Staying in Bad Jobs With a Sense of Superiority: Boundary Work as a Sensemaking Strategy

How do people make sense of work that grants them no economic recognition? Based on longitudinal data from interviews with artists, I argue that boundary work helps people to make sense of their position because it offers a sense of cultural superiority that masks economic inferiority. The artists mobilized three types of boundaries: the boundary vis‐à‐vis the “uneducated” public, the boundary vis‐à‐vis art and artists who cater to the taste of that public, and the boundary that created a crevice within the self—separating the work kept as sacred from the work that could be polluted by market forces. Private boundaries carried public consequences for labor markets as they created labor supply in parallel realms of market, semi‐market, non‐market work, each with different potential for exploitation or self‐exploitation.