Job, career and calling: A teacher’s work orientation is/as discursive work during research interviewing

Three categories of work orientation – job, career and calling – have been widely used to characterise how people perceive and behave towards their work. While this typology has been generative, this paper adopts a different perspective (based on Discursive Psychology) by prioritising what and how teachers talk about their work on their own terms during research interviewing. Even though the sample of primary and secondary school teachers from Singapore drew on aspects of these work categories, these teachers were also flexibly managing moral accountability and identities for specific interactional purposes. Specifically, the three work orientations were discursively enlisted to validate, justify, censure and so forth during research interviews. We argue that social-science categories are not just ‘ready-made’ items to be transplanted from the world of research but are indubitably participants’ categories as part of their available rhetorical toolkit. The findings warrant a greater examination than what is currently being done methodologically to understand the world of teachers’ work through research interviews.