The double uncertainty: Trajectories and professional identity in changing contexts

People do not live in fixed, immutable contexts; neither are their life-trajectories uniform. On the contrary, people experience discontinuities, breaks and transitions at various points in their lives, including their professional lives. The fundamental requirement for a transition is a social and cultural relocation, accompanied by the challenging, reworking or abandoning of former valid identities, routines and representations of reality. The construct of transition can be usefully applied to the study of professional trajectories, by offering a perspective that takes into account the dynamicity and uncertainty imposed by the change in professional practices, not just on the activities that take place in professional contexts, but also on the definition/redefinition/negotiation of individual professional identity. This paper suggests an intrinsic “dual uncertainty” of both the context and the individual during the change processes of professional trajectories. The paper provides a complementary outlook to the points raised in Daniels’ (2011) article on the mutual shaping of human action and institutional settings. Taking Daniels’ approach as a basis, it is possible to broaden the analysis of professional trajectories within rapidly-changing occupational settings, by adopting a perspective that takes into account the inherent open-ended nature of socio-cultural phenomena, the fluidity of living contexts, the permeability of the boundaries within which transitions take place and trajectories evolve, as well as the impact of these aspects on professional identity and on its role in processes of change.

Literacy and the Formation of Cultural Identity

In this article we offer both a conceptual and a methodological proposal for the study of cultural identity by cultural-historical psychology. First we will develop a conceptual framework in which we define acts of identification as a suitable unit of analysis for cultural identity. Acts of identification integrate dynamically social and individual components, both of them necessary in the explanation of cultural identity. To study identity empirically we adopt a rhetorical perspective: we can study cultural identity through the analysis of the discursive processes that people use to persuade an audience and themselves. Secondly, we will present empirical research based on the conceptual ideas explained previously. In this research we will analyse the acts of identification performed by various groups of Andalusian people who differ in their literacy experience. Results of this empirical research are presented, concluding that literacy affects the way people discursively construct their cultural identity.

Habitus, Psychology, and Ethnography

Habitus has become a conceptual anchor in work on the social study of the body in a range of disciplines, but also more generally in psychology proper. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is one of a “structuring structure” or “system of dispositions” that generates practices by ensuring the presence of the past in experience. The papers in this section discuss issues arising from this notion, particularly its relevance to psychology, the problem of reductionism, and the possibility of freedom, as well as the methodological implications of Wacquant’s work for models of ethnography.