‘Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries
基于对31名从大都市迁往南欧偏远地区的自由职业者的访谈，研究创意工作者如何理解和合理化地理职业转型，并重新评估职业成功的意义，提出用能力方法分析城市环境对职业身份和幸福感的影响。
This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing reflexively over their lifespan the shifting meaning of their career success. We propose the adoption of Nussbaum’s capability approach in the study of such career transitions as a means of strengthening current theorizing about the role played by urban contexts in individual conceptualizations of career success and meaningful professional identities. Applying this analytical lens, we tease out the ways in which our informants perceived the influence exerted by different urban contexts on their capacity to enact a set of capabilities for the attainment of well-being and quality of life at different stages in their careers while striving to preserve a stable professional identity as creative workers. We argue that a good life evaluation, which includes a reflexive and comprehensive reassessment of the capabilities to live life well while pursuing a creative career, underlies creative workers’ shifting interpretations of geographical career transition that contravene conventional measures of career upward mobility, development and growth.