There is a scenario which is, I believe, familiar to most arts and humanities postgrad researchers. You are at a party or a social gathering with people you don't know when you are asked what you do. How do you respond? What do you tell them of your PhD?
As a PhD student, I used to answer this question in a variety of different ways. Sometimes I would try to prejudge the stranger in front of me, and adapt my answer to what I thought they might like to know. Depending on my mood, and the state of my thesis, I have told strangers that I do research on French literature from around the time of Shakespeare, or that I am a historian, or that I am a dealer in stories of knights and princesses. Other times, I have felt a deep inward groan at the question. On those days, I might have been asking myself what exactly I was doing (and why I was bothering to persevere). To tell that to a stranger, though, is a risky strategy. You might find yourself, as I once did, being told that you are a waste of taxpayers' money. Worse, you might be tempted to agree.
We are all familiar, therefore, with framing our PhD in different ways for different audiences. There are many stories to be told of a doctorate, and many 'truths' about it to be shared. Just as with any job and any role that gives us a public identity (parenthood, a profession, educational status) we sometimes feel close to these labels, and sometimes quite distant from them.
It is curious, with this in mind, to think how often we frame the idea of a 'career' in only one way and with just one ideal narrative arc. There is a tendency in everyday conversation to talk of the ideal career starting at some point low on the scale (with adjustment depending on prior educational achievement) and then continuing on an ever-upward trajectory. We tend to encourage people to decide on a single 'career path' and to feel nervous about 'career changers'. Researchers of careers have called this the 'onward and upward' ideal, and likened it to the arrow with its fast, linear movement (Arthur et al, 1999).
We can use two classic stories to help us examine the framing of career as an 'onward and upward' ideal: Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey. In the Aeneid, Virgil's epic hero, Aeneas, journeys from the devastated Troy to Italy, there to found a new nation, Rome. Aeneas subjugates his own desires to the weight of this greater historical narrative. When he appears to stray from this course by falling in love with Dido, queen of Carthage, the gods are on hand to recall him to his duty. Dido is sacrificed to the cause (she commits suicide after Aeneas's departure) and the future founding of Rome is saved. Aeneas's trajectory is 'onward and upward', his status epic, and the perspective on his 'career' retrospective. His epic status only becomes clear when the story is seen from the end – the perspective of the founding of Rome – which is why Virgil reminds the reader constantly, and from the very beginning of the poem, of this ultimate ending.
Compare to this Odysseus, the cunning man, whose trajectory is not linear but wandering. In Homer's poem the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew spend ten years on the journey home from Troy to Ithaca, moving from adventure to adventure. The cycles of stories contained in this poem do not show Odysseus as an epic hero. Instead, Odysseus repeatedly uses cunning and wit to escape from tricky situations. He is endlessly inventive and no greater pattern or significance appears from these episodes. The pleasure of the stories lies not in knowing their ending, but in enjoying the experience. Additional adventures may lengthen the narrative, but they can not throw it off course, as they would in the Aeneid.
In these two ancient stories, we see many of the characteristics of modern career ideals and realities. Aeneas puts his 'work' duty before his personal desires, and recognises a greater pattern in his life than that which is evident to him while on the journey. This higher cause is like the 'ideal' career, in which the end point of the career story can justify and make sense of the journey. If we transfer the concept to the doctorate, a PhD only becomes validated at the point at which it fits into a single, upward, career trajectory, usually from student, to lecturer, to professor.
By contrast, Odysseus wanders and circulates, encountering different and apparently unconnected adventures. His experience is akin to the experience of a PhD and indeed a lived career, in which there is no certain sense of a future end point to authenticate the current moment. As we write our PhDs, we may hope to be the next great name in our field, but we probably feel like Odysseus, wandering without apparent end, and encountering ever more bizarre adventures.
In the same way, there can be a great sense of disappointment when the PhD doesn't lead straight into an academic career – or the opportunity for one – even if we aren't sure that it's the right course. The expectations of others, and often of ourselves, are for this linear movement, and anything else can feel like deviation. We live in a world which celebrates the characteristics of an Aeneas, and tries to suppress personal feelings or experiences of an Odyssean nature.
Or do we? Researchers (Arthur et al, 1999) have drawn attention to the ways in which conventions surrounding the concept of career seem to obfuscate the realities of the majority of career experiences. Rather than the arrow, two other terms are proposed to help conceptualise the evolution of careers over time: cycling and spiralling. These allow us to examine the way in which many changes in career for individuals are not clearly upward, but may often be lateral, diagonal, or even apparently downward. It is common for individuals to move between seemingly unrelated employment fields or activities and they may do so repeatedly in their lives, a process which Arthur et al call 'cycling'. Others might move or 'spiral' between activities so that while progression is apparent it is not always determined by status, but perhaps by learning, earnings, or personal fulfilment:
Cycling in a career means moving in and out of different realms of activity. In addition to changes of employment, industry, occupation and location, examples include changing the job itself, moving between projects, moving between full-time and part-time work, moving between work commitments and family commitments. In cycling there is little sense of direct progression or increase in formal achievement. However, the same moves may be more rewarding: in 'spiralling' the career actor moves through different arenas with a strong undercurrent of personal learning and development. (Arthur et al, 1999, p.36)
We can relate ideas of cycling and spiralling to the careers of those with PhDs. Within the academy, lecturers will cycle through different roles in relation to their department: pastoral tutor, head of department, graduate admissions officer, external examiner, and so on. They may also spiral through different forms of research, from the magnum opus to collaboration with others, to a significant shift in the field or focus of research. Indeed, many of the academics who at the end of their careers appear the most accomplished are those who behave in maverick ways, straying into fields which were not originally their own. Even within the most apparently 'epic' career we can see 'Odyssean' tendencies.
Outside the academy, cycles and spirals can be even more free form, and former PhDs can be observed moving far from their PhD identity or retaining links to it. As someone who moved away – but not very far away – from an academic role, I have told stories about my PhD which have varied dramatically from wholesale rejection (in an interview to get my first non-academic job) to integration of my current work and the PhD (this article is one example). I have talked of my career as an 'onward and upward' trajectory, in which the story of my PhD emphasises only those aspects which are immediately relevant to where I am now; but when I do this I always feel that much is missing from the account.
I have also talked of spirals and cycles, of episodes and of the pleasure of the career journey, rather than the pursuit of a career destination. In doing this I value the totality of my experiences and their contribution to my current work and wider life – but notice again the tendency (a desire to give my career a totalising narrative?) to integrate what are in some senses, unconnected episodes in my career. I often emphasise how much my PhD has affected my thinking about everything in life – not just about that small corner of French literature.
These stories, which foreground dissonances in my career, and tell of the pleasures of change, don't often get the same easy reception as the clear arrow of a career – but these are stories I prefer. I identify more closely with Odysseus than Aeneas. Aeneas is confident of the future already: what is there to discover? But I would say that – I was a researcher of romance, not epic. Many audiences in history have rejected the Odyssey in preference to the uplifting, noble qualities of the Aeneid – and as with the stranger at a party who wants to know about my PhD, we can't always anticipate who wants to hear which version of 'career'.
Julia Horn
July 2008
Bibliography
Arthur, M.B., Inkson, K. and Pringle, J.K. (1999). The new careers: individual action and economic change. London: Sage.
This article was also inspired by the writing of Audrey Collin on career, most notably her article 'Epic and novel: the rhetoric of career' in Collin, A. and Young, R.A. (2000). The future of career. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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