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ABSTRACT Based on qualitative data from participant interviews, this study explores how nonprofit arts managers construct the notion of career, and more specifically, how they frame the nature of their work and career choices. Findings revealed that participants employed a spiritual framework of calling, service, sacrifice, and personal rewards to socially construct, understand, and legitimate their nonprofit careers. These framing devices provided the language for participants to make sense of their career decisions and to define their career successes in terms of their own values instead of traditional measures of extrinsic rewards. As contemporary workers place increasing importance on meaningful work, spiritually centered discourse has implications for career theory and organizational practices in both for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
Smith et al. (Sat,) studied this question.