Accounts of Ruptures and Narrative Positioning in Qualitative Follow-Up Research

Abstract

<p>This chapter applies and develops a small-story approach and narrative positioning analysis to examine employability as a temporal process of interpretation in adult graduates’ educational and working-life trajectories. The method of analysis applied and developed in this chapter represents a novel interactionally oriented and practice-based paradigm for theorising about the connections between narrative and identity. The chapter illustrates the narrative positioning analysis of follow-up interview data using one adult business graduate as a case example. The analysis focuses on one adult graduate’s temporarily evolving accounts of ruptures, such as dismissal, in her working-life trajectory. Moreover, the analysis examines the agency dilemma and how the graduate negotiates her agency in relation to employability over time, thus also navigating the constancy/change dilemma. The narrative positioning analysis of follow-up data makes visible the multi-voicedness of identity positionings in narrated accounts at two different timepoints (2019, 2020). Depending on the situation and audience (e.g., employers, colleagues, and students), different versions of the self are performatively created. This also reveals important narrative and psychological functions. The small-story approach and narrative positioning analysis provide methodological tools with which to analyse adult graduates’ employability as an evolving and multi-voiced process of identity construction, which manifests itself in relation to situated expectations and demands, as well as various audiences.<br></p>