By Authors:
Winnie Yun Jiang – INSEAD
Amy Wrzesniewski – Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Interviewers:
Clara Soo – Michigan State University.
Drew Jauron – Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231196062
Q: How did the research collaboration arise? What did the start of the project look like?
Winnie: This originated from my second-year doctoral paper. I know I was genuinely interested in how people sort of make meaning of different events at work, but I didn’t know what the specific context or people that I should talk to should be. One night in New Haven, a friend of mine in my cohort went to see a movie called Spotlight. It was about a group of journalists at the Boston Globe reporting on a big scandal of the priest in the Catholic Church and I just remember feeling, wow, this is such a fascinating occupation. I know journalists are also very sort of pro-social people, very citizenship driven and most of them have a sense of calling. At that time, I was actually more interested in how they make sense of societal scandals and issues like that. How do they see the role of their occupations in these kinds of events?
So I just knew that I wanted to study journalists. I wanted to get to know more about this occupation and the people navigating this occupation. Their occupation seems super exciting, but also full of challenges. Like they face a lot of potential risk when investigating these kinds of stories. So I approached Amy and I said I really don’t have a clear research question, I just want to get to know this group of people a little bit more.
Amy actually connected me the first participant (Participant Zero), a prior student of Amy’s who did his MBA at Yale and previously worked as a journalist. So I remember reaching out to him, had our first interview sitting at the Yale Club in New York. We talked for like four hours. It was a really really long first interview, which is very common. In the first interview, we just have all sorts of questions and luckily in my case the informant was really willing to share everything he had been through. And he told me he had such a sense of calling toward this occupation. This was all he wanted to do when he was in it.
He told me all the plights of this occupation, starting when Craigslist came up on the Internet and the revenue of newspapers just completely like sank and after that, this occupation and the people in it seem to never be able to recover fully. And it had a huge impact on the people doing this job and especially the people who see this work as super meaningful. After this interview, I had a clearer focus in terms of what I wanted to know. So instead of focusing on how people doing this work navigated challenges in investigating specific stories, now I focus on how are navigate the destabilization, in particular the decline of this whole industry when they were personally so attached to it and they see such huge sense of meaning of it. So that’s the beginning of the research.
Amy: One of the things that I’ve told Winnie over the years and that I tell doctoral students when I’m teaching PhD seminars is even if you don’t know why but you’re just drawn to something, trust it. There’s a reason. It’s not random. There’s a reason you’re drawn to it. It will somehow connect to, even if other people are the ones to make sense of it, it will somehow connect to the dynamic or the process or the question or the tension that you’re just interested in as a researcher. And I see this work as fitting so beautifully with Winnie’s overall research identity and the kinds of questions she carves out. So sometimes you have to trust your gut.
Q: You described sampling across three stages – what motivated each stage of sampling? Were there any challenges or obstacles that you encountered in recruiting or interviewing this specific population (journalists)?
Winnie: We started with snowball sampling just through our personal network and Participant Zero actually introduced to me to more of his previous colleagues. As I didn’t want to focus on just that geographic location or people that working in that newspaper, I also used other approaches to sample, like I’d go to journalist events or I’d go to LinkedIn to search for people who listed ‘Journalist’ as part of their career histories. They may still be in it or not, but I just selected a random sample of people on LinkedIn and reached out to them. From there we grew our sample to a bigger size until we felt that we are no longer getting additional new insights after each interview, which is theoretical saturation. That’s kind of the first stage, which is also the typical sampling process as you would take in qualitative research.
In the sample that we gathered in the first stage, some individuals had already transitioned out of journalism and moved on to other occupations. The first participant I mentioned, he already left journalism and did his MBA and now is in consulting. Some would have already successfully made a transition into a new occupation and some of them are still in the process. Some may be doing freelancing while others just got laid off. So I got a bunch of people at different career stages at stage one.
For people who have successfully made the move into another occupation, they expressed a looser sense of meaning fixedness or a more flexible sense of meaning that, oh yeah, I love interviewing, I love writing and I think I can find all those things in my new job. While those who are still doing freelancing, those who are still in journalism, talked about it in a more fixed way, like “I don’t see myself doing anything else than journalism”. Is it just because of the action they’ve taken and they’re justifying it? So to address the question of whether what they are sharing with me is just post action justification, we decided to follow up with these people again a few months later to see are their narratives consistent or did they change? And to also see whether those people in our sample from stage one that just got laid off talked about things in a different way. And actually, did how they made sense of the destabilization of journalism and being laid off influence their job search behaviors later?
So we followed up with every one of them and found that those who have been talking about meaning in a more fixed way continue to use those consistent narratives and those who talk about meaning in a more flexible way they are still consistent in their narratives and these variations in how flexible or fixed they talked about the meaning from this work seems to be shaping their job search behaviors. People who have been talking about this in a fixed way just felt this huge resistance internally and just couldn’t get themselves to do modify their resume to apply for a job that’s not in journalism. But those people who are talked about meaning in the first stage in a more flexible way, they talked about the strategy they’re following to try to get into say consulting or like marketing or like a lawyer… So they are more strategic, entrepreneurial, and proactive in showing different sides of themselves to different people in other industries versus those people in the fixed category who just could not seem to be able to do that. So I started to see the very important implications of the first stage narratives.
Q: When you’re interviewing, how do you ensure what you say or your responses as the researcher does not shape or influence what the interviewees would tell you?
Winnie: So in the early stage of the interview, I definitely try to be as quiet as possible. I have an interview protocol but usually I start with the first two questions and then I don’t need to ask the rest of it. I also think it’s a very important attribute of this specific group of people. They are journalists. They are really beautiful narrators. Once they start talking, they can’t stop and I decided as a researcher to just let them talk so a lot of my interviews end up being like more than two hours and it’s fine because for several of them who just got laid off, they got nothing to do. So it’s actually a really good timing for them. It’s kind of a win-win situation. So in the interview process, especially the early parts or the first round of interview, I personally just try to be as quiet as possible if the participant wants to talk. And I have a protocol but it’s mostly just bullet points like can we talk about this can we talk about this can we talk about this a little bit without really shaping oh um like what specifically they should talk about. So I really just give them all the freedom and space to share what they have.
Later on, though, once you have sort of an idea about what kind of model or framework you want to build, you can start to channel the direction of the conversation in that domain, especially when you want to learn more about some specific processes. For example, I remember in this project, I started to see some differences in people’s mindset – very restricted and fixed in one domain versus other people seeing a more flexible way. Then I started to ask specifically about it later like, “I’m starting to see these differences among other people I interviewed. Do you think there are these differences in the people you talk to? And I see that you’re particularly like ‘this’. Why do you think you’re particularly this way?” I would share with them what I have found so far from my data and ask them to help me understand the emergent findings a little bit better. So that’s how I usually navigate the process.
Amy: I don’t know that I’ll ever be part of a project where the quotes are as beautiful some of these quotes are. Exactly to Winnie’s point, they just spoke in these ways that just felt like poetry. And I’ve also separately talked with people who that’s not how they operate in the world necessarily and for those kinds of samples, I think getting people to tell stories about things that have happened in their work is a way to get into that eloquence when it’s not like right there. We’re just asking about instances or times when ‘that’ happened or times when they felt ‘that’ way because then that puts them into a mode where everybody can tell stories about that, right? Where you’re getting a lot more than just an answer to your question and then they’re pausing and waiting for the next question.
Something Winnie said made me also think of this, that this protocol got worked and worked and worked through the process of the interviews. And I think you know when you have a good protocol. It was so captured in something that you said, which is you would ask the first couple of questions and then they would just go and they would have covered everything else. Like a really good protocol they kind of just start going and they’re just going through the list of the things that you don’t even have to ask because they’re like, oh, and that brings up this thing, and then they’re thinking, oh my gosh, that was next. Okay, like keep going, right. And so from the under carriage or the understructure of a protocol, that’s often how you know, okay, we’ve got a good logic and flow for how we’re constructing these questions because just getting them in this headspace is getting them to talk about it.
Winnie: And you will definitely encounter some interviewees that are more reserved or less willing to share more like even though you like keep kind of digging digging but the more you dig the more they want to close up. So that’s okay. What I find helpful is that in that situation sometimes I would share something personal about myself if I had similar experiences before. Like when I was interviewing the women in China who were like facing these entrepreneurial opportunities, I had to share something I personally experienced, like “I also faced self-doubts”, then they start to feel more comfortable. Sometimes that works, but sometimes you really just feel like you are talking to a rock and they’re not giving you anything but don’t give up. That’s why we need to interview more people. Some of them will give you the insights that you would like to hear.
Q: You introduced a new construct of meaning fixedness to explain why individuals might respond to occupational destabilization and job loss differently. How does meaning fixedness contribute to the general theoretical lens of the meaning of work? Where do you think future research on meaning fixedness can go from here?
Winnie: I worked on this paper for so many years. And this is a question that we were pushed and pushed and pushed to think about. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible that the editor would publish it. So I initially just had this general idea and wasn’t even thinking about theoretical contribution, you know, I didn’t have that. And now I realize it’s okay like eventually you will kind of be able to find something new if you actually feel there’s something there that really draws you.
And the general theoretical lens of the meaning of work, you probably already know the ROB paper Amy had published which very beautifully captured and mainly focused on this question of how people make meaning derive meaning from their work, what kind of things in their work make them feel this work is worthwhile, important, and significant. So mostly very sort of static perspectives. Most of the work that has been done on the meaning of work has focused on a stable working context and people have stable relationships with the work they do.
So I think meaning fixedness does have a potential to explain more patterns of behavior dynamics that are in some sort of a changing context. For example, not just occupational destabilization, occupational decline, these kinds of contexts where people have to transition across different occupations. But even within the same occupation, within the same organization, people can change roles. People can change roles both sort of vertically and laterally right. And now in Singapore, I meet a lot of expats who basically change geographic locations and are doing similar jobs, working for the same company, but other things have changed, right? The colleagues they work with have changed. The culture they work in has changed.
So even within the same organization, same occupation, there could be changes. How do people navigate these changes? And before, I think many scholars have not yet had a sort of a full answer to what factors may explain their ability to more fluently navigate these changes within different kind of contexts and I think meaning fixedness has the potential to help people understand why some people are more able to flexibly derive meaning when they navigate all these kind of changes while other people find it harder, even when they initially seem to be able to derive meaning from their previous role, but they find it harder now after changes to continue to derive the same sense of meaning.
Amy: Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful way to put it and I think a fundamental sort of excitement for me is that is so much of what I had been involved in and had sort of come before had looked at the relationship people have to the domain of the work, to the job that they’re doing or what have you, in terms of how do they define that and so on. But I feel like this was an opportunity to dimensionalize in a totally different way, regardless of the nature of the kind of attachment somebody has to the work – what is the actual structure of that, of what that thing is that they’re evaluating and how locked in or not is that structure. And to be able to see it under the pressure of this destabilization that’s happening allowed us to really get a lot of traction with what we could pick up. And, to me, I think a good paper is one that gets people excited about all the other questions that need to be answered now, right? And I feel like this is a paper that does that.
You know, we would have so many conversations about this. To me, this fixedness in this context is a source of almost, to me, of fragility, like almost tragedy, right? Like these are people who are going down with the ship. They’re heroic. And on the other hand, we would really worry about like, what is going to happen like they can’t let go of this thing. But I also have wondered when is fixedness a source of strength? Or when is it a source of something that is quite sort of, you know, positive? So there’s absolutely this thinking about how does it help us understand how people can navigate these kinds of things? And for me, the thing that stuck with me after we wrote this is thinking about this puzzle – if this is a fact of a difference in how people configure the way they think about their work, when and where does this get people into trouble on both sides of the higher and lower fixedness? I feel like that’s just wide open space in terms of many things we really don’t know yet.
Winnie: Yeah, I remember when I present this research, people have these questions and I always have to emphasize actually we’re not saying which one is absolutely better than the other, even if like it seems like it appears that the flexible people are doing better but those people who endorse a more fixed view they are actually really passionate still about what they do. They feel like they’re upholding the faith, you know, and the mission they had for their whole life and objectively yes they are earning much less and they are very much leading what nowadays the management scholars call the ‘precarious’ life but they are fine with that and they feel that they are onto something extremely important. So yeah, you could say there are these people with that kind of a stubborn conviction.
Q: The model of meaning fixedness (Figure 2) suggests that meaning fixedness directs and facilitates people’s appraisals, emotions, and behaviors to manage occupational destabilization. Do you have any thoughts about what factors might shape meaning fixedness? Where might we explore as researchers if we’re intrigued by this construct?
Winnie: This was beyond the scope of the published paper, but I remember from some of the interview data people talked about past experiences, and not even necessarily transitioning occupations, but they mentioned things related to ending a relationship in their past and that being very difficult. They felt that that person was their whole world, but then realized life ended up being okay after they start a new relationship with someone else.
When I was looking through this data I was like, wow, there seems to be something about this cross-domain learning, about your life experience with setbacks and being able to take that experience into an occupational destabilization. It seemed to help people accumulate and build up this kind of resilience. Connecting back to their work, these people with more flexible meaning of their careers could make comparisons between different occupations. They would say, “I still love writing. I still love talking with people and the human connections that come with this job, but those things do not have to be all lost after I leave journalism.”
Again, this is an additional question that doing this research has opened up, so future research could definitely investigate these possibilities.
Q: What were a couple challenging pieces of feedback that came up during the review process, that were especially important in shaping the final article?
Winnie: One is just a general question of what is new here. That’s, I think, something that every qualitative researcher will encounter. We had questions like “how is it different from identity complexities… how is it different from resilience… how is it different from the growth or fixed mindset.” When I read the paper again, I’ll say yeah, there are all these similar neighboring constructs. I think what really helped me is to see that, maybe a general reader, people who are not who part of the meaning of work research community, would not see any difference, they’re all the same. And that’s totally fine. My view is that you shouldn’t let that stop you from theorizing something with a more nuanced difference compared to these other constructs.
But we believed that there is really something different that this construct can capture, and for us what this really addresses that is very particular in the domain of meaning making, which is how different people can derive different meaning or interpretation from similar contexts based on how flexible or fixed their meaning making is.
So, my main point is that you should still try to push to really identify the nuanced differences, even though that difference is only understood by people who study [your field].
Another piece of feedback I still remember and continue to use to guide all my research before or after the review process starts is when an editor told me that you should try not just to add windows to a house, but to tear down the house and build it again. Whether in the review stage or starting a new project, I always ask myself, am I adding windows to a house or am I actually building a new house? At that moment when I received the feedback, it was challenging, so I basically forced myself to forget everything I have learned from all these interviews, to completely redo the analysis with a fresh perspective, which was really helpful to push us towards the concept of meaning fixedness and how that shapes different paths of behavior.
Q: Amy, meaning of work, meaningfulness, and calling have been your major career interests dating back to even your doctoral dissertation (which is cited throughout the present article). How do you think research interests we as young scholars develop now progress as we grow older and more knowledgeable in the field, but also how do they continue to open up new questions?
Amy: To start, I had the enormous benefit of being trained by or mentored by two people who themselves were wonderful examples of this model of scholarship. One being Paul Rosen, one being Jane Dutton, and both of them were fearless methodologically, topically, theoretically in letting something that just didn’t quite make sense or didn’t quite fit raise the next question or raise the next puzzle. Like a stone in a shoe, not in a negative way but just that it kept percolating.
It’s finding the strange pattern very deep in a quant table, it wasn’t the focus of the paper, but it just keeps bugging you, like what is going on with that and if it stays with you and you feel like nobody else has really nailed that down, then there’s an opportunity to maybe look at that or think about where would you expect to see that the most or see that the least or see that you have to go through a dynamic process. Just keep that alive. And I feel like that model of following the questions to wherever the answers will take you is just going to keep generating. If you’re interested in these dynamics or processes of whatever it is you’re studying, it’s just going to keep fueling sort of this curiosity machine. If you’re careful about trying to choose good questions or insightful questions, it’s not going to really lead you wrong in terms of both keeping yourself fascinated, but hopefully doing something that’s of value to people who are interested in these questions too.
Interviewer bios:
Clara Soo (sooclara@msu.edu)is a doctoral candidate in Management (Organizational Behavior) at Michigan State University. Her research explores how individuals cognitively and emotionally navigate challenging or difficult situations in their work and careers, as well as the subsequent well-being/resilience outcomes.
Drew Jauron (andrew-jauron@uiowa.edu) is a PhD student in the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. His research interests include (but aren’t limited to!) selection, self-motivated training, artificial intelligence usage, career pathways, and meaningful work. He is especially interested in exploring new phenomena in unique work contexts.