The Rhetoric of a Corporate Job: from Enthusiasm to Desperation Decisions and Patterns of Staying and Leaving
The Rhetoric of a Corporate Job: from Enthusiasm to Desperation Decisions and Patterns of Staying and Leaving

Summary/Abstract: My main research interest concerned the decisional processes of corporate employeeswhen leaving their company, as they appear in retrospective accounts. I used discursive analysis ofinterview accounts to inquire into relationships between organizational identities and personalidentities, and their shifting career dynamics. I studied how people construct their professional questsby investigating the discursive structure of the accounts involved in their professional stories. At thesame time, I tried to figure out how people deal with their corporate and personal nested identitiesover time, presenting ‘corporations’ both as working environments and moral actors. I aimed toexplain how people make use of various constructs of ‘corporation’ as scaffold for their stories and asinterpretive frame for their professional and personal worlds. My analysis was grounded on aconstructivist approach and sensible to the interviewees’ work of self-presentation. I also paidattention to the interactions people talk about and to the cultural resources they used in conversation. Ifavoured a narrative analytical perspective, given that respondents often presented their decisionalprocesses in story-like form. Moreover, I took gender into consideration as a possible source ofdiscursive patterns. As a research method, I used focused narrative interviews. I conducted 10 focusedinterviews with actual and former employees from different industries: media, IT andpharmaceuticals. My research work to date indicates that various types of narrative patterns emergewhen interviewees recollect their working experiences. The most salient refers to a sequence ofemotions presented in discourse, from enthusiasm to desperation. As a rule, the ‘corporation’ isconstructed as an either good or a reluctant working environment depending on the moment of thestory. Corporations on the whole gradually become personified, in later stages of the disengagementnarrative, becoming important characters in employee’s stories. Agency is embedded in theorganization and quickens the alienation process people go through.

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