Work, narrative identity and social affiliation

Abstract

Sociologists of work have been drawn into a conversation over work’s significance as a source of identity and social affiliation – ‘needs’ which, according to late modern theorists, are increasingly fulfilled in multiple other realms. This article enters this exchange by foregrounding the epistemological puzzle of how we can ‘know’ identity and social affiliation in narratives. As a provisional solution, Jenkins’s concepts of identification and categorization are brought into contact with Marks and Thompson’s emphasis on interests and identities and operationalized through Somers’s concepts of narrative identity, emplotment and categorization in an analysis of qualitative interviews with 52 working people and former workers in Canada.