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Entry and exit as embodied career choice in professional sport

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-08, 10:56 authored by Christine CouplandChristine Coupland
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 Behavior

Volume

90

Pages

111 - 121

Citation

COUPLAND, C., 2015. Entry and exit as embodied career choice in professional sport. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 90, pp. 111 - 121.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • 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

2015-08-14

Publication date

2015-08-19

Notes

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.2015.08.003

ISSN

0001-8791

eISSN

1095-9084

Language

  • en