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Exploring the Transactional Quality of Everyday Occupations Through Narrative-in-Action: Meaning-Making Among Women Living with Chronic Conditions

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Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce everyday occupations as embedded in local cultural perspectives and how embeddedness is to be understood in the light of women living with chronic conditions. We address the dilemma between individual actions and experiences and their local and global contextualization. To that end we introduce our reading of Ricoeur’s reasoning on narrative-in-action and establish possible links to a transactional perspective. Stories elicited from the everyday life of women living with chronic conditions show how narrative meaning may occur in occupation and how the transactional qualities of occupation are unpacked through these everyday stories. Our presentation and discussion elaborates on how the inherent flexibility and openness of everyday occupation makes transactional opportunities available for the women. In such processes, meaning and morals are communicated between the individual woman and her local culture, showing transactions from different angles. Finally, we elaborate on the possibilities and hazards that we identify by using the concept of narrative-in-action to access transactional dimensions of human occupation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kirby and Mièle are expensive vacuum cleaners of high quality, but with slightly different functions.

  2. 2.

    Moreover, ‘trying out’ is another instance of the connection to the transactional perspective where experimental inquiry is seen as an essential part of everyday activity (see Chap. 2).

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Correspondence to Sissel Alsaker .

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Alsaker, S., Josephsson, S., Dickie, V.A. (2013). Exploring the Transactional Quality of Everyday Occupations Through Narrative-in-Action: Meaning-Making Among Women Living with Chronic Conditions. In: Cutchin, M., Dickie, V. (eds) Transactional Perspectives on Occupation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4429-5_6

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