The protean self: Career self-management between the dream of autonomy and the dystopia of disposability
Isleide Arruda Fontenelle, Sao Paolo University
The “Myth of Proteus” has been used by the literature written on strategic career self-management to indicate two of the main skills needed by individuals at this time when work is understood in terms of “individual enterprise”: the capacity to take on different shapes, as many as necessary for survival in the present competitive environment; and the capacity to tell the future, anticipating change.
The idea of a “protean career” has permeated organizational discourse and practice, instilling the idea that each individual is responsible for his professional destiny. This concept bears the promise of social mobility developed by modernity, but it also urges for the deconstruction of the “myth of identity” that was so necessary to the success of the modern project of the industrial society of order. The new career discourse shows all the ambivalence present in the construction of the modern project: between that which existed only in the imagination, and that which became true. Also, “work identity” was something that succeeded in industrial society, and that’s why its dilution gives an “identity dilemma” to everyone who has been created in this order.
This dilemma has been overcome by organizations through a discourse focused on the promise of personal realization by means of career self-management. However, if this new order brings the dream of autonomy imbedded in the discourse of right of choice and self-realization, it also brings the agony of uncertainty and the permanent need of risk management. The central idea is that there are “no more guaranties”. Even the State, which, in its well-being format, presented itself as a “Prosthetic God”, has already left the scene. In that sense, without a providing State or a steady job, managing life may mean the entirely personal responsibility to invent ways to survive during the periods without the steady job and for providing everything that we have been used to believing was the role of the State or the press to provide.
We intend to analyze the challenges and dilemmas of this new form of managing work and career using an empirical survey carried out at one of the top Business Schools in Brazil, which restructured its specialization course for graduate students in 2004 to include in its mandatory curriculum the subject matter “career guidance”. The coordinators and professors of the subject were heard, as well as 140 students. We could analyze the challenge faced by the school in restructuring itself, aiming at the demands of the market and geared towards the “education” of this new professional, and we could hear the professional students searching for this new education. In them are embodied all the dilemmas present in the promise of autonomy that the new design has to offer, as well as the risks of having to take responsibility for their own fates and of presenting themselves with infinity plasticity, so that they can anticipate their future and transform themselves continuously.