Work and its narratives

Abstract

When I began writing, my work life divided in two. In one compartment, I wrote novels; in the other, sociology. The novel writing which interested me from the beginning made experiments in narrative -- stories which played with the indeterminate movement of events or created incoherence intentionally. The masters of this kind of disruptive narrative in my youth were Jorge-Luis Borges and Italo Calvino; its great interpretative critic was Roland Barthes. The crafting of such stories exhilarated me, opening up the freedom of the unchartable. As a sociologist, I worked in another realm of time. When I began studying labor in the early 1970's, the life histories of the people I interviewed resembled well-made plots, determinate and constricted rather than experimental. The American manual laborers on whom I reported in The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972), for instance, served only a few employers during the course of their lives, and hoped to better themselves by small, incremental gains in salary and status. White collar employees higher up the job scale even more orchestrated their lives in order to a climb up a fixed corporate ladder. These real-life narratives were shaped by big, well-defined institutions: corporations with elaborate bureaucracies, powerful unions, an intrusive welfare state.