Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork among professionals and jobseekers in Berlin, I describe how employment resources allow those who procure and mobilize them to experience, on a diminutive scale, what they are denied at large writ: a sphere of agency through which to carve out a socially validated meaning.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork on the work lives of professionals and jobseekers in Berlin, I identify a tension between a widely shared ideal of employment as free, empowering, and meaningful, and an equally widely shared understanding of the circumstances that enable and limit one’s employment possibilities. This apparent contradiction is resolved by a rescaling. Specifically, in a reality heavily circumscribed by the dynamic of accumulation, resources are afforded, primarily in and through employment, which allow those who procure and mobilize them to experience, on a diminutive scale, what they are denied at large writ: a sphere of agency through which to carve out a socially validated meaning. I describe how this state-regulated and supported rescaling shapes the ways in which men and women in Berlin relate to their current or ideal employment.