction in a particular socio-cultural historical and institutional context

• In poststructuralist feminist approach identity is understand as a dynamic process of intersubjective discourses, experiences, and emotions: all of these change over time as discourses change, constantly providing new configurations

• Agency is a key mediating category through which interconnections between cultural and economic forces, identify formation and social structures can be examined (McNay 2004)

Research questions

• How researchers and entrepreneurs negotiate, construct and reconstruct their agency and identity?

• What kind of challenges do they face at their career pathways?

• How do their different work settings constraint and support the ways in which researchers and entrepreneurs negotiate their professional identities?

The data of the study and methods

• Narrative interviews researchers and entrepreneurs

• Interviewees are working in a different fields of Finnish universities and small private enterprise/companies

• Narrative and discursive approach is used in analyzing and describing how and what subjects are telling their experiences of work and discursive subject positions

Case Catherine

• Changing discursive subject positions • promising doctoral student - researcher

who is puzzling with a marginal theme• competative academic

• publish or perish

• Individual – collaboration• Reseacher – teacher

• Continuous insecurity and tightrope walking

Case: Susan

• Changing (discursive) subject positions • nurse, teacher educator, private counsellor

and working life developer, PhD student• continuous studying and improving know-

how• employee – entrepreneur• working alone – working with colleges • portfolio career

Discussion

• Findings of the study show that researchers and entrepreneurs exist at the points of intersection of multitude discursive practices and subject positions.

• Researchers are constantly negotiating between their own aspirations and the institutional demands of being an appropriate researcher (for example possibilities to continue research work).

• Private counsellors are negotiation further education and marketing their enterprise

• Both researchers and entrepreneurs share feeling that• they are tightrope walking• their work is significant and

rewarding, although it includes continuous insecurity and competition for the further contracts or funding