Transformative Agency in Workers’ Account: Tensions in Professional Development

Abstract

The concept of agency expresses one’s will in actions that alter reality. In the work market's current social and cultural conditions, individuals are pushed to continuous change to transform their professional and personal lives. The interests and socio-material constraints help understand the personal and professional path shape. In this paper, we will focus on how a group of workers expressed transformative agency in their narrative accounts, how it evolves and the influence of the interests and socio-material constraints on the expression of agency. To pursue this objective, we interviewed twelve workers that moved from Italy to France. From the transcription and the analysis, we have identified four dimensions in their account to make sense of their career path: conflicts of motives to act; wandering actions in global cultural (dis)fluency; activation of resources toward an (in)definite interest; sensorial and material mobility.