I’m working on a other question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.
- How would you define what a “real job” is?
- What types of jobs do you think of as not being “real jobs”?
- Where have you heard the term real job, and who taught you its meaning?
Use, bold AND define 2 key terms from Ch. 11 in your answer.
In Robin Clair’s work The Political Nature of a Colloquialism, “A Real Job”: Implications for Organizational Assimilation (1996), she critiques current models of organizational assimilation, such as Miller and Jablin’s, for assuming that any work that occurs prior to or aside from working for an organization is not “real” work. To help us understand how individuals become socialized outside the context of organizations and to understand what constitutes work, she studied the popular expression real job by asking undergraduate students to write an essay about a time they encountered the term. She did so to examine what students mean by the term real job as well as to understand who was socializing them into a belief about what a real job looks like.
In their essays, Clair’s respondents identified five dominant characteristics of a “real job”:
- The money (i.e., one is well paid)
- Utilizes one’s education
- Is enjoyable
- Requires 40 hours of work per week/8 hours per day
- Advancement is possible
Specific jobs that were identified as not being real jobs included serving in volunteer organizations such as the Peace Corps, working in a fast-food restaurant, working for one’s family, or not making enough money to provide for a family. Overall, the respondents suggested that people with a college degree do not belong in unskilled labor positions, which for them did not constitute real jobs.
A number of respondents did acknowledge that the concept of a real job was a social construction and some even rejected it. But even those who embraced jobs that others might consider not a real job continued to compare their own work to the societal standard and felt the need to justify their choices.
When asked who shaped their perceptions of what constitutes a real job, respondents pointed to family members (particularly fathers), friends, and coworkers. As Clair also points out, however, socialization is not a linear process in which society socializes young people into a particular belief about what constitutes a real job. Instead, she argues, those who are being socialized also serve to socialize themselves and others by the ways they talk about their own and others’ employment plans and desires.
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