Perceiving Fixed or Flexible Meaning: Toward a Model of Meaning Fixedness and Navigating Occupational Destabilization

IF 8.3 1区 管理学 Q1 BUSINESS Administrative Science Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-09-04 DOI:10.1177/00018392231196062
W. Jiang, Amy Wrzesniewski
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Abstract

This article examines individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to the destabilization of their occupations, how their responses differ, and why. We focus on the context of journalism, an occupation undergoing severe destabilization in the U.S. and seen as deeply meaningful by many of its incumbents. Drawing on two waves of interviews with 72 unemployed or former newspaper journalists, conducted over five months, and additional interviews with 22 others, we identified two sets of responses, each characterized by distinctive cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns. Building on these findings, we developed the construct of “meaning fixedness” to capture the extent to which individuals view the meaning of the different components of their work to be fixed within one occupational context or flexible across different occupations. We found that participants held different interpretations of journalism’s destabilization and assessments of how portable their work components were to other occupational contexts: flexible-meaning perceivers generally engaged in actions to reinvent their career, while fixed-meaning perceivers engaged in actions to persist in journalism with the hope that their occupation could be restored. Our findings culminate in a model of meaning fixedness and how it shapes individuals’ navigation of occupational destabilization. This research uncovers an individual-level perception that has the potential to shape the varied responses to occupational changes observed in prior research, contributing to the literatures on occupations, the meaning of work, and role transitions.
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感知固定或灵活的意义:走向意义固定和职业失稳的模型
这篇文章考察了个人对职业不稳定的认知、情绪和行为反应,他们的反应有何不同,以及为什么。我们关注的是新闻业的背景,这一职业在美国正经历着严重的不稳定,许多现任者认为这一职业意义重大。根据对72名失业或前报纸记者在五个月内进行的两波采访,以及对另外22名记者的额外采访,我们确定了两组反应,每一组反应都具有独特的认知、情绪和行为模式。在这些发现的基础上,我们开发了“意义固定性”的概念,以捕捉个人对其工作的不同组成部分的意义在多大程度上被固定在一个职业环境中或在不同职业之间灵活的看法。我们发现,参与者对新闻业的不稳定有不同的解释,并对他们的工作组成部分在其他职业环境中的可移植性有不同的评估:灵活的意义感知者通常会采取行动重塑自己的职业,而固定的意义感知者则会采取行动坚持新闻业,希望自己的职业能够恢复。我们的发现最终形成了一个意义固定性模型,以及它如何塑造个人的职业不稳定导航。这项研究揭示了一种个人层面的感知,这种感知有可能塑造先前研究中观察到的对职业变化的各种反应,为有关职业、工作意义和角色转变的文献做出贡献。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
20.50
自引率
3.80%
发文量
49
期刊介绍: Administrative Science Quarterly, under the ownership and management of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, has consistently been a pioneer in organizational studies since the inception of the field. As a premier journal, it consistently features the finest theoretical and empirical papers derived from dissertations, along with the latest contributions from well-established scholars. Additionally, the journal showcases interdisciplinary work in organizational theory and offers insightful book reviews.
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