Bricolage and Identity Work

Work, identity and health

Personal introduction Having free-lanced as a public health physician for over a decade, with the inevitable variation in both the avaiIability and type of work, 'retirement' is, perhaps, a vaguer concept than for those with conventional full time jobs. In my middle sixties, I was drifting towards retirement, thinking that I should soon refuse any new work, when an incident occurred quite uncon...

Gender, Ethnic Identity and Work

Gender, Ethnic Identity and Work The European Union’s strategy to raise employment is confronted with very low work participation among many minority ethnic groups, in particular among immigrants. This study examines the potential of immigrants’ identification with the home and host country ethnicity to explain that deficit. It introduces a two-dimensional understanding of ethnic identity, as a...

Bricolage forever!

According to constructivism, learning takes place by constructing cognitive structures. An experiment was carried out to uncover the mental models of experienced, but not professional, users of a word processor. The study shows that the mental models are superficial, and that bricolage (trial-and-error) is extensively used even though it is not viable for solving nontrivial problems. The conclu...

Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions

Self-narratives—stories that make a point about the narrator—help people revise and reconstruct identities during work role transitions. We propose a process model in which people draw on narrative repertoires to engage in narrative identity work in role-related interactions. Using feedback from their interactions, they revise both the stories and repertoires. Successful completion of the trans...

Transformations at work: Identity and learning