The interface between coping and narrative

The confluence of coping and narrative perspectives enabled me to gain insight into individual experiences from a time perspective. At the same time it offered views on both action and meaning-making levels.

Firstly, the narrative perspective made a contribution to the field of necessity en-trepreneurship by increasing understanding of the necessity entrepreneurs’ lives, leaving behind sole concentration on the situation that pushed them into entrepre-neurship. Moreover, it captured the whole experience of the individual, opening up the subjective level of how individuals perceive the experience and challenges along the way and how they manage those challenges. As was concluded, indi-viduals experience most challenge on the emotional and cognitive level and they handle their coping in multiple ways, such as by differentiating themselves from traditional opportunity-based entrepreneurship, repositioning the importance of work and building up a new entrepreneurial identity.

Secondly, the narrative perspective enabled me to recognize smaller units, narra-tive themes from the necessity entrepreneurs´ narration that also provided a tool for analysis in content analysis. The narrative themes that recurred in the

necessi-ty-entrepreneurs´ narratives were: the disappointing point, reasoning the choice, finding the new me, balancing paradoxes, lessons from the past and hopes for the future. These findings shed light on the role of the coping narrative as a personal growth story that captured the reflection on past and perceptions of future orienta-tion.

In a similar way to how Eija Kauppinen (2010) in her dissertation on teachers’

emotions applied Lazarus’s (1999) concept of emotional narrative and defined it as conceptual wholeness proposing a common denominator to the each narratives, I termed these narratives entrepreneurial coping narratives that reflect individu-als’ perceptions in relation to major unexpected change in their personal life. Fol-lowing that I named each group of narratives after recognizing the similarities within their narration of entrepreneurial coping. As Hänninen & Koski-Jännes (2010) discuss the role of narrative in the recovery process and claim that the breaking of the self-narrative can work as a means of reorientation, so I see that the individual benefits from dealing with the past in narrative form, although tell-ing a personal story does not solely help the individual to redirect their thoughts, but rather create experiences in an sensible order. In these narratives, individuals were able to reconstruct their thoughts and create a coherent and understandable past, gain a sense of coherence towards the sudden changes they experienced in going from salaried work to entrepreneurship. The stories of the participants re-peated similar patterns and as their narratives constructed a picture of their past events, the storytelling had a wider meaning for the teller, as they reflected their own thoughts and evaluated meanings. They even sometimes considered possible learning outcomes. As these narratives offered them an opportunity to crystalize their own thoughts and pass on their experiences to others, they at the same time reassured themselves that there was hope as others were in the same position.

In addition to adding knowledge on how entrepreneurs narrate their coping and what kind of themes they deal with, the structure of the coping narrative provided a tool for further analysis in this study. The structure was advanced in creating understanding of entrepreneurial path together with emplotting the journey of the entrepreneur. In terms of analysis, I suggest that the structure of the narrative can be appropriate in other coping contexts, too. This could provide a structured ap-proach to the personal stories of, for example, other precarious forms of work such as temporary agency work and temporary contract workers, and also for the analysis of other career-related personal stories that have similar elements of sud-den change and lack of other options.

The literature on coping and narrative discussion shares many aspects. Narrativity is claimed to be part of human nature and a way of relating and reconstituting the past, whereas coping is seen as a special kind of habit to direct that narrative way

of thinking. The literature on coping lends a wider perspective on a practical lev-el, for example by emphasizing a wider perspective on resources available to in-dividuals, reaching also beyond the psychological side, and although coping is strongly linked to personality, its basic assumption is that coping is a natural way of human nature to redirect action or mind to cope with difficulties or uncomfort-able situations. Similarly, narrativity is seen to be part of a natural way of think-ing and creatthink-ing coherence in one’s life. Hence, narrativity and copthink-ing are inter-vowen when considering concepts and basis of thought that strengthen conceptual development. Coping here was seen as an individual´s subjective evaluation of his/her life and situation: as the individual´s means of managing demands and maintaining balance (Folkman & Lazarus 1984). In similar means, the narrative concept of inner narrative (Hänninen 2000, 2004) comprises a similar idea: an individual´s personal story that is based on perceptions of the past from which the individual draws future directions. Both are cognitive processes that are created in interaction with the social environment. In this regard, individual coping is very suitable to study from a narrative point of view; thus, both lean on an individual process of making sense of the past and creating meanings.

Although psychology has connected coping and narratives for years and discussed the healing effects of narrating, work life context phenomena have received less attention. Coping in psychological studies is usually attached to more severe cop-ing cases ariscop-ing from trauma, loss and threat and other psychotherapy-related topics. In this study, I tried to apply understanding to a less dramatic context, but I would still claim that this context may have challenging and even well-being threatening consequences since it is also linked to a person’s self-confidence, well-being and identity crises. Individuals revealed through their stories different attempts to create understanding between their new and old self in a new life en-vironment as entrepreneur, but they also reconstructed a sense of order in the situ-ation and reasons that resulted in them leaving and changing to entrepreneurship.

When positioning the study within the discussion of necessity-based entrepre-neurship, the results point toward personal coping and highlight the aspects from an involuntary employment choice point of view. Previous negative findings re-lated to necessity entrepreneurship created the basis for the study, thus framing the starting point, and although this study is not able to answer whether necessity leads directly to poor employment alternatives, it certainly stresses the process of becoming an entrepreneur from a starting point that did not originally contem-plate striving toward entrepreneurship. Because of the sole concentration on ne-cessity-based entrepreneurs, this study does not give answers to the distinct well-being of opportunity and necessity-based entrepreneurs, but instead by means of coping it has revealed how individuals respond to major (employment) changes in

their lives. Nevertheless, narratives can also be seen as an opening contributing to an individual’s life satisfaction, because well-being as such is very subjective in nature; thus, general factors do not manage to follow individual perceptions about the issue. A narrative life story is closely tied to the subjective interpretations of oneself as happy, emphasizing meaningfulness and growth. The emphasis within the narratives of the participants on personal growth and the way they framed difficult life experiences as transformative, imply a certain kind of happiness or eudaimoinic feeling (term from Bauer, McAdams & Pals 2008). Whereas inter-pretation of their happiness is not in focus here, or even aimed at, the ability to create rather coherent narratives and tell the story of one’s own life, refers also to the process they have gone through finding meanings and sense in the past.

Whereas stories were not about seeking pleasure, but rather managing life chal-lenges, it may also point to a mature attitude toward sudden changes in life or even a resigned attitude, resulting from years of forced adaption to the situation.