Waiting to Work: Institutional Crossover, Career Precarity, and the Provisional Framing of Work

Research on dual-career households and precarity has shown that mobility and instability shape professional lives, yet existing accounts incompletely explain how uncertainty is generated for workers whose career trajectories are not intrinsically insecure. Studies of dual-career couples emphasize household negotiation around co-location, while precarity research locates instability in contingent employment or labor-market volatility. What remains underdeveloped is how institutionally-sequenced careers might produce prolonged uncertainty that reorganizes the career planning of connected romantic partners. This paper addresses that gap by examining how institutional timelines governing one partner's career shape how the other plans their career. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seventy partners of individuals embedded in doctoral and medical training regimes, I show how respondents narrated their employment as provisional. Work was described in conditional terms, subordinated to institutional milestones and unresolved geographic futures. Rather than treating accommodation as a one-time compromise, respondents anticipated extended periods in which their own careers would remain contingent on externally governed timelines. To manage this uncertainty, they oriented their employment toward compatibility rather than advancement, redesigning work for flexibility, undershooting aspirations, or assembling patchwork arrangements. The analysis demonstrates institutional crossover as a mechanism through which institutional calendars governing one partner's advancement restructure the career horizons of another. It also introduces provisional framing of work as an interpretive orientation through which workers understand stable jobs as temporary or deferrable. Together, these concepts extend theories of precarity and dual-career mobility by showing how instability can be produced relationally and temporally, even when employment itself appears secure.