TRANSITIONS AND THE CONCEPT OF CAREERS

As social scientists we often run into difficulties because of the language we use. Try as we might, we have generally failed to create a lexicon of technical usage that is separate and distinct from the discourse of everyday life and thereby achieves the scientific virtues of precision, neutrality and malleability. The language of mathematics has provided a convenient but overused refuge, but still the social scientist must come out from under its cover to speak to the world about what he or she knows.

Here's where the problems start, and often the cause is that the implicit metaphors lurking in the terms we use confound our attempts to operationalize, define and fix their limits. Concepts are still inclined to spread beyond the boundaries we set for them; other meanings creep back in, like stowaways re-embarking after a craft has been inspected and cleared for departure. The notion of “career” is a case in point. The metaphor of journey can be detected at its center and is traceable to its complex etymological origins. The use of the term career to mean “course” is a fairly recent linguistic re-adoption from several Romance languages, where its semantic root denoted a “carriage way” or road (Onions, 1966).

Thinking of careers as journeys is clearly both apt and attractive for many people. Journeys have beginnings and ends, with purposes connecting them – a reassuring image. But the dangers of this epic metaphor are twofold: It encourages reification of the integrity of careers and it inclines one to view the journey as an attribute of the traveler rather than the compulsive shape of the terrain.