Introduction

Activities of daily life become imbued with meaning when they are articulated in a narrative way, because only then can one locate particular actions within a specific plot. Personal narratives are constructed within a wider social context; they both reproduce and are produced by dominant cultural meta-narratives. While many statistical studies have reported on the grand sweeping changes which have been occasioned by the end of communism, this model did not match their own experiences nor those of people they knew, and so it was that they launched upon an open-ended project of collective autobiography. People create their personal narratives as they are created by them, and it is the work of narrative researchers to narrate the narrations of others. In the chapters which follow, the reader is presented with different stories about the process and function of employment in the lives of narrators.