Coping With the Working Sphere (Switzerland, 1890–1950)

Occupational choices, job seeking and unemployment constitute biographical crosspoints where individual expectations for the future collide with the structures of the job market and ideals of successful life. The project analyzes such critical points in occupational biographies, where subjectivities were put to the test. It explores institutional trajectories of occupational counseling, unemployment and job seeking as well as new materializations of work-related knowledge, and horizons of orientation. Many of these negotiations of occupational uncertainty involved emotional practices and norms regarding the working world. The evoked emotional repertoires are crucial to understand how strategies of coping with the working sphere were appropriated and put into practice. First, models of counseling and instruments of advice regarding occupational choices and job seeking are examined. Second, the project looks into new modes of generating social and scientific knowledge on the working sphere. New understandings and practices of the self are analyzed in the third part. The project assumes all these aspects to have informed processes of decision and shaped ways of coping with biographical imponderabilities and economic uncertainties. As well as being attempts of containing economic risks, these practices and discourses raised issues of individual achievement and successful social integration between ideals of equality and unequal capacities.