No footsteps to follow: How blue -collar kids navigate postindustrial careers
Abstract
During the recession of the early 1980s, the United States experienced a massive industrial downturn. More than 3 million blue-collar jobs permanently vanished from the economic landscape, altering the structure and availability of once-viable career paths. Therefore, the goal of this project was to learn about the experiences of the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers who cannot follow in their parents' footsteps, but instead must transition into careers in a postindustrial economy. Guided by life course theory, I interviewed 62 people---sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers---to determine how family-based communication about work and career both helped and hindered one cohort of "blue-collar kids" in their career transitions. The research consisted of two phases, an archival phase and an interview phase. The archival research traced events of the recession (1979-1982), particularly as they related to industrial downturn in a small Michigan mining community. The interview-based research phase delved into the life courses of a cohort of individuals who came of age during that particular period of economic downturn. These individuals' (and their parents') work histories, family messages about work and career, and career and class identities, reveal several important insights into postindustrial career transitions. First, the "kids"' and parents' constructions of periods of economic downturn serve several notable purposes, including destigmatizing the experience of job loss, offering a viable model of lifetime employability, and backgrounding the politics of economic downturns. Second, family-based messages about work and career do not occur in straightforward, unambiguous memorable messages. Instead, communication about these issues---and ultimately communication about social class mobility and reproduction---emerges and comes to be understood through relational dialectics. Third, this cohort simultaneously must reconcile competing tensions between two macrolevel discourses that dictate, to an extent, how careers should unfold. On one hand, blue-collar kids are driven by the social mobility mandates of the American Dream and, on the other hand, are committed to upholding the values-based obligations of the Working Class Promise. The findings contribute to the literature on organizational socialization, family communication, and career identities. The findings also are suggestive of several interventions for communities facing deindustrialization.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Buzzanell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American history|Communication|Sociology
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