Research

The central aim of my research is to understand how people make sense of work, and how their interpretations of work 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 important 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, which are socially constructed. Accordingly, I tend to use ethnographic observation and interviews as my primary data sources to explore the interpretive and discursive processes that underlie evolving attitudes toward work.