Career, Class, and Social Reproduction in the Life Stories of Outsourced Cleaners

• Published in: BAR, Brazilian administration review Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Souza, Filipe Augusto Silveira de, Lemos, Ana Heloisa da Costa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Portuguese
• Published: Rio de Janeiro Associacao Nacional de Pos-Graduacao e Pesquisa em Administracao-ANPAD 01.10.2023; Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração; ANPAD - Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração; Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração (ANPAD)
• Subjects: boundaries; bourdieu; career; Career development; Career development planning; Career opportunities; Careers; Cleaning; Cleaning services; Dominance; Dropping out; Habitus; Housework; Humiliation; Investigations; Labor market; Life history; life stories; MANAGEMENT; Mediation; Neighborhoods; Outsourcing; Pleasure; School dropouts; Social aspects; social class; Social classes; Social reproduction; Topography; Working class; Brazil; life stories; boundaries; career; Bourdieu; social class
• ISSN: 1807-7692; 1807-7692
• DOI: 10.1590/1807-7692bar2023230026

In this paper, we employ the life story method to investigate the multiple boundaries that, visible or invisibly, have influenced the trajectories of outsourced cleaners working in organizations, delimiting their career opportunities. Based on the Bourdieusian framework, we aim to contribute to the expansion of the debate in the field of career studies by emphasizing the influence of the contextual dimension of analysis in the career construction process. Above all, we privilege a social class perspective, scarcely present in career studies, in which the dominance of constructs such as boundaryless and protean careers reflects the typical emphasis attributed to individual agency. Access to the life stories of the respondents enabled us to unveil multiple boundaries interposed throughout their trajectories, associated with family (family disorganization and early transitions: maternity, conjugality, and insertion into domestic work), educational (early school dropout), neighborhood (local ties associated with low career returns), and professional (intersubjective relationships associated with experiences of pleasure and social humiliation) contexts. Taken together, these boundaries ended up circumscribing the topography of their careers by largely limiting them to providing care and cleaning services.