Living Lives of Change: Examining Facets of Women Managers’ Career Stories

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter I shall explore various facets of women managers’ career stories. I shall reflect on senior women managers’ career patterns and decision making by examining content themes that appear in the stories of women who have experienced significant career transitions or reviews. I shall also look at what forms these accounts took and aspects of how they were told. I am working critically with an interest in narrative. There is currently abundant attention to the notions of narrative and story and their relevance to researching people’s lives (e.g. Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992; Mumby 1993; Lincoln and Denzin 1994; Lincoln 1997; Denzin 1997). Understanding narratives as constructions of truth generated through complex, active (individual, interpersonal, and social) processes of sensemaking, self-presentation, and interpretation is seen by many as a pathway beyond the social realism we can no longer claim in our research (Lincoln and Denzin 1994). I approve this general direction, but am also concerned that working with narrative can become as conventionalized and stylized as any other form of inquiry.