‘Unleash the tiger within your soul’: Interplays among professionalism, socializing discourses, and work–life management in adventure work

Abstract

Abstract Socializing messages shape individuals’ perceptions of professionalism and meaningful work. For individuals in the USA, many anticipatory socialization messages consist of normative notions of work; socializing discourses often draw from dominant ideologies. However, not all workers align their understandings and enactments of work with socializing discourses and/or dominant ideologies. This study draws on 14 interviews with adventure workers (AWs) to examine how socializing messages interplay with their conceptualizations of meaningful work and professionalism, as well as take shape in their work–life management. AWs simultaneously resisted and retooled professionalism depending on the value they associated with work, illuminating ways that professionalism can be a resource and constraint in particular contexts. Our findings illustrate how AWs’ perceptions of work–life management, notions of meaningfulness, and enactments of professionalism are co-constituted. We situate our findings alongside work–life scholarship and call for future investigations of the interplay between meaningfulness and professionalism in nonnormative work.