This sociological collection advances the argument that the concept of a “turning point" expands our understanding of life experiences from a descriptive to a deeper and more abstract level of analysis. It addresses the conceptual issue of what distinguishes turning points from life transitions in general and raises crucial questions about the application of turning points as a biographical research method. Biography and turning points in Europe and America is all the more distinctive and significant due to its broad empirical database. The anthology includes authors from ten different countries, providing a number of contexts for thinking about how turning points relate to constructions of meaning shaped by globalization and by cultural and structural meanings unique to each country. The book will be useful across a wide range of social sciences and particularly valuable for researchers needing a stronger theoretical base for biographical work.
professionals’, although they increasingly experience conditions similar to those of dependent workers and at the same time suffer the effects of the further precarisation brought about by the crisis, but missing trade-unions support or political representation. Keywords: knowledge workers; subjectivities; precarity; precariousness; precariat; self-identification; self-exploitation; experience of misalignment How many graduates are hired for jobs which do not match their qualifications (“to make photocopies,” as the saying goes)? How many fixed-term contracts pay 500, 800
producers, seeking to explicate the ways in which this cohort under- stands and deals with their precariousness, particularly with regard to self-identification, self-exploitation and experience of misalignment. In her reply, Nancy Ettlinger (2013) considers, among other things, the exploitative and deleterious aspects of crowdsourcing, arguing that collective refusal to engage in such activities may be one means of opposing precariousness, with a greater emphasis on bottom up activities needed. Finally, Mauro Turrini and Federico Chicchi (2013), with a reply by Heather
that provokes a person to recognise that ‘I’m not the same as I was, as I used to be’, and is accompanied by experiences of ‘misalignment surprise, shock, chagrin, anxiety, tension, bafflement, and self-questioning’ (Strauss, 1959, p 95). Accordingly, the person seeks out a new self in order to render the new experiences meaningful and to coherently overcome the disconnection caused by the turning point, which leads to the transformation of identity. 100 Biography and turning points in Europe and America Following Erikson’s work on identity (Erikson, 1956
