The Concept of Career: An Interactionist Instrument of Objectivation

This article proposes using the concept of career as an instrument of objectivation that goes beyond the traditional opposition between “description” and “objectivation.” Beginning with a study of the anorexic career, we show that it is a technique for breaking with both medical interpretations and the self-descriptions of those studied. The concept of career, then, is part of a system of objectivation distinctive of interactionist sociology, based in particular on “qualitative” aggregation procedures and systematic comparison.