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The field of work and employment is among the most rapidly changing fields in current societies. The sociology of work attempts to map these changes, developing concepts that seek to grasp the transformations of labor. Currently, the discussion revolves around two main topics: (a) the 'normality of non-normality' expands on the flexible, insecure, and precarious forms of employment, while (b) the 'subjectivation of work' has been introduced in order to reflect the newly observed trend in which entrepreneurial strategies and rationales colonize the whole spectrum of an employee's personal life and the self. It is a paradox, however, that while all these transformations in the labor world are taking place, interest in biographical research on the field has declined. This article aims to show the ways in which biographical narrative research has studied the changes that have taken place in the world of labor and to highlight new research possibilities. We especially wish to highlight ways in which reconstructive biographical research can contribute to the corpus of knowledge generated on this topic. We argue that, through biographical case reconstruction, paths by which transformations of the labor world become biographically significant for individuals and their social life worlds can be grasped in a dialectical manner. Employing systematic reconstruction of the ways in which social actors construct their work experiences biographically can serve a twofold purpose. First, it reveals how social rules, dominant discourses, and social conditions form new workers' subjectivities, and second, it identifies biographical sources of resistance on the part of the actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences has posed a theoretical and methodological challenge to qualitative social research. It has forced researchers to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of applying qualitative research methods in their research on transnational social phenomena. We underline the need to examine the influence of the biographical experiences of the researcher on the research process in transnational research settings. We argue that by inducing biographical self-reflection during the research process, it is possible to work out the possible biographical entanglements with the research topic and to reflect their influence on the further development of the research process. In consequence, it is possible to tackle methodologically the “invisible” role of the researcher in the narrative construction of transnational social fields and to show how transnational knowledge production is an intersubjective, relational activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the concept of transnational biographies in migration studies. We use a biographical case study from the relatively new research field of advancement through education to explore that a transnational biography is not just a product of subjectivity but also a way of gaining access to invisible but nonetheless objective structures of transnational migration spaces. Our thesis is that the discovery and use of a transnational European educational space made it possible for second generation migrants in Germany to circumvent the exclusionary mechanisms of the German education system much more effectively than through unconditional assimilation into that system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]