Abstract
This thesis explores how young professionals navigate contemporary work life. It examines identity, career, and engagement as projects of the self, tracing how these projects unfold in response to an unpredictable, increasingly fragmented landscape of work. In this context, I argue, performance and employability emerge not only as external demands but as compelling frameworks that shape how young professionals engage with identity, career, and work. Through these frameworks, I suggest that young professionals approach work as a medium for self-optimization rather than a site of self-realization. This ethos of optimization offers direction in the absence of clear and stable anchors, yet draws young professionals into a continual imperative to perform, adapt, and improve without arrival.
The thesis comprises a comprehensive summary and four research papers. The summary develops a conceptual lens that situates identity, career, and engagement within the broader dynamics of projects of the self, setting the stage for the analyses presented in the four research papers. Two of these papers are based on longitudinal fieldwork, analyzing how young professionals sustain identities around performance and draw on principles of employability in navigating work life. The other two papers analyze engagement in different ways: one shows how it shifts across career stages, the other illustrates how it can become an excessive or self-defeating pursuit.
Through these papers, the thesis contributes to scholarship on identity, career, and engagement at work. It also sheds light on the tensions and stakes these pursuits entail for young professionals, challenging the familiar narratives that circulate about younger generations in popular discourse. Never Settle captures this dual consequence of optimization: the lingering sense of never fully arriving and the recurring experience of never really doing or being enough.