Internal considerations: Provisional identity, precarity and opportunism among French professional interns

Internships are an increasingly ubiquitous temporary work category, positioned between educational and market spheres. Based on emerging discussions around the precarity and ambiguity of internships, we focus on how interns use provisional identifications to navigate this ambiguity. An in-depth qualitative study was conducted in the context of professional internships in the French business school context, examining how interns navigate the tensions between educational and workplace roles, making sense of their own identities alternatively as students and as precarious workers. Based on how the interns understood their intern positions, as that of organizational members, career-building entrepreneurs, or students-in-training, they built specific conceptions of themselves at work that oriented their coping behaviours, as well as their possibilities for engaging in workplace critique. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of understanding the heterogeneous identities of interns and their ramifications for workplace critique