NARRATIVES AT WORK: Women, Men, Unionization, and the Fashioning of Identities

Abstract

NARRATIVES AT WORK: Women, Men, Unionization, and the Fashioning of Identities Linda K. Cullum St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 2003; 383 pp. How is it that we construct our identities when we are telling stories about our past? As qualitative researchers, what assumptions do we make about what and how people tell us about their lives? Narratives at Work: Women, Men, Unionization and the Fashioning of Identities by Linda Cullum is a carefully detailed exploration of these questions through an investigation into how gender, race and class were (re)produced in the Job Brothers fish and blueberry processing factory in St. John's, Newfoundland. This accessible book is an excellent resource for feminist qualitative researchers. The initial goal of Cullum's research was to recover "the story" of the formation of the Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union (LCSWU) in 1948, the first all-woman union in Newfoundland. As the author began interviewing the workers ("the narrators") about the union, she was struck by the wide variety of responses, both between their stories and within individual accounts of the work at Job Brothers. The stories that the narrators told did not neatly fit into coherent themes. Some women told stories that showed the LCSWU to be a significant part of their work experience while other women could not recall anything about the union at all. Other women told stories that revealed a shifting, sometimes contradictory, experience of the union. As a result, Cullum shifted her focus to documenting and analyzing the production of meaning and identity formation. To investigate these emerging issues from the interviews, she adopted a feminist poststructuralist theoretical framework where "language is not privileged as a transparent tool, reflecting social reality and giving unmediated access to a "real", fixed and knowable world" (p. 28). The purpose of this research was not to discover the "truth" about work processes at Job Brothers or the formation of the union. Rather, it was an exploration of how identities and social relations are actively created in and through discourse. Cullum's approach was to make the data analysis process transparent to the reader. At the beginning of the book, Cullum remarks that data analysis is "seldom clearly explicated in published studies" (p. 23). Using the setting of the fish and blueberry processing plant, Cullum explicitly names, discusses and highlights the process of data analysis. She addresses difficulties such as locating people to interview, dealing with people who were unwilling to be interviewed, and interpreting interview data. …