Framgång, med eller utan karriär? : Unga vuxna om karriär i mediabranschen

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to enlighten how todays working environment affects young individuals descriptions of how to reach success in work life, now often titled as ”career”. Our purpose has been to analyse how the term career is constituted discursively among young people in jobs characterized by flexibility. The study is based on six qualitative interviews with young adults in the media industry, all between 20-30 years old. By utilising a Foucaultdian discourse analysis we want to expose how the competing and dominating discourses, that our interviewees’ statements are based on, can be associated with a wider social context.    The study reveals that our interviewees describe career in two separate ways, both positively and negatively. A more traditional definition of career, where the term is described as promotion, is explained to have a negative tone. This traditional definition has in the majority of our interviews been replaced with explanations of career as personal. We can also distinguish that even though not all of our informants describe career as desirable, everyone talks about success in work life as self-fulfilment. The demands from today’s individual work environment appears discursively regardless negatively or positively interpretation of the term career.   Our analysis demonstrates further that all interviewed talks about an increased illness and problems with the balance between work and personal life. It is described to be a problematisation caused by the pursuit of career success, in a work life characterized by flexibility and insecurity.   The results from our study can be derived to recent research regarding a change in work environment. A more flexible and insecure labour market is forcing the individual to take more responsibility and makes success to a personal project. It gives hope of self-fulfilment but also threats of physical and mental illness.