‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be’: Narratives of promotions in elite professional careers

Abstract

How do organizational decision-makers and promotion candidates experience promotions in elite professional careers? Despite literature recognizing that promotions are important career events for organizations and individuals, this question has received little scholarly attention.Drawing on a narrative approach and combining spoken and visual accounts, this article examines how organizational decision-makers and promotion candidates experience the promotion to partnership in law firms. Our study reveals four narratives which illustrate important differences and similarities in their accounts. In the official script, organizational decision-makers uniformly recounted promotions in a detached way, emphasizing objective meanings of career success. In contrast, promotion candidates' accounts were varied ranging from joy and anticipation in walk in the park, to anger and frustration in dark art to anxiety and ambivalence in bittersweet narratives. The study makes three contributions to the literature on promotions. First, we develop an emotion-based understanding of promotions suggesting that promotions are constructed through people's lived emotional experiences which inform their meaning making of the new role. Second, we argue that promotions are not always positive career events, but potentially contradictory and negative. Third, we contribute to extant research on promotions which has favoured quantitative methodologies by adopting a multimodal approach.

How to be a hero: How managers determine what makes a good manager through narrative identity work

“…The paper thus adds theoretical grounding to studies that have highlighted the role of landscapes in providing moral context for narratives (e.g. Clifton, 2018; Whittle and Mueller, 2011), or the capacity of individuals to personally interpret organisational discourses (Gustafsson and Swart, 2020; Pérez and Sabelis, 2019), and complements studies which have focused on the role of individuals in co-constructing shared versions of the organisation through collective stories and narrative identities (Foroughi, 2020; Savage et al, 2018; Sörgärde, 2020).…”

“…Recent studies have examined the role of individuals as co-constructors of group and organisational identities through stories (Foroughi, 2020; Savage et al, 2018; Sörgärde, 2020) but these important contributions still focus on macro- and meso-level processes of constructing collective stories and versions of the organisation, rather than how individuals construct personal versions. Some recent studies hint at the capacity of individuals to construct their own working versions of organisational discourses and thus the nature of the organisation (Gustafsson and Swart, 2020; Pérez and Sabelis, 2019) but such processes are not their focus, and they fail to explicitly draw out and theorise them.…”

Being ‘human’ under regimes of Human Resource Management: Using black theology to illuminate humanisation and dehumanisation in the workplace

“…CIT has proved powerful in elucidating lived experiences of the career path. For example, Gustafsson and Swart (2020) used it by asking elite professionals to draw pictures that narrate their experience of promotion. As the authors argue, this is useful because "promotions need to be understood through the emotional experiences of individuals, whereas promotion decisions need to be viewed as situated in socio-emotional contexts" (ibid.…”

GigLawyer and/or BigLawyer? A grounded theory study of lawyer career craft

“…A possible explanation for the lack of empirical research could be the relatively recent emergence of this trend and researchers have focused more on those who perceive themselves as disenfranchised (Sommerland, 2016) or as sideliners (Carroll & Vaughan, 2019). However, research has shown that even in elite professional careers, individuals can experience difficulties in adapting to new roles (Gustafsson & Swart, 2020).…”