Identity As Career Capital: Navigating Careers in the Creative Industries

We aim to extend the discussion of identity as career capital for enhancing employability by drawing insights from existing studies of careers in the creative industries. Based on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we propose and elaborate on the concept of “identity capital”, and explore the work involved in converting identity into career capital and the challenges people may face in acquiring and accumulating identity capital. We argue that such process is full of paradoxes that require three types of work for remedy: display work, authenticity work, and personation work. We suggest that authenticity challenges and inequalities are inherent in the process of investing and deploying identity into career capital for advancing one’s career.