Research

The central aim of my research is to understand how people make sense of work, and how their interpretations can change over time. Whether work is seen as drudgery or delight, a path to financial security or personal meaning, a chance to actualize the self or serve others, these perceptions shape how individuals relate to organizations and to one another in powerful ways. My work is grounded in the symbolic interactionist tradition (Blumer, 1969), which emphasizes that people act based on their subjective interpretations of the world. Accordingly, I use ethnographic and interview-based methods to explore the interpretive and discursive processes that underlie people’s evolving attitudes toward work.