Career Construction in volatile settings: seeking congruence in a journalist’s world today

ABSTRACT

In the section of his book Career Counseling on how to compose a life portrait, Savickas (2011) addresses the issue of setting, or the ‘social niche and preferred environment in which the client wishes to situate the self’ (124). Self and setting are integrated through the stories clients tell themselves (scripts), and are drawn from a community’s master narratives. But what happens when a setting becomes unstable within the master narrative because of social and economic pressures? To study this question, we conducted a textual analysis and replicated a day’s search for micro narratives about the authorial career of journalism on Twitter. While multiple themes emerge that reflect the profession in a disrupted state, we also find examples of journalists performing nuanced and complex roles that resist contemporary master narratives. We feature one day’s worth of tweets from one journalist to display narratives of work life that reimagine an authorial career. While the preferred environment may not exist day to day, a job seeker would find journalists who construct the best environments that they can. We suggest that a client’s exploration of setting must become more innovative, and the tools for coping with change more robust, as fields such as journalism face greater uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Career settings
• journalism
• micro narratives
• destabilised professions
• vocational congruence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michael Humphrey is an assistant professor of digital storytelling at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado and a contributor at Forbes.com, where he writes about the intersection of technology and entertainment. Before he entered academia, Michael was a journalist and a community educator. He holds an M.A. in Journalism from New York University and a PhD in Public Communication and Technology from CSU.

Lorie Humphrey is a Career Counsellor in the College of Business Career Management Center at Colorado State University working with both undergraduate and graduate students as well as alumni. She holds an M.Ed. in Education and Human Resource Studies with a specialisation in Counselling and Career Development from CSU.

ORCID

Michael Lee Humphrey http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2252-0130