‘Unbecoming’ a Professional: The Role of Memory during Field Transitions in Japan and the USA
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Existing scholarship documents how, in becoming a professional, such as a partner in a professional services firm (PSF), one's habitus comes into alignment with field expectations. Less understood, however, is what happens to habitus and, relatedly, to professionals' accumulated cultural, social, and economic capitals, as individuals ‘unbecome’ a professional and transition away from the field. We examine this overlooked phenomenon via individual and focus group interviews with partners retired from PSFs in Japan and the USA. We find that, in unbecoming a professional, aspects of ex‐partners' habitus may be misaligned with the field they operate in, prompting a hysteresis effect. The lack of fit of habitus with one's current circumstances is induced by ex‐partners' nostalgia regarding accumulated capitals, that is, wistful memories capable of structuring present and future actions. By demonstrating how nostalgia informs ex‐partners' experience of the hysteresis effect, this paper contributes to understandings of the importance of memory when detaching from one's profession. Furthermore, given that our investigation is carried out across two distinct cultural settings, we also theorize how country‐specific historical work arrangements may condition memory in professionals' unbecoming from PSFs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it