Description
Book SynopsisProbing the ominous side of career advice to follow your passion, this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. Follow your passion is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this passion principleseductive as it isdoes not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on inter
Trade Review"As the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many people to contemplate the meaning of their work and life, this book offers particularly relevant insights for those wanting a career change to consider how they should make career decisions and the role work should play in their life. The Trouble with Passion should also be revelatory to people who potentially shape others’ career decisions, such as educators and career counselors; those who can influence the career outcomes of people in the labor market, such as hiring managers and organization leaders; and policymakers who have the power to rectify the structural factors producing the dark side of the passion principle in the first place. I would also recommend this book to social science scholars interested in careers, passion, the meaning of work, segregation, and inequality in general."
* Administrative Science Quarterly *
"If you’re looking for a book that can offer you new insights into career choices while making you think critically about librarianship, passion, and labor, this is a recommended read."
* College & Research Libraries *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. What Is the Passion Principle?
2. Why Is the Passion Principle Compelling?
3. The Privilege of Passion? Passion-Seeking and Socioeconomic Inequality among Career Aspirants
4. The Passion Principle as Prescriptive and Explanatory Narrative? How the Passion Principle Choicewashes Workforce Inequalities
5. Exploiting Passion? The Demand Side of the Passion Principle
Conclusion
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Methods
Appendix B: Supplemental Analysis of 2020 College Student Survey
Appendix C: Supporting Data
Notes
References
Index
