Work Devotion as Identity Armor? How Single Professionals with Relationship Aspirations Use Career Decisions to Manage Their Identities
研究追踪89名国际援助工作者八年，发现单身且有恋爱渴望的专业人士通过三种职业决策（工作奉献、临时调整、持久调整）来管理身份，揭示了工作奉献如何成为身份盔甲，尤其对直女和LGBQ人群影响显著。
Although scholarship has established how people with a partner, child, or other domestic obligations account for these responsibilities when making career decisions, we lack conceptual apparatus around how career decision making is informed by personal aspirations. Following a cohort of 89 international aid workers over eight years, I draw on in-depth interview (n = 126), survey (n = 551), and job transition data (n = 228) to detail how career decision making serves as a platform for identity management for single professionals who have aspirations for a long-term intimate relationship. I introduce the possibility space, which conveys how the ability to realize relationship aspirations is constrained for work-devoted professionals, especially for straight women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people. Yet, they resist scaling back work. I detail why, presenting the three types of career decisions they made: (1) work devotion as identity armor, protecting and affirming their current aid worker identity; (2) temporary work alterations as identity diversification, carving out time to hopefully realize their desired relationship while postponing the affirmation of their aid worker identity; and (3) durable work alterations as identity restructuring, removing the aid worker identity from their identity network. This article’s model of career decision making as identity management and the broader theoretical explanation of how different behavioral practices can manage temporally distinct identities offers important contributions to scholarship on identity, the work-nonwork interface, labor market inequalities, and career decision making. Funding: This research was supported by the University of Minnesota’s Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship and a Stanford University Dissertation Support Grant.