Career Politics: Coping with Economic Insecurity

Career is investigated as the temporal form of coping with economic insecurity. This article focuses on two levels of analysis: the theoretical concept of career politics, and the empirical analysis of biographical strategies and orientations for action in the field of highly qualified labor. Current, flexible capitalism is based upon a variety of contradictions; one of them is the shortening of predictable career paths; the other is a simultaneous generalization of individual career motives and career strategies. For a growing fraction of the workforce career politics is becoming ever more important for ensuring material and symbolic reproduction. In this contribution, a typology of career politics is first developed on the basis of qualitative interviews as well as group discussions. Subsequently, the interdependence of individual and organizational strategies of action in the field of human resource management is examined.