The formative role of contextual hardships in women's career calling

Abstract

The current study explores the relationship between contextual hardships and women's career calling. We examine how the formation of career calling drive is linked to how an individual perceives and affectively reacts to forms of oppression within and across institutional subsystems. In conceptualizing career calling formation, we attempt to broaden our understanding of this concept to include external and negative contextual factors. Our core argument holds that the perception and experience of contextual hardships play a key role in the formation of career calling. Based on 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with successful women in Lebanon whose work fits the scholarly definition of career calling, our findings show that these women's career narratives are constructed in close relation to perceptions of oppression (i.e., violence, marginalization, powerlessness, exploitation and cultural imperialism) experienced across the political, financial, education and labor, and culture subsystems. Taken together, our main findings demonstrate that experiences of negative and external contextual hardship elicit affective responses that foster a career calling drive. Our findings help bridge the neoclassical and modern approaches to career calling by showing the important role that external sources can play in driving the internal formation of career calling.