Careers Boundaries in the Arts in Brazil: An Exploratory Study

Over the last years the scholarly literature on careers has been enriched by the proposal of new career models which present a rhetoric that asks for the end of career boundaries: individual, hierarchical, organizational and geographical. However, in the real world, many constrains continue to exist. This paper tries to contribute to the understanding of the new boundaries of the 21 century careers. To do so we look at the case of careers in the arts. We review existing literature on careers, present a historical, contextual perspective of artistic careers, and conduct field work in the city of São Paulo based on in-depth interviews with 18 Brazilian artists from nine different occupations in the field of arts, whose data were subjected to qualitative content analysis. Our results show that career boundaries exist even in a sector we could consider as historically boundaryless. We identify and discuss four boundaries of the artistic career, seeking to reflect on the importance of considering the relationship of the individual and the context in which he/she operates in order to understand careers today.