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Download fileEntry and exit as embodied career choice in professional sport
The concept of an embodied career draws attention to the individual, corporally, socially, culturally and institutionally located in relationship with work. Career theories have tended to focus on psychological and social variables and measurements that narrow understanding of contexts and agency. It is thus timely to consider a more holistic approach to understanding contemporary careers as embodied processes. The paper works on three levels; first as an empirical illustration of professional sports careers as short-term careers, second as an application of Bourdieu's habitus to understand the relationship between social fields and accounts of career choice and, third in order to draw parallels with the embodied nature of work in a more general sense. Utilising empirical material from a study of elite UK professional rugby players, it is argued that understanding an embodied-career resonates with present concerns regarding career patterns of short-term contracts, which require the individual to be committed, flexible and adaptable, be prepared for exit, and yet remain immersed and dedicated to the current sphere of employment. It is proposed that this kind of immersion requires alternatives to be, temporarily at least, silenced and in this context renders the accrual of bodily capital as fit, but only temporarily fit for purpose.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Journal of Vocational BehaviorVolume
90Pages
111 - 121Citation
COUPLAND, C., 2015. Entry and exit as embodied career choice in professional sport. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 90, pp. 111 - 121.Publisher
© ElsevierVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-08-14Publication date
2015-08-19Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Vocational Behavior and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.08.003ISSN
0001-8791eISSN
1095-9084Publisher version
Language
- en