The structure of an uncertain world: Combining sequences classification and career life histories to identify narrative schemas in the careers of financial journalists

Abstract

This article argues in favour of combining statistical sequence analysis with the study of biographical narratives to identify the underlying social structures in the unfolding of professional careers in particularly uncertain worlds. The careers of French financial journalists, whose professional world has been characterised by exceptional turbulence since the 1990s, are used as a case study. The article begins by describing the variety of relationships between trajectories and social structures in social science research that uses sequence analysis techniques. It then shows that by involving the interpretation of career life histories at each stage of sequence analysis, it is possible to highlight relevant regularities, even when trajectories unfold in contexts of high uncertainty. For this purpose, an optimal matching technique that calculates the dissimilarity between each pair of sequences is combined with an agglomeration technique that groups similar sequences into classes. The method is applied here to 297 sequences of professional activities of former and current financial journalists, reconstructed from the information they provided in the LinkedIn socio-professional network or in a professional directory. By comparing these regularities to the interpretations made by journalists in their 37 career life histories, the article examines three narrative schemas constructed by journalists to navigate an uncertain world and which have historically followed one another: the vocational schema, the gateway schema, and the decline schema. It thus describes the conditions for the emergence and decline of these schemas, which are linked not only to changing employment opportunities, but also to the ability of journalists to observe the traces left behind by the career paths of their counterparts.