Digitale Disruption und biografische Verarbeitung: Vom Umgang mit Karrieretransitionen im Kontext wissensintensiver Berufsfelder

Digitalization as a global megatrend not only transforms industries, organizations, and professions, but also creates challenges of change and path breaks that have to be dealt with on a biographical level. Our contribution sheds light on the implications of digital transformation processes in three knowledgeintensive occupational fields (communication, finance, ICT) at the level of professional identities and individual career paths and analyses how professionals affected by this try to maintain their ability to act and shape. Based on professional biographical case study interviews, we reconstruct how knowledge workers subjectively experience the upheavals in their professional environment and try to cope with and shape them in the light of their own ideals of a meaningful and successful life and a coherent professional biography. Our results show that the ability to weave professional transitions – despite their potentially critical and distressing character – into a coherent biographical narrative serving to form an identity, is a decisive factor in successfully shaping biographies in times of upheaval.