Professional Biographies of Polish Corporation Workers in the Late Capitalist World

Abstract

Referring to a set of narrative interviews being professional biographical interviews with managers and professionals, I would like to present some definite typically patterned professional careers. The course and main phases of the settling into corporate order are identified and described with Fritz Schütze’s analytical tools and categories. The main focus of interest is not only biographical processes of growing-up in corporation, that is the sphere of cognitive, normative and emotional references, but also their relation to the institutional sphere. Simultaneously, I intend therefore to address two types of questions: what type of biographical experiences are we dealing with: biographical plan (an autonomous, self-reflexive and intentional process of planning one’s own actions), institutional pattern (a normative-based process of meeting institutional expectations), trajectory (a suffering-involved process of uncontrollably being subject to external circumstances), metamorphosis (a surprise-driven creative process of change); and what are the ways a biography reflects corporate order, that is, some definite type of the social order in late capitalism, and the related processes of Europeanization, globalization, multiculturalism and transculturalism, as well as the neoliberal economic order?