The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations 9780198827115, 0198827113
This Handbook offers a comprehensive assessment of current debates and major theories in research on identities in organ
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English Pages [967] Year 2020
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Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Hanbook of IDENTITIES INORGANIZATIONS
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Chapter 1: Identities in organizations
Introduction
Identities in organizations
Enduring debates in identities research
Identities in processes and outcomes
Overview of this handbook
Surveying the Territory
Approaches to Identities Research
Researching Identities
Issues in and Processes of Identity Construction
Identity Kinds and Types
Identities in Organizational Processes and Outcomes
Looking Forward: The Future of Identities in Organizational Research
The future of identities research
Subjects for Identities Studies
Topics for Identities Research
Approaches to Identities Studies
Methods for Identities Studies
Countering and criticizing the Identitied juggernaut
Conclusions
Notes
References
Part I: SURVEYING THE TERRITORY
Chapter 2: On the scope and limits of identity
Introduction
Meaning(s) of identity
On hembigs
Sidestepping work and swapping concepts
Organizational Culture Dressed Up as Organizational Identity?
Identity Replaces Role
Step-on, stretch, and fake
Spot-on
Stretch
Fake
Not everything is (best seen as) identity (work)
Sometimes Identity Is Less Central
Trimming Down Identity (Work)
Remedied for addressing identity as a hembig
Theoretical Scrutiny
Methodological Antidotes
Conclusions
References
Chapter 3: Bridging self and Sociality: Identity Construction and Social Context
Introduction
The duality of social realities
The Dynamics of social reality construction
Identity as positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and power
Identity-as-Positioning: Similarities and Differences
Identity-as-Performance: The Symbolism of Words, Acts, and Artefacts
Identity-as-(Co)Production: The Individual as Producer and Product
Identity-as-Process: Long Shots and Close-Ups
Identity-as-Politics: Strategic Agency and Power Structures
Social circuits of identity construction
Inner Conversations: Self-Directed Positioning
Self–Other Definitions: Relational Positioning
Situated Interactions: Reciprocal Positioning
Institutional Dynamics: Subject Positioning
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4: 'Identity work': A Metaphor Taken Literally?
Introduction
Doing identity work: a proliferation of concepts and metaphors?
The Identification of metaphors and the metaporization of identification
Obvious and Less Obvious Identity Metaphors
From comparison to correspondence-based identity metaphors
Imposing and exposing identity metaphors
Identity metaphors: some closing comments
References
Chapter 5: Networks and identity: Positioning the Self and Others Across Organizational and Network Boundaries
Introduction
Liminal identities and boundary-spanning
Identities in B2B marketing contexts
Identities in inter-organizational collaborations
Identities and agency in global supply chains
Identities in networks in other social contex
Approaches to analysing identities in networks
Summary of extant work on networks and identities
A research agenda for networks and identities
References
Chapter 6: Career identity: An Ongoing Narrative Accomplishment
Introduction
Career identity as socially constructed trrough narrative
Change and continuity in narrative career identity
Contemporary career developments and their identity implications
The critical potential of taking a career perspective on identity
Concluding remarks
References
Chapter 7: Applying an intersectional perspective to identity foci at work
Identities and identification in organizations
Adopting an intersectional perspective to identities research
What Is Intersectionality?
Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Being and Becoming Yourself at Work
1. An Intersectional Perspective on the Stable Content of Identity Targets in Organizations
2. An Intersectional Perspective on the Evolving Content of Identity Targets in Organizations
3. An Intersectional Perspective on the Stable Contextof Identity Targets in Organizations
4. An Intersectional Perspective on the Evolving Context of Identity Targets in Organizations
Reflections and conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Preserving the generative potential of identity scholarship: The Value of Writerly Texts
Introduction
Exspansion of the identity work field-uncommon ground and traditions in relative disharmony
Comparative Analysis 1: Identity Work and Struggles
Comparative Analysis 2: Identity Work and Space and Place
The flowering of insights?-readerly and writerly
Encore, not conclusion
References
Part II: APPROACHES TO IDENTITIES RESEARCH
Chapter 9: Discourse, communication, and identity
Introduction
Conceptualizing discourse and communication
Discourse
Communication
Distinguishing Discourse from Communication
Discourse and communication in theories of identity
Social Identity Theory
Narrative Theory
Critical and Poststructural Theory
Relational Ontologies
Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 10: A psychodynamic perspective on identity as fabrication
Introduction
'There is no such thing as an infant!' and neither 'A' psychoanalysis
Becoming a self, fabricating identity
Adolescence is never enough
the unconscious is plural
Longing for identity
What is psychoanalysis good for?
References
Chapter 11: Lacan, identities, and organizations: Potentialities and Impossibilities
Introduction
Lacan and organizational identification
The subject and language
The subject and her job
Discourses of work and organization
Lacanian organizational identification: key issues and future directions
Affect
Going ‘Beyond’ Subjection
Gender
Methods
Impossibilities and future 'directions'
Concluding remarks
References
Chapter 12: Performed identities
Introduction
Performing an identity
Performing the identity of a performer
Performing a bibliogrphy
(Dis)connecting: the precarity of performed identities
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 13: Noise, identity, and pre-interpreted worlds: A Phenomenological Perspective
Introduction
Noisy worlds, pre-interpretation, and identitiy
The man of noise
Brexit: a confessional tale of noise
Studying identity through noise
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Note
References
Chapter 14: Materialities and identities
Introduction
New materialist theories
New materialist studies in management and organzation studies
Steps towards a theory of material-identities
Conclusion
References
Chapter 15: Making sense of myself: Exploring the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking
Introduction
A sensemaking perspective on identity: definitions and assumptions
Identity
Sensemaking
The relationship between identity and sensemaking
Question 1: How Does Identity Impact Sensemaking?
Question 2: How Does Sensemaking Impact Identity?
Question 3: What Role Does Sensemaking Playin Identity Processes?
Question 4: What Role Does Identity Playin Sensemaking Processes?
An Integrated Model of the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking
Where do we go from here?
Conclusions
Note
References
Chapter 16: Bourdieu and identity: Class, History and Field Structure
Introduction
Pierre bourdieu: master concepts
The Field: ‘Rules of the Game’
Habitus: ‘Feel for the Game’
Capitals
Reflexivity
Bourdieu on identity
Aspirational Identities and the Paras
Provisional Selves
Sexual Heterodoxy in the Church
Elite MBAs and Portable Selves
A Bitter-Sweet Symphony
Conclusion: A bourdieusian approach to identity
Notes
References
Part III: RESEARCHING IDENTITIES
Chapter 17: Human identities, identity work, and organizations: Putting the Sociological Imagination into Practice
Introduction
A research conversation
Doing and researching
How things work in organisations and identity work
The nature of organizations and human beings
Self-identity, social-identities, identity work, and personas
Embracing and resisting social identities
The variety and types of social-identity
Historical, Literary, and Media Social-Identities
Social-Category Social-Identities
Formal-Role Social-Identities
Local-Organizational Social-Identities
Local-Personal Social-Identities
Cultural-Stereotype Social-Identities
Finally
Notes
References
Chapter 18: How can i study who you are?: Comparing Grounded Theory and Phenomenology as Methodological Approaches to Identity Work Research
Introduction
Researching identities and identity work
Grounded Theory
Traditional Grounded Theory
Constructivist Grounded Theory
Phenomenology
Descriptive Phenomenology
Interpretive Phenomenology
Guidelines for selecting a grounded theory or phenomenological methodology
Research Aim(s)
Sampling
Key Analytical Steps
Further research and conclusion
References
Chapter 19: Conversations with the self and others: Practising Reflexive Researcher Identity Work
Introduction
the reflexive researcher and identity work
Reflexive identity work in the research process
Shared Identity Work in the Research Process
Reflexive Vulnerability
Reflexive Recognition
Conclusion
Appendix: POSSIBLE QUESTIONS FOR THE SELF-REFLEXIVE RESEARCHER INTERVIEW
Identity
Method
Change
Notes
References
Chapter 20: Membership categorization analysis: Studying Identities in Talk and Text ‘In Situ, In Vivo’
Introduction
Origins
Membership categories and organizations
An illustrative example: the new york times op-ed piece
Author identity
President Trump’s Identity
Discussion
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 21: Between the bridge and the door: Exploring Liminal Spaces of Identity Formation Through Video Diaries
Introduction: There are always new thresholds to cross
Process of identity transition
Simmel: life as transcendence
Bridge and door
Gathering identity transition data through video diaries
Past, present, and future identities: an empirical example
Encountering Bridges and Doors
Examining transitions and liminal dynamics in video diary data
Video diaries
Concluding remarks
Notes
References
Chapter 22: Historical methods for researching identities in organizations
Introduction: the historic turn in organization studies
Historical methods in organization studies
Ethnographical history
Clerical workers
The silence of the archives
Summary and conclusion
References
Part IV: ISSUES IN AND PROCESSES OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Chapter 23: Autobiographical memeory and identities in organizations: The Role of Temporal Fluidity
Introduction
Memory and identity
Memory and Temporality
Autobiographical Memory
Fluidity of Memory
Organizational autobiographical memory
The Corporate Historian as the Architect of Autonoetic Consciousness
The Temporal Fluidity of Autobiographical Memory
Co-Production of Individual and Organizational Memories
Conclusion
References
Chapter 24: Real, fake, amd crystallized identities
Introduction
The 'Crystallized self': a synbthesis
The Real-selfFakself dichotomy
Problamatic outcomes of the real-selffake-self dichotomy
The 'crystallized self' metaphor
Real, fake, and crystallized identities today
Discursive Struggles of Self-Disciplining and Resistance in Relation to a Preferred Self
Multiplicity of Identity as Valuable Rather than Contradictory
Crystallization and the Gendered Work Involved in Boundary Spanning
Crystallization and Critical Intersectionality
Crystallization and Qualitative Research
Crystallizing future identity research
Conclusion
References
Chapter 25: Identity, image, and brand
Introduction
Branding, image, and identity
Identity
Brands and branding
Image
Comtemporary empirical studies of identity, image, and branding dynamics
Future directions
References
Chapter 26: 'If you have to say you are, you aren't‘: Paradoxes of Trumpian Identity Work Knotting in a Post-Truth Context
Introduction
Identity work, agency, and paradox
Poststructuralism, identity worl, and knotting
Post-truth leadership and knotted identity tensions
Real-Self/Fake-Self: ‘If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t’ (Authenticity Paradox)
Public/Private: Onstage/Backstage (Site Paradox)
Popular/Elite: Right versus Left (Affiliation Paradox)
Automatic/Planned: Unmonitored versus Monitored Communications (Automaticity Paradox)
Emotion/Reason: ‘Irrational’ versus Rational Responses (Affect Paradox)
Implicatoions for identity work
Notes
References
Chapter 27: Emotions and identity
Introduction
Emotion and identity: overview of the field
Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioural Elements of Identification
Emotions and Identity Verification/Non-Verification
Emotions as Discursive Resources in Processes of Identification
Emotional Labour and Organizational Identification
Humour, Emotions, and Identification
The future of identities and emotions research
Conclusion
References
Chapter 28: Fiction and the identity of the manager
Introduction
Theoretical background
Cultural portrayals of the manager
‘Negative’ Portrayals of the Manager
‘Positive’ Portrayals
‘Tragic’ or ‘Nihilistic’ Portrayals
Fictional portrayals and manager's identity work
The rise of leadership
Sexual identity and authority
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 29: The liminal playground: Identity Play and the Creative Potential of Liminal Experiences
Introduction
Fertile emptiness: the creative potential of liminal experiences
Liminal experience
Liminality as crucible for transformative change
Individual and collective identity play as a response to liminality
Divergent Exploration
Delayed Commitment
Time, space, and relationships: creating a liminal playground
Transitional Relationships
Transitional Time and Space
Conclusion
References
Chapter 30: Gender identity: Does It Still Matter in Organizations and Society?
Introduction
Is identity a relevant concept for understanding social phenomena and organizational works?
Deconstructing and refusing gender identities
Relational identity: theoretical implications
Practical implications
References
Chapter 31: Identity work in developing collaborative leadership
Introduction
Identity work and leadership development
Understanding the liminality of identity work
Introducing the leadership studio
CJC as a site of perpetual liminality
Risk-Taking and Rule-Breaking
Innovating and Incubating
Learning and Resilience
Reading the Movements of Identity Work
Discussion
Note
References
Part V: IDENTITY KINDS AND TYPES
Chapter 32: Age identity and organizations: Critical Potential and Challenges
Introduction
Generational identities
From 'older workers' to age at work
The intersection of age with other identities
Retirement
Identity in later life: what future beyond work?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 33: Hybrid professional identities: Responding to Institutional Challenges
Introduction
What is hybrid professional identity?
Assessing hybrid identity-progressive or regressivew professionalism?
What variation is ther in enacting hybrid professional identity?
What is the instututional challenge of enacting hybrid professional identity?
Support for transition towards hybrid professional identity?
Future research pathways
Conclusion
References
Chapter 34: Organization sexualities and lgbtq+indenties
Introduction
Historicizing LGBTQ+sexualities and identities
LGBTQ+ identities in organizations
Identity Disclosure
Identity Management
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 35: Stigmatized identities in organizations
Introduction
What is stigma?
Categorizations of stigma
Sources of stigma
Challenges of stigma
Responses to stigma by the stigmatized
Responses to stigma by the non-stigmatized
Moving forward
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 36: Anchored in the past: Nostalgic Identities in Organizations
Introduction
Nostalgia as an emotion
Identity and individual nostalgia
Organizational nostalgia and group identity
Social nostalgia and social identity
Summary and conclusions
References
Chapter 37: National identity in and around multinational corporations
Introduction
National identity: towards new understandings
National identity constructions at different levels
Macro-Level: Ideologies and Worldviews as Overarching Structures in National Identification
Meso-Level: Using National Identities for Specific Organizational Purposes
Micro-Level: National Identities in Daily Interaction
National identity in and around MNCs: looking forward
Conclusion
References
Chapter 38: Paradoxes in the pursuit of posistive identities: Individuals in Organizations Becoming Their Best
Introduction
Criticism of over-accentuating the positive
Positive identity work seen through a paradox/tension lens
The paradox of positivity-negativity in positive identity work
Paradoxical tensions of positive identity work
1. Positive Identity Coherence Paradox: Virtue and Structural (Complementary) Perspectives: Narrative Frame
Tactic: Developing a Spiritual Identity of ‘Holistic Integration’ at Work
2. Positive Identity Threat/Growth Paradox: Evaluative Perspective: Identity Work Frame
Tactic: Transforming Identity Threats
3. Internal Identity Gap Paradox: Developmental (Progressive) Perspective: Narrative Frame
Tactic: Experimenting with Possible Selves
4. Internal-External Identity Gap Paradox: Developmental (Adaptive) Perspective: Identity Theory Frame
Tactic: Leveraging (In)congruence
5. Positive Identity Balance Paradox: Structural (Balanced) Perspective: Social Identity Theory (SIT) Frame
Tactic: Searching for Optimal Balance
Ways forward: future research in the paradoxes of positive identiy (work)
Conclusion
References
Chapter 39: Crafting philanthropic identities
Introduction
Identity, entrepreneurship and philanthropy
Conceptualizing philanthropic identities
Modelling philanthropic identify formation
Philanthropic identities, legitimacy and elite power
Conclusion
References
Chapter 40: Race and identity in organizations
Introduction
The strange life of race in organization and management studies
The 'probelem' of the 'racialized body'
Race as organization and identity work: conversations with other fields
Racial identity in the imperial palace of social science
Returning to the body with a difference
Conclusion
References
Chapter 41: Creating creative identities in organizations
Introduction
Creative identity projects
Creative selves at worl
Inside the creative organization
Complications of creative identities in creative organizations
Summary
References
Chapter 42: Identity regulation and globalization
Introduction
Regulating identities across national borders
(Re)producing neo-colonial power relations
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part VI: IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES
Chapter 43: Finding ourselves in space: Identity and Spatiality
Introduction
Space and place in MOS
Workspaces and 'new ways of working'
The other 'new office': identities at home
Changing identities: liminal, free and resisting spaces
Summary and directions for further research
Final thoughts
Notes
References
Chapter 44: Indentity and power in organizational theory
Introduction
Structure and agency
Language and Materiality
Elites and shopfloor employees
Future research
Conclusion
References
Chapter 45: Theorizing the 'I' in institutional theory: Moving forward through theoretical fragmention, not integration
Introduction: The'I' in institutional theory: a mid-life crisis?
Theoretical complexity and conceptual confusion in the literature on identity and institutional theory
Different Theories of Identity in Institutional Theory
Different Identity-Constructs in Institutional Theory
The Causal Ambiguity of Identity in Institutional Theory
Implications for the Promise of Increased Theoretical Integration
Five alternative institutional theories of actorhood
Institutional Theory Type 1—The Actor as a Mythicized, Rationalized Subject
Institutional Theory Type 2—The Actor as a Structurally Constrained Responder
Institutional Theory Type 3—The Actor as a Strategic Political Activist
Institutional Theory Type 4—The Actoras an Institutional Bricoleur
Institutional Theory Type 5—The Actor as a Value Rational, Affected Practitioner
The myth of cumulative theoretical progress in institutional theory
The Structure–Agency Fallacy
The Contingency Fallacy
Identity and the five types of institutional theory
Relating the Five Types of Institutional Theory to Theories of Identity
Organizational Identity and the Five Types of Institutional Theory
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 46: Leadership and identities: Towards More Critical Relational Approaches
Introduction
Identity and leadership: a critical review
Relational leadership and identities: rhetoric and practice
Rethinking relational leadership identities: psychological theories and applications to research and practice
Jane’s Account
Analysis
Discussion
Conclusions
References
Chapter 47: Entrepreneurship and identity
Introduction
Founder identity
Social identity theory and role identity theory in entrepreneurial studies
Identity formation
Prior Identities
Transition Process
Identity Work
Identity management
Managing Multiple Identities
Using Identity Strategically
Future research
Notes
References
Chapter 48: Strategy and identities in organizations
Introduction
The 'Entitative' perspective on strategy and identities in organizations
The Nature of Strategy and Identity
Levels of Analysis
Consensus, Continuity, and Change
Methodological Considerations
The 'narrative' perspective on stragegy and identities in organizations
The Nature of Strategy and Identity
Levels of Analysis
Consensus, Continuity, and Change
Methodological Considerations
The 'work' perspective on strategy and identities in organizations
The Nature of Strategy and Identity
Levels of Analysis
Consensus, Continuity, and Change
Methodological Considerations
Directions for future research
The Nature of Strategy and Identity
Levels of Analysis
Consensus, Continuity, and Change
Methodological Considerations
Conclusion
Note
References
Part VII: LOOKING FORWARD: THE FUTURE OF IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH
Chapter 49: The killing fields of identity polotics
Introduction
Identity
Identity work
Identity polotics: the organization of hatred
Conclusion Thoughts
Notes
References
Chapter 50: Identities and identification in work contexts: Beyond our Fixation on the Organization
Introduction
Identifying with proximal targets, artefacts, and practices
Looking Within: Identifying with More Proximal Targets than the Organization
Beyond Social Targets: Identifying with Artefacts and Practices
Alternative work arrangements may threaten organizational identification
Virtual Environments: The Challenge of Salience
Temporary/Project-Based Environments: The Challenge of Stability
Pluralistic Employment Environments: The Challenge of Authenticity
With what do individuals identify in a dynamic work world?
External Foci of Identification
Internal Foci of Identification
Importance of Holding Environments
Coclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 51: Agile identities: Fragile Humans?
Introduction
Agile identities
The dark side of agility
Fragile humans?
Selection
Performance Appraisal
Embodied Agility
Agile identity: a tool for critique
Note
References
Chapter 52: Senses of self: Affect as a Pre-Individual Approach to Identity at Work
Introduction
Feeling identity: orienting to the pre-individual
Affect and the Individual
Senses of Self: Bodily Encounter as an Alternative Unit of Identity Analysis
Porous Bodies, Sleepwalking Subjects: A Molecular Politics of Identity
Studying senses of self: the case of the glass slipper
Occupational Identity as Social Construction: People Make Meaning with Material Consequence
Occupational Identity as Sociomaterial Production: Senses of Self Materialize in Affective Economies
As It Happens: The Glass Slipper as a Politics of Bodily Vulnerability
Senses of self: sleepwalking with the sommelier
Notes
References
Chapter 53: Identities, digital nomads, and liquid modernity
Introduction
From modern to liquid life
Bauman's liquid modernity
Strategies of identity work in changing organizational contexts
Strategies of Coherence
Strategies of Fragmentation
Strategies for Managing Identity Tensions in the Context of Liquid Modernity
The nomadic self and liquid identity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 54: Identity saves the world? Musings on Where Identity ResearchHas Been and Where It Might Go
Introduction
Identity in organizations: historic focus on attachment and conflict
Organizational Attachment and Identification
Identity and Conflict/Cooperation
Looking ahead: what we can learn more about
Moving Towards Viewing an Identity as ‘Fuller’ (Less Empty)
Moving from Parts to Wholes
Moving from Identity as ‘Star’ to Identity as ‘Ensemble Member’
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 55: Identities in organizations: Some Concluding Thoughts
Introduction
Emerging themes
Changing Times
Increasing Uncertainty
New and Reworked Metaphors
From Discourse to Action, Embodiment, and Affect
From the Individual to the Social
Temporality and Spatiality
Authentic, Fake and Real Selves
Intersectionality
Reflexivity
Gaps in this handbook
To conclude
Notes
References
Name Index
Subject Index
Citation preview
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/12/2019, SPi
IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONS
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/12/2019, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/12/2019, SPi
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IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONS ......................................................................................................................................... Edited by
ANDREW D. BROWN
1
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, , United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press © Andrew Brown, chapters and The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors
. Identities in Organizations
xi xiii xv
A D. B
PART I SURVEYING THE TERRITORY . On the Scope and Limits of Identity
M A S G
. Bridging Self and Sociality: Identity Construction and Social Context
S Y
. ‘Identity Work’: A Metaphor Taken Literally?
R O C O
. Networks and Identity: Positioning the Self and Others Across Organizational and Network Boundaries
N E G H
. Career Identity: An Ongoing Narrative Accomplishment
P H
. Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Identity Foci at Work
D A, R K, E D
. Preserving the Generative Potential of Identity Scholarship: The Value of Writerly Texts P M S C
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vi
PART II APPROACHES TO IDENTITIES RESEARCH . Discourse, Communication, and Identity
T K J S
. A Psychodynamic Perspective on Identity as Fabrication
G P
. Lacan, Identities, and Organizations: Potentialities and Impossibilities
K K
. Performed Identities
N B S B
. Noise, Identity, and Pre-Interpreted Worlds: A Phenomenological Perspective
G P
. Materialities and Identities
N H
. Making Sense of Myself: Exploring the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking
H C. V, B B. C, S M
. Bourdieu and Identity: Class, History and Field Structure
C C C S
PART III RESEARCHING IDENTITIES . Human Identities, Identity Work, and Organizations: Putting the Sociological Imagination into Practice
T W
. How Can I Study Who You Are? Comparing Grounded Theory and Phenomenology as Methodological Approaches to Identity Work Research
M J. G
. Conversations with the Self and Others: Practising Reflexive Researcher Identity Work L C
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. Membership Categorization Analysis: Studying Identities in Talk and Text ‘In Situ, In Vivo’
vii
A W F M
. Between the Bridge and the Door: Exploring Liminal Spaces of Identity Formation Through Video Diaries
M Z, D M, R M, C M
. Historical Methods for Researching Identities in Organizations
M R M H
PART IV ISSUES IN AND PROCESSES OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION . Autobiographical Memory and Identities in Organizations: The Role of Temporal Fluidity
R S, M S, T I
. Real, Fake, and Crystallized Identities
S J. T S T
. Identity, Image, and Brand
D K S F
. ‘If You Have to Say You Are, You Aren’t’: Paradoxes of Trumpian Identity Work Knotting in a Post-Truth Context
G T. F M L. S
. Emotions and Identity
I W
. Fiction and the Identity of the Manager
M L M G
. The Liminal Playground: Identity Play and the Creative Potential of Liminal Experiences
H I O O
. Gender Identity: Does It Still Matter in Organizations and Society? M F
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viii
. Identity Work in Developing Collaborative Leadership
B S B C
PART V IDENTITY KINDS AND TYPES . Age Identity and Organizations: Critical Potential and Challenges
S A
. Hybrid Professional Identities: Responding to Institutional Challenges
G C K L
. Organization Sexualities and LGBTQþ Identities
N R
. Stigmatized Identities in Organizations
G E. K C A. M
. Anchored in the Past: Nostalgic Identities in Organizations
Y G
. National Identity in and around Multinational Corporations
A K, J T, E V
. Paradoxes in the Pursuit of Positive Identities: Individuals in Organizations Becoming Their Best
M L. S
. Crafting Philanthropic Identities
M M C H
. Race and Identity in Organizations
M G, P A, J T
. Creating Creative Identities in Organizations
I J
. Identity Regulation and Globalization M B
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PART VI IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES . Finding Ourselves in Space: Identity and Spatiality
A H M H
. Identity and Power in Organizational Theory
T B Ś Ṕ
. Theorizing the ‘I’ in Institutional Theory: Moving Forward Through Theoretical Fragmentation, Not Integration
J L
. Leadership and Identities: Towards More Critical Relational Approaches
J F
. Entrepreneurship and Identity
E F M G
. Strategy and Identities in Organizations
A L, D O, L R
PART VII LOOKING FORWARD: THE FUTURE OF IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH . The Killing Fields of Identity Politics
C C D K
. Identities and Identification in Work Contexts: Beyond our Fixation on the Organization
B E. A, J R. M, P B
. Agile Identities: Fragile Humans?
C C S S
. Senses of Self: Affect as a Pre-Individual Approach to Identity at Work K L A
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. Identities, Digital Nomads, and Liquid Modernity
S A, N N, S C
. Identity Saves the World? Musings on Where Identity Research Has Been and Where It Might Go
M G. P
. Identities in Organizations: Some Concluding Thoughts
A D. B
Name Index Subject Index
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A positioning framework for individual-level identity foci related to work
.
Pre-interpretation, noise and identity processes
.
Four relationships between identity and sensemaking
.
Four dimensions of human identities and identity-making
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Analysis of Max []
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Analysis of Max []
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Analysis of Max []
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Analysis of Max []
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Analysis of Max []
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Analysis of Max []
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The Trumpian identity knot
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Typology of philanthropic identities
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Crafting philanthropic identities
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Expected entrepreneurial behaviours arising from the interplay between the founder’s social identity and role identities
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Overview of founder identity research
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The prevalence of literal and metaphorical terms in the identity discourse
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Categorization of literal and metaphorical identity terms
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Readerly/writerly features expressed as conceptual, theoretical, thematic, and methods position (and expansion)
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Theoretical approaches to discourse, communication, and identity
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A comparison of grounded theory and phenomenological methodologies
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Membership categorization analysis
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Three levels of national identity construction
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Positive identity paradoxes: aspirational outcomes, tensions, and tactics to navigate overall paradox of positivity vs. negativity in identity construction
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Logics of distinctive philanthropic orientations
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Theories of identity in institutional theory: a comparative overview
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Five types of institutional theory and their relations to theories of identity
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Social identities of entrepreneurs
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Three perspectives on strategy and identities
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Pasi Ahonen is a Senior Lecturer at the Essex Business School, University of Essex. Sumati Ahuja is a Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. Susan Ainsworth is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne. Mats Alvesson is Professor of Business Administration at the Lund University. Karen Lee Ashcraft is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Blake E. Ashforth is the Horace Steele Arizona Heritage Chair at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Doyin Atewologun is a Reader, and Director of the Gender, Leadership & Inclusion Center at the Cranfield School of Management. Thibaut Bardon is a Professor of Management at Audencia Business School. Nic Beech is Vice Principal, Provost, of the University of Dundee. Mehdi Boussebaa is a Professor at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Stephen Broad is Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Andrew D. Brown is a Professor at the School of Management, University of Bath. Philipp Bubenzer is a Professor at the School of Management Fribourg (HES-SO) and a Senior Researcher at ETH Zürich. Brigid Carroll is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management and International Business, University of Auckland Business School. Chris Carter is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Brianna B. Caza is the Richard Morantz and Sheree Walder Morantz Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Business Ethics at the Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba. Caroline Clarke is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of People and Organisations, The Open University.
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Stewart Clegg is a Distinguished Professor in Management at the University of Technology, Sydney. Sandra Corlett is a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University Business School. Christine Coupland is a Professor at the School of Business and Economics, University of Loughborough. Graeme Currie is a Professor at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Leanne Cutcher is a Professor at the University of Sydney Business School. Elena Doldor is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Nick Ellis is a Professor at Durham University Business School. Gail T. Fairhurst is a Distinguished University Research Professor, University of Cincinnati. Emmanuelle Fauchart is a Professor at the University of Fribourg. Jackie Ford is a Professor at Durham University Business School. Marianna Fotaki is a Professor at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Sanne Frandsen is a Senior Lecturer at Department of Business Administration at Lund University. Yiannis Gabriel is a Visiting Professor, Lund University and an Emeritus Professor, University of Bath. Michael J. Gill is an Associate Professor at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Susann Gjerde is an Associate Professor at the BI Business School and a Researcher at the Lund University. Mrinalini Greedharry is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Laurentian University. Martyn Griffin is an Associate Professor at Durham University Business School. Marc Gruber is Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Nancy Harding is a Professor in the School of Management, University of Bath. Charles Harvey is a Professor at Newcastle University. Michael Heller is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel Business School. Alison Hirst is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Business and Law, Anglia Ruskin University.
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Gillian Hopkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Lancaster University Management School. Patrizia Hoyer is an Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Michael Humphreys is a Professor at Durham University Business School. Herminia Ibarra is The Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School. Trevor Israelsen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria. Iva Josefsson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Lund University. Dan Kärreman is a Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Kate Kenny is Professor of Business and Society at NUI Galway's JE Cairnes School of Business and Economics. David Knights is a Distinguished Visiting Professor, Lancaster University Management School. Alexei Koveshnikov is an Assistant Professor at Aalto University School of Business. Glen E. Kreiner is a Professor at the Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University. Timothy Kuhn is a Professor at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder. Roxanne Kutzer has recently completed her doctoral research at the Cranfield School of Management. Ann Langley is Professor in the Department of Management and Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings at HEC Montréal. Mark Learmonth is a Professor at Durham University Business School. Katey Logan is a Doctoral Researcher at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Jaco Lok is a Professor at Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University. Peter McInnes is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. Robert MacIntosh is a Professor at the School of Social Sciences, Heriot-Watt University. David Mackay is a Professor at the University of Strathclyde. Claire McKenzie is a Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School. Mairi Maclean is a Professor at the School of Management, University of Bath.
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Sally Maitlis is a Professor at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Christine A. Mihelcic is a Doctoral Researcher at the Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University. Jordana R. Moser is a PhD student at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Frank Mueller is a Professor at Newcastle University. Natalia Nikolova is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. Otilia Obodaru is a Professor at the School of Management, University of Bath. David Oliver is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School. Cliff Oswick is a Professor at the Cass Business School, City, University of London. Rosie Oswick is a Research Assistant at the Cass Business School, City, University of London. Gerardo Patriotta is a Professor at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Gianpiero Petriglieri is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. Stéphan Pezé is an Assistant Professor at Toulouse School of Management. Michael G. Pratt is the O’Connor Family Professor at the Carroll School of Management Boston College. Linda Rouleau is a Professor at the Department of Management, HEC Montréal. Michael Rowlinson is a Professor at the University of Exeter Business School. Nick Rumens is a Professor at Oxford Brookes University. Majken Schultz is a Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Mathew L. Sheep is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management and Interim Associate Dean, Lutgert College of Business, Florida Gulf Coast University. Barbara Simpson is a Professor at the Strathclyde Business School. Jayne Simpson is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder. Simona Spedale is an Associate Professor at the Nottingham University Business School. Crawford Spence is a Professor at King's College London.
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Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria. Janne Tienari is a Professor at the Hanken School of Economics. Sophia Town is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University. Sarah J. Tracy is a Professor at The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University. Eero Vaara is a Professor at Aalto University School of Business. Heather C. Vough is an Associate Professor at the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. Tony Watson is Emeritus Professor at Nottingham University Business School. Andrea Whittle is a Professor at Newcastle University. Ingo Winkler is an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management at the University of Southern Denmark. Sierk Ybema is a Professor at Anglia Ruskin University and Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Mike Zundel is a Professor at the University of Liverpool Management School.
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Abstract Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of identities-related theorizing, accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades, continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. Moreover, in times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and liquid the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed, less secure, and less certain, making identities issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has focused on processes of identity construction (often styled ‘identity work’), how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities—their relative stability/fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not) and how they are fabricated within relations of power—combined with other conceptual issues, continue to invigorate the field, but have led also to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, however, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis, has significant generative utility for multiple streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.
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.................................................................................................................................. F more than two decades, the attention of management and organization scholars has turned increasingly to self-identities in organizations (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Baumeister, ; Brown, ; Caza et al., ; Miscenko and Day, ; Swann and Bosson, ). Research on identities, identity work, and identification has exploded (Caza et al., ), with the literature exhibiting a growth rate in publication of over per cent in the twenty years to (Miscenko and Day, : ). The allure of ‘identity’ is both that it ‘neither imprisons . . . nor detaches . . . persons from their social and symbolic
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universes’ (Davis, : ) and holds out the promise of ‘significant theoretical and practical advances in the study of almost every aspect of organizational life’ (Haslam and Reicher, : ). This ‘turn’ has been predicated on established identities scholarship not just in diverse branches of psychology, sociology, and anthropology but across the arts, theology, and humanities which themselves draw on systems of thought and religious philosophies that have for thousands of years been preoccupied with the nature of selves (Cerulo, ). This vast reservoir of ideas and theorizing has helped engender diverse contemporary identities research and turbo-charged it so that rather than a minor concern for a specialist grouping, identities in organizations are becoming a key focus of interest for a broad community. Why identities research has blossomed in recent decades is contested, with some suggesting interleaved explanations framed at societal and organizational levels while others point to disquiets within our field. Sociologically informed perspectives emphasize that, globally, societies and organizations have evolved in ways that render identities issues more salient and more intriguing. Certainly, traditionally accepted sources of identity such as nation states, world religions, and gender categories have become for many more confused and less axiomatically appealing, both creating more uncertainty and allowing a broader range of identity choice (Baumeister, ). A clash of multiple modernities (Lee, ) has made us more sensitive to diverse experiences and ways of being. Centred on the notion of ‘reflexivity’ Giddens () and Beck () have argued that ours is an age of selfdiscovery in which individuals have become (newly) empowered to quest for change, autonomy, and freedom (Rose, ). According to Bauman () we live in ‘liquid modernity’ characterized by ephemerality, in which identities are ‘irreparably fluid, ambivalent and otherwise unreliable’ (Bauman : ). For Lasch () a closed-circuit focus on our ‘selves’ is a defining characteristic of our present-day culture of narcissism. Drawing on an intriguing combination of ideas from Freud and Marx, Gabriel () maintains that identity is an opiate of contemporary consumer society, and individuals’ fixation with defining their identities testament to deep-seated desires (fantasies) for uniqueness, freedom, and choice. Societal-level transformations have been accompanied by profound changes in the social organization of work. Declining security, increasingly protean, boundaryless, digitized, and sometimes plural careers, growing demographic diversity (at least in the USA and Western Europe), the proliferation of information and communication technologies, and the spread of English as a lingua franca have all served to make identities issues in work organizations more relevant (Caza et al., ; Ramarajan and Reid, ). For individuals, the result has frequently been more fractured and disconnected experiences of organizations, and identities. Indeed, it has been claimed ‘that most people are not happy with their lives’ (Cullen, : ). Moreover, ours is an era in which business organizations are recognizing the limitations of engaging and treating their personnel merely as economic units of production, and increasingly encourage their employees to bring their ‘whole selves’—including their cultural tastes, emotional sensitivities, and innovative capacities—to work, a trend not all have interpreted as benign. Fleming (), for example, comments on this as means by which organizations attempt to ‘capture’ more of people’s previously non-work selves and instrumentalize these skills, aptitudes, personal attributes, and identities for profit. Complementarily, within the organization and management field, the rise of identities research, like that of culture some years earlier, symptomizes dissatisfactions with
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theorizing focused on often reified and sometimes simplistic conceptions of groups, systems, structures, and processes. Drawing in part on a long-established consumer studies tradition of identities-focused research (e.g. du Gay, ), it is indicative also of a renewed concern with people in an age when social structures are less certain and the longer-term implications of new technologies difficult to fathom. From this vantage, a focus on identities stems also from the decline of what now seem old-fashioned ‘strongly bureaucratized’ readings of organizations that eliminate ‘from official business love, hatred and all purely personal irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation’ (Weber, : ). Much scholarship with its origins in the work of Weber, it is argued, contributed to a view of ‘organizational man’ as two-dimensional, insipid, depersonalized, and passionless, one that is increasingly critiqued and which a focus on self-identities tends most often to dispute. Ethnographies of people at work in particular have highlighted the rich and diverse ways in which people are spontaneous, reflexive, individually distinctive, insistent on expressing who they are through emotional displays, and able to contest relations of power (e.g. Casey, ; Kunda, ; Watson, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. ‘Self-identity’ is a contested concept not just within organization and management studies but throughout the arts, humanities, social sciences, and philosophy. In organizational research, identity generally refers ‘to the meanings that individuals attach reflexively to themselves’ (Brown, : ). Such meanings are developed and sustained in order to address key questions such as ‘Who am I?’, ‘How should I lead my life?’, and ‘Who do I want to become?’ Identities provide us with definitional, descriptive, justificatory, and prescriptive information which set in place cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and social boundaries rendering our selves and social worlds comprehensible and practicable (Petriglieri et al., ). Sociologists tend often to view identities as constructed by a reflexive ‘self ’, Mead’s () ‘I’ as opposed to the ‘Me’, that is aware of its past and continuing existence and which incorporates the multiple identities it fabricates (Giddens, ; MacIntyre, ). Complementarily, for social psychologists, identities are organized by a ‘self-concept’, a system of affective-cognitive structures (Baumeister, ; Gecas, ). While some have problematized the (often implicit) assumption that there is a pre-existing consciousness that works on identities, in the main organization and management scholars have been content to ignore or gloss over essentialist suppositions and to focus on identity processes and outcomes rather than issues of ontology and epistemology. Recognizing that an individual is best understood as a ‘parliament of selves’ (Mead, ), a significant stream of research has sought to identify various identity ‘types’, ‘forms’, ‘kinds’, and ‘templates’. Caza et al. (), among others, suggest that people in occupations and organizations work on three principal categories of identity: collective (self-meanings around organizations and professions), role identities (as leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, etc.), and personal identities (unique, individual self-descriptions based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.). Some identities such as those that are colonial or post-colonial (see Boussebaa, ), nostalgized (Gabriel, ), philanthropic (Maclean and Harvey, ),
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stigmatized (Kreiner and Mihelcic, ), occupational (Ashcraft, ), entrepreneurial (Fauchart and Gruber, ), hybrid (Currie and Logan, ), networked (Ellis and Hopkinson, ), portable (Petriglieri et al., ), liminal (Ibarra and Obodaru, ; Zundel et al., ), and hypocritical (Brunsson, ), are associated with distinctive groups of individuals. Other identities, for example those which are sexualized (Rumens, ), gendered (Fotaki, ), racialized (Greedharry et al., ), aged (Ainsworth, ), agile (Coupland and Spedale, ), liquid (Bauman, ), and paradoxical (Fairhurst and Sheep, ), are shared by large populations. Almost everyone harbours possible (Markus and Nurius, ), provisional (Ibarra, ), ideal/ought (Gecas, ), aspirational (Thornborrow and Brown, ), alternative (Obodaru, ), and feared selves (Carver et al., ). These labels are mirrored by established popular descriptions of identities as, for example, ‘economized’ (Cullen, ; Martin, ), ‘spiritualized’ (Lieu, ), and ‘utilitarian’ (Mill, ). Always, it seems, another epithet can be joined seemingly felicitously with the term ‘identity’ to describe some aspect of the human condition. A particular source of fascination for identities scholars are the processes of their construction. This stream of research has fixated on the metaphor (sometimes referred to as a concept, construct, or perspective) ‘identity work’. Initially defined by Snow and Anderson (: ) as ‘the range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’, a range of alternative formulations have since been proposed (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ; Watson, ). Other researchers have recommended that we engage with a broader range of metaphors for researching identity construction processes such as ‘identity play’ (Ibarra and Petriglieri, ; Ibarra and Obodaru, ), ‘identity quests’ (Turner, ), ‘identity bricolage’ (Visscher et al., ), ‘identity jujitsu’ (Kreiner and Sheep, ), and ‘identity practicing’ (Pratt, ), though none have yet achieved a widespread following (Oswick and Oswick, ). The ‘identity work’ by which people differentiate themselves from others (individuation) and identify with them and social categories (identification), both in the immediate present (for example, in interactions with colleagues) and over longer periods (such as when adjusting to new roles), now figures in a considerable body of research. Reviews of the identity work literature distinguish multiple streams. Alvesson et al. () consider three ‘metatheoretical orientations’ which they characterize as ‘functionalist’ (emphasizing cause–effect relations and effectiveness), ‘critical’ (focusing on issues of power, control, and resistance), and ‘interpretivist’ (concerned with the interactional processes by which identities are formed). Ashforth and Schinoff () suggest that identity construction is enacted through feelings/affect (I like and value this identity), behaviours (I ‘do’ this identity), and thoughts/cognitions (I am this identity) which ‘are densely intertwined’ (: ). Brown () identified five main—overlapping and interlinked—approaches to (and forms of) identity work: discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic. Caza et al. () analyse research on identity work into four ‘modes’ according to where it occurs: cognitive (in thoughts), discursive (in talk), physical (in symbols), and behavioural (in actions). These competing pathways through the labyrinth of the identities literature both catalogue and are testament to its efflorescence.
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The identity work metaphor casts individuals as ‘strategists’ who engage actively, reflexively, and in relation to significant others to create, adapt, signify, claim, and reject identities in efforts to promote and sustain ‘liveability’, without implying that people’s capacity to fabricate their selves is unconstrained by context. This scholarship has attended in particular to how, when, and why identity work takes place (Caza et al., ). Some of the many processes by which identity work occurs include identification (Ashforth and Mael, ; cf. Brown, ), affinity and emulation (Pratt, ), cultural positioning (Hermans, ), and claiming and granting (DeRue and Ashford, ). Most scholars acknowledge that people in organizations engage in identity work continuously. However, many suggest that such activities are more prominent during specific events such as times of transition, when there are conflicts, misunderstandings, or tensions around roles, and in the face of threats that make identity issues more salient (e.g. Ibarra, ; Stryker, ). Questions relating to why identity work occurs have mostly been addressed through the attribution to people of ‘a dizzying number of potential motives’ (Ashforth and Schinoff, : ) inter alia, self-enhancement (Tajfel and Turner, ), distinctiveness (Kreiner et al., ), self-continuity (Ashforth et al., ), self-verification (Swann et al., ), hope (Bloch, ), and belonging (Baumeister and Leary, ) which spur such processes. Identity construction is both an individual practice and a social one (Weick, ). Much identity work occurs through processes of soliloquy (Athens, ). Indeed, one element of identity work involves the imaginative creation of what Sampson () refers to as the ‘serviceable other’ which is employed to fabricate ‘desired qualities’ for one’s self and in-groups. Through the creation of stereotyped and/or fetishized ‘others’, people construct putative norms regarding what is reasonable, appropriate, or acceptable which naturalize and valorize their preferred identities. ‘Serviceable others’ are tactical creations that allow individuals and groups self-servingly to construct themselves in cultural, moral, political, aesthetic, or economic terms. Actual exchanges or dialogues with significant others are at least equally important: they facilitate processes of learning how we should act, and allow us to develop a vocabulary of contrasts and oppositions that are used to discursively position the self. As Taylor (: –) argues, ‘we define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against’ others and their representations of us. These sentiments echo those of Bakhtin (: ) who writes of the ‘nonselfsufficiency’ of selves that always exist dialogically ‘in a tensile relationship with all that is other and most important, with other selves’ (Clark and Holquist, : ). A very considerable amount of sociological and social psychological research has shown that people are motivated to present themselves positively to others (Cooley, ; Mead, ). Seeking social validation, individuals provide indicators (specific behavioural repertoires, articulations of identity-related beliefs and norms, appropriate attire, etc.) that they have taken on an identity. Positive or negative assessments of how one is performing are made on the basis of feedback from others (social cues). In these iterative, dynamic, and often ambiguous identity negotiation processes, people may seek out opportunities to display their identity-exemplar status, deliberately cultivating senior managers, friends, and esteemed co-workers, whose opinions are most valued (DeRue and Ashford, ; McCall and Simmons, ; Swann et al., ). Great discomfort may result in those instances where social validation from others is perceived to be unjustifiably high or low, leading in the former case to the ‘impostor syndrome’ and in the latter to a range of
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insecurities and anxieties (Knights and Clarke, ). These processes by which identities are negotiated in relation to others are constituted within relations of power as studies of the ‘creeping annexation’ (Kunda, : ) of employees’ identities by ‘greedy institutions’ (Coser, ) demonstrate (Alvesson and Wilmott, ; Westwood and Johnston, ).
E D I R
.................................................................................................................................. The identities literature is marked by prominent and most likely irreconcilable disagreements on how best they are researched and theorized. Some of the most salient disputes centre on the extent to which identities are stable/fluid, coherent/fractured, positive (or not), and the products of agency. Building on a social psychology tradition initiated by James (), identities are often described as ‘relatively secure and stable’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, : ) not least because individuals require ‘a sense of stability’ (Petriglieri, : ) to function effectively in work organizations. Others, sometimes drawing on Goffman’s () view of the self as a performed character, insist that identities are plastic or fluid creations that are continually refashioned in-the-moment in response to situational cues (Beech and Broad, ; Gergen, ). Empirical research suggests that while some identities are more stable than others, most embrace ‘tensions’ (Beech, : ), ‘antagonisms’ (Clarke et al., ), and ‘ambiguities’ (DeRue and Ashford, ), and are not infrequently hypocritical (Brunsson, ), hybrid (Currie and Logan, ), or even paradoxical (Fairhurst and Sheep, ). People, it seems, generally experience identity conflicts, i.e. inconsistencies between two or more identities, and although these can lead to enhanced performance and psychological resilience (Rothbard, ), they are testament also to their potential for change. For some, identities are formed by people in pursuit of positive meaning or ‘authenticity’ and indeed most individuals tend often to describe themselves as possessing ‘an inner authentic core’ (Ybema et al., : ; Creed et al., ; Watson, ). Considerable attention has focused on ‘positive’ identities, defined as those ‘that are beneficial, good, or generative in some way’ (Dutton et al., : ) and which are ‘competent, resilient, authentic, transcendent, and holistically integrated’ (Kreiner and Sheep, : ; Sheep, ). While there is no shortage of studies of how people strive for these idealized selfconceptions (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Maitlis, ), critical management scholars have largely avoided use of the term ‘positive’, regarding it as an ideological device (Tracy and Town, ). Indeed, critical management scholarship often emphasizes that people’s work can be ‘dirty’, that they may experience it as ‘degrading and exploitative’ (Learmonth and Humphreys, : ), and that rather than a ‘positive’ enterprise, people are engaged in (sometimes losing) struggles with anomie (Durkheim, ), alienation (Marx ), and other existential concerns (Sartre, ). One aspect of identities theorizing that has attracted particular attention is the extent to which they are ‘chosen’ by independent individuals or ascribed to them by history,
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institutions, discourses, and elites (Bardon and Pezé, ; cf. Howard, ; Jenkins, ; Webb, ; Ybema, ). While relatively few scholars attribute unfettered agency to individuals to choose whatever identities they like, nevertheless, much research regards people as having considerable scope to work on desired versions of their selves (Gergen, ). Often drawing on Foucault (, ), others emphasize how people are constrained in their identity work by locally available resources and the capacity of organizations and their managers to ‘regulate’ workers’ identities so that they conform to institutional norms (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Boussebaa and Brown, ; Covaleski et al., ). In the main, researchers tend to regard people as exercising agency within constraints, able to make meaningful identity choices and to contest the regulatory efforts of organizations, but often in circumstances not of their choosing and subject to processes of surveillance, and normative and biocratic power.
I P O
.................................................................................................................................. For identities in organizations to continue to attract significant attention they will need to be plugged securely into important debates in organization studies, and their utility in elaborating and generating organization theory demonstrated convincingly. In this respect, there are grounds for optimism. Borrowing from Pepper’s () analyses of root metaphors in epistemology, Albert et al. (: ) characterize ‘identity’ and ‘identification’ as ‘root constructs in organizational phenomena’. ‘Identity’ is also what Pratt et al. (: ) refer to as a nexus concept that serves both as a meeting place for other concepts and theories and a means to link different ideas in novel ways to generate more complete and more interesting interpretations of people and organizational phenomena. Moreover, ‘identity’ is a bridging concept that can be applied at multiple levels of analysis (from the individual to the supranational bloc) and which can assist efforts to discern new patterns and tease out fresh connections between research domains. This bridging capability is important as Ashforth (: ) argues, because ‘much of the “action” in organizations and many of the most provocative and practically significant questions occur at the interface of multiple levels’. ‘Identity’, in part because of its root and nexus status and bridging potential, is ideally suited for analysing how micro (individual-level) actions may have meso- and macro-level consequences. To date, considerable research has focused on how organizational members’ identities and identity work can be employed to explain a range of specifically individual-level processes and outcomes. Studies have considered how identities are involved in tension resolution, threat reduction, the reconciliation of intra-psychic conflicts, role reconciliation, the navigation of competing discourses, and various forms of individual-level integration, synthesis, and coping. Often, the results are portrayed positively, for example, in terms of successful role transitions, the management of stigma, articulations of personal fulfilment, learning and a claimed sense of authenticity (e.g. Kreiner and Sheep, ; Maclean et al., ; Toyoki and Brown, ). In particular, ‘a secure sense of self ’ has been linked to ‘identification with various workplace collectives’ (Ashforth and Schinoff, : ) and through identification to multiple outcomes such as task
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performance, withdrawal and turnover, perceived organizational fairness, health and well-being. Identities and identity work are, though, double-edged swords, and can also negatively affect individuals. Identity work is not always successful and never a one-off event, ambiguities and tensions may often persist uncomfortably, identities may be spoiled or damaged beyond quick-fix repair, and insecurities that require continuous attention and endure indefinitely may result in emotional distress (Croft et al., ) and intensified status anxiety (Gill, ). The implications of individual-level identities and identity work, however, stretch beyond specific actors ‘into numerous research domains in organizational studies’ (Dutton et al., : ). As Weick () has persuasively argued, how people make meaningful sense of their worlds is grounded in their self-identities and this sensemaking has profound implications for processes of organizing, how risk is dealt with, and the resilience and reliability of organizations. Sensemaking rooted in individuals’ favoured versions of their selves as technically proficient, reliably informed, skilled experts (arguably) led to the Mann Gulch fiasco (Weick, ), the Piper Alpha disaster (Brown, ), the failure of the Shuttle Challenger (Schwartz, ), and the collapse of Barings Bank (Brown, ). Sensemaking based on unjustified, sometimes arguably narcissistic self-identities, has been shown also to be implicated in specific failings in organizations, such as the police shooting of the innocent Charles de Menezes (Colville et al., ), and corporate malfeasance at Volkswagen (Rhodes, ) and in the banking industry (Whittle and Mueller, ). Recent research has demonstrated that identities underpin processes of entrepreneurship (Fauchart and Gruber, ) and creativity (Josefsson, ), are crucial to understanding both processes of continuity and institutional change (Creed et al., ; Leung et al., ; Lok, ), and central to internal legitimacy maintenance (Brown and Toyoki, ). Identities are vital to understanding organizational control (Anteby, ), individual morality and ethically informed decision-making (Wright et al., ), socialization (Ibarra, ), processes of leadership and the internalization of leadership roles (DeRue et al., ; Fairhurst and Sheep, ; Ford, ), boundary formation between groups (Koveshnikov et al., ), the management (or otherwise) of intractable conflicts (Pratt, ), and strategizing (Langley et al., ). Further, identities are tied intimately to considerations of neo-colonialism, race, nationality, class, ageing, and gender that intersect in contemporary organizations (e.g. Ainsworth, ; Boussebaa, ; Butler, ; Greedharry et al., ), not always harmoniously or felicitously, and are inseparable from issues of diversity, inequality and conflict (Gray et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. This handbook consists of fifty-three chapters in seven major sections: ‘Surveying the Territory’, ‘Approaches to Identities Research’, ‘Researching Identities’, ‘Issues in and Processes of Identity Construction’, ‘Identity Kinds and Types’, ‘Identities in Organizational Processes and Outcomes’, and ‘Looking Forward: The Future of Identities in Organizational Research’.
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Surveying the Territory The seven chapters in this section provide a mixture of broad (Alvesson and Gjerde, , Ybema, ; Oswick and Oswick, ; McInnes and Corlett, ) and more focused (Ellis and Hopkinson, ; Hoyer, ; Atewologun et al., ) insights on the identities in organizations literature. Chapter : Not all studies that purport to be about identity, argue Alvesson and Gjerde (), are centrally concerned with identity matters—some are ‘spot on’, but others are a ‘stretch’ or even ‘fake’. With the rise of identity as a concept that is for many researchers hegemonic, ambiguous, and expansive, there comes a need for ‘theoretical scrutiny’ and ‘methodological antidotes’ to inspire more insightful studies of identities in organizations. Chapter : Identity is not merely an agentic accomplishment of individuals but a product of relational dynamics, social interactions, organizational hierarchies, and managerial regimes. Thus, argues Ybema (), identity scholars should attend more diligently to issues of positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and power in four ‘locales’ or ‘circuits’, namely inner conversations, self–other definitions, situated interactions, and institutional dynamics. Chapter : While it has frequently been observed that the identities literature is suffused with metaphors, Oswick and Oswick () provide the first attempt to map systematically how management and organization studies scholars employ them. In so doing, they champion identities research that uses metaphors as analytic tools to gather data (not just to analyse them), highlights rather than hides metaphors, and investigates the roles of dormant metaphors in identity studies. Chapter : As Ellis and Hopkinson () make clear, individuals’ identities are constructed not just within organizations but also in the boundary-spanning activities that connect people and organize institutions into networks, supply chains, and markets. Boundary spanners, they argue, occupy liminal positions that amplify identity tensions which can lead to identity incoherence and irresolution, with important implications both for individuals and their organizations. Chapter : Hoyer () takes a ‘careers’ perspective on identity, arguing that this has the potential to inform our understanding of people’s narratively construed identities. Her chapter develops the concept of a ‘career identity’ to understand better how identities can be coherent despite the changing—increasingly temporary, protean, and boundaryless— nature of contemporary careers. Chapter : Atewologun, Kutzer, and Doldor () analyse how people derive a sense of self from the organizationally situated targets ‘manager’, ‘leader’, ‘follower’, ‘team’, and ‘organization’. They encourage scholars to adopt an ‘intersectional mind-set’, which invites consideration of multiplicity and power, when researching and theorizing identities and identification in organizations. Chapter : Drawing on Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, McInnes and Corlett () review critically key works on identity struggles and identities in relation to place and space. In so doing, they argue persuasively for the development of a ‘writerly’ identities literature that is sufficiently plural to explore adequately the dynamics of organizing and organizations.
Approaches to Identities Research The eight chapters in this section appraise some of the distinctive (though also often somewhat overlapping) approaches to identities research: discursive/communicative
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(Kuhn and Simpson, ), psychodynamic (Petriglieri, ), Lacanian (Kenny, ), dramaturgical (Beech and Broad, ), phenomenological (Patriotta, ), new materialities (Harding, ), sensemaking (Vough et al., ), and Bourdieusian (Carter and Spence, ). Chapter : Kuhn and Simpson () argue that identities are constituted through discursive and communicative processes. They analyse how four prominent approaches—Social Identity Theory (SIT), narrative, critical/poststructural, and relational—theorize (and lead researchers to study empirically) intertwined issues of identity/subjectivity and discourse/communication. Chapter : Synthesizing ideas from both traditional psychodynamic theories and systems psychodynamics, Petriglieri () proposes the idea of ‘identity as a fabrication’, i.e. a process of positioning and orienting individuals in time and space. He shows that identity work is often unconscious and that even conscious identity work may serve unconscious ends, securing the consistency and vitality of the self. Chapter : Lacan’s ideas have become increasing influential in (especially European) theorizing on identities and identification processes in organizations, and Kenny () both takes stock of this oeuvre and problematizes it. She argues convincingly that Lacan’s work has untapped potential for linking the macro to the micro, to prompt insightful questions regarding the nature of ‘identity work’ and to explore issues of gender and power in processes of organizing. Chapter : Drawing on Goffman, and work inspired by his theorizing, Beech and Broad () explore the dramaturgy and dialectics of identity enactments. They focus in particular on the identities of those in creative and cultural organizations—such as orchestra conductors, musicians, and dancers—to analyse the dynamics of occupational identities as performances. Chapter : Patriotta () offers a phenomenological perspective on identity and identity work. His argument is that when ‘noise’ violates our expectations such that it challenges our cherished ‘pre-interpretations’, it may also threaten our identities, and such moments present valuable opportunities for scholars to account for how we experience and understand the worlds of which we are part. Chapter : Drawing on the ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, and in particular the work of Barad and Schopenhauer, Harding () explores its implications for understanding of identities in organizations. Research on identities that better appreciates ‘new materialities’ thinking can, she argues, help inform the political and ethical imperatives we face in our research. Chapter : Seeking to explore the interrelated and recursive relationships between sensemaking and identity, Vough, Caza, and Maitlis () consider four key questions: How does identity impact sensemaking? How does sensemaking impact identity? What role does sensemaking play in identity processes? What role does identity play in sensemaking processes? A sensemaking lens, they conclude, facilitates understanding of the dynamic, narrative, and enacted aspects of identities in organizations. Chapter : Through an analysis of five key studies of identities in organizations, Carter and Spence () investigate what Bourdieu’s ideas can contribute to contemporary identities research. Bourdieu’s oeuvre, they argue, can be employed to promote prosopographical research that is sensitive to issues of history, field, and class.
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Researching Identities The six chapters in this section consider some of the different methods, methods issues, and methodologies at stake in the research of identities in organizations: the value of a pragmatist epistemology and processual ontology (Watson, ), the virtues of grounded theory and phenomenological approaches (Gill, ), the importance of researcher reflexivity (Cutcher, ), the utility of Membership Categorization Analysis (Whittle and Mueller, ), video diaries (Zundel et al., ), and the importance of taking a historically informed perspective (Rowlinson and Heller, ). Chapter : A conversation with a research participant leads Watson () to argue that a pragmatist epistemology combined with a processual/relational ontology offers identity researchers a valuable way forward for research. Predicated on these assumptions he offers a conceptual scheme—that encourages scholars to focus on the interplay between selfidentity, social identities, identity work, and personas—to analyse relationships between human identities and organizations. Chapter : Noting that qualitative researchers have employed a multitude of methodologies to analyse individuals’ identities in organizations, Gill () identifies two approaches to the study of identity work—grounded theory and phenomenology. He outlines similarities and differences between these methodologies and provides guidelines to assist researchers as they seek to make methods choices appropriate to their research needs. Chapter : In studying the identities of others, argues Cutcher (), our own identities—professional, racial, ethnic, gender, age, sexuality, etc.—are all implicated, requiring us to challenge reflexively what are often taken-for-granted aspects of who we are as researchers. Using encounters drawn from her own fieldwork, she shows how identities are negotiated through processes of shared identity work between researchers and others in what are often unequal relations of power. Chapter : Whittle and Mueller () offer a Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) of a New York Times article focused on President Donald Trump. They show how MCA permits analyses of how identities are constructed by drawing on social categories and how they are judged (evaluated) based on the normative expectations associated with those categories. Chapter : Video diaries, argue Zundel, Mackay, MacIntosh, and McKenzie (), are an important method for studying the emotive aspects of identities in transition. Drawing on Simmel’s metaphors of the ‘bridge’ and the ‘door’, they illustrate the use of video diary entries to analyse the liminal transition processes of a manager of a newly formed firm. Chapter : As yet, assert Rowlinson and Heller (), there are few if any historically situated studies of identities in organizations. Using historical research on clerks and entrepreneurs, they illustrate a range of historical sources that might usefully be employed by identities scholars and business historians to research historically positioned identities in organizations.
Issues in and Processes of Identity Construction The nine chapters in this section analyse a diverse range of issues in processes of identities construction, but are united by a shared interest in explaining how individuals’ identities
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are not just personal concerns but interwoven with interpersonal, group, organizational, and societal discourses. Some of these, such as authenticity (Tracy and Town, ), brand/ image (Karreman and Frandsen, ), liminality (Ibarra and Obodaru, ), and gender (Fotaki, ) have already attracted the sustained attention of scholars. Others, ranging from autobiographical memory (Suddaby et al., ), emotions (Winkler, ), and leadership (Simpson and Carroll, ), to paradoxes (Fairhurst and Sheep, ) and the fictional sources that provide material for identity work and its research (Learmonth and Griffin, ) have more recently begun to garner interest. Chapter : Issues of temporality, suggest Suddaby, Schultz, and Israelsen (), have been underplayed in an identities literature that valorizes stability. Focusing on autobiographical memory they show how both individual and organizational constructions of the self employ the past, present, and future to create coherent selves. Chapter : Why, ask Tracy and Town (), at a time when poststructural understandings of identities eschew the idea that there are essentialized, authentic, and ‘real’ identities, do people routinely talk in terms of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves? They show this deeply sedimented way of conceptualizing identities can be contested by use of the metaphor of the ‘crystallized self ’ and the implications of this metaphor for identities research. Chapter : Karreman and Frandsen () discuss how individuals’ identity work is regulated, challenged, and supported by the images and brands organizations promote in today’s ‘brand society’. More interpretive and critical studies of how individuals negotiate identities are required, they argue, in order to explore adequately the opportunities, tensions, insecurities, and dilemmas posed by brands and images in contemporary organizations. Chapter : Adopting a paradox approach, Fairhurst and Sheep () argue that paradoxical tensions are discursive resources for identity work. With reference to President Donald Trump, they demonstrate how tensions may ‘knot’ together in a dynamic interplay and use this ‘extreme’ example to explore how identities are constituted in a post-truth era. Chapter : Identities, identity work, and identification, Winkler () reminds us, are not merely cognitive, linguistic, or behavioural matters, but intersected by emotions. Drawing on the increasingly vast and heterogeneous literature on identities in organizations, he analyses how emotions are implicated in identities, connect individuals to others, and are evident in identity work. Chapter : Learmonth and Griffin () explore how fictional accounts of managers and manager-like figures shape cultural understandings of the identities of practising managers. They argue persuasively that ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘tragic’ representations of managers in popular culture, in particular those in novels and films, shape the societal context in which actual managers’ identity work (and our scholarly analyses of it) take place. Chapter : Liminality, argue Ibarra and Obodaru (), is a pervasive, often permanent and problematic experience for individuals and organizations. Drawing together disparate research on liminality in organizational life they offer a clearer conception of its antecedents and consequences to shed light on issues of renewal, adaptability, and identity growth. Chapter : Inspired by Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger, Fotaki () provides an analysis of gender identity from a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminist perspective.
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Not only are gender identities malleable, provisional, and unstable, she argues, but they are constructed in relation to important ethical and political discourses which need to be accounted for to address issues of injustice and inequality. Chapter : Drawing on insights from a leadership development studio which fosters collaborative leadership skills, Simpson and Carroll () show that leadership development involves identity work. Taking a performative-processual perspective, they argue that identity construction implicates liminal practices that are emergent edgy, ephemeral, fluid, and precarious.
Identity Kinds and Types The eleven chapters in this section focus on a small selection of the very considerable number of types and kinds of identities that people work on in and around organizations. Some of these, such as those that relate to age (Ainsworth, ), sexuality (Rumens, ), nationality (Koveshnikov et al., ), positivity (Sheep, ), and race (Greedharry et al., ) are a concern for almost everyone. Others, including those identities that are hybrid (Currie and Logan, ), stigmatized (Kreiner and Mihelcic, ), nostalgized (Gabriel, ), philanthropic (Maclean and Harvey, ), creative (Joseffson, ), and (neo)colonial (Boussebaa, ) are a feature of distinctive populations. Chapter : While ‘age identity’ is a hugely important social identity, and organizations a significant context in which age identities are negotiated, yet, argues Ainsworth (), this is a topic that has received only scant attention from organization theorists. Focused on generational identities, age-identity categories, the intersection of age with other social identities, retirement and identities in later life and their management, she reviews the critical potential and challenges of age identity research. Chapter : Currie and Logan () consider the identity issues faced by occupational professionals who take on managerial or commercial roles, and the consequences of hybridity for their selves. While some powerful professionals are able effectively to blend, buffer, or decouple competing institutional logics, others, they argue, may experience an identity-threatening loss of agency and control. Chapter : With a focus specifically on LGBTQ+ identities Rumens () provides an overview of the vast literature on sexualities in organizations. The chapter reviews principal concepts relating to identity disclosure and identity management, exposing knowledge gaps and signposting avenues for future research. Chapter : Drawing on the substantial literature on stigmatized identities, with its origins in the work of Goffman, Kreiner and Mihelcic () consider how individuallevel stigma arises, its consequences for individuals’ identities, how people seek to manage stigma, and its implications for workplace interactions. They conclude with a call for further research into how stigma is related to personal, relational, and collective levels of the self and other literatures, and for more research on stigmatized populations that have been relatively overlooked. Chapter : Nostalgia, asserts Gabriel (), is both a collective phenomenon and an individual experience and, importantly, one that maintains a sense of continuity for people as they deal with disruptions. It is an emotion that reinforces social bonds and defines in-
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groups and out-groups, but also a malleable resource that in some instances anchors people to (often yearned for) past identities, while in others it can be appropriated by managers to legitimate identity change. Chapter : National identities in and around multinational corporations, argue Koveshnikov, Tienari, and Vaara (), are constructed through discourse at three levels: macro (in relation to ideologies and worldviews), meso (with regard to cultural groups), and micro (through everyday interactions). How national identities intersect with other identities associated with gender etc. and with globalist rhetoric is an exciting prospect for future research. Chapter : Drawing on the ‘positive’ turn in social psychology Sheep () argues that people in the main work hard to develop and sustain positive identities, i.e. self-identities that are competent, resilient, authentic, transcendent, and historically integrated. The pursuit of the positive does not, though, entirely negate the negative, and individuals pursue the positive in complex, contradictory, tensional, and indeed paradoxical ways. Chapter : Focusing specifically on philanthropic identities, Maclean and Harvey () outline a framework for understanding ‘philanthropic journeys’ based on the scale of a person’s philanthropy and whether it is geared towards the ‘institutional’ or ‘transformational’. Their typology of philanthropic identities—‘local hero’, ‘pillar of society’, ‘social crusader’, and ‘game changer’—usefully extends understanding of the emerging field of contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy. Chapter : Focusing on race as a formative rather than circumstantial element of identity, Greedharry, Ahonen, and Tienari () forge connections between the literature on identities in organizations and those on race and identity. Race, they argue, is not a limiting and problematic aspect of particular bodies but an important ‘organizing principle’, and racial identities productive and generative. Chapter : Creative workers, argues Josefsson (), crave recognition by others that they possess ‘creative identities’, often as artists with putatively special or even unique signatures. Organizations exploit these desires, promoting discourses that encourage workers to engage in processes of self-discipline in the hope of self-realization in ways that serve economic ends. Chapter : Situating his analysis within the context of (neo)colonialism, Boussebaa () shows how globalization enabled by multinational enterprises stretches identity regulation across nations, discourses, and institutions. His chapter is an invitation for scholars to integrate globalization, and related processes of (multi)nationalism and (neo)colonialism into identities-focused research.
Identities in Organizational Processes and Outcomes The six chapters in this section discuss identities in relation to other processes of organizing and, sometimes, their outcomes. Identities are key to understanding organizations, and the chapters here provide insights on how they are bound up with issues of space and place (Hirst and Humphreys, ), power (Bardon and Pezé, ), institutional theory (Lok, ), leadership (Ford, ), entrepreneurship (Fauchart and Gruber, ), and strategy (Langley et al., ).
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Chapter : Identities both draw on and inform the spaces and places people inhabit. Focusing on workspaces and homes, and processes of both management/design and resistance, Hirst and Humphreys () analyse the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between place/space and individual/organizational identities. Chapter : Bardon and Pezé () provide a reassessment of the literature on power in relation to identities in organizational theory centred on three antagonisms: structure/agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. They argue that, over time, the emphasis of identity studies has shifted so that issues of agency and materiality are foregrounded, and all members of organizations credited as active members in relations of power. Chapter : While it is well accepted that identities are key to processes of institutional stability and change, yet the combination of alternative institutional theories and multiple approaches to identity have resulted in considerable confusion. Lok () identifies five distinct institutional theories and their associated theories of actor-hood, and three influential theories of identity, in an effort to reduce conceptual confusion and facilitate successful integration of institutional theory with the literature on identities. Chapter : Drawing on feminist psychosocial theorizing, Ford () examines the competing, multiple, contradictory, and complex nature of leader identities. Critical relational approaches to the study of leadership and followership identities, she argues, may both shed new light on leaders’ identity challenges and, perhaps, help to create workplaces that are more egalitarian and benevolent. Chapter : Entrepreneurship, as Fauchart and Gruber () adroitly point out, is a field of inquiry that is increasingly turning to identity theories to provide individual-level explanations of founder activity. Drawing on this rich literature, they provide a valuable roadmap of current research and make some enticing suggestions for further research. Chapter : Langley, Oliver, and Rouleau () review three perspectives on strategy and identities in organizations—‘entitative’, ‘narrative’, and ‘work’—which offer different ways of conceptualizing, and have distinct methodological requirements for researching, identity– strategy dynamics. Most promising for the future, they argue, is the ‘work’ perspective, which allows for a more fluid and dynamic appreciation of strategy–identity interactions.
Looking Forward: The Future of Identities in Organizational Research The six chapters in this final section comment on identity research and its limitations (Clarke and Knights, ; Pratt, ), reflect on contemporary identities (Ahuja, Nikolova, and Clegg, ; Coupland and Spedale, ), and suggest ways forward for research and theorizing (Ashcraft, ; Ashforth et al., ). Chapter : Clarke and Knights () argue that our fascination with the concept of identity has led us to reproduce rather than challenge the idea that people, by attending to their identities, can achieve order, stability, and security. They see dangers—in the form of discrimination, prejudice, aggression, nationalism, and xenophobia—with this myopia, and challenge scholars to interrogate with more conviction the ‘dark’ side of identities. Chapter : This, argue Ashforth, Moser, and Bubenzer (), is an age where work environments are increasingly virtual, temporary, and pluralistic, and when people are now
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more likely to identify with proximal targets such as occupations, workgroups, artefacts, and practices. In such times, they suggest, the focus for identification research should be not just on organizations but a range of external (networks, projects, third places) and internal (personal brands and protean selves) loci. Chapter : With an unprecedented degree of freedom to choose who we are, argue Coupland and Spedale (), comes the responsibility to become the ‘right’ kind of organizational member. A correlate of the new spirit of capitalism, then, is the injunction for employee identities to be ‘agile’, an insistence that is not necessarily benign. This, say Coupland and Spedale, should alert us to the need for identities scholars to build theory that not only helps us understand the workplace but to critique the dominant ideologies of our age. Chapter : To understand identities, argues Ashcraft (), we need to look beyond the fantasy of bounded individuals to their socio-material production. Identities, she suggests, whether personal or occupational etc., are not constructed by people in isolation but through semi-conscious, transpersonal bodily encounters that may collide with as well as constitute human will. Chapter : Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s () notion of ‘liquid modernity’, Ahuja, Nikolova, and Clegg () discuss how traditional conceptions of identities and identity work need updating in contemporary organizations. They show how people are increasingly nomadic and must work harder to reconcile identity contradictions and tensions as they strive to construct selves virtually and on the move. Chapter : A better understanding of identities, suggests Pratt (), can deepen our appreciation of organizations and perhaps even improve them as places to work. To provide the requisite variety required to tackle core organizational issues, he argues, we need conceptualizations of identity that are ‘fuller’, to focus on multiple identities, and to recognize that identity is often just one part of a complex picture.
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.................................................................................................................................. Despite burgeoning interest in identities, vast scope remains to explore the often-integral roles they play in individual, group, organizational, and supra-organizational processes and outcomes. In part, this is because of what Caza et al. () describe as multiple empirical and conceptual misalignments in extant literature which mean that while attention has been lavished on the study of certain groups of people and topics using a particular set of perspectives, methods, and assumptions, others have been relatively overlooked and in some cases ignored almost entirely. What follows are some indicative suggestions, what Kreiner and Sheep (: ) refer to as a ‘starter’s yeast’ for themes, topics, issues, and questions that merit further work.
Subjects for Identities Studies Overwhelmingly, studies of identities in organizations have been conducted by North Americans and Western Europeans who have focused on those in the USA and Europe. The identities and identity work of participants in organizations in other parts of the world
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have received far less scrutiny, with studies of identities of people in work organizations in Asia, and particularly the Middle East, Central and Latin America, and Africa, still rare (for exceptions see, for example, Leung et al., ; Purchase et al., ; Srinivas, ). This is noteworthy because there are important individual and collective differences between those socialized in different national cultural systems (Hofstede, ; Triandis, ), and there is suggestive evidence that patterns of identity work vary by national and geographic context. For example, Western cultures place a premium on identity consistency and stability relative to East Asian cultures that emphasize relationships, connectedness, and belonging (Swann and Bosson, ). Further research that investigates identities and identity work in non-Western organizations is required to expand our knowledge of how selves are constructed and their implications for organizing. Predictably, although an increasingly diverse range of individuals, occupational groups, and organizations have attracted attention, there are many more studies of those working in education, legal, marketing, financial, and other conventional professional and commercial organizations than, say, military, penal, and psychiatric institutions (Brown, ). Similarly noticeable is that much less attention has been devoted to the identities of those at the margins of organizations—part-time workers, contractors, home-workers, and various kinds of boundary spanners—than permanent, full-time employees. Petriglieri et al. () is one of the very few studies to have analysed how individuals construct work identities outside organizations as independent contractors, a category of labourer likely to grow in the face of the economic volatility and technological change that has created a ‘gig economy’. The rise of virtual organizing, unbounded, protean and hybrid career structures, and the uncertainties associated with liquid modernity pose both challenges and opportunities for identities theorizing.
Topics for Identities Research Probably ‘the most studied identity construction scenario’ (Ashforth and Schinoff, : ) is how new recruits are socialized into organizations and adopt identities consonant with dominant norms (Van Maanen and Schein, ). Other ‘mainstream’ topics, such as gendered, professional, positive, and desired identities have also attracted sustained interest, while others have only recently begun to be explored. For example, there is little work on how identities form in relation to technologies or in networks (Ellis and Hopkinson, ). Far more work has been devoted to how people claim, maintain, repair, and protect desired identities than the efforts they make to deny or relinquish identities and to cope with those identities they are repulsed by or fear. For social psychologists, relatively unexplored is whether different motivations for self-enhancement, self-consistency, belongingness, and uncertainty reduction engender distinct forms of identity work (Cooper and Thatcher, ). Although it is well-established that people harbour multiple identities, yet much empirical research is concerned with just one or a small selection of the identities held by those studied (Caza et al., ). Similarly, despite the fact most scholarship acknowledges that identities are constructed in relation to significant others there is scant research on how identities are formed, maintained, and negotiated relationally (Petriglieri and Obodaru, ).
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Much scholarship assumes that processes of identity construction are adaptive, rational, and/or self-satisfying, and that identities are a means for ameliorating anxiety, bolstering self-esteem, and counteracting insecurity. Researchers have shied away from investigating the costs (dis-benefits) associated with identity work, the pains that may accompany identity maintenance, the scope for guilt, despondency, loss, and despair that can afflict those fixated on what they regard as their failed or disappointing portfolio of identities. Studies have revealed the extent to which identity work is undertaken ironically, sceptically, and cynically but these insights are confined mostly to the critical studies community (Fleming and Spicer, ) and have had little influence on positive identities scholarship. There is increasing recognition that people in organizations suffer from unhealthy narcissism, paranoia, delusional thinking, and other forms of abnormal identity development, personality disorders and mental health conditions (Elraz, ), but our understanding of their organizational implications is inchoate. As Ashforth and Schinoff (: ) ask, ‘What processes foster “identity gone wrong” ’ processes that may result in overidentification, identity foreclosure, insecurity, narcissism and insecurity, and be associated with ‘its own etiology . . . events, obstacles and spirals that are not encountered when construction runs smoothly’? While there is no shortage of theorizing acknowledging that identities are forged over time, and that identities are one means by which people understand their selves in relation to temporality (Ricoeur, ), empirical studies of identity formation and change over (especially long) periods are uncommon in interpretive organization and management studies. Research such as that by Lutgen-Sandvik () on workplace bullying, which identifies temporal phases of identity work, has been undertaken. However, as Pratt (: ) observes, explicit ‘theorizing about time in identity research is relatively rare’ and very little research actually accounts adequately for interrelations between people’s past, present, and future selves (Caza et al., ). Those studies that do purport to have a temporal dimension often depend on snapshot interviews in which people are relied upon to make retrospective sense of their lives. Basic questions such as ‘how do past identities shape current identity work?’, and ‘how do future hoped-for identities affect everyday identity work?’ are yet to be adequately addressed.
Approaches to Identities Studies We have a wealth of knowledge regarding how people in organizations construe their identities through discourse (e.g. Kuhn and Simpson, ). By contrast, while object symbols and performances of the self are sometimes implicated in these analyses, attention has only occasionally focused directly on them. Even studies concerned with the most obvious symbolically freighted artefacts such as attire, buildings, and opportunities for interaction such as formal meetings and leader–follower exchanges have not attracted the intensity of scrutiny from an identity perspective that seems justified (cf. Pratt and Rafaeli, ). Moreover, while it is well recognized that ‘The corporal body can . . . serve as a resource for self-construction’ and that through, for instance, cosmetic surgery and body art ‘the body can be shaped in an attempt to construct particular meanings of self ’ (Callero, : ), yet ‘the body/identity nexus is a relatively underexplored topic’ (Courpasson and Monties, : ). Future research might usefully focus on embodied identities,
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symbolic resources for identity work other than language, and the patterns of behaviour that constitute identities in practice. Very noticeable is that psychodynamic and more broadly psychoanalytic research that takes its inspiration from either Freud or Lacan, despite a growing number of significant papers (e.g. Kenny, ; Petriglieri, ; Petriglieri et al., ), is under-represented in the identities literature. Brown () speculates that this is likely a consequence of the perceived difficulties in applying these theories empirically combined with the small scale of the psychodynamics community. This is, however, unfortunate, and means that the balance of the literature has developed in skewed ways. For example, while we know much about how organizations as ‘workspaces’ (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, ) or ‘meaning arenas’ (Westenholz, ) provide desirable, preferred, and aspirational identities that lend people succour, psychological safety, and worldviews, we know much less about the imagined, fantasized, and perhaps illusory nature of those identities (Driver, ; Gabriel, ). Also of note is that, except for a few in-depth case studies and ethnographies of work organizations, researchers have tended to adopt a single, exclusive approach to identities research. In order better to account for the richness and complexity of people’s identities, research that draws on broader sets of theoretical resources and considers subjects from discursive, symbolic, dramaturgical, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives might be helpful.
Methods for Identities Studies Some have argued that there is a lack of methodological diversity in identities scholarship, which is dominated by qualitative studies, and that this has led to a proliferation of similartype concepts, conceptual ambiguity, and confusion (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Caza et al., ). Ashforth and Schinoff (: ) complain ‘that many qualitative studies simply echo the findings of earlier interpretivist work’ and argue that our understanding of identity construction processes would benefit from ‘a more functionalist orientation, where quantitative methods are used to assess hypothesized relationships among variables’. Caza et al. () suggest that even if the contents of identity work are often idiosyncratic, yet there is scope for quantitative methods to facilitate a greater degree of conceptual consistency on the ‘how’ and ‘objectives’ of identity work. They suggest that the field would benefit from validated measures of identity work tactics, and recommend researchers employ mixed methods and make more use of comparative case studies in order to explore underlying ‘mechanisms’ and the implications of different industry and national contexts. Recommendations that scholars adopt quantitative means for the study of identities and identity work need, however, to be understood with reference to the broad literature on identities and identification. There is already a stream of research, associated with Social Identity Theory/Self-Categorization Theory (SIT/SCT), which for many has assumed the ‘force of a paradigm’ (Ashforth, : ), and is overwhelmingly associated with quantitative methods. An alternative view is that subjectively construed identities and processes of identity construction ‘are not easily tractable using hypothesis-testing research designs and quantitative methods’ (Brown, : ). From this standpoint, what the identities field needs to expand its scope and analytic depth are more ethnographies, autoethnographies, and in-depth case studies that employ judiciously interviews, observations, participant diaries, documentary, photographic and video materials that allow researchers better to
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appreciate reflexively the nuanced, emotional, temporally complex, and plural nature of identities and the processes by which they are fabricated (Cutcher, ; Gill, ; Langley et al., ; Learmonth and Griffin, ; Rowlinson and Heller, ; Watson, ; Whittle and Mueller, ; Zundel et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Not everyone has been seduced by the identities turn. As Dutton et al. (: ) assert, not only is the conversation regarding identities fast growing and fertile, it is also ‘most contested’. As the turn to identities has gathered momentum, so it has also attracted a backlash of sceptical commentary which positions ‘identities’ as ‘problematic’ (Albert et al., : ), derides the concept as a ‘cliché’ (Gleason, : ), and questions whether it has ‘run out of steam’ (du Gay, : ). Some are uncomfortable with what they regard as another bandwagon or ‘epiphanogenic fad’ (Cullen, : ) to which early career researchers have (injudiciously) attached themselves in attempts to find an audience for their work, and oldstagers have adopted to camouflage timeworn ideas by dressing them in new clothes (Alvesson and Gjerde, ; Clarke and Knights, ; Pratt, ; Watson, ). One set of criticisms have been directed at the notion of ‘identity’, which it is sometimes claimed has too restricted an intellectual hinterland to account fully for how people enact themselves in the context of processes of organizing (Brown, : ). A proposed alternative is ‘person’, a concept that figures in various philosophical, theological, legal, historical, anthropological, and political debates, embraces a bundle of notional capacities or attributes such as ‘morality’ and ‘self-consciousness’, and which also implicates cultural and social relations in the form of kinship and legal responsibility (e.g. Carrithers et al., ). Another sometimes favoured term is ‘subjectivity’, used generally to refer to people’s experiences of the world, how they agentically interact with and are cognizant of their selves and others, and how these experiences are shaped by economic, political, and communitarian organizations (e.g. Allen, ; Foucault, , ). While not necessarily of more utility than ‘identity’ for organization and management scholars, both ‘person’ and ‘subjectivity’, valuably open up rather than close down debates on how as social scientists we should best seek to know others and ourselves. Rather than replacements, they are, perhaps, more reasonably regarded as complements that helpfully expand the requisite variety of identities theorizing and research. Most disquiet, however, has centred on diagnosed ‘failings’ of the identities literature, though consensus on what these are, like much else in identities scholarship, has proved elusive (see, for example, Alvesson and Gjerde, ; Clarke and Knights, ; McInnes and Corlett, ; Pratt, ). For some, the primary issue is that the identities literature is unhelpfully ‘fragmented’ (Côté and Levine, : ) with the risk that it will become so broad that it loses focus (Swann and Bosson, ). From this viewpoint, what is required are fewer ‘empirical and conceptual misalignments’ (Caza et al., : ), and more ‘construct clarity’, shared meanings and definitions (Atewologun et al., : ) that promote consensus on ‘a unified theory of the self ’ (Swann and Bosson, : ). Perhaps it is this sense of a literature developing with relatively few centripetal forces to cohere it
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that accounts for the recent rash of reviews of the field that seek to delimit its boundaries, render significant debates visible and problematics tractable (e.g. Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ; Caza et al., ; IJMR, ; Miscenko and Day, ). Others, however, argue that ‘entrenched ideological assumptions’ have militated against broad-ranging, multi-perspectival research on identities (Brown, : ). These scholars complain that the identities literature already suffers from severe limitations including both amnesia and myopia (Knights and Clarke, ), and plead for diversity in theorizing to be valued to ensure that ‘identity scholarship’ remains ‘endlessly fascinating’ (Corlett et al., : ). More fundamentally, critics point out that identities scholarship imposes limitations on the research questions it addresses, the kinds of explanations it offers and the topics/fields in which it is relevant. As Burke () reminds us, every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. For example, in answer to the question ‘why do new ventures fail?’ an identities approach focuses on the characteristics of individuals and organizations, and yields relatively little insight on, for example, the financial resources, government regulation, legal obstacles, market competition, and environmental issues, that may play significant roles. In considering the success or failure of an IT system an emphasis on identity may lead to important insight on the social dynamics of its implementation but is unlikely to yield much useful information about the excellence (or otherwise) of the technology itself. Similarly, while a research project which aims to explain how people move around their workplace might usefully be curious about the identities of those workers, yet it may be as or more important to account for additional factors, such as building architecture and office design. Others may question whether subjectively construed identities have an important role to play in extending frameworks such as evolutionary theory or the resource-based view of the firm. An identity perspective is not always a silver bullet, and a preoccupation with identities not always advised. This said, currently, optimists enthused by the rich potential of identity studies outweigh pessimists’ siren warnings that it is too broad a concept with too confused a heritage for its application to lead to anything more than reductive explanations and sterile debates. Of course, we should always be sensitive to the dangers of fixating exclusively on one concept, approach, or perspective, or arcane attempts to extend its reach in empirical inquiry and theorizing in marginal or irrelevant ways. Indeed, perhaps the most insidious danger to the integrity of identities research is that of over-claiming by its devotees. We should be clear that identity—as concept, construct, metaphor, field of inquiry, perspective—does not constitute a ‘theory of everything’. However, as long as we are realistic in our expectations, there is much to be gained from the study of identities in organizations, in particular research that starts with identities as a means for explaining collective processes and outcomes. A concept, identity, that focuses scholarly attention on the most crucial element of organizations and processes of organizing, namely people, will for the foreseeable future continue to be at the heart of multiple streams of theorizing in organization studies.
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.................................................................................................................................. One aspect of the rationale for this handbook has been to collect and connect work on identities that is in general ‘largely disconnected’ and to encourage what Alvesson et al.
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(: ) have described as a need for conversations that span distinct ‘metatheoretical lenses’. It is in this spirit that contributors working in a diverse array of (mostly university) institutions, employing assorted intellectual resources, have been invited to participate in this project from across the globe. The identities in organizations field is, though, still nascent, emergent, and pluri-paradigmatic, and while, arguably, it is pitted with some specific domains of consensus, overall it is far from coherent. Indeed, as this opening introduction, and indeed the handbook as a whole indicate, the vast array of identitiesfocused research being undertaken currently is in many ways impressive, but hard to appreciate as a totality: often there is the danger of losing sight of the wood in the face of so many, and so diverse species of trees. Everyone, not just academics, is increasingly certain that identities matter. Business organizations focus on customers’ identities, politicians on the identities of their electorates, and teachers on the identities of their students. Fittingly in an increasingly secular world, ours is an era in which Pope’s () injunction that individuals should ‘know then thyself ’ has taken firm hold. The rise to prominence of notions of identity and self in sociological and socio-psychological theorizing and research such that they now feature as cornerstones in fundamental debates (Cerulo, ; Elliot, ; Gleason, ) mirrors these broad trends. The contributions to this handbook demonstrate that the study of selfidentities in organizations has become a mainstream concern for scholars with a multitude of diverse interests: they symptomize the vitality of the field, and, I hope, will encourage the production of novel, generative, and compelling identities theorizing.
N . Arguably, the conjunction of ‘identity’ with ‘work’ is a further instance of what Phillips and Lawrence (: ) describe as ‘the turn to work in organization and management theory’ in which the word ‘work’ has been employed with numerous other terms and phrases to draw attention to how actors ‘affect a social symbolic aspect of their context’ (: ). . The phrase ‘identity work’ was in use prior to Snow and Anderson (). See, for example, Strauss et al. (). . ‘Identity construction’ is of course another metaphor. . A theory of everything (ToE), sometimes referred to as a final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory, is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that explains fully and integrates all physical aspects of the universe. . These initial ambitions have been only partially fulfilled. The contributors are employed by institutions in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand; at the time of publication, none have permanent, full-time positions in universities in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. . I gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of Yiannis Gabriel, Alison Hirst, and Mike Pratt on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Abstract This chapter addresses problems tied to when identity is used in organization studies in broad, slippery, and loose ways, with weak empirical support. The chapter shows limitations in the current over-expanded use of identity by looking at identity through a hembig-lens (i.e., when a concept is hegemonic, ambiguous, and big). The authors argue that identity needs to distinguish itself from and relate itself to similar concepts such as role and culture, rather than replace or be conflated with these. With the use of a simple typology—‘spot-on’, ‘stretch’, and ‘fake’—they explore previous empirical identity studies and reflect upon when these studies seem to be about identity and when other concepts, perhaps less fashionable but more to the point, would have been more fitting. The chapter suggests two main remedies in the form of theoretical scrutiny and methodological antidotes to address the current challenges in identity research in the hope it will inspire more insightful identity studies in the future.
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.................................................................................................................................. I this chapter, we discuss a problematic tendency in the field of organization research to use identity in increasingly broad and vague ways. While we acknowledge that rigour and sharpness may sometimes be difficult to accomplish, and that too much of this may imply that complex, hard to nail down phenomena cannot be studied, it is important to avoid overuse and ‘fluffy’ employment of the identity concept. We address some of the problems that arise when a fashionable term falls prey to such practices, examine critically what identity means and how the concept is used in empirical inquiries, and suggest ways to help counteract a troublesome trend. The chapter starts with a brief review and presentation of the ‘hembig’ problem, i.e. when a concept becomes hegemonic, ambiguous, and big (Alvesson and Blom, ). We explore identity through this hembig-lens and show how many studies are inconsistent in their use of identity definitions and why they would be more precise and informative if they did not
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refer to identity, but to e.g. role, position, experience, self-esteem, situational response, behavioural mode, social categorization, values, or purpose, etc. Another problem we attend to is the superficial nature of much empirical identity research. It is quite common that the identity concept is evoked and/or inferred based on one-off -minute encounters during which a person’s identity is supposed to be revealed and knowledge claims are put forward based on what an interviewee said in a single meeting with a professional stranger. We end the chapter with possible remedies: firstly, we suggest that when the identity concept is employed it should be clarified and used with precise and limited meaning, i.e. differentiation from alternative concepts is important. Secondly, we urge researchers to engage in empirical in-depth analysis to be sufficiently confident about their own understanding and interpretations to avoid identity claims being imposed on interview talk of uncertain value, relevance, and meaning.
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.................................................................................................................................. For us, and many others, identity refers to subjective meanings and experiences of our ongoing efforts to address two related questions: ‘Who am I?’ and by implication ‘How should I act?’ (Cerulo, ). One’s personal identity implies certain forms of subjectivity (often positive) and thereby weaves together feelings, values, and behaviour, and points them in particular directions. From this perspective, collective visions of self, such as group and organizational identities, or words used to describe oneself, become not so much the ‘main show’ as important resources in the formation of personal notions of self (Alvesson et al., : ). Most researchers emphasize that identity themes often, or at specific, significant moments demand attention, which requires both emotional and cognitive work. They are not pre-given, but call for internal dialogues and public displays, e.g. the crafting of a narrative that links past, present, and future, which are elements that constantly change in life. For many, in particular poststructuralist researchers, identity is inherently vulnerable, contested, and problematic in an unpredictable social world. This world, coupled with an existentialist or psychological need for (or an institutionalized expectation of) a positive identity, means that securing, however fleetingly or tenuously, a sense of self makes concerns for identity a ‘must’. The uncertainties and fragmentations of social life are viewed as triggers that set off an intensive preoccupation with identity (Beech, ; Costas and Fleming, ; Knights and Willmott, ). As Collinson (: ) argues, there is a ‘broad-sweeping shift from ascriptions to achievement’ which results in identities that become more open. Potentially this allows for greater freedom and more choices, but also results in increasingly ‘precarious, insecure and uncertain subjectivities’ (: ). Still others (e.g. Lord and Hall, ), including those who emphasize narratives (e.g. Ibarra and Barbulescu, ), tend to see identity as more stable and integrated, at least outside role transitions and periods of challenge.
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.................................................................................................................................. What Alvesson and Blom () refer to as hembig concepts (hegemonic, ambiguous, and big) are all-embracing concepts that are widely in use, but which gradually lose their analytical bite.
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Hegemony (originally from Greek politico-military dominance) refers to cultural and/or linguistic dominance at the expense of other alternative expressions and vocabulary. As Gramsci () emphasized, hegemony is achieved largely through spontaneous consent by subordinate interests to the cultural domination they believe will serve their interests because it is regarded as ‘common sense’. ‘Hegemony refers to the ways that subjects participate in their own subordination through socially constructing their identities, knowledge and institutions’ (Putnam and Boys, : ). Given its dominance in much research on experiences and other subjective aspects of organizations, identity has at present hegemonic influence, which marginalizes other conceptualizations. Ambiguity points to vagueness and uncertainty associated with multiple, incoherent meanings attributed to a phenomenon (Alvesson and Sveningsson, ; Meyerson and Martin, ). It involves uncertainty that cannot be resolved or reconciled, absence of agreement on boundaries, clear principles or solutions. Ambiguity means that a group of informed people are likely to hold multiple meanings, and/or that several plausible interpretations are possible even when more data is assembled and rigorous analyses are performed. Thus, ambiguity is different from uncertainty since it cannot be clarified just by gathering more facts. Big refers to the range of meanings attributed to a concept. A big or broad scope involves a wide number of more-or-less coherent meanings, which typically also results in the concept being applied in a wide-ranging set of contexts and situations. Hirsch and Levin (: ) talk of umbrella concepts ‘used loosely to encompass and account for a set of diverse phenomena’. In summary, a hembig is a scientific concept characterized by its broad scope, ambiguous meanings, but at the same time—somewhat paradoxically—its hegemonic effects crowding out other less fashionable concepts and/or preventing the development of more precise terminology. Concepts are not by nature hembigs. It is not words per se but how they are used that creates hembigs. When particular signifiers, such as identity, are broadly (over) used, they tend to be attributed so many diverse, vague, and inconsistent meanings and associations that clarity and analytical precision is weakened. Thus, it is not only the individual, but a collective culture that turn concepts into hembigs. In social science there is often ‘excessive appreciation for novelty’, ‘mania for new theory’ (Antonakis, : ) and a culture of unclarity. Identity exemplifies this hembigization of fashionable concepts but is by no means alone (Alvesson and Blom, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. There are several problems with hembigs and concepts which are particularly fashionable such as identity. One, which we address here, is the re-labelling of a specific phenomenon which dismisses earlier work not labelled in the same way. Once a new successfully launched label is presented, one can simply repeat earlier insights in a new language and marginalize and/or repress the ‘old’ work. We will take a look at how this has happened to ‘organizational culture’ which has been replaced by ‘organizational identity’, and ‘role’ which has been swapped for ‘identity’.
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Organizational Culture Dressed Up as Organizational Identity? Frequently studies of organizational identity (OI) come very close to themes already covered extensively in organizational culture (OC) without referring to its wealth of work (Alvesson and Robertson, a). For example, Albert and colleagues (: ) state that organizations become ever more organic: ‘In the absence of an externalized bureaucratic structure, it becomes more important to have an internalized cognitive structure of what the organization stands for and where it intends to go—in short, a clear sense of the organizations . . . ’. Here the reader may expect that the missing word is ‘culture’ and a few years before Albert et al.’s text appeared, this would probably have been the case. But what follows is: ‘ . . . a sense of identity [our emphasis] which serves as a rudder for navigating difficult waters’ (: ). Gioia and colleagues () suggest that conceptual and empirical work on OI has been ongoing for the last thirty years, but the main evidence is a reference to the original work of Albert and Whetten (). There has, however, been considerable academic interest in organizational culture (OC) since the late s (e.g. Alvesson, ; Canato et al., ; Pettigrew, ). Still, OC studies are marginalized in contemporary studies as the majority of OI researchers have tended to overlook this literature. There seems to be an increasing tendency in contemporary research in general, to attach labels somewhat superficially and to place artificial boundaries around areas of study in a way that neglects what is not labelled ‘correctly’. Hence, OI studies will refer to other ‘OI’ studies, i.e. ones that are labelled as such, and disregard perhaps more relevant work termed differently. Knowledge development becomes a matter of tunnel-visioning and is built less upon core insights than adding to literatures labelled in specific ways. Researchers work within boxes (Alvesson and Sandberg, ), and so, there are many often unacknowledged similarities between common views on OI and OC. A few argue that considerable parallels can be drawn between the two, but many ‘solve’ the problem by simply omitting or disregarding the less fashionable OC terminology, i.e. they favour identity and neglect what is labelled OC. Neglecting work because there is a new, fashionable term in circulation is not good scholarship and deprives us of important knowledge.
Identity Replaces Role We find a similar hembig-development in literature on organizational members’ identities where ‘role’ is replaced by ‘identity’. Identities may be understood as internal self-meanings that one attributes to oneself and that help answer ‘who one is’ in a social situation, while role is the external component that provides cues and clues as to what is appropriate and/or expected behaviour in the situation and helps answer how one should act (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Although the difference between the two concepts is fairly straightforward in the role literature, they are often confused and overlap in the identity literature. A closer look at the history of the role concept may help us understand how and why identity became a hembig at the expense of role, and lost sharpness and rigour along the way. It may also help us disentangle the two concepts and counteract the current problem identity is facing.
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The term ‘role’ began as a theatrical metaphor, which compared social interaction with actors’ performances in theatres. It was suggested that in much the same way that actors’ behaviour would be predictable and differentiated because they played their parts adhering to scripts, so would people in everyday interaction behave in somewhat predictable ways following ‘scripts’ for conduct linked to social identities and the situation (Biddle, ). These scripted parts were believed to be ‘written by culture and shaped by evolutionary adaptation’ (Stryker, : ) as people engage with each other and learn what is expected of them. Most versions of role theory assume that people are aware that socially constructed and shared expectations constrain their behaviour and help them ease social interaction (Biddle, ). The comprehensive patterns of behaviour and attitudes that make up roles constitute a ‘strategy for coping with a recurrent set of situations, which is socially identified’ and may be played in recognizable ways by different individuals (Turner, : ). Roles, therefore, help people place themselves and others in a group, organization, or society, and from this categorization know what to expect of self and others in different social and organizational positions (e.g. leader and follower). Role used to be ‘one of the most popular ideas in the social sciences’ (Biddle, : ) and operated as a major ‘vehicle’ that brought the three core social sciences of anthropology, sociology, and psychology into a single discipline concerned with understanding characteristic behaviour patterns (Ashforth, : ). As role was repeatedly criticized for being static, deterministic, and built on the assumption of an over-socialized conception of man (Levinson, ; Stryker, ; Wrong, ), it fell out of fashion. Roles’ fading came at a time when identity theories offered an understanding of human behaviour replete with both agency and dynamism (Simpson and Carroll, ). It is also worth remembering that Identity Theory (IT) (Burke, ; Stryker, ) developed as an implicit critique of role theory (Stryker, ). IT argued for a less deterministic relationship between role and behaviour and showed how identity, i.e. people’s self-in-role understanding, could explain why ‘where choice is possible, one role-related behavioural choice is made rather than another’ (Stryker, : ). While the role concept plays second fiddle in IT, it hardly figures in Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Ashforth and Mael, ; Tajfel and Turner, ). According to SIT, group classifications provide people with a social identity and people’s idiosyncratic characteristics (e.g. bodily attributes, abilities, psychological traits, interests, etc.) lay the foundation for a personal identity (Ashforth and Mael, : ). The ideas of SIT have caught on in the fields of management and leadership (e.g. Haslam et al., ; Turner and Haslam, ; van Knippenberg et al., ) where the ‘leader role’ concept is now almost non-existent (Hiller et al., ) while ‘leader identity’ has become the hot, novel concept (Ibarra et al., ). Nevertheless, the vacuum that role has left in the management and leadership literature, has been filled with identity discourse, often surprisingly similar to role discourse from the past: ‘Just how one should enact some identities [such as leader] is ambiguous, as some identities have less consistency and social consensus about how they should be enacted in particular contexts than do others. In other words, when the appropriate behavior associated with a particular identity is vague, uncertain . . . ’ (DeRue et al., : , our italics). Here we see how social consensus about appropriate behaviour is portrayed as identity, while this is what role theorists would argue is the very epitome of role. Just see how similar DeRue and colleagues’ definition of leader identity is to Gordon’s definition of the leader role thirty
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years back: ‘By role we mean a collection of patterns of behavior which are thought to constitute a meaningful unit and deemed appropriate to a person occupying . . . an informally defined position in interpersonal relations (e.g. leader or compromiser)’ (Gordon, : , our italics). The diminishing of role’s initial meanings as identity grows, is even more apparent as Ashforth suggests that role simply represents a ‘position in a social structure’, while the ‘behavioral expectations component’ he argues ‘is reserved for the later discussion of role identity’ (Ashforth, : ). Another example of how identity is confounded with the original essence of role is DeRue and Ashford’s () theory on leader identity construction. This theory describes how people claim and grant leader and follower identities during social interaction. However, what is claimed and granted in this process is not leader and follower identities understood as ‘self-in-role meanings’ (McCall and Simmons, ) or ‘meanings attached reflexively’ to selves (Brown, : ), but what role theories used to refer to as ‘social categories’, ‘systematically related categories’ (McCall and Simmons, : ), and ‘role’. In Turner presented a theory of ‘role-taking’ which he explained was: ‘a process of looking at or anticipating another’s behaviour by viewing it in the context of a role imputed to that other’. Role, he writes, is ‘a collection of patterns of behaviour which are thought to constitute a meaningful unit and deemed appropriate to a person [ . . . ] occupying an informally defined position in interpersonal relations (e.g. leader or compromiser)’ (Turner, : ). The essence of Turner’s () role theory is remarkably similar to DeRue and Ashford’s (): people categorize each other with the use of labels (e.g. ‘leader’) based upon recognizable patterns of (leadership) behaviour (i.e. role) in order to facilitate social interaction. While Turner argues that role is inferred from behaviour and operates as a meaning-making device to facilitate people’s interaction, DeRue and Ashford are more concerned with how and why identities get constructed during this process. The two theories complement each other. However, as role disappears into the background in the ‘claiming and granting’ theory of DeRue and Ashford () the external categorization process during which social labels are assigned, gets lumped together with the internal identification process in which people reflexively develop ideas of what it means to be someone who carries such a label/category. What is left is the all-encompassing concept of ‘identity construction’. This implies a confounding of internal (identity) and external (role) processes. We see this even more clearly in a study that set out to test DeRue and Ashford’s theory and where leadership identity construction is defined as ‘a process by which individuals come to be seen (by themselves and by others) as leaders’ (Marchiondo et al., : ). The identity (work and construction) concept grows in size and as a consequence becomes more ambiguous. Nevertheless, although role may have lost its theoretical appeal, it is often used in everyday parlance when people talk about self and their social situation (Simpson and Carroll, ). Simpson and Carroll, therefore, compel us to rethink the role of role in identity research and offer a ‘distinctly critical, theoretical and empirical’ understanding of role as a ‘boundary object’ that operates as a key element within the process of identity construction (: ). Role and identity are mutually constructive phenomena as ‘role marks the point where one’s own presentations of self meets the perception of how others desire that self to be constructed’ (: ). We need both concepts, used in disciplined
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ways. A reintroduction of role into the identity debate should help fight the turning of identity into a hembig-lost-case, where ‘everything’ is characterised as identity and therefore tells us ‘nothing’.
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.................................................................................................................................. Identity is generally viewed as critically important, at least by people who research the theme (or use the identity vocabulary), and it is often difficult to question ideas about the significance and explanatory power of identity theorizing. It is, for many, tempting to interpret almost everything as having to do with identity. But sometimes it is too easy to pull the identity card. The carpenter that only knows how to handle a hammer is inclined to treat everything as a nail; and so, the identity researcher similarly sees ‘identity’, ‘identity work’, and ‘identity narratives’ everywhere. If we are to further develop our understanding of people in contemporary working life and organizations, we need to avoid the tendency to routinely use established ideas to explain phenomena that are better explained by related, albeit different concepts (Alvesson and Robertson b: ). With the aim to expand our use of concepts (rather than expand and further ‘hembigize’ the identity concept) in the identity literature we now take a closer look at empirical identity papers with the use of a simple typology: ‘spot-on’, ‘stretch’, and ‘fake’ and explore what alternative concepts may be used instead of identity. ‘Spot-on’ refers to data that is analysed in line with how the paper defines identity (and identity work) at the outset of the study; ‘stretch’ is when we find the empirical data is stretched in such a way that it may be about identity, but another concept such as e.g. role, climate, or social category could equally well have been used; and ‘fake’ is when we believe the data refers to something other than identity, i.e. would be better addressed through use of another vocabulary and theory. We do not suggest that anyone has faked their findings, but believe that the hembigqualities identity has developed may ‘trick’ researchers and reviewers into seeing identity even when it is ‘not there’, i.e. not in line with their definition of identity. By taking a closer look at data through this typology, we may desensitize ourselves towards identity and discover other already existing or develop new concepts that may be more helpful to explain, understand, or influence our phenomena at hand.
Spot-on We find an example of ‘spot-on’ in Beech’s () study on liminality and the practices of identity reconstruction. There is a clear alignment between the paper’s identity definition and the data that is presented to exemplify the discovered phenomena. Beech defines selfidentity as ‘their own notion of who they are’ (Beech, : ), and through two in-depth cases, Eric and Julie, we learn how the notion of who they believe they are gets reconstructed as they experience changes to their work conditions. Another example that we believe is spot-on, is a paper on ‘managing managerial identities’ through ‘identity work’ by Sveningsson and Alvesson (). Rather than seeing identity as a fixed, essentialistic quality, they emphasize ‘dynamic aspects and on-going
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struggles’ as people attempt to create a sense of self and illustrate this with reference to their heroine H, a director of administration. Costas and Fleming’s () study of junior management consultants who experience identity loss in an alienating work situation also illustrates this type of approach. A final example of ‘spot-on’ is Thornborrow and Brown’s () paper on paratroopers and their aspirational identities. Again, we find that the presented quotes are in line with the conception of identity the study set out to explore, and like with the former two spot-on examples, this study presents a rich, contextual understanding that strengthens the reader’s trust in the researchers’ interpretations of the material as having to do with identity.
Stretch Finding full-fledged stretch-papers was difficult, as it seems more common that parts of the data are stretched or even fake, while other bits are spot-on. References to experiences, attitudes, feelings or even behaviours are often interpreted as referring to, or indicative of, identity (work), but in some cases they may be stretching the productive or sensitive use of the term. Croft and colleagues () explore the emotional transition of nurses into managerial roles and how ‘identity work’ is used to mitigate an identity conflict that arises as the leader identity clashes with their professional identity as a nurse. The paper defines desired identity as ‘preferred versions of self or group identity’ (: ) and presents some examples in line with this definition. However, as the study progresses, the interpretation of the (presented) data stretches into what we suggest may be better understood through concepts related to ‘role’ (Goffman, ) and ‘role development’ (Ashforth and Saks, ; Nicholson, ). Quotes from interviewees that the authors refer to as ‘identity work’ are rather what Goffman () once coined ‘role distancing’, i.e. ‘actions which effectively convey some disdainful detachment of the performer from a role he is performing’ (: ). Once the identity-signifier is evoked in Croft et al.’s study, it misses out on a vast role literature that could have been helpful. Moreover, the other two second-order constructs employed by Croft et al. () also seem to link more to ‘role’ and ‘role construction’ than ‘identity construction’. We learn less about who these nurse managers are in their new role, and more about what they are expected to do, what function they have and tasks they are expected to perform such as motivate, care for, make decisions, and influence (i.e. leader role). Here the study could have made use of a concept such as ‘role development’ (Ashforth and Saks, ; Nicholson, ) and looked into literature on the ‘leader role’.
Fake When the empirical data and interpretation is so overstretched that it is no longer about identity, but the identity label is still used, we regard the analysis as fake. One such example is a recent study by Rothausen et al. () which presents a compelling argument for why some people quit while others stay through a ‘process of seeking facilitation of identity and well-being from jobs’ (: ). However, the paper’s identity-quotes do not portray signs of reflexivity or the ‘subjectively construed understandings of who they were, are, and desire to become’ (Brown, : ) that are the markings of ‘identity’. Bardon et al. () claim to study the identity regulation and identity work of managers (supervisors) at Disneyland, but very little of the data presented is self-evidently about or
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even indicative of identity issues. Typically, the material they present concerns what people do rather than is clearly about identity work, e.g. one manager says that an employee arrived four times late and was absent one day ‘so there is no reason for me not to sanction him’. Another said that ‘I always try to be as clear as possible’, and a third said that ‘when you are a manager, you have to be fair’ (Bardon et al., : ). Since twenty-nine individuals, interviewed once or twice, only appear through one or a few dispersed statements in the text it is difficult to know if accounts about being fair, decisive, etc. say something about efforts to shape a coherent identity, or not. The Bardon et al. paper says more about how people deal with practical problems, but as the authors think ‘that talk is both identity work and identity-constitutive’ (Bardon et al., : ) they claim to address these issues.
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.................................................................................................................................. Almost all work on identity expects its primacy. Researchers assume ‘that people satisfy their need for self-esteem, self-knowledge, and self-continuity by authoring self-narratives that are relatively coherent’ (Clarke et al., : ). This is complicated and scholars lay different emphases on themes of singularity/multiplicity, power/agency, coherence/ fragmentation, discursive/non-discursive. However, the unchallenged assumptions are that identity is vital and people engage heavily in identity work.
Sometimes Identity Is Less Central We think there are good reasons not to ‘over-do’ identity and caution against a strong tendency to privilege identity and ‘find it’ everywhere. Sometimes people are less concerned about identity issues than most identity researchers believe. For example, in an in-depth study of six bank investors, each interviewed once per month over a ten-month period, accounts of their working lives showed an absence of a clear or rich identity story (Alvesson and Robertson, b). Meaningfulness, emotions, and personal investment in work values were not salient in their career histories. There were no signs of organizational identification or dis-identification. In addition, they did not offer (produce) narratives that constructed a specific view of themselves or what they stood for. From this study, Alvesson and Robertson developed the idea of identity minimalism, which implies an almost dis-engagement in or with identity construction processes. This demands at best very little ‘work’, ‘struggle’, or ‘emotional labour’, all terms which are commonly used to explain identity processes. This identity minimalism was conveyed in spite of the challenging and demanding situations they often faced and the long hours they put into their professional work. They responded to exploding bosses and rude clients in a neutral way. Relatively effortlessly and with a sense of humour, some cynicism, and indifference, they dealt with these challenges. Their efforts were, arguably, less about identity ‘work’ and more about manoeuvring and bypassing identity concerns. It was less about invoking a strong sense of self, and an identity narrative to support it, and more about exhibiting an indifferent identityminimizing orientation (Alvesson and Robertson, b: ). Indeed, their main, and
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possibly only, significant concern seemed to be money. This stands in stark contrast to other sectors where intrinsic motivation, meaning, and identification with occupations/ organizations may be more salient, and workers often face identity-invoking dilemmas. It also cautions us against taking identity concerns as a given.
Trimming Down Identity (Work) It is vital to avoid turning ‘everything’ into identity. Even if identity is viewed as a perspective that can be productive and insightful, it is sometimes not the most sensitive or relevant one to use. It calls for rich and relevant material, not only about what people (claim to) do, experience or feel. Identity concerns need to be triggered to become accessible as this is when people engage in identity work. In this context we see identity as dealing with themes such as efforts to create a sense of coherence, distinctiveness, direction, positive value, and self-awareness to feed the self (Brown, ). There is considerable variation as well as confusion in the literature. Alvesson and Willmott (: ) claim ‘much, if not all [our emphasis] activity involves identity work: people are continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’. However, the paper also refers to events and experiences that ‘serve to heighten awareness of the constructed quality of self-identity and compel more concentrated identity work’. This suggests that identity work may be interpreted in two different ways: either something that is ‘continuously engaged in’, or ‘concentrated’ punctuated effort in order to deal with problems such as ‘self-doubt’ and ‘inconsistency’. Brown () also notes this tension between trivializing identity work and reserving its use for major concerns/events. Recognizing that on occasion some issues may be worrying and continuously engaging, some poststructuralists emphasize (perhaps overemphasize) the fluidity, uncertainty, and existentially threatening nature of social life. However, if the concept of identity work is reserved for issues of some personal significance that involve experiences of inconsistency, anxiety, and deviation from a sense of ‘positive coherence and distinctiveness which triggers self-doubt’, identity work may at best be seen as occasional or periodic, rather than constant or continuous (Alvesson and Robertson, b: –). We could argue that to claim identity work is occurring, there needs to be evidence of some focus and effort directed at ‘maintenance, repair or revision work’ linked to identity. This kind of repair work should not be taken for granted. Arguably, ‘most people do not engage in identity work most of the time’ (Alvesson and Robertson, b: ). Recognizing this cuts the concept down in size and reduces its hembig-qualities.
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.................................................................................................................................. When a new master signifier enters the scene along with a growing number of advocates, we need to consider whether this is a novel area of study that will foster new theoretical and
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empirical possibilities, or if it is just a fad (Alvesson et al., : ). The breakthroughs need not be gigantic, but new concepts should at least present fresh perspectives that enable us see phenomena in a new light and help revitalize existing areas of research. We also need to consider how best to study this novel area, i.e. methodological choices should reflect the quality of the phenomena at hand. However, as we have argued, identity as a concept has grown in scope and ambiguity, protected by hegemonic forces that hinder critical scrutiny. This has caused people to discern identity even where it is hard to see good reasons for doing so. To advance this field of research and help identity out of the hembig-state it is currently in, we suggest a set of theoretical and methodological remedies.
Theoretical Scrutiny An obvious way to move forward is to demand some specification of the concept in question. A formal definition is important but seldom sufficient. In addition, some explorations of the specific nature of the phenomenon targeted through the concept need to be illustrated. Geertz () recommends cutting concepts down in size so they cover less and reveal more. Much work on identity emphasizes identity work. It is important, therefore, to consider whether ‘work’ is always a good term to use in relation to identity. Pratt (: ) argues that language is important here and asks: ‘What is gained and lost by using terms like “construction” or even “work”?’ He suggests that ‘construction’ evokes a sense of permanence and notes that both terms are highly functional, indicative of purposeful action. He points to the need to consider carefully what the verbs or adjectives we use denote and connote. In the context of uncertainty, fragmentation, and anxiety around notions of self and identity, ‘work’ may make sense, as people need to make efforts to deal with serious issues such as low self-esteem, confusion, lack of direction, etc. However, these concerns may not always be salient. This leads us to a tactic of exploring what a concept does not indicate. To understand and zoom in on identity, calls for the illumination of what is not identity and identity work. This ‘not’ needs to be reasonably specific. One option is to employ a concept such as identity minimalism and the notion of teflonic identity manoeuvring (TIM) (Alvesson and Robertson, b). For some workers, identity minimalism and TIM is a credible alternative to a ‘strong’ identity construction and the interrelated need to do identity work. In these cases, one could contradict Brown’s (: ) statement that ‘the self is fuelled by the identities it feeds on’ and say that in this context the self relies more on the ability to feed off identities, as any commitment to such identities would actually complicate life. Yet another way to deal with the hembig problem could be to self-critically discuss the disadvantages with a concept. A good reason to use a specific concept needs to be presented. Rather than use and reproduce the identity concept one could ask: What may be problematic with this concept? How and how often is it used in the actual enterprise of a specific study or text? Perhaps one could demand a page of careful and thoughtprovoking (self-)reflection and (self-)critique before yet another contribution to a hembig-dominated area is considered for publication. That identity is in vogue is no intellectual reason for using it.
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Finally, scholars could make deliberate attempts to use a wider spectrum of alternative concepts and associated sensitivities. As we have shown, sometimes role and social categorization can be more relevant concepts. One can also consider referring to experiences, self-esteem, or preferred behaviour, rather than use identity vocabulary (and literature with this label). Following Pratt () and Brown (), we think that the current metaphors/adjectives we draw upon in identity theorizing should be supplemented with concepts which expand our interpretive repertoire for thinking about identity and its centrality/marginalization in working life. This is not to deny the significance of identity themes, or to discourage the study of identity and identity work, having contributed to this field ourselves (e.g. Alvesson and Kärreman, ; Gjerde and Alvesson, forthcoming; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). However, we should remember that popular but ‘slippery’ terms such as identity can exercise a colonializing effect and limit our thinking and perspectives on organizing.
Methodological Antidotes Alvesson et al. (: ) claimed that ‘whilst organizational scholars are increasingly interested in issues of identity, in-depth empirical studies analysing actual processes of identity construction and regulation continue to lag behind’. This has improved somewhat, but there are two prevalent norms in identity studies that we find problematic and which need to be addressed. We refer to these as ‘single-shot’ and ‘partitioning’. Single-shot is when X number of people are interviewed for say minutes by a researcher-stranger and the interviews are used to interpret a subject’s identity constructions (e.g. Clarke et al., ; Rothausen, et al., ). Partitioning is when the analysis consists of coding and a factor-analytical logic (Cornelissen, ) which may give the impression of robust data management, rigour, and transparency, but which leads to a limited sense of the whole. Single-shot and partioning strategies may be valuable when it comes to straightforward issues that are easy to verbalize. Single-shot interviews have the advantage that it is easy to gain credible numbers and some generalizations. However, identity does not usually emerge in easy ways but calls for close and intimate knowledge of the subject matter and rich material that is addressed thoughtfully and critically. Repeat interviews or observations are of course no guarantee of richer material. Still, it allows for temporal and situational issues to be explored and may give the researcher better opportunities to assess these. We believe that accounts can be seen as uncertain clues to identity, and not a simple mirroring of an easily accessible sense of self. Thus, identity is a theme that calls for hermeneutical interpretation, where all data are seen as more or less trustworthy and worth paying attention to. Multiplying the single interview per subject with X number of people does not make the empirical material more trustworthy as each interview may be governed by impression management, politics, or adaptations to local context (Alvesson, ). Still, what is said is often treated as more or less straightforward expressions of who the person constructs him-/herself to be, not only in a specific, artificial and temporal situation but in ways that assume far-reaching interpretations are possible. This seems like a bold assumption and one could argue that research calls for much more than the assembly of X number of oneshot interviews and the processing of these.
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While a short interview can produce rich material, going ‘in-depth’ about identity is not easy. Expectations that interviewees can say much that is insightful about their identities or identity work may put a heavy burden on their meagre shoulders. It is not always easy to reveal key insights about one’s inner life and who one is. Self-knowledge, motivation to reveal sensitive issues, and ability to communicate are needed. To get a good feel for identity an in-depth study should capture feelings, experiences, or behaviours. Life history interviews can, to some extent do that, but one-shot interviews are unreliable as it is very difficult to assess and sort out what may be impression management, adaptation to the interview situation, rationalizations, and self-serving bias. If these elements are at play, something about identity can be traced, but broader and deeper empirical material is necessary. It may, for example, be relevant to distinguish between ‘light beliefs’/attitudes that are easily modified and ‘deeper’ identity concerns. It is also vital to not only privilege narratives in interview settings, but also interactions, as Down and Reveley (: ) argue: ‘confirming one’s identity by displaying oneself in front of others is central to identity formation’. A ‘story’ about being the ‘leader’ is important to consider, but it may also be out of tune with interactions and subordinates’ views, which makes the identity project much more complicated than the impression one may get from a one-time narration.
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.................................................................................................................................. Identity is a very popular concept. We believe it important and worthwhile to study identities in organizations, but find the concept has hembig qualities and is often used elastically. Sometimes researchers insert the ‘identity’ label without sufficient conceptual care or reflexivity and use it on empirical material that could equally well or better be understood in other ways. Alternative concepts and ideas are marginalized and our ability to make distinctions regarding the type of phenomena we deal with is weakened. Identity studies need to carefully consider what identity can offer as a sensitive framing device and resource for theorizing, and work with data that is rich and deep enough to go beyond interview talk, claimed actions, or experiences. With such careful consideration we will probably get fewer, but more insightful studies.
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Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, , –. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (). ‘The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior’. In S. Worchel and W. G. Austin (eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, pp. –. Thornborrow, T. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Being Regimented: Aspiration, Discipline and Identity Work in the British Parachute Regiment’. Organization Studies, (), –. Turner, J. C. and Haslam, S. A. (). ‘Social Identity, Organizations and Leadership’. In M. Turner (ed.), Groups at Work: Advances in Theory and Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. –. Turner, R. H. (). ‘Role-Taking, Role Standpoint, and Reference-Group Behavior’. American Journal of Sociology, (), –. Turner, R. H. (). ‘Role: Sociological Aspects’. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan/Free Press, vol. , pp. –. van Knippenberg, B., van Knippenberg, D., De Cremer, D., and Hogg, M. A. (). ‘Research in Leadership, Self, and Identity: A Sample of the Present and a Glimpse of the Future’. The Leadership Quarterly, (), –. Wrong, D. H. (). ‘The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’. American Sociological Review, (), –.
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Identity Construction and Social Context .......................................................................................................................
Abstract ‘Identity’, Berger and Luckmann (: ) maintained, ‘remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’. In order to ‘locate’ identity, this chapter provides, first, a theoretical underpinning for an essentially social understanding of identity construction by conceptualizing identities as arising at the intersection of, and in the interaction between, people’s personal lifeworlds and environing social worlds. Second, it discusses the implications of such a view, summarizing the principles underpinning a social constructivist perspective in terms of five p’s: identity as positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and (an act or effect of ) power. Third, it locates identity construction in four different worlds or social circuits where we might observe the interaction between self and sociality ‘in action’: () inner conversations (self-directed positioning), () self–other definitions (relational positioning), () situated interactions (reciprocal positioning), and () institutional dynamics (subject positioning). By sketching what to look for (the five p’s) and where to look (the four circuits), this chapter assists scholars in deploying identity as an analytical bridge between agency and structure.
I
.................................................................................................................................. W is an area in which we spend a large part of our lives, and in which we invest ideas and aspirations about who we are in life. This might involve ideas about pursuing a career, upholding professional values, maintaining social relations, building status, doing meaningful work, and so on. Already when we enter an organization or start a business people ask us who we are, what we are capable of, and how we relate to others. In our day-to-day work identity questions appear regularly on our agendas: how do I learn to play my ‘part’, is this corporate self carved out for me really who I am, what professional self do I aspire
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to, will others buy the self I present to them, how do I counter reputation damage or manoeuvre in between different sides placing competing demands on our ‘selves’? Unsurprisingly, a conversation about anyone’s work often turns into an effort to make sense of his or her self. Such conversations touch upon what people find essential about themselves, how they view themselves in relation to others, how they present themselves to an outside world, how others see them, how they negotiate versions of self and other, what ‘member roles’ are imposed on them, and what produces pride, doubts, desires, or fears about their ‘selves’. Engaging the intricacies and sensitivities of organizational actors’ most basic sensemaking efforts ‘identity’ provides an entry point for exploring some of the intriguing mysteries of organizational life. Essentially, the identity concept sensitizes us to how individuals make sense of themselves and how they relate to the social worlds they inhabit. Addressing both ‘self ’ and ‘sociality’, identity has been heralded as a bridging concept that may help to capture our being-in-the-world (Brown, ; Webb, ; Ybema et al., ). However, the field of organization and management studies currently lacks a theoretical framework that helps identity studies to analytically bridge individual lifeworlds and wider social contexts. This chapter takes a first step in this direction. Building on a notion of identity as inherently social—and of the individual as at once caught in, and actively engaging with, larger webs of cultural significance, a strong texture of social relations, and the maelstrom of the everyday—it explores various ways in which ‘self ’ and ‘sociality’ intersect and interact. Herewith, I hope slightly to shift researchers’ focus away from the field’s predominant understanding of identity as the agentic accomplishment of individuals and to integrate such a notion with views of identity as a product of relational dynamics, social interaction, organizational hierarchies, managerial regimes, and societal dynamics. This way, I hope also to broaden the field of vision in research in identities in organizations. Rather than a review of the extant literature on identity in organization studies, this chapter is an attempt to consider more fully what it might mean to analyse identity as sociality. To ground theoretically this exploration, the first two sections of this chapter elaborate the duality of, and dynamics between, personal lifeworld and social context, and individual agency and social structure. I address the issue of agency and structure, not to engage in philosophical debate, but to provide a theoretical vantage point from which to analyse identity as an essentially social process. I discuss the implications of such a view by introducing and developing an understanding of identity in terms of five p’s: identity as positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and (an act or effect of ) power. Having laid the groundwork, I then sketch four social circuits or analytical domains within which we might observe the interaction between self and sociality ‘in action’: () ‘inner’ conversations, () self–other positioning, () social interactions, and () institutional dynamics. First I provide the necessary theoretical grounding for an identity-in-context perspective.
T D S R
.................................................................................................................................. Identity formation can be viewed as a continuous interplay between social and selfdefinition. Social (re-)definitions involve, for example, cultural codes for appropriate or
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desirable behaviour, disciplinary persuasions to act ‘normal’, and ‘external’ views of who we are as an individual or a collective, etc. Concomitantly, people present their selves to an outside world, conforming to, deviating from or reshaping particular opinions, prescriptions, or persuasions through, for instance, social performance, role embracement, rule breaking, and emotional distancing. Identity formation is, thus, a ‘dynamic interplay between internal strivings and external prescriptions, between self-presentation and labelling by others, between achievement and ascription, and between regulation and resistance’ (Ybema et al., : ). An outcome of this continuous self-society dynamic, an ‘identity’ is simultaneously both what is projected and what is perceived. Constructed somewhere ‘in between’ the communicator(s) and their audience(s) (cf. Alvesson, : ), ‘[i]t is in the meeting of internal and external definition that identity, whether social or personal, is created’ (Jenkins, : ; see also Jenkins, ). These suggestions can be theoretically grounded by situating ‘identity’ as a linchpin in the social constitution of self and society, mediating agency and structure (Ybema et al., ). The relation between individual agency and social structure is one of the central problems of both social theory (Giddens, ) and organizational analysis (Reed, ). Here I follow Berger and Luckmann ( []), whose basic assumption in their classic work is that ‘society’—or indeed any social reality—has a dual character. In their attempt to connect an interpretivist and an institutionalist approach to the study of social life, they build on the premise that social realities exist at once in the personal realities of individual thinking, feeling, and acting and, simultaneously, in the institutionalized realities of collective structures, power hierarchies, cultural norms, and socially accepted ‘normality’. Seen from this vantage point, organizations can also be regarded as existing both in an individual’s lifeworld and in supra-personal institutions, ideologies, traditions, codes, etc. Typical of the social fabric of a hospital, for example, is its strict separation of nursing and caring personnel, paramedical professions (physiotherapists, occupational therapists, etc.), and medical specialists (surgeons, neurologists, etc.), and an equally strict, well-delineated hierarchy between them. This is why Lammers () once likened a hospital to a caste society—it is practically impossible to move from one ‘caste’ to another and, in everyday life, socially important to comply with cultural codes that prescribe how to approach the other caste, and to respect the hierarchy. Generally, membership of a ‘caste’, often symbolically bolstered by dress and demeanour, tends to define an individual’s position in hospital life. Individual attempts to break out of an institutionalized order are frowned upon and often founder, like attempts to jump a queue. Hospitals’ ‘caste structure’ is strongly normative and can rarely be simply ignored, bypassed, or overthrown. Yet, occasionally caste members may manage to exercise some agency, to bend slightly the rules, and to make minor adjustments to ‘better’ their position. An occupational therapist working in a hospital once told me how the physiotherapists—members of the paramedical caste like herself—used to be dressed in white, just like the highest caste of medical specialists. Ostentatiously they also wore a stethoscope—seen as a medical specialist’s instrument—around their necks that served further to buttress their status aspirations and, in the eyes of the occupational therapist, to jump the queue. Naturally, hospital management’s plans to have all paramedical professionals wear dress in mint green met with physiotherapists’ fierce collective resistance. Within the parameters set by the ‘caste structure’, caste members will attempt to use the scope for manoeuvring it offers. That is,
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individuals’ engagement with the social world—of physiotherapists and other folk—can only be understood against the backdrop of social structures that may inculcate, colonize, and constrain, as well as enable, facilitate, and sanction individuals’ identity formations.
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.................................................................................................................................. Berger and Luckmann () theorize the connection between, and the construction of, personal lifeworlds and supra-personal structures as a two-way process. First, they assert that people externalize their ‘inner’ world of thoughts and feelings in their (inter)actions. This process of externalization or institutionalization gradually gives rise to supra-personal processes and persistent patterns of thought and action. This process—from the formation of individual habits, to shared typifications of actors and acts, to legitimization, and, finally, to sedimentation and reification of the newly emerging order—results in a social world that seems normal, necessary, and natural to those who (re)produce it. A key foundation stone of this social world is the formation of identities and the emergence of reciprocal typifications of actors (and their acts)—‘me Tarzan, you Jane’, ‘me high caste, you low caste’, ‘me normal, you crazy’. Second, since such institutionalized structures constitute the medium for individual thought and action, they shape profoundly the individual’s lifeworld when (s)he becomes a ‘member’ of society (or an organization). In a process of internalization or socialization, newcomers become initiated in the outer world by learning the cultural knowledge and accepted behaviours of the community. Again, this is a process of identity formation. People learn to create reflexive distance and to become self-conscious; looking at themselves through the eyes of others, taking in their views, taking up their roles, ‘taking over’ their worlds, mirroring, appropriating and internalizing it, making it ‘self ’. Institutional rules, roles, and routines become part of the individual’s habitus and the outside world, the voice of the community, joins our inner conversation as a permanent (and often rather loud-mouthed) partner, constantly echoing what we learned from others. Social realities—societies, organizations, identities, etc.—are constructed in an ongoing interplay or ‘dialectic’ between agency and structure, externalizations and internalizations, like the warp and weft that create the final weave, the social fabric. As an ‘outer’ world, a social reality exists as the product of, and thus by virtue of, individuals’ engagement with it. It is ‘man-made’ (or woman-made). However, even though the whole exists only by virtue of the constituent parts, it is more than the sum of its parts; it has a supra-individual life of its own beyond any single individual’s engagement with it. Through its production the product (e.g. a ‘caste structure’) becomes detached from its individual producers. For them it has social facticity, a ‘dominant and definite reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ), independent from, and potentially conflicting with, their wishes and strivings. Society (structure) is a human product, but it is often the unanticipated and unintended outcome of intentional action (agency). Moreover, institutionalized social realities are made by wo/men and inhabited by wo/ men, but, in turn, also make (or break), initiate, entice, inculcate, and infuse them: ‘the
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product acts back upon the producer’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ). Individuals act with intent and purpose, but their practices are situated within wider social contexts that enable and constrain human action. Ironically, like the two hands drawing one another into existence in the lithograph by graphic artist Escher, we are producer and product of social reality. This is already evident in everyday situations such as when we, as fully socialized members of our society, politely wait for our turn at the coffee machine. A simple notion like a queue has such a powerful effect on us that we keep strictly to its rules and, by queuing up, routinely enact it into existence (and ourselves as ‘queuers’): ‘man produces reality and thereby produces himself ’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ) (for not dissimilar views, see Bourdieu, ; Elias, ; Giddens, ). Likewise, we are also producer and product of organizational realities. Often organizations are recalcitrant instruments, resilient to change and, more often than not, exerting control over us rather than the other way around. For instance, when hospital management tries to bridge professional and hierarchical boundaries and to integrate services by introducing multidisciplinary teams (Liberati et al., ), such integration tends to have counterproductive effects, because, in response, professionals resist such attempts by reasserting their professional identities and defending discipline-based specialization. In light of the duality and dialectic of social realities, such resistance can be interpreted, paradoxically, both as an illustration of how an established order—the hospital’s caste structure—is kept intact in spite of change efforts, and as an agentic act of professionals serving their own vested interests.
I P, P, (C)P, P, P
.................................................................................................................................. The social constructivist perspective sketched above has implications for how to understand and study identity construction. Here, I discuss five such implications, which pertain to identity as positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and (and act or effect of ) power.
Identity-as-Positioning: Similarities and Differences A social constructivist approach suggests that, principally, identities are socially and subjectively made meaningful by defining alignments and drawing distinctions; that is, by articulating sameness and otherness. It is through positioning ‘self ’ in relation to ‘other(s)’ that we make sense of ourselves, and are made sense of by others. An intrinsic part of the process by which we come to understand who we are is intimately connected to notions of who we are not and, by implication, who others are (and are not). Enacting an identity thus involves symbolically separating, and signifying ‘self ’ and ‘other’. The social construction of identity is a matter of establishing and articulating ‘relationships of similarity and difference’ (Jenkins, : ) which impose seemingly arbitrary boundaries to create and define ‘identity’ through ‘alterity’ (Czarniawska, ). In everyday life, such
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distinction drawing may be accomplished through the ways in which we talk, act, dress, or stand in a queue. Distinction drawing is done explicitly through ‘discursive positioning’ (Garcia and Hardy, ) or ‘self–other talk’ (Ybema et al., ): in often unreflective truisms we produce categorical lines of demarcation through which we locate, define, and relate our ‘selves’ to an apparently external reality—high versus low, normal versus abnormal, in versus out, black versus white. Unsurprisingly, given the crudeness of many such distinctions, there is an element of over-simplification and distortion in definitions of sameness and otherness. It tends to follow the formula of categorization (drawing boundaries), typification (describing differences and similarities), and valuation (ascribing status and establishing hierarchies). Through this process one typically comes to outshine the other. One is higher caste, has better taste, is more respectable and acceptable than ‘that lot over there’ (Young, : ), ‘a brand of people who ain’t my kind’ (as Elton John sang in ‘Border Song’, ). Such positioning is essential in our engagement with others, in interactions, associations, confrontations, and negotiations. It also occurs in the privacy of our inner thoughts, as we imagine different selves or others-in-us and construct a contrast between, for instance, aspired-to and assigned selves, ‘old’ and ‘new’ selves, feared and desired selves. On the other end of the spectrum, social structures, formal hierarchies, dominant discourses, cultural scripts and normative prescriptions also position people and, by specifying who is who— and who does what, who counts, who rules, etc.—weave a social texture into everyday life: whether in institutionalized contexts, social interactions, or actors’ personal struggles, ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ emerge as pivotal guidelines in the elaboration of identities.
Identity-as-Performance: The Symbolism of Words, Acts, and Artefacts Assuming that identities are socially constructed also means, by implication, we do not see identities as fixed and objective facts existing somewhere ‘out there’—as manners or demeanour indicative of presumed character traits—or somewhere ‘in there’—as a pregiven or pre-constituted self or inner essence of an individual or collective. Instead, research concentrates on the forms identity takes, its manifestation in acts and artefacts, and the activities with which actors articulate, resist, contest, embrace, maintain, or modify a sense of individual or collective self. In this sense, a social constructivist perspective does not focus attention on identity per se but on construction processes and their consequences. In this mode, researchers locate identity in an individual’s performances of their selves, regarding identity as ‘a matter of claims, not character; persona, not personality; and presentation, not self ’ (Ybema et al., : ). They foreground performative forms of identity construction (Brown, ; Corlett et al., ) and its symbolic manifestation in words, acts, and objects, assuming individuals project their identities to an audience by engaging in language, such as stories, narratives and rhetorics, behaviours, such as ceremonial actions, social practices and everyday doings, and the deployment or display of objects—offices, badges, business cards, bodies, cars, clothes, tattoos, and other artefacts. A physiotherapist’s white attire and stethoscope may help to sustain and secure a statusenhancing narrative of their professional self, just as some rugby players may author a narrative of themselves as young, tough, and ambitious (Brown and Coupland, ) or some policemen choose a bodily presentation of themselves as fit, clean, and intimidating
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(Courpasson and Monties, ). It is through the forms it takes that identity is made— talked and acted into being—and made known and intelligible to others and to ourselves. Conceptualizing identity as a social performance is not to say that identities are always prepared and polished: staged, scripted, and rehearsed to meet the expectations of an audience. Identity construction is not necessarily a playful game or outward display. A job interview or a lecture come close to frontstage performances, but writing a page in a personal diary, a look in the mirror or into another’s eyes, a visit to a counsellor, an interview with a researcher, a conversation with a colleague over lunch, a coffee with the boss, a training session on the track, or a chat on the internet, may all trigger different performances—dramatic or non-dramatic, scripted or improvised, playful or serious, amusing or embarrassing, politically sensitive or insensitive. In other words, identities may be differently performed and do different kinds of work for different audiences in different situations. Reflexive moments in backstage situations, for instance, may invite selfquestioning, while frontstage situations may foster self-affirmation (Beech et al., ; Ybema et al., ). Seen as a social performance, identity thus sensitizes to how the individual’s agentic work is embedded within, and conditioned by, contexts, settings, and audiences.
Identity-as-(Co)Production: The Individual as Producer and Product The implication of viewing identity as a social performance constructed somewhere in between self and sociality is that individuals have no full ownership of, and only limited control over, who and what they are. From an agency viewpoint, they may attempt to establish and secure a particular version of their individual or collective selves by articulating it with eloquence, decorating it with dress and make-up, presenting it with elegance or defending it with fervour, but it would need social affirmation nonetheless. I may present myself as the heir to the Dutch throne, but others may refuse my claim and ridicule me. Individuals’ identities are, however skilfully performed, always bound (or primed) by social context—culture, tradition, hierarchy, setting, and the like, and dependent upon an audience. This is not the only restriction on individual agency. From a structural point of view, the individual is not the producer, but the product of processes of socialization (Berger and Luckmann, ), domination, and subjectification (Fleming and Spicer, ). As literatures on diversity, discrimination, and xenophobia show, it may be difficult, sometimes extremely difficult, for individuals to escape, counter, redress, or re-label dominant social definitions of our selves. Being categorized or pigeonholed by others can be violently powerful and, once accepted as social ‘fact’ and translated into formal policies and procedures (e.g. Jackall, ) or adopted in a culture management programme (e.g. Kunda, ), real in its consequences. When an identity is externally ascribed, individuals may adopt it passively, fully embrace, actively resist, or creatively make their own version of the self carved out for them. Yet, identity matters are never entirely up to the individual: identity is a social construction rather than an individual achievement. This ‘entails a dialectic between identification by others and self-identification, between objectively assigned and subjectively appropriated identity’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ).
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Identity-as-Process: Long Shots and Close-Ups A social constructivist perspective also implies that we study social realities and identity construction, never as ‘a static, once-and-for-all state of affairs’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ), but as a continuous process. As identities only take form, and that form only has effects, insofar as people produce and reproduce that form in their sayings and doings, identities are constantly ‘under construction’. Conditional upon actors’ continuous reproduction, stability in any given identity is routinely reproduced, institutionally inscribed, hierarchically enforced, actively renegotiated, or, at times, merely staged as a PR product. Social construction and reconstruction emerge as a continuous process and identity, whilst often maintained and replicated, is always a momentary achievement, a temporary outcome of, and a medium for, the dynamic interplay between self and sociality. Given the duality of social realities, a processual approach to identity may combine ‘extreme close-ups’ that zoom in on the short-term dynamics in day-to-day organizational life with ‘wide-angle’ or ‘long shots’ that zoom out to show long-term dynamics and panoramic views of the organization, with its history, power relations, and surrounding societal dynamics. For instance, a close-up account of a disturbance between rival gangs of football supporters may show how, when the riot police arrive, supporters from both clubs establish a collective identity and join forces to fight the newly arrived common enemy (cf. Pearson, : chapter ). Koot () describes an equally ironic situation of, this time, long-term identity dynamics in a multinational corporation. Close-ups of the Shell oil refinery on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao shows how, in the s and s, employees of the Shell plant were keen to express their affinity with Latino culture vis-à-vis the Dutch management. In the s, however, the refinery was rented out to a Venezuelan company and the same Curacaoan workers then dissociated themselves from Latino culture and called upon their Dutch roots vis-à-vis the Venezuelan management, praising the old Shell culture. These examples illustrate that we can understand processes of organizing if we understand identity, and understand it processually, ‘because reified views of identity do not help researchers capture the fluidity of social life’ (Phillips and Hardy, : ). Importantly, such a process view is sensitive to how a change of social scenery impacts on the identities constructed. Analysing temporal sequences in disparate identity constructions may reveal how inclusionary identity work (e.g. integrating ‘outsiders’) paradoxically creates counterproductive, exclusionary effects (e.g. Glimmerveen et al., forthcoming) or how nurses, when moving from one social setting to another, subtly shift their self–other identities (Koster and Ybema, forthcoming). Analysing the process of identity construction thus involves investigating how the formation of identities unfolds in time and space. Identities are situationally (made) salient, dependent upon how actors define themselves within a situation and how situations define them.
Identity-as-Politics: Strategic Agency and Power Structures From a social constructivist viewpoint, the process of constructing identities is inherently political, and imbued not just with emotional sensitivities, cultural norms and values, and ethical considerations but also with issues of power. The examples discussed above
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illustrate identity’s intimate relation to, inter alia, situationally shifting interests (e.g. of football supporters), strategic resistance to managerial control (e.g. of Curacaoan workers in a multinational), and symbolic action (e.g. of physiotherapists in a hospital). Consonant with Knights and Willmott’s () original statement in introducing identity into the field of organization studies, power and identity are as two sides of the same coin. The way people make sense of themselves and others is often best understood when also unravelling the intricacies of, for instance, the day-to-day politics of decision-making processes, the unequal distribution of economic and social capital, and dynamics of control and resistance. As people’s sense of self can have a powerful grip on them, identity itself may become a concrete stake within a political arena as well as an effective instrument to exert influence. Asserting an identity may thus be an act of power or an effect of it (or both). As people come to identify themselves—or come to be identified—as particular persons or groups, they may become better (or worse) positioned to pursue an interest, to make their case, or to exercise, resist, or elude control. Being branded as a ‘troublemaker’, for instance, may turn someone into a target for disciplinary action. Being selected, celebrated, and singled out as a ‘talent’ in a talent management programme or being promoted to a new position may create both opportunities (opening new doors) and risks (being in the spotlight), generating simultaneously a sense of empowerment and powerlessness (Daubner et al., ). Power and identity, thus, are inextricably intertwined. A cartoon circulating on the internet gives a simple illustration of power and identity— and agency and structure—shaking hands. Picturing birds on a rack—from a ‘manager’ on top, to two ‘executives’ on the second rung, six ‘departments’ on the third, and, on the lowest rung, ‘the rest’—the cartoon shows how those sitting on higher rungs have forever been defecating on the unhappy birds lower down. The cartoonist’s caption states: ‘When top-level guys look down, they only see shitheads; When bottom-level guys look up, they see only assholes . . . ’. From a structural perspective the message is clear: our position in an organizational hierarchy determines how we see others and how others see us, e.g. as ‘shitheads’ or ‘assholes’. From an agency perspective, calling someone ‘shithead’ or ‘asshole’ is a rhetorical strategy to strengthen one’s own position within a hierarchy. Combining power and identity may thus provide unusually clear depictions of the messy workings of a formal hierarchy in organizational life.
S C I C
.................................................................................................................................. If identities are socially constructed, where might we be able to observe the production process? What are the locales of identity construction? Loosely inspired by Jenkins’ () treatment of social identity, I provide an answer to this question by describing four possible ‘locales’ or ‘circuits’—social scenes within which we may observe different kinds of positioning: () inner conversations (self-directed positioning), () self–other definitions (relational positioning), () situated interactions (reciprocal positioning), and () institutional dynamics (subject positioning). Distinguishing different circuits allows us to place identity
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within the social contexts of its production and to explore how the self-sociality dynamic plays out—and plays out differently—at various junctures and in different domains.
Inner Conversations: Self-Directed Positioning In the first social circuit, the analytical focus is on people’s outer performance—in talk and text, acts and artefacts—of their inner sense of self. Here, the question is how do individuals present their inner sense of self to others and to themselves? Interestingly, self-directed identity work rarely constructs a single, undivided self. Usually we present ourselves as ‘accommodating’ different selves. In order to portray their inner worlds individuals reflexively imagine themselves to be hosting an assembly of selves who together engage in an inner ‘conversation’ between, for instance, a ‘higher’ self (representing sociality) and a ‘lower’ self (representing animality) (Berger and Luckmann, : ), between a former self (despised or romanticized) and a future self (feared or aspired-to) (Ybema, ), or between an ‘authentic’ self (close to someone’s imagined true core) and a ‘fake’ one (alien to the ‘true’ self ) (Costas and Fleming, ). Different selves are cast as different characters, involved in processes of question and answer, agreement and disagreement. In such soliloquies or inner conversations, the outside world often joins in through imagined or internalized others-in-me. The outside world ‘speaks’ through such voices in me. When I claim to be engaged in an inner ‘dialogue’ between, for instance, ‘who I really am (or want to be)’ and ‘how they see me’ or ‘what they are turning me into’, I present my interiority as a struggle between internal ideas, wishes, and affections and external expectations and evaluations. Young consultants analysed by Costas and Fleming () experience such an inner tension. They feel ‘desperate’, ‘strangled’, or even ‘brain-rotten’, because in their day-to-day work they unwillingly act on their ‘robotic’, ‘aggressive’, ‘mask-wearing’ workaday selves. Authoring a tragic story of self-alienation that portrays them as victims of the corporate world, they claim that the ‘cold’ and ‘slave-driven’ work environment of the consultancy firm alienates them from their ‘creative’, ‘artistic’, and ‘intellectual’ extraemployment self with which they identify strongly. In such staged inner conversations we see the interaction-writ-small between inside and outside, self and sociality: we present the outside world as sitting on our shoulder, whispering unasked-for advice, offering biting critique, putting us up to perform—or abandon—a particular action, holding up a looking glass to ourselves, providing running commentary on who or what we are. In this circuit, sociality not only figures as a ventriloquizing other-in-me, it figures also as the wider context—the social setting and scenery—within which the individual’s inner conversation is situated (Watson, ). The individual articulates their sense of self against a background of, for instance, a managerial regime that puts pressure on young consultants (Costas and Fleming, ), an industry of independent music that denounces commercialism and emphasizes ‘art for art’s sake’ (Beech et al., ), or the insecurities of performance-driven professional rugby (Brown and Coupland, ). Self-directed identity work is accomplished, not in a social vacuum, but against the backdrop of organizational change initiatives, power regimes, institutionalized rules, or social templates (e.g. Musson and Duberley, ). Such pressures require individuals to perform multiple, sometimes conflicting selves (Ellis and Ybema, ). In response, people employ tactics to resolve these self-tensions by, for instance, eschewing emotional attachment to a professional identity in favour of a manager identity (Croft et al., ) or reconciling their
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marginalization by committing themselves to a change agent identity (Creed et al., ). Inner conversations respond to outer demands, as individuals come to terms with the social worlds in which they operate, and in this sense, our inner conversations are miniature reflections of the interactions between selves and sociality.
Self–Other Definitions: Relational Positioning In the second circuit the self–sociality dialectic plays out explicitly. Here, the essentially relational character of identity construction becomes manifest, revealing how individuals understand their selves in relation to others. Studying this circuit involves focusing on the ways we dress, walk, and talk in order to socially construct and symbolically underscore notions of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. While in inner conversations identity is formed in a dialogue between different selves (or internalized others), identity construction in this circuit is forged in the relations between—individual or collective—selves in relation to other actors. In this type of identity work, individuals define and depict their selves by deploying other people as symbolic resources and material for comparison. Positioning the self within an intricate web of relations, others serve as a background against which individuals establish, secure, question, or congratulate their personal, professional, and collective selves. As a means of referring to and making inferences about self and other, relational positioning often builds on rather blunt black-and-white dichotomies—normal/abnormal, good/bad, etc. Linguistic binary oppositions are often utilized in identity construction to set up a hierarchy and position the other not merely as different, but also as less acceptable, less respectable, or less powerful (Hall, ). The images invoked tell a selective, frequently stereotypical, and often dramatized story that scripts the ‘self ’ in relation to the ‘other’ on a stage which magnifies differences. Among the more visible discourses which demonstrate this are those relating to class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Such discursive positioning underscores the point that identity construction may be a far from neutral or benign process. It is invariably coloured by emotions, moral judgements, and approbations, and political and economic interests. It implies processes of (dis)identification, social manoeuvring, and power games. Such phenomena often appear to inform the claims of ‘sameness’ or ‘otherness’ in relation to, for instance, colleagues, clients, or competitors, between male and female roles, superiors and subordinates, younger and older generations. In all such instances, identity construction is instrumental in attempts to establish, legitimate, or challenge prevailing relationships of power and status (Ybema et al., ). Self–other positioning is observable in different social contexts. As Watson () shows, through contrast, an individual manager may sketch a version of himself as a romantic hero manager, priding himself as the champion of the underdogs by claiming to scourge, and setting himself apart from, bullies. A new generation of entrepreneurs may identify themselves as ‘young guns’ who have a desire to replace ‘outmoded’ management practices and business attitudes vis-à-vis the ‘old farts’ who defend and maintain the way that things have been done in the past (Down and Reveley, ). And Japanese bosses in a Dutch subsidiary of a Japanese multinational justified the fact that they held all important positions within the subsidiary by laying claim to putatively Japanese virtues, such as loyalty, devotion, perseverance, a long-term orientation, respect, and tactfulness, while scorning the imprudence, impoliteness, and ineptitude of the Dutch (Ybema and Byun, ). In response to the unequal distribution of power, status, and resources, Dutch staff
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members emphasized their cultural distinctiveness vis-à-vis the Japanese; they portrayed themselves as ‘typically Dutch’—efficient workers, clear communicators, and flexible decision-makers—while also criticizing the authoritarian attitudes and inefficient decision-making of their Japanese bosses (cf. Ailon-Souday and Kunda, ; Drori et al., ; Kamsteeg, ). These examples show how self–other positioning clarifies who we and others are and, by doing so, may satisfy psychological needs and serve political ends. Articulating, contesting, and negotiating claims of ‘sameness’ or ‘otherness’ is an inherent part of the processes that unfold within a variety of social contexts (Parker, ). While identity work studies often treat relational positioning en passant, as part of individuals’ preoccupation with their inner sense of self, it deserves more systematic scholarly attention as a social circuit in its own right, one in which social processes centre on actors’ definitions of selfhood and otherhood. This is particularly pertinent in work settings in which parties build and break relationships on the basis of their conceptions of who others are (Ybema et al., ). On the other hand, accounts of self–other positioning may have limitations of their own. They may ignore the reciprocal positioning of the self by the other and the ways in which such mutual positioning plays out in situated interactions.
Situated Interactions: Reciprocal Positioning In the third circuit we zoom in on situated interactions as another central site for the social construction of identities. This adds new elements (Koster and Ybema, forthcoming). First, it highlights that identity performance is directed at, and adjusted to meet (our interpretation of) the expectations of a particular audience, within a particular setting, at a particular moment in time. In face-to-face and technologically mediated interactions, we form self-understandings and present ourselves in relation to (a community of ) others. Our identities are meaningful within the bounds of such temporal, spatial, and social contexts. By implication, as earlier examples demonstrated (e.g. contending football supporters together targeting the police), our identities may shift in response to changing circumstances. Within this circuit, the analytical lens is on the socially situated production of identities and ‘the detail of turn-taking: how subject positions are made available and taken up in the turn-by-turn of the immediate interaction’ (Smith and Sparkes, : –). Second, individuals are assumed actively to position themselves and, importantly, to be positioned by others as having a certain sense of self or identity. Sociality intrudes not only through actors’ own self–other definitions, but also through ‘external’ definitions of self and other. As identities are both conferred and actively claimed (and contested), the analytical focus is on how individuals perform particular versions of themselves in the ‘real-time’, moment-to-moment unfolding of interactions with others as well as on how these others audit, applaud, or reject those selves (e.g. Czarniawska, ). Concentrating on the interactional dynamics Jenkins defines identity as ‘our understanding of who we are and of who other people are, and, reciprocally, other people’s understanding of themselves and of others (which includes us)’ (Jenkins, : ). Identity, within this circuit, is conceptualized as negotiated in the meeting of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’, of self-labelling and labelling by others, in situated interactions.
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In the field of organization studies, there is paucity of research into how identity issues appear in the fine grain of everyday life, showing how identities are constructed ‘live’ in interpersonal communications. Relying primarily on interview data, situated interactions remain largely out of sight (McInnes and Corlett, ). However, some studies have empirically investigated how identity work can be analysed as a dialogue between selfconstructions and others’ counter-constructions. Beech () describes how a festival organizer embraced a romantic notion of himself as an ‘arty’ person who was close to the festival artists while his superiors characterized him as being a ‘not-manager’, lacking commercial skills. Beech’s study provides sparse empirical detail on face-to-face interactions, but it makes a strong case for the analysis of how dialogue ‘acts to reinforce, refine or reject’ (Beech, : ) identity constructions (see also, e.g., Down and Reveley, ; Llewelyn, ). Other studies are sensitive to the in situ performance of identities, showing that people can switch from one type of identity construction to another. For instance, consultants may either distance themselves from, embrace, or overstate the competencies of their own professional groups (Visscher et al., ) and marketing managers may exclude or include others in their notions of ‘us’ or ‘me’ in order to flexibly construct both a competitive and a collaborative identity vis-à-vis their clients (Ellis and Ybema, ).
Institutional Dynamics: Subject Positioning When shifting the analytical focus to ‘institutional dynamics’—the fourth social circuit— first we zoom out to sketch a wider context (e.g. describing social life in a hospital in terms of a caste structure); we then zoom in to examine how context shapes the individual (individual members’ positioning within the caste structure), focusing on how people come to be socially defined. Social definitions and redefinitions are framed, for example, through the division of labour and the demarcation of lines of authority; the creation of shared beliefs and an ideal member role through normative control (Kunda, ), ‘identity regulation’ (Alvesson and Willmott, ), and ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, ); or the social construction of ‘subjectivity’ through ‘disciplinary’ processes (Foucault, ). All such processes are located in the wider societal mélange of cultural conditioning, class affiliation, and religious and moral codes. Analysing institutional dynamics then highlights how such social settings and wider contexts script, categorize, and shape people’s identity constructions. So, for example, professional and organizational scripts for appropriate or desirable behaviour, attributes, and aesthetics—e.g. official standards for professional conduct or informal dress code—provide disciplinary persuasions as to how individuals can act ‘normal’, play ‘the part’, or express ‘appropriate’ opinions. This social circuit portrays social interactions and individual interpretations as embedded within historical processes, organizational structures, managerial regimes, and wider discourses that constitute the ‘unacknowledged conditions’ and ‘unintended consequences’ of human action (Giddens, ). Within this social circuit the starting point for the analysis is social structure rather than individual agency, but it also emphasizes how the individual’s identity constructions, in turn, shape the social settings and institutional contexts, as ‘selves and sociality are mutually implicated and mutually co-constructed’ (Ybema et al., : ). The assertion of self-definition—while this may often merely reflect individual conformity to structure’s identity regulation—finds expression through,
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for example, role embracing and redefinition, emotional distancing, position taking, and rule breaking. Individuals present their selves to, and in, a particular context, conforming to or deviating from particular prescriptions. Studies sensitive to the socializing or ‘subjectifying’ effects of societal conditions, disciplinary discourses, and managerial regimes throw a different light on how, for instance, self-directed identity work (described under the social circuit of ‘inner conversation’) might be embedded in sociality. For instance, social theorists have argued that today’s narcissistic preoccupation with the self in Western society (Lasch, ) is related to the fracturing of sociality, theorized as ‘reflexive’ or ‘liquid’ modernization (e.g. Bauman, ; Giddens, ). Long-standing identities, these authors argue, have lost their solidity, definiteness, and continuity, because a post-traditional society no longer assigns a secure place within a conventional collective. Due to the breakdown or bracketing of traditional structures, the rapid flow of information, and the increasing importance of outward appearances (Alvesson, ) individual choice has become at once possible, important, and imperative, turning identity into an individualized and ongoing ‘reflexive project’ (Giddens, ). The search for ‘identity’ may thus be itself a symptom of individualism in late modernity and an effect of the ‘liquid’ conditions we live in. Critical scholars offer an alternative reading of such self-absorption. They point out that the individual’s preoccupation with their inner self—and the sense of self-alienation described by Costas and Fleming ()—also suits the interests of management, as it smothers collective employee resistance. A regime of normative control, for instance, posits a preferred identity or ideal member role (Kunda, ) and for management it can be beneficial if ‘those who do not readily fit the ideal mold’ understand their ‘deficiency’ as an individual problem rather than a socio-political issue to be collectively solved (Tracy and Tretheway, : ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. ‘Identity remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ). In this chapter, I have provided a few coordinates that may help locate identity, both theoretically and empirically. First, this chapter provided a theoretical underpinning for an essentially social understanding of identity construction. The starting point was the notion of identity as a bridging concept mediating agency and structure, sense of self and sociality. From this vantage point, social ‘reality’ is a duality—existing simultaneously in personal lifeworlds and supra-personal patterns and processes—and the process of constructing social realities (and identities) as a dynamic interplay or dialectic between individual agency and social structure. Identity construction arises at the intersection of, and in the interaction between, people’s sense of self and the environing social worlds in which their lives unfold. I discussed the implications of such a view for our conceptualization of identity and summarized the principles underpinning a social constructivist (or identity-in-context) perspective, discussing identity in terms of its positioning, performative, (co)produced, processual, and political qualities (the five p’s of identity construction if you will). Finally, I located identity in a variety of social worlds by discussing four different social circuits or scenes for the production of identities: inner conversations, self–other definitions, situated
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interactions, and institutional dynamics. This chapter underscores the importance of locating identity in specific social worlds and provides some thoughts and ideas regarding what to look for (the five p’s) and where to look (the four circuits). My hope is that it assists researchers more systematically to deploy identity as an analytical bridge between selves and others, identity and sociality.
N . In writing this chapter I imposed a few notable restrictions on myself (albeit without being overly strict). First, although the construction of people’s sense of collective self (‘we are . . . ’) is equally social, dispersed, and dynamic and I also use examples of collective identities, in this chapter I tend to focus on the individual’s sense of self (‘I am . . . ’). Second, individuals often construct their sense of self by referring to their past, present, and future, relating ‘who they are’ to ‘who they used to be’ or ‘expect/aspire to become’ (e.g. Costas and Grey ), but here I will discuss relational rather than temporal constructions of identity. Third, unintentionally, I tend to be biased towards discursive—rather than practice-based or material—dimensions of identity construction. Instead of restricting myself here, I did my best to counter it. . I here acknowledge the help given to me in developing ideas presented in this chapter by Nic Beech, Andrew Brown, Simon Down, Frans Kamsteeg, Tom Keenoy, Wim Koot, and Luzan Koster.
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Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., and Lok, J. (). ‘Being the Change: Resolving Institutional Contradiction through Identity Work’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Croft, C., Currie, G., and Lockett, A. (). ‘The Impact of Emotionally Important Social Identities on the Construction of a Managerial Leader Identity: A Challenge for Nurses in the English National Health Service’. Organization Studies, (), –. Czarniawska, B. (). Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Daubner-Siva, D., Ybema, S., Vinkenburg, C. J., and Beech, N. (). ‘The Talent Paradox: Talent Management as a Mixed Blessing’. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, (), –. Down, S. and Reveley, J. (). ‘Generational Encounters and the Social Formation of Entrepreneurial Identity: “Young Guns” and “Old Farts” ’. Organization, (), –. Down, S. and Reveley, J. (). ‘Between Narration and Interaction: Situating First-Line Supervisor Identity Work’. Human Relations, (), –. Drori, I., Wrzesniewski, A., and Ellis, S. (). ‘One Out of Many? Boundary Negotiation and Identity Formation in Postmerger Integration’. Organization Science, (), –. Elias, N. (). What is Sociology? New York: Columbia University Press. Ellis, N. and Ybema, S. (). ‘Marketing Identities: Shifting Circles of Identification in InterOrganizational Relationships’. Organization Studies, (), –. Fleming, P. and Spicer, A. (). ‘Power in Management and Organization Science’. The Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Foucault, M. (). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications. Garcia, P. and Hardy, C. (). ‘Positioning, Similarity and Difference: Narratives of Individual and Organisational Identities in an Australian University’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, , –. Giddens, A. (). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glimmerveen, L., Ybema, S., and Nies, H. (forthcoming). ‘Engaged yet Excluded: The Processual, Dispersed, and Political Dynamics of Boundary Work’. Human Relations. Hall, S. (ed.) (). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Jackall, R. (). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, R. (). ‘Rethinking Ethnicity: Identity, Categorization and Power’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, , –. Jenkins, R. (). Social Identity, th edition. New York: Routledge. Kamsteeg, F. (). ‘Transformation as Social Drama: Stories about Merging at North West University, South Africa’. Anthropology Southern Africa, (&), –. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (). ‘Power and Identity in Theory and Practice’. Sociological Review, (), –. Koot, W. C. J. (). ‘Strategic Utilization of Ethnicity in Contemporary Organizations’. In S. Sackmann (ed.) Cultural Complexity: Inherent Contrasts and Contradictions. London: Sage, pp. –. Koster, L. and Ybema, S. (forthcoming). ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin: Relational Identity Work in Interactional Dynamics’. Under review. Kunda, G. (). Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lammers, C. J. (). ‘Het ziekenhuis als kastemaatschappij’ [The Hospital as a Caste Society]. Sociologische Gids, (), –. Lasch, C. (). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W. W. Norton. Liberati, E. G., Gorli, M., and Scaratti, G. (). ‘Invisible Walls within Multidisciplinary Teams: Disciplinary Boundaries and their Effects on Integrated Care’. Social Science & Medicine, , –. Llewellyn, N. (). ‘ “He Probably Thought We Were Students”: Age Norms and the Exercise of Visual Judgement in Service Work’. Organization Studies, (), –.
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McInnes, P. and Corlett, S. (). ‘Conversational Identity Work in Everyday Interaction’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, (), –. Musson, G. and Duberley, J. (). ‘Change, Change or be Exchanged: The Discourse of Participation and the Manufacture of Identity’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Parker, M. (). Organizational Culture and Identity: Unity and Division at Work. London: Sage. Pearson, G. (). An Ethnography of English Fans: Cans, Cops and Carnivals. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Phillips, N. and C. Hardy (). Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Reed, M. I. (). ‘The Agency/Structure Dilemma in Organization Theory: Open Doors and Brick Walls’. In H. Tsoukas and C. Knudsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: MetaTheoretical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Smith, B. and Sparkes, A. C. (). ‘Contrasting Perspectives on Narrating Selves and Identities: An Invitation to Dialogue’. Qualitative Research, (), –. Tracy, S. J. and Trethewey, A. (). ‘Fracturing the Real-Self $ Fake-Self Dichotomy: Moving toward “Crystallized” Organizational Discourses and Identities’. Communication Theory, (), –. Visscher, K., Heusinkveld, S., and O’Mahoney, J. (). ‘Bricolage and Identity Work’. British Journal of Management, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Narrative, Life Story and Manager Identity: A Case Study in Autobiographical Identity Work’. Human Relations, (), –. Webb, J. (). Organisations, Identities and the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ybema, S. (). ‘Talk of Change: Temporal Contrasts and Collective Identities’. Organization Studies, (), –. Ybema, S. and Byun, H. (). ‘Unequal Power Relations, Identity Discourse and Cultural Distinction Drawing in MNCs’. In C. Dörrenbächer and M. Geppert (eds.), Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation: The Role of Interests, Identities, and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Ybema, S., Kamsteeg, F., and Veldhuizen, K. (). ‘Sensitivity to Situated Positionings: Generating Insight into Organizational Change’. Management Learning. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, (), –. Ybema, S., Vroemisse, M., and Van Marrewijk, A. H. (). ‘Constructing Identity by Deconstructing Distinctiveness: Building Partnerships across Cultural and Hierarchical Divides’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, (), –. Young, E. (). ‘On the Naming of the Rose: Interests and Multiple Meanings as Elements of Organizational Culture’. Organization Studies, (), –.
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‘ ’ A Metaphor Taken Literally? .......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter explores the use of metaphor in identity-related research in organization studies via a systematic analysis of five key review articles. In total, different identity metaphors were identified. It is posited that the existence of a vast array of identity metaphors increases complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy rather than producing definitional clarity or meaningful insights. In order to enhance identity research, the authors advocate a focus on three specific forms of metaphor-based inquiry: () a deductive approach using metaphors as analytic tools in data gathering (i.e. a projective empirical focus) rather than simply using them as a means of interpreting or framing data (a reflective conceptual emphasis); () exposing embedded identity metaphors through inductive epistemologies (e.g. via deconstruction and critical discursive techniques); and () the investigation of ‘dormant identity metaphors’ (such as ‘identity work’) using correspondence-based approaches to metaphor via processes of conceptual blending.
I
.................................................................................................................................. Metaphors are an inevitable and unavoidable component of language (Lakoff and Johnson, ). They do more than act as figurative embellishments (Grant and Oswick, a) insofar as they involve a carrying over of attributes that enables ‘the transfer of information about a relatively familiar subject (often referred to as the source or base domain) to a new and relatively unknown subject (often referred to as the target domain)’ (Grant and Oswick, b: ). In effect, the metaphorical process of transferring or superimposing a relatively concrete construct (i.e. a metaphorical source domain) on to a relatively abstract construct (i.e. a literal target domain) produces new insights (Lakoff and Johnson, ). For example, the metaphor ‘organization as family’ invites the projection of the properties of a family (e.g. paternalistic behaviour, matriarchy, family ties, family values, family feuds, and so on) onto an organization to generate ‘ways of thinking’ and ‘ways of seeing’
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‘ ’ : ?
(Morgan, ). Hence, metaphors are ‘a process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence’ (Schön, : ) because they act as ‘generators of new meaning’ (Morgan, : ). Metaphors can also operate as powerful educational devices because they aid understanding and learning due to their vividness, compactness, and ability to convey the inexpressible (Ortony, ). As powerful linguistic devices, metaphors have played an important role in organization theory and organizational theorizing (cf. Grant and Oswick, a; Morgan, , ; Ortenblad et al., ). Hence, it is unsurprising that research on identity in organization studies is replete with metaphors. As Brown asserts (: –): ‘Identity work . . . is the most significant metaphor (cf. Morgan, ; Tsoukas, ) among many that may be useful in the analysis of identities construction in and around organizations’. However, within the extant literature, metaphors relating to identity are typically deployed in takenfor-granted and largely unreflexive ways. Put differently, metaphor-based contributions which explicitly and critically engage with identity, identification, and identity work are rare. Alvesson’s () articulation of different metaphorical images of identity (e.g. selfdoubters, strugglers, surfers, storytellers, strategists, stencils, and soldiers) and Brown’s discussion of the ‘identity work’ metaphor are notable exceptions. In this chapter, we explore the proliferation of largely unacknowledged metaphor-use in the identity discourse and the absence of focused metaphor-based explorations and analyses of identity within organizations and organization studies. There are three main parts to this chapter. First, we seek to expose the prevalent identity-related metaphors that arise within the field (e.g. ‘identity work’, ‘identity play’, and so on). In doing so, we undertake a brief content analysis of some review articles on identity appearing in organization studies literature. Second, we explore how metaphors operate in the field, offer a classification of the types of metaphor (i.e. live, dead, and dormant metaphors), discuss different forms of metaphorical engagement (inductive versus deductive approaches), and analyse an alternative conceptualization of ‘metaphors as blending devices’, developed within the field of cognitive linguistics (Fauconnier, ; Fauconnier and Turner, ). Finally, we present some future directions for metaphor-based identity research and outline how certain avenues of inquiry could potentially extend and enhance insights into processes of identification, identity construction, and identity work within organizations and organization studies.
D I W: A P C M?
.................................................................................................................................. A useful starting point for exploring the range of different perspectives taken on identityrelated work, and the attendant variety of metaphors marshalled in support of these perspectives, is to review some of the published reviews and broadly framed conceptual pieces. Rather than consider narrower work on the topic—such as literature reviews on ‘professional identity’ (Caza and Creary, ), ‘leadership identity’ (van Knippenberg et al., ), ‘social identity’ (Haslam and Ellemers, ), and ‘multiple identities’ (Ramarajan, )—we focused on broader and more generically-framed treatments of identity. We also decided to limit our analysis to aspects of individual identity in relation to
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organizations and organizational scholarship rather than consider the more collective and de-individualized notion of ‘organizational identity’ or engage with wider disciplinary contributions (i.e. reviews beyond organization studies in areas such as psychology, sociology or anthropology). Five contributions met these criteria (Alvesson et al., ; Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ; Miscenko and Day, ; Swann et al., ). While similar, they nevertheless each have a slightly different emphasis. Alvesson et al. (), foreground the concept of ‘identity research’ (i.e. how researchers engage with the topic); Miscenko and Day’s () review centres on ‘work identity’ (i.e. the processes of identification with regards to work and the workplace); Brown () focuses on ‘identity work’ (i.e. contrasting ways of thinking about identity and identification); Ashforth and Schinoff () concentrate on ‘identity construction’ (i.e. the process by which individuals come to define themselves in organizations); and Swann et al. (), present a theory of ‘identity negotiation’ in the workplace (i.e. what principles govern the process of negotiating identity in work contexts). These five sources were systematically analysed for identitybased constructs and concepts that were then classified as either literal or metaphorical in nature (see Table .). To begin with, it is interesting how many different identity constructs are covered in the five review articles analysed. There were identity-based constructs mentioned across the review articles. If repeated constructs are ignored, a total of different constructs are contained in Table .. Arguably, the existence of such a vast array of identity-related terms goes some way to explaining why research into identity in organizations can be characterized as ‘an increasingly vast, heterogeneous, and fragmented body of literature’ (Miscenko and Day, : ). In order to capture, present, explain, and differentiate the inherent etymological variety and range of concepts within the identity discourse, scholars resort to metaphor to present their intellectual wares in a novel, persuasive, and seductive manner. Moreover, it is not particularly surprising that a field characterized by disciplinary diversity, contested meanings, and considerable ambiguity provides fertile ground for the proliferation of metaphors. More surprising than the total volume of identity concepts is the proportion of insights that can be classified as being largely figurative rather than literal. In all, just under per cent (i.e. n = ) of constructs had metaphorical connotations. Moreover, the variety and diversity of the metaphors produced was extensive and the corpus contained a number of contrasting perspectives. For instance, some metaphors were enlisted to evoke a sense of predictability and relative consistency via figurative framing, such as: ‘coherent identities’ (Ybema et al., ), ‘fixed identities’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, ), ‘stable identities’ (Petriglieri, ), and ‘secure identities’ (Brown, ). Other metaphors depicted a sense of indeterminacy, movement, and/or disruption. These included discussion of ‘cracked and fissured identities’ (Lawler, ), ‘contradictory identities’ (Humphreys and Brown, ; Shotter and Gergen, ), ‘fragmented identities’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ), ‘provisional identities’ (Tansley and Tietze, ), ‘blurred identities’ (Crisp and Hewstone, ), and ‘divided identities’ (Ford, ). Following on from categorizing identity-based constructs based on whether they were literal or metaphorical in nature, we further categorized the metaphors used in the literature as being ‘categories and types’, ‘processes and practices’, or ‘other identity phenomena’ (see Table .).
Table 4.1 The prevalence of literal and metaphorical terms in the identity discourse Quasi-literal identity categories, concepts, and constructs mentioned in the literature reviews
Quasi-explicit examples of identity-based metaphor-use within the literature reviews
Alvesson et al. (2008)
anti-identities, competing identity stories, conscious identity work, dialogical identity work, discursive identity construction, identities at work, identity interviews, identity literature, identity matters, identity norms, identity research, identity scholarship, identity studies, identity theorists, identity vocabularies, individual identity, in-group identities, leadership identity, managerial identities, multiple identities, new identities, occupational identities, organizational identities, organizational identification, organizational identification scholarship, organizing identity, personal identity, professional identities, self-identity, social identification, social identity (n = 31).
collective identities, competing identities, crafting of identities, default identity, dis-identification, fragmented identity, identification levels, identity construction, identity control, identity crises, identity development, identity flux, identity frame, identity label, identity levels, identity patterns, identity pressures, identity regularities, identity regulation, identity repair, identity solutions, identity threats, identity work, ingredients of identity, integrated identity, internal personal identity work, invisible identity cage, managed identity work, measuring identity, micro-processes of identity construction, new identities, out of favour identities, remedial identity work, secure identity position, shifting identities (n = 35).
Miscenko and Day (2016)
ambivalent identification, appropriate identities, associated identity, beneficial identity, collective identity, dual identity, ethnic identity, family identities, gender identity, group identification, identity change, identity customization processes, identity motives, identity narratives, identityrelevant behaviour, individual-level work identity, interpersonal-level work identity, intra-individual team identification, leader identity, managerial identity construction, meaningful identity, multiple identities, multiple work identities, narcissistic organizational identification, narrative self-identity, non-work identities, occupational identity, occupational identification, organizational identification, personal identity, professional identity, relational identification, relational work identity development, role identity, social identity, strong identification, team identification, work identity, workgroup identification, workplace identities, work-related identity (n = 28).
identity activation, identity coherence, identity demands, identity fluidity, identity inclusiveness, identity loss, identity salience, identity construction, identity stability, identity strain, identity threats, identity transformation, identity verification, interconnected sub-identities, internal identity asymmetry, mutual identity verification, particularistic identity, provisional identities, work identity construction, managerial identity construction, identity conflicts (n = 21).
(continued )
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Author(s)
Table 4.1 Continued Quasi-literal identity categories, concepts, and constructs mentioned in the literature reviews
Quasi-explicit examples of identity-based metaphor-use within the literature reviews
Brown (2015)
identity change, identity formation, identity narratives, identity literature, identity scholars, identity-stories, identity theorizing, identity workspaces, positive and negative identities (n = 9).
authentic identities, blurred identities, coherent identities, contradictory identities, cracked identities, divided identities, elastic identities, evolutionally adaptive identities, fake identities, false identities, fissured identities, fixed identities, fluid identities, fragile identities, fragmented identities, identity bricolage, identity conflicts, identity crises, identity jujitsu, identity play, identity practicing, identity regulation, identity threat, identity work, malleable identities, negative identities, non-work identities, positive identities, preferred identities, real identities, robust identity, secure identities, shifting identities, stable identities, tainted identities, tenuous identities, true identities, whimsical identities, work identities, identity construction (n = 39).
Ashforth and Schinoff (2016)
identity narratives, identity motives, identity scholarship, progressive identity development, social identity, personal identity, multiple identities, role identity, relational identity, adaptation focused identities, organizationally desired identity, work-based identities, career identity, occupational identity (n = 16).
identity construction, emergent identities, identity threats, corporatist identity, agreeable identities, validated identity, identity work, unwanted identities, identity regulation, identity-asequilibrium, budding identity, identity negotiation, identity process, identity aptitudes, situated identity, identity states, identity reconstruction (n = 18).
Swann et al. (2009)
identity negotiation, employee identity, situated identity, workplace identity, organization specific identities, situated workplace identities, identity related expectations, identity change, identity negotiation theory, final identities, initial identity, organizational identity, social identity, new identity, existing identities, incompatible identities, multiple identities, collective identity, relational identity, old identities, different identities, work-related identities, religious identities, actual identities (n = 24).
identity cues, identity capital, stable identities of workers, symmetric identity negotiation, asymmetric identity negotiation, chronic identities, identity congruence, ensuing identity, identity negotiation process, stable identities, identity displays, identity concern, true identity, identity verification, identity disconfirming, easy-going identity, preferred identity, distinct identities, discrepant identities, overarching identity, interconnected situated identity, mutually acceptable situated identity, interdependent situated identities (n = 24).
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Author(s)
Table 4.2 Categorization of literal and metaphorical identity terms
Identity categories and types
Metaphorical
leader identity, anti-identities, identities at work, individual identity, in-group identities, leadership identity, managerial identity, multiple identities, new identities, occupational identities, organizational identities, personal identity, professional identity, self-identity, social identity, appropriate identities, associated identities, beneficial identities, collective identity, dual identity, ethnic identity, family identities, gender identity, group identification, identity, individual-level work identity, interpersonal-level work identity, intra individual team identification, meaningful identity, multiple work identity, narrative selfidentity, non-work identities, personal identity, role identity, workplace identities, work-related identity, positive and negative identities, relational identity, adaptation focused identities, organizationally desired identity, workbased identities, career identity, employee identity, organization specific identity, situated workplace identities, interconnected situated identity, mutually acceptable situated identities, interdependent situated identities, final identities, initial identity, existing identities, incompatible identity, old identities, religious identities, actual identities (n = 55).
collective identities, competing identities, default identities, fragmented identities, identification levels, identity control, identity frame, identity label, identity levels, identity patterns, identity pressures, identities regularities, identity threats, integrated identity, invisible identity cage, new identities, out of favour identities, secure identity position, identity demands, identity inclusiveness, identity loss, identity salience, identity stability, identity strain, interconnected sub-identities, internal identity asymmetry, particularistic identity, provisional identities, authentic identities, blurred identities, contradictory identities, cracked identities, divided identities, elastic identities, evolutionally adaptive identities, fake identities, false identities, fissured identities, fixed identities, fluid identities, fragile identities, fragmented identities, identity threat, identity, malleable identities, negative identities, non-work identities, positive identities, preferred identities, real identities, robust identity, secure identities, shifting identities, stable identities, tainted identities, tenuous identities, true identities, whimsical identities, work identities, emergent identities, corporatist identity, agreeable identities, validated identity, unwanted identity, budding identity, situated identity, coherent identities, stable identities of workers, chronic identity, ensuing identity, true identity, easy-going identity, preferred identity, distinct identities, discrepant identities, overarching identity (n = 76). (continued )
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Literal
Literal
Metaphorical
Identity processes and practices
identity change, identity construction, identity customization processes, identity-relevant behaviour, relational work identity development, strong identification, team identification, workgroup identification, conscious identity work, discursive identity construction, identity interviews, identity research, identity studies, organizational identification, social identification, organizing identity, identity formation, identity theorizing, managerial identity construction, progressive identity development, identity reconstruction, ambivalent identification, dialogical identity work, occupational identification (n = 25).
crafting identities, internal personal identity work, disidentification, identity construction, identity development, identity regulation, identity repair, identity solutions, identity work, managed identity work, measuring identity, micro-processes of identity construction, remedial identity work, shifting identities, identity activation, identity transformation, mutual identity verification, work identity construction, identity verification, identity bricolage, identity jujitsu, identity play, identity practicing, symmetric identity negotiation, asymmetric identity negotiation, identity displays, identity verification, identity disconfirming (n = 30).
Other identity phenomena*
competing identity stories, identity literature, identity matters, identity norms, identity scholarship, identity theorists, identity narratives, identity scholars, identity-stories, identity workspaces, identity related expectations, identity negotiation theory, organizational identification scholarship, identity motives (n = 14).
identity flux, ingredients of identity, identity coherence, identity fluidity, identity crises, identity-as-equilibrium, identity capital, identity cues, identity congruence, identity concern, identity threats, identity conflicts (n = 12).
* (i.e. not discernible categories or distinctive identity-based processes)
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Table 4.2 Continued
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Using the tripartite classification offered in Table ., we found that out of the identity-based metaphors identified, per cent (n = ) could be construed as being ‘identity categories or types’. The constructs that appeared in this category tended to be ways of delineating different types of identity. A little under per cent (n = ) of these were literal categories or types such as ‘religious identities’, ‘ethnic identity’, and ‘leadership identity’. Although potentially complex phenomena in their own right (e.g. religion, ethnicity, and leadership are messy concepts), these literal identity constructs are generally clearly demarcated insofar as we know what is broadly meant by the category in each instance (e.g. leadership identity as distinguishable from a different non-leadership identity). Metaphorical identity ‘categories and types’ on the other hand—such as ‘whimsical identity’, ‘positive identity’, and ‘fragile identities’—are generally harder to pin down, overtly figurative in nature, and offer considerable conceptual latitude. The main difference between literal and metaphorical ‘identity categories and types’ that can be derived from Table . is that literal categories are aimed at ‘closing down meaning’ (i.e. denotative) while metaphorical categories, although clearly having some boundedness, serve to ‘open up meaning’ (i.e. connotative). In total per cent (n = ) of the terms we identified were classified as being ‘identity processes and practices’. This category could be described as containing predominantly ‘identity verbs’ (i.e. the enactment or doing of identity). Similar to the proportions in the first category, per cent (n = ) of the identity constructs were literal while per cent (n = ) were metaphorical in nature (such as ‘identity activation’ and ‘identity regulation’. Interestingly, although perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a lot of emphasis on indeterminacy, movement, and instability (e.g. ‘identity bricolage’, ‘identity jujitsu’, ‘shifting identities’). Our final category, ‘others’, which accounted for just per cent (n = ) of the constructs, was almost equally divided between literal and metaphorical constructs, per cent (n = ) and per cent (n = ) respectively. This section of the table was used to place identity metaphors which could not easily be seen as fitting into the two main categories. The content ranged from tangible, material entities (e.g. identity theorists, identity scholars, and identity workspaces) to more intangible concepts (e.g. identity motives, identity cues, and identity conflicts) along with a few more abstract terms (such as ‘identity-as-equilibrium’ and ‘ingredients of identity’). Given that per cent of the constructs listed in Table . pertain to identity categories and types, one of the overarching inferences that can be drawn is that the extant literature on identity has devoted a significant amount of time to classifying (or pigeonholing) forms of identity as opposed to understanding identity processes. In this regard, considerable attention has centred on ‘what it is’ activity (i.e. categorizing) rather than ‘how it works’ activity (i.e. process emphasis). Beyond this, the volume and breadth of metaphors identified in Tables . and . raise further questions about the nature of these metaphors and the implications for identity inferences and, more specifically, for identity research. It is perhaps helpful to have a deeper dive into how metaphors work and, more specifically, how they work in relation to identity and identification in organization studies. It is to this issue that we now turn our attention.
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T I M M I
.................................................................................................................................. The prevalence of metaphors within the extant identity literature can largely be attributed to both their ability to produce new meanings (i.e. as generative devices) and their value as mechanisms for communicating insights (i.e. as educational devices). Beyond concerns about the volume of metaphors within the identity discourse, which is an issue of quantity (i.e. how many metaphors there are), we also need to reflect on the utility of the specific metaphors deployed (i.e. how they are used). In order to do so, it is helpful to think in terms of different categories of metaphor.
Obvious and Less Obvious Identity Metaphors Several commentators on metaphor have drawn a distinction between what can be referred to as live, dead, and dormant metaphors (Fraser, ; Grant and Oswick, b; Lakoff and Johnson, ; Tsoukas, ). ‘Live metaphors’ are a relatively obvious form of analogy insofar as their use is conscious and acknowledged as being explicitly figurative in nature (Lakoff and Johnson, ). For example, the notion of ‘identity jujitsu’ (Kreiner and Sheep, ) is a deliberately figurative use of language that is intended to produce evocative imagery that provides novel ways of thinking about certain properties of identity. In this regard, the development of a metaphor is clear to both the ‘metaphor producer’ (e.g. the identity researcher) and the ‘metaphor consumer’ (e.g. the reader). Another example is Alvesson and Robertson’s (: ) idea of ‘teflonic identity manoeuvring’, which projects the ‘slippery’ and ‘nothing sticks’ characteristics of Teflon on to the identity work undertaken by investment bankers as they attempt to maintain a positive sense of self. Other live metaphors include ‘invisible identity cage’ (Alvesson et al., ), ‘identity fluidity’ (Miscenko and Day, ), and ‘cracked identities’ (Brown, ) where the construct of identity cannot be easily misconstrued in a literal sense. The impact of live metaphors on the generation of identity-related knowledge is benign for two reasons. First, they act primarily as a way of conveying predetermined knowledge in a relatively vivid and accessible way. Hence, in the case of ‘teflonic identity manoeuvring’ (Alvesson and Robertson, ), the literal understanding of how investment bankers manage their notion of selfhood is a prerequisite to then enlisting the ‘teflon’ metaphor. In these instances, at worst, metaphor-use acts as a form of ‘poetic embellishment’ (Pinder and Bourgeois, ) and, at best, as a useful way of ‘disseminating knowledge’ rather than a means of generating knowledge (Oswick et al., ). Second, because the producers and consumers of live metaphors realize they are figurative devices their impact is bounded and concomitantly managed because they are not mistakenly taken to be literal representations (i.e. everyone knows that identities are not really teflonic).
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Unlike live metaphors, ‘dead metaphors’ are perceived to have effectively stopped being recognized as operating in a figurative sense because they have ‘become so familiar and so habitual that we have ceased to become aware of their metaphorical nature and use them as literal terms’ (Tsoukas, : ). Concepts such as ‘identity construction’ and ‘identity regulation’ are examples of phrases that are generally presented as being literal. In such situations it is only through deliberate interrogation that metaphors are revealed as being metaphorical (i.e. identity, as a non-material phenomenon, cannot be literally ‘constructed’ or ‘regulated’). Within identity-related research, dead metaphors have relatively limited utility insofar as they are unreflexively treated as literal signifiers rather than image generating figures of speech. Their role is largely ‘denotative’ rather than ‘connotative’ (Barthes, ), and, as such, they do not generally aid the generation of new insights or knowledge (Oswick et al., ). Indeed, in some instances they can inadvertently act as knowledge constraining devices. This arises because at a subliminal level they can shut off other readings of a particular concept or construct. Take, for example, the notion of ‘identity regulation’. The idea of ‘regulation’ in this context suggests the ability to moderate one’s identity (i.e. to regulate it). This in turn subliminally, and somewhat problematically, implies a disproportionate degree of predictability and scaled controllability. Hence, regulating one’s identity is depicted as operating in a controlled, cause-and-effect way that can be figuratively equated to, for instance, regulating the flow of water through a kitchen tap. In this regard, ‘identity regulation’ subconsciously overplays the degree of control that can be exercised in relation to the management of self and underplays other readings of identity that present it as inherently complex, messy, and ambiguous. The net effect is that the process of generating new insights is often closed down, rather than opened up, by dead metaphors. Finally, ‘dormant metaphors’ fall somewhere between live and dead metaphors insofar as they are ‘used as literal terms but are distinguishable from dead metaphors because they are in fact semi-literal’ (Grant and Oswick, b: ). Arguably, the notion of ‘identity work’ exists in the liminal space between on the one hand the explicit use of metaphors and on the other the largely unconscious use of metaphors that are treated as if they are literal representations of phenomena. The dormant nature of ‘identity work’ means that this signifier is treated as a literal term in everyday use. But, when interrogated and juxtaposed with other terms, such as ‘identity play’, it becomes apparent that the enactment of identitybased activity is not literally work insofar as it does not necessarily require overt physical effort or exertion (i.e. it is not work) and it does not have to occur in a prescribed locale or context (i.e. within a work setting rather than a non-work setting). The metaphorical credentials of ‘identity work’ become even more evident if one compares it to the term ‘work identity’. We would contend that the notion of a ‘work identity’ is a literal signifier, rather than a figurative construct, because it is contingent upon the bounded and largely conscious enactment of certain forms of either physical or discursive activity and it is typically connected to a specific context (i.e. it is workplace-related). The fact that dormant metaphors occupy a space between live and dead metaphors has implications for identity research and knowledge creation. The ‘in between’ status of these metaphors means that, when they are recognized and reflected upon as being metaphorical devices, one of the unintended consequences is to engage in a process of ‘figurative dichotomization’. For example, if one explicitly treats ‘identity work’ as a metaphorical
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construct, the temptation in seeking to unpack the metaphor is to ask: What is the opposite or antithesis of ‘identity work’? The resultant search for a ‘counter-metaphor’ (Oswick, ) is likely to lead to the consideration of either ‘non-identity work’ or ‘identity play’. Equally, the deliberate contemplation of ‘identity coherence’ (Ybema et al., ), as a form of dormant metaphor, is likely to lead to a counter-focus on ‘identity fragmentation’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Arguably, the problem with this process of countermetaphor generation is that it privileges a dangerous binary logic (Beech and Cairns, ). Put differently, it promotes a kind of ‘black and white’ dichotomy that limits the capacity to explore identity issues in terms of ‘shades of grey’ (e.g. the ways in which identity is simultaneously both fixed/stable/coherent and dynamic/contradictory/fragmented).
F C CB I M
.................................................................................................................................. Thus far, the categories of metaphors discussed have all relied upon a carrying over of properties from a metaphor (i.e. a concrete or source domain) to aspects of identity/identity work (i.e. an abstract or target domain). This is effectively a unidirectional process (i.e. from a metaphorical source to a literal target). An alternative form of metaphorical thinking has been developed by Fauconnier and Turner (). They present the analogical process as a form of ‘conceptual blending’ involving an interaction between two domains to create an alternative synthetic image or construct. This involves a messy process of correspondence between two domains rather than a simple carrying over or borrowing from one domain to another. More specifically, they argue that there is a form of cognitive integration which ‘involves setting up mental spaces, matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend, locating shared structures, projecting backwards to inputs, recruiting new structure to the inputs or the blend, and running various operations in the blend itself ’ (Fauconnier and Turner, : ). Conceptual blending, as a way of thinking about metaphor has, to a certain extent, been applied within organization studies (cf. Cornelissen, ; Oswick et al., ; Oswick and Jones, ). Drawing upon the work from cognitive linguistics (i.e. Black, ; Fauconnier and Turner, ; Gentner, ), Cornelissen (: ) advocates the use of a ‘domains-interaction model’ in organization analysis where ‘metaphor involves the conjunction of whole semantic domains in which a correspondence between terms or concepts is constructed rather than deciphered and where the resultant image and meaning is creative’. Cornelissen proposes a three-stage model of interaction between domains: () development of a generic structure—where upon ‘encountering a metaphor, its terms are encoded, the relevant domains are inferred, the structures to be seen as parallel are found, and the correspondences between these structures are mapped’; () development and elaboration of the blend—following the construction of a generic structure, ‘further instance-specific information is transferred from the target and source concepts and is elaborated upon’ and the ‘process of blending composes elements from the target and source concepts, and, furthermore, leads the comprehender (i.e., the theorist) to complete and elaborate on the composition made’; and, () emergent meaning—in the final stage ‘the meaning (ideas and
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conjectures) that emerges from the blend is linked and translated back to the input target concept’ and there is ‘new meaning in the blend that is not simply a composition of meanings that can be found in either the target or source concepts’ (Cornelissen, : ). The outcome of this process is that it ‘forces us to see a target subject such as organization in a new light’ (Cornelissen, : ). Cornelissen () uses the examples of ‘the learning organization’ and ‘organizational identity’ to show the potential of his approach. He suggests that these two examples work well because ‘the semantic domains conjoined within both metaphors are considerably distant (i.e., the social world of organizations versus the psychological world of cognition, personality, and identity formation)’ (Cornelissen, : ). And, the dissimilarity of conjoined domains is the reason why both metaphors ‘are “apt” and have indeed forced organizational theorists and researchers to create resemblances between concepts and their respective domains that did not seem particularly related beforehand’ (Cornelissen, : ). Arguably, there is considerable scope for using a blending, correspondence-based approach in relation to identity and identification metaphors. An obvious example is the notion of ‘identity work’, with ‘work’ constituting a source domain and ‘identity’ acting as a target domain, and where the two conjoined domains are considerably distant (e.g. ‘work’ as a tangible outer-world activity versus ‘identity’ as an intangible inner-world endeavour). Taking a domains-interaction approach with other conjoined domains—such as ‘selfidentity’, ‘social identity’, and/or ‘identity play’—might also offer fruitful ways of developing new and interesting research pathways and avenues for identity-based inquiry.
I E I M
.................................................................................................................................. It is important to consider how identity scholars engage with metaphors during the research process. A distinction can be drawn between what have been referred to as inductive and deductive approaches (Cornelissen et al., ; Grant and Oswick, b; Palmer and Dunford, ). Deductive approaches utilize metaphors in a projective manner insofar as the researcher typically selects a metaphor and superimposes it on a situation, object, or concept and ‘the emphasis is on illustrating how particular metaphors can be applied to organizational situations’ (Palmer and Dunford, : ). The imposition of deductive metaphors tends to occur in one of two main ways (i.e. conceptually or empirically). When applied in a conceptual sense, a metaphor is imposed on literal insights that emerge from the research process. So, for example, if we return to the notion of ‘teflonic identities’ (Alvesson and Robertson, ) discussed earlier, this is a term developed by the researchers to frame the data produced by respondents rather than being used by respondents themselves. By contrast, the empirical use of deductive metaphors arises when they are deployed as an integral part of the data gathering process itself. A deductive style of inquiry that projects metaphors on to pre-existing concepts is commonplace within identity research and is valuable in helping to describe the literal phenomena that are uncovered via research (cf. Alvesson, ; Alvesson and Robertson,
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; Kreiner and Sheep, ). Identity-based inquiry that uses metaphors deductively as means for generating data is far less common. Enlisting metaphors in data gathering is, nevertheless, a potentially valuable endeavour. Indeed, Brink () has highlighted the benefits of treating ‘metaphors as data’. Asking respondents to describe identity constructs by projectively representing them as analogous to other objects or concepts has the potential to unlock deep/subliminal connections and generate powerful/evocative insights. This deductive analogical approach has also been applied in highly effective and innovative ways in other areas of organizational research to explore phenomena by ‘drawing pictures’ (Broussine and Vince, ) and assembling ‘toy construction materials’ (Heracleous and Jacobs, ). Inductive metaphors are very different to their deductive counterparts insofar as they are uncovered via research. Here, the focus for researchers is on revealing and analysing the pre-existing metaphors that are contained in the discourse of organizational actors or embedded in the text of various documentary sources. To an extent, the second part of this chapter is an example of applying an inductive metaphor-based approach to identity work. It examines the extant literature to reveal patterns of contemporary identity-related metaphor-use. We contend that there is considerable scope for applying an inductive metaphor-based approach to explore the representation of identity and identity-related perspectives in other texts or within naturally occurring discourse within organizational settings.
I M: S C C
.................................................................................................................................. Our discussion has explored how metaphors have been deployed in the study of identity, identification, and identity work. It has revealed that the metaphor of identity work has, as the title of this chapter suggests, been taken literally (i.e. it has been treated in most of the extant literature as a literal rather than a figurative descriptor). It has also highlighted that there is a vast array of identity metaphors used within the identity discourse (see Table .). We contend that the metaphor of identity and the attendant variety of other identity metaphors has hindered rather than helped the advancement of identity research. More specifically, the proliferation of metaphor-based identity concepts has increased complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy rather than promoting consensus and definitional clarity. This is somewhat paradoxical because identity metaphors, as devices designed to aid insight and understanding, appear to have obscured insight and created considerable misunderstanding. This problem is compounded by an unhelpful process of interplay between literal and figurative language in which more identity concepts produce more metaphors and more metaphors produce more identity concepts. The overriding inference that might be drawn here is that we need fewer identity metaphors! However, this is overly simplistic. It is better to draw a distinction between the different categories of identitybased metaphors and metaphorical approaches highlighted in terms of their relative status and utility.
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We believe that enrolling metaphors to frame literal identity concepts that are already understood is generally overused by identity scholars and also of relatively limited value insofar as it operates as a means of embellishing, disseminating, or rendering accessible pre-existing knowledge rather than generating genuinely new knowledge. Hence, researchers should refrain from focusing on projecting obvious figurative terms (i.e. live metaphors) during the process of theorizing about identity constructs (i.e. a conceptually-informed deductive approach). This is not to say that the deliberate imposition of metaphors is necessarily problematic. To the contrary, we would advocate using a deductive metaphorical approach as a means of gathering data (i.e. a projective empirical focus) rather than as a means of interpreting data (a reflective theoretical emphasis). Put differently, using metaphors with research respondents is divergent, generative, and has the potential to create new identity insights. By contrast, a researcher imposing a metaphor(s) on theory or post-hoc to frame research findings actually tends to be convergent, close down generativity, and limits knowledge generation. Beyond imposing metaphors as part of the research process, there is also considerable scope for identity researchers to spend time exposing them through inductive epistemologies. This can be actioned in at least two ways. First, we encourage concerted efforts to uncover ‘dead identity metaphors’ (such as ‘identity construction’ and ‘identity regulation’ discussed earlier) and explore the subliminal liberating and constraining effects of these taken-for-granted signifiers. This type of inquiry requires a close interrogation of naturally occurring talk (i.e. identity discourses) and/or the scrutiny of written material (i.e. identity texts) via techniques, such as: deconstruction analysis (Kilduff, ), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, ), rhetorical analysis (Cheney et al., ), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, ). Second, we strongly support the investigation of ‘dormant identity metaphors’ (such as ‘identity work’) using correspondence-based approaches to metaphor via ‘conceptual blending’ (Fauconnier and Turner, ) and/or the application of the ‘domains-interaction model’ (Cornelissen, ) to reveal radical and novel insights into identity and identification in organizations and organization research.
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Positioning the Self and Others Across Organizational and Network Boundaries .......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter argues that studies that embrace some notion of networks, supply chains, and markets in exploring identity can enhance the wider identity field in organization studies. The authors show that boundary spanners engage in identity work from a particular position of liminality where the tensions of identity become amplified. Hence, in their identity work, boundaries oscillate as they seek to define who counts as ‘the other’; and different identity levels are juxtaposed and particular characteristics activated to legitimize their role. The picture emerges of incoherence and irresolution in identity work as central to interactions across organizational boundaries. Nevertheless, the literature also regards the construction of identity as critical to effective performance in inter-organizational relationships and to how the employing organization is positioned in a variety of networks. This identity work is, therefore, fundamental to opportunities and constraints available to the organization. Important and consequential questions about the role of identity in power and agency are thus emerging.
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.................................................................................................................................. B (: , emphasis added) reminds us that researchers into identities and identity work in organizations ‘have focused on the strategies and tactics of identity work associated with different groups of people in particular organizations’. Recent reviews of the literature reinforce the emphasis upon identities within organizations. For example, Atewologun et al. (: ) explicitly exclude studies ‘with identities construed primarily outside
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organizations’ to focus on identities relating to the performance of ‘a role or a job, in relation to others, within the organizational structure’ (: ). Similarly, Miscenko and Day (: ) consider ‘individual work identity in the context of so-called traditional work’ which they characterize by elements such as a ‘predefined compensation scheme and work schedule, hierarchical organizational structure, and clearly defined job positions’. The dominant intra-organizational focus has produced rich understanding of identities and identity work within organizations. Yet this field of scholarship has generated a more limited understanding of these phenomena amongst those whose work spans organizational boundaries and who are as embedded in inter-organizational networks as they are in the more formalized structures and positions of the bounded organization. A discussion of identity in organizations that embraces some notions of extraorganizational linkages and networks builds on and contributes to extant scholarship in several ways. First, considerable attention has rightly been given to identity work in particularly demanding organizational situations, yet the tensions of everyday work and the difficulties in navigating these might be expected to be amplified for boundary spanners operating in contexts that lack the formal structure and definition found within the organization. Second, in order for identity studies to contribute to a broader social understanding, ‘there is a need for research that explores identity talk of organizational actors who build and maintain relationships across institutional, social, and cultural boundaries’ (Ybema et al., : ). As Brown (: ) notes, ‘there is much we still do not know about how contexts—particularly organizational and national cultural settings— affect individuals’ identities and identity work’. This is frustrating since ‘there is broader recognition that individuals have multiple work identifications, some of which are embedded or nested (e.g. job, department, organization), and others of which cross-cut these boundaries’ (Brown, : ). It is the implications of just such ‘cross-cutting’ that we explore in this chapter, mainly for individual identities but also for how identity construction processes can affect the organizations and network contexts in which they are often embedded. So what do we mean by boundaries, networks, and boundary spanners in the arena of identity studies? At the firm level, two organizations that interact can be considered to form a dyad, whereas three or more form an inter-organizational network (Provan et al., ). The nodes in a network may be individuals or organized groups such as family enterprises or business firms, and the relationships and exchanges between nodes make up networks. Organizations are typically represented by individual actors such as managers, professionals, or senior executives operating in boundary-spanning roles with some responsibilities for the management of specific relations (Langan-Fox and Cooper, ). Moreover, individuals referred to as ‘boundary spanners’ are active in the development of interorganizational networks that come about through their social interactions (Tushman and Scanlan, ). Long () notes the significance of ‘identity-constructing processes’ that are inherent in the pursuit of livelihoods in networks. For Long, this pursuit entails the building of relationships with others whose lifeworlds and statuses (and, we might add, organizational culture and ethos) may differ markedly. Thus, in addition to managing exchanges in the marketplace, individuals must be skilled in managing their relationships and meeting their obligations of identity and status.
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The chapter needs to be delimited: we review work that has taken a broadly social constructionist approach to identity in a ‘business-to-business’ (BB) context. Identity is defined as ‘the meanings that individuals attach reflexively to themselves, and [which are] developed and sustained through processes of social interaction’ (Brown, : ). A social constructionist approach regards identity as fluid and contestable; as a sense of the self that we continuously refashion. Hence, we can think of ‘identity work’ as the construction of this sense of self, and its differentiation from ‘the other’, through the discourses and practices we deploy in social exchanges (Ybema et al., ). We start by exploring the identity work of individual managers as boundary spanners in inter-organizational relationships (IORs) and extend this to supply chains and industrial networks. We do not ignore consumers completely in the sense that they are often effectively the end user of a supply chain and thus an important other; and similarly we attend to those actors at the other notional ‘end’ of the chain, such as local producers and other intermediaries. We include work in traditional commercial settings as well as that in organizational fields such as non-profit collaborations, co-operatives and other movements. After presenting key areas of research, we provide an overview of methods and guiding theories used by scholars working in inter- rather than intra-organizational contexts. Finally, we summarize the key points of the review and suggest future directions for research as well as areas in which scholars of identity in IORs might converse more fully with those studying identity within organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. One organizational context where some of the identity-related challenges of working in boundary-spanning or cross-cutting roles have been acknowledged at a more conceptual level is that of liminality (see Söderlund and Borg, for a discussion of the literature on ‘liminality as position’). Here we highlight identity-related research where interorganizational contexts and networks are addressed. The extra-organizational environment, where there are few clear-cut guarantees of role and status, exposes managers to potential vulnerability that, according to Flores and Solomon (: ), pertains in particular to people’s sense of self: ‘Whatever other vulnerabilities may be at stake (one’s job, substantial amounts of money, the success of the business) it is the self that is in some danger’. There is, then, a particular uncertainty and insecurity of self that comes with the in-between position of the boundary spanner. Ellis and Ybema (: ) demonstrate the challenges for the enactment of identity, focusing on a number of different supply chains, including in the automotive sector. They argue that this position involves the crossing of social boundaries, and means that the other is no longer at a ‘safe’ distance, so that it is all the more important and, ironically, all the more complicated at the same time, to hold on to a distinct and secure idea of one’s self through defining ‘otherness’. Their boundary position in between firms requires IOR managers to navigate between multiple and sometimes contradictory demands, and asks them to build relationships with various others across us/them divides while simultaneously maintaining
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and ‘marketing’ their professional or organizational identities (Ellis and Ybema, ). Distinction drawing and self-enhancement are as much part of IOR-related discourse as is the building of boundary-crossing relationships and linked supply chains. Ellis and Ybema (: ) conclude that ‘boundary work in IORs is thus at once inclusive and exclusive’ as ‘liminal identity talk . . . positions the speaker as oscillating between “in” and “out”, “same” and “other”, and between an inclusive and exclusive “us” ’. In the ambiguous and dynamic context of IORs, parties build and break relationships on the basis of their conceptions of who others are and what they believe these others can contribute to their goals (Beech and Huxham, ). Claims from (or about) liminars of ‘same-ness’ or ‘other-ness’ in relation to colleagues, clients, or competitors, position organizational members and establish, legitimate, and/or challenge relationships of power and status (Ybema et al., ). Drawing ‘external’ stakeholders into a personal or business-like relationship implies an increased exposure to these actors’ opinions and judgements; and may simultaneously pose a potential threat to people’s organizational and/or managerial identities. Boundary setting and crossing thus plays a role in structuring the world(s) of IORs and establishes some of the network ‘realities’ in which managers act. In a further example of this structuring, Ryan (: ) embraces notions of liminality and networks, albeit on quite a small scale, as she suggests that ‘the boundary spanner will become a liminal state spanner as they seek guides and make efforts to create an ally network’. She thus extends the work of Ellis and Ybema () by showing how the ‘liminal experiences of IOR managers are not a natural consequence of their boundary spanning activities, but are crafted by the IOR manager . . . where interaction offers an opportunity/ challenge/trigger to this’ (Ryan, : ). Such interactions may present occasions to actively develop a new or revised identity position through seeking counterparts in external relationships to guide liminal experiences.
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.................................................................................................................................. Ellis () adopts the notion of ‘identities in networks’ (after Huemer et al., ) to set the scene for how identities have been conceptualized by some scholars in the field of BB marketing. The phrase is used to describe the development of a particular firm’s ‘position and identity’ (Ellis, : ) in those inter-organizational configurations within which the firm is, or seeks to become, embedded. The notion of an embedded ‘position’ is important since position is determined by how that firm’s identity is constructed in interactions and is viewed by other network actors (Gadde et al., ). Position, in turn, is viewed by network theorists as a key strategic resource that both enables and constrains the firm’s possible actions (Håkansson and Ford, ). For example, an individual or organizational actor’s identity can convey legitimacy and authority by showing that they/it adhere/s to the shared norms, values and definitions that exist specific to that network. Schepis et al. () illustrate the relevance of identity to strategic possibilities in a study that shows how endorsement of the ‘network theories’ (Håkansson and Johanson, ) circulating in one industrial network allowed two sets of actors to construct their identities in line with their strategic aims. Schepis et al. () considered a mining network
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comprising indigenous small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and Australian firms, in which they argued that the indigenous enterprises needed to prove their legitimacy and show that they could assume network norms, whilst also helping shape them. Indigenous business managers drew on two contrasting sets of repertoires: one of ‘connection’ to the indigenous community; and the other of ‘distance’ from that community and affiliation with Western business values and practices. Schepis et al. (: ) demonstrate the criticality of identity work to network positioning and argue that this allows actors to ‘simultaneously restructure immediate relationships and the wider web of dependencies in the . . . network’, enhancing or restricting strategic options. It is clear that there are multiple levels of identity; in the above example the cultural identities of indigenous and Western communities operate alongside personal work identities. The construction of multiple notional identities is further theorized by Ellis () who identifies three levels: national, organizational, and individual. These are interrelated areas of identity that effectively range from the macro to the micro level of social actor. Thus, individual (managerial) identities are nested within both organizational and national identities, whilst the organizational (company) identity is nested within the nationally constructed identity. Based on a study of Indian import/export managers, Ellis et al. () examine how managers evoke different levels of identity in the same segment of talk. Managers are able to position themselves, and their firms within the network, as practitioners and organizations with particular attributes, even without explicit reference to their own (nested) roles. For instance, a ‘past and present practices’ interpretative repertoire tends to construct a changing national identity for India, and thereby Indian firms and managers. Further, the use of an ‘India versus China’ repertoire reveals a powerful instance of discursive ‘othering’ on a national level as China is regularly compared to India and found wanting (Ellis et al., : ). Thus, Ellis et al. () show how Indian managers on one hand use their linguistic toolkits to mould identities in their own terms, while on the other hand they appear unable to perceive IORs in terms other than those suggested by the various knowledge systems circulating in the Indian business context. The study reveals, therefore, something of the tensions experienced by managers through the juxtaposition of different aspects of identity levels. Discursive struggles over identities are often highlighted in the literature about identities in organizations. In studies of identity amongst those operating in IORs, the need to construct and communicate a particular competence that facilitates effective accomplishment of the boundary-spanning role is evident. Ellis and Hopkinson () examine the subjective and sometimes paradoxical ways in which networks are discursively theorized by their participants. Marketing and purchasing managers deploy a range of ‘communication’-based interpretative repertoires to simultaneously (re)produce theories about what effective relationship management involves and to display their effectiveness in this role. Their deployment enables the accomplishment of the self as a practical manager of business relationships and signals their engagement with the more formal discourses of marketing that circulate within the network. Dean et al. () highlight the need to communicate a particular identity to achieve professional/personal legitimacy. Participants representing nano-technology vendors construct the self as ‘scientist seller or buyer’ within sales interactions for their innovative products. These vendors appear to regard BB marketing as quite separate from, and
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indeed less respectable than, a natural sciences discourse. In this way, sellers give sense not only to buyers but to themselves as well (cf. Snell, ). The positioning as ‘scientists’ induces a sense of belonging within an elite group carrying out business activities within the network by discursively othering non-scientists and what are perceived as non-scientific discourses (Dean et al., ). Jain et al. () also examine scientists’ role identity amongst individual scientists who had been involved in some form of commercialization activity as they interacted with their university’s technology transfer office. As such, they became participants of a commercial network since they were establishing interfaces with other actors, including professional contacts, within the university and beyond. By allowing others to provide the entrepreneurship required for the commercialization process, they were able to ‘focus on maintaining and nurturing their academic identity’ (Jain et al., : ). The selection and activation of particular characteristics within identities are thus important aspects of interaction and network positioning.
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.................................................................................................................................. Research into inter-organizational collaborations has provided much discussion of identity construction, particularly in the area of organizational identification. A wide variety of collaborative relationships are listed by Zhang and Huxham (: ) including ‘international partnerships, networks, strategic alliances, and joint ventures’, as they confirm that ‘ways of thinking and working’ conducive to building international collaboration have generally been studied only in intra-organizational contexts. Zhang and Huxham’s () study of a joint-venture between construction sector organizations shows how individuals’ identifications are (re)constructed, and how this impacts on the nature of trust in the relationship. This allows Zhang and Huxham to build on the work of Vaara et al. (), on identity construction between business partners in the ‘developed’ world, by exploring relationships between organizations in both developed and developing countries. In this process, they note the significance of individuals’ claims of self-categorization that can be extended to the collective identities they construct in relation to the collaboration. In multi-sector collaborations, identities are likely to be continually shifting while sometimes becoming crystallized. It is therefore unsurprising that Beech and Huxham (: –) paint a picture of ‘a complex, interwoven, and tangled melee’ of ‘cycles of identity formation’ in this sort of interorganizational network context. Through a study of a collaborative setting centred on health promotion, they show how the actions of participants are at least partly determined by the identities that those participants assign to themselves and others, and illustrate the ways in which identities are to an extent determined by actions. They argue that processes of identity formation will affect almost every aspect of ‘productive collaborative practice’ (Beech and Huxham, : ). The process of identity formation is expanded by Ybema et al. (), who find that boundary spanners must constantly seek context-specific identities to align with or
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distinguish themselves from the collaboration as required. This can entail considerable identity work and shifts between multiple identities in order to cope with the fragmented context experienced by participants. For instance, Maguire and Hardy (: ) show how individuals may identify, ‘counter-identify’, and ‘dis-identify’ with a cross-sector collaboration as they move between their roles as collaborative partners and organizational representatives. They point out that, ‘in identifying with an organization, members not only create a sense of self, but they also construct the organization’s identity’. Reflecting the theme of the current chapter, the authors note how ‘different aspects of [individuals’] identities were foregrounded as they related to various “others” within and across organizational boundaries’ (Maguire and Hardy, : ). Similarly, Kornberger and Brown () note the use of ‘ethics’ as a discursive resource in identity work undertaken by members of a non-profit institution that was established to facilitate cross-sector knowledge exchange. They argue that this might be regarded as a defensive manoeuvre in the face of the pressures encountered in boundary spanners’ dayto-day experience of the difficulties of managing confidential information and retaining client trust. At the same time, ethics was utilized in individuals’ authoring of organizational identities, allowing members to consolidate organizational processes of recruitment and service delivery with identities and business strategies. After Ybema et al. (), Kourti (: ) asserts that individual partners in inter-organizational collaborations seek ‘identities that will fit the space they experience’, including collaborative, organizational, professional, and personal identities. She suggests that tensions between the various identities that are created as a result of partners’ interactions need not necessarily be resolved in order for the collaboration to succeed. Such studies thus indicate that incoherence and irresolution in identity work appear to be part of the rich set of processes of interacting across organizational boundaries.
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.................................................................................................................................. In an emerging stream of research, scholars have considered questions of agency and voice in international supply routes. This approach draws on extensive and long-standing debate in organizational studies about the role of control and the possibilities for resistance in identity work (Alvesson and Willmot, ; Covaleski et al., ). Applied to interorganizational contexts, these concepts have allowed for a growing understanding of identities in relation to power and ethics. Ellis et al. (: ) study marketing management practices within the farm supply industry and are, therefore, able to unpack IORs in the dynamic market conditions that characterize so much of global commodity supply. They ‘deconstruct market(ing) discourses’ to show how the self, the focal case company, the supply chain and the market ‘are interwoven and interlaced within participants’ language’. The network in which the focal firm is embedded is characterized by participants as a ‘supply chain’ that appears to ‘provide coherence and linkages between the different parties involved. It offers both a
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degree of stability for the participants but it also provides a source of tension, with uncertainty over the construction of the chain, nature of the links and the fear of dissolution’ (: ). Ellis et al.’s () study confirms the vulnerability of identities of actors such as marketing managers and farmers in dynamic market contexts. Rather than the organization, the market effectively describes forms of change that dissolve any settled identity (O’Neill, ). In considering this vulnerability, Ellis and Higgins (: ) argue that ‘a more subtle understanding of social constructions of managerial identities and the other within the language of supply chain ethics may facilitate moves towards fair international trade’. They note that actors who are central to the network are able to manipulate information throughout the network; and that this ability often lies with the retailer or manufacturer, but rarely with the primary supplier. If this marginalized ‘other’ is to be heard, we must consider how discourse can give voice to (or silence) any attempts at a just dialogue with central network actors. Hopkinson and Aman () highlight lack of voice in a critical perspective on ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ (BOP) marketing, focusing especially on struggles over meaning, and the creation of identities for participants. Their empirical material relates to so-called ‘women entrepreneurs’ who, without being employed by the company, distribute Unilever consumer goods in rural India. They shed light on the working of discourse in power relations between multinational corporations (MNCs), like Unilever, and local participants. Corporate literature emphasizes the production of an empowered identity for the women. The Unilever website quotes a single mother, ‘Today everyone knows me. I am someone now’, thereby giving the impression that the system has ‘literally created an identity . . . bound up with self-esteem and empowerment’ (Hopkinson and Aman, : ). Hopkinson and Aman (: ) question who defines the possibilities of that identity and the empowerment that is brought by an identity embedded in a network that reflects the dependence of the women on the MNC due to the social benefits ‘conferred or indeed obligated by the relationship’ (Hopkinson and Aman, : ). Several scholars have expanded on the theme of identities within supply routes by considering networks that include ‘intermediaries’ who might have considerable power in defining the identities of others but who are not always directly involved in exchange. The position of ‘cultural intermediaries’ can be significant in legitimation struggles as these actors emerge in managers’ discourse as nodes through which a flow of specialist knowledge about products and markets must occur in order for the supply network to ‘work’. For example, Smith Maguire () explains that marketing practitioners in the wine sector oscillate between the boundaries of the various relations that support market exchange in the notional supply chain for wine as they negotiate between their roles as symbolic producers and taste-leading consumers in the context of their own reflexive identity projects. Relatedly, Parsons () explores ways in which exchanges in the world of antique trading offer dealers resources, such as discursive repertoires of taste and aesthetics, and of morality and care, for the creation and expression of their identities. Similarly, Hopkinson and Cronin () explore the influence of ‘celebrities’, specifically celebrity chefs, as intermediaries defining what is to be considered as sustainable in markets. Whilst these chefs leverage specific, ‘heroic’ identities, they incite malcontent amongst consumers, at least to the extent that organizations and institutions respond. Hopkinson and Cronin
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() show how the intermediary can reshape the network and, in their case, greatly influence what fish is to be consumed in an affluent Western market as well as how and where (in the waters of less affluent countries) it is caught. The entanglement of identities in networks lies at the centre of Hopkinson’s () work and complicates our understanding of how, and by whom, those identities are constituted. Adopting a view of markets as ‘broad, large and flexible combinations of human actors and material entities’ (after Cochoy et al., ), she shows how the identities of farmers, lobby groups, and retailers were leveraged in a way that meant new members of the dairy beef market were enrolled by highlighting an intersection of interests. For example, Hopkinson () unpacks the positioning of farmers in the veal industry (via media ‘pen portraits’ that establish a degree of reconnection and provenance) in the UK to show how status may be conferred on certain network actors. This emergent stream of research, which expands our purview of commercial networks beyond those directly involved in exchange, provides insights that allow us to develop an understanding of the linkages between the micro (individual identity), meso (organizational identity), and macro (position in a global network). By examining inter-organizational contexts, we are able to see how boundary spanners concurrently navigate the efforts of others to shape worker identity and their own attempts to resist (Alvesson and Willmott, ) across multiple levels. This opens up the political processes in identity work that navigate multiple levels since its successful accomplishment is an important aspect in gaining a central position that enables influence on the terms of trade that link economies and (distant) lives together.
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.................................................................................................................................. Several studies have examined the role of identity for those seeking to enter particular business networks and, in so doing, reveal the role of networks in entrepreneurial identity work. Phillips (: ) offers a reading of ‘ecopreneurial’ self-narratives that shows how individuals seek to achieve a relatively coherent sense of self-identity by negotiating between conflicting discourses and social groups that relate to the environment and enterprise. Ecopreneurs’ narratives set up binaries of self and other, including business as usual versus business as visionary, green warriors versus pragmatists, and entrepreneurs against non-entrepreneurs; with other actors, whether individual or groups, typically being characterized as ‘villains’. De Clercq and Voronov () focus on the need for new entrepreneurs to be endowed with legitimacy that results from the collective sensemaking of other ‘field’ participants, in this case other entrepreneurs in the wine sector, such that the newcomer receives the social categorization of ‘entrepreneur’. Viewing a field (after Bourdieu, ) as a space where actors are embedded, and given the presence of multiple stakeholders in such a field who have diverging interests, such as wine critics and consumers, newcomers may have to vary their strategies for managing meaning within the network. The national level of network identity noted by Ellis () may also be drawn on by social actors. For instance, Ailon-Souday and Kunda (: ) claim that national
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identity forms ‘a symbolic resource that is actively and creatively reconstructed by organizational members to serve social struggles which are triggered by globalization’. In this way, members representing an Israeli firm could express detachment from their US merger partners by mobilizing their national identity which ‘was revealed as a potent and widely used symbol that secured the local organizational boundary’ (Ailon-Souday and Kunda : ). In this way the collaborative partners were characterized as either ‘Americans’ or as displaying elements of Israeli culture, thereby somewhat undermining notions of a supposedly borderless world, or arguably network, of global work. Ybema et al. (: ) explore an aid organization’s relationships with their ‘Southern’ partners and show how identity work might be used to minimize boundaries. They note that individuals attempt to depolarize differences between themselves and their partners in their identity talk. For what appear to be ideological and strategic reasons, they ‘smooth out, trivialise or upend differences’ by (i) adopting a ‘thin’ notion of cultural identity, (ii) building their selves as ‘strange’, (iii) ‘levelling out’ hierarchical differences, and (iv) constructing an inclusive ‘we’ in talk of personal relationships. Finally, Wells et al. () remind us that networks and boundaries are not just based on relations amongst organizations, as they look at the discursive identity construction practices of consumer co-operative members. In the co-operative context, ‘tensions are evident between the hegemonic discourse of neoliberal managerialism and that of democratic collective ownership’ (Wells et al., : ). They identify a series of interpretative repertoires drawn on in members’ accounts that can be categorized into two groups: one that reflects a sense of connection or attachment and one of disconnection or division, i.e. community and boundaries respectively. Wells et al. () show how a community enterprise can exist and operate within boundaries between various network stakeholders, which serve to demarcate its membership; and how such tensions, at an individual level, may be negotiated. This means that much of the identity work undertaken by co-operative members is shown to be ‘aimed at securing a socially viable identity positioning’ in the context of paradoxical tensions (Ghadiri et al., : ). These boundary constructing processes are also reflected by Saunders () who observes how, as activists commit to organizations with an encompassing collective identity, and thereby develop a strong sense of solidarity with other activists similarly committed to that organization, the resultant solidarity can lead to the construction of a ‘we/them’ dichotomy between organizations within the same movement or network.
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.................................................................................................................................. As well as noting why the study of identity in networks is interesting and socially important, our chapter shows how this wider perspective often entails particular forms of thinking. Thus, we also describe briefly some of the different ways of conceptualizing and analysing data used by scholars writing about identities and networks and related contexts. Like Zhang and Huxham (), the studies we have drawn on in this chapter tend to focus on identity construction at the level of individuals. This is because the collaborative
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relationship between organizations is enacted through the interaction of certain individuals across the boundaries of IORs. Rather than the use of Social Identity Theory (SIT), which assumes the stability and crystallization of identities (e.g. Salk and Shenkar, ), Zhang and Huxham () favour a ‘process’ approach influenced by social constructionism which views identity as fluid (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ) and identity construction as a dynamic discursive process. Relatedly, it is common to embrace a discursive approach to analysis which, unlike research undertaken under the umbrella of SIT, focuses ‘primarily on the constructive effects of conversations in which participants describe themselves’ (Hardy et al., : ). Ellis and Ybema () also advocate employing a discourse analytical view in analysing social life in the ambiguous and dynamic context of IORs where actors are engaged in the construction of a ‘tellable’ marketing story which ‘narrates boundaries, relations, agency and identities’ (Simakova and Neyland, : ). An accompanying sensemaking perspective is prevalent, where discourse analysis is utilized to ‘unpack’ the linguistic constructions of network actors and to appreciate how this talk may help to perform market relations (Ellis et al., ) as participants make sense of their world(s). Such practices can be explored through the identification of ‘interpretative repertoires’ in participants’ discourse (Potter and Wetherell, ), where these are defined as broadly discernible clusters of terms, descriptions, and figures of speech that are socially shared linguistic resources that individuals draw on to construct and project versions of reality. Reflecting the nested interplay between different notional levels of identity noted earlier, some network scholars have illustrated how interpretative repertoires function to, variously, assert a positive national identity, stress a sense of connection to or distance from a particular organization or community, or legitimize the self. For instance, as Ellis and Hopkinson (: ) point out, an ability to draw upon, deploy and communicate certain types of knowledge (or theories) ‘legitimizes one as . . . for example, a credible sales manager. Thus the production and display of particular forms of knowledge is at once a sensemaking act and an act through which identity is claimed’. Similarly, Hopkinson and Aman (: ) view identity as not essentialist, and interests as not authentic; rather these are discursively constituted (Lok and Willmott, ). This allows them to explore the production of meaning, and the construction of identity, in discourse that ‘evades complete fixation and yet makes available particular subject positions . . . through which lives are experienced’. Hopkinson () uses media data to trace contests amongst ‘antenarratives’ (Boje, ). Use of such data, rather than data generated specifically in the context of the research, allows her to explore how powerful actors define what may be and may not be told here and now in a public arena. She examines how certain actors assert a claim to speak and have an ability to gain an audience, whilst the inclusion and exclusion of particular ‘others’ shapes networks. Hopkinson () develops the metaphor of graffiti to conceptualize how certain narrators (or ‘graffers’) define the dominant story and how others seek to reshape or uproot that story. Hopkinson (: ) argues that researchers should seek to trace the negotiation of meaning in narrative processes as this will help us ‘to study organizations as participants in sensemaking in broader society and overcome a tendency to see, or at least treat, the organization in isolation’. Other studies that draw on SIT have begun to relate identities to networks. For example, Stoyanov () shows how Bulgarian migrant entrepreneurs can become embedded in a
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diaspora network. His study is arguably more about ‘networking’ than the processes that we have discussed thus far and is set more firmly within the social identity tradition. Nevertheless, Stoyanov (: ) reveals a dynamic embedding process illustrating the ‘reflective nature of identity regulation between insiders and outsiders, as informed by the diaspora structure’, thus providing a further example of how identities matter in networks. Salk and Shenkar (: ) examine identities in a limited form of network as they explore an international joint-venture (IJV). As they put it, ‘IJVs engage at least three organizations—the IJV and parent firms—that serve as potential sources of identity’. They argue that the role of national origins and other identities in sensemaking deserves close attention in such inter-organizational networks, and recognize the significance of both individual and organizational levels of analysis when considering identities in this network. In a much-cited paper, Foreman and Whetten () surveyed members of rural cooperatives, in a sample containing both farmers and non-farmers, and organizations providing a range of support for and involvement in co-ops in what we would term a network. They argue that ‘members are likely to identify not only with their local organization, but also with its encompassing organizational form’ (: ). They suggest that ‘the legitimacy of an organizational form [in this case a co-operative] is partly a function of the degree to which that form’s key identifying characteristics are congruent with its surrounding institutional environment’ (: ). Whilst arguably an outlier within this chapter in terms of methodological approach, Foreman and Whetten’s () study does expand extant understanding to encompass multiple identity organizations, with co-ops embodying elements of both ‘business’ and ‘family’ identities (Wells et al., ). Thus, the types of approaches above have facilitated an increasingly nuanced understanding of identities, boundaries, and networks in organization studies.
S E W N I
.................................................................................................................................. As we have previously observed, ‘it seems likely that we will find intense boundary work and identity work . . . performed at the notional boundaries of organizations and marketplaces’ (Ellis et al., : ). This chapter has attempted to capture prior studies of this identity work predominantly in the context of the networks that are manifest in the relationships between various organizations, both commercial and non-profit. We believe studies that embrace some notion of networks, supply chains, and markets in exploring identity can both enhance and converse with the wider identity field in organization studies. We have highlighted work that addresses diverse types of network contexts encountered by boundary spanners. The review has shown that boundary spanners do, indeed, engage in identity work, but that they do so from a particular position of liminality where the tensions of identity become amplified, allowing for the examination of the often vulnerable self. Hence, in their identity work, boundaries oscillate as they seek to define who counts as ‘the other’, identities are revised according to the counterparts they are interacting with, different identity levels are juxtaposed and particular characteristics
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activated to legitimize their role in cooperation. The picture emerges of incoherence and irresolution in identity work as central to interactions across organizational boundaries. Despite the many tensions in identity work, which are accentuated for boundary spanners, the literature also regards the construction of identity as critical to effective performance in IORs and to how the employing organization is positioned in the network. This identity work is, therefore, fundamental to opportunities and constraints available to the organization. The literature is increasingly recognizing constraints on the production of self-identity and the role of others in the network in defining who one is. This is especially evident in work that has examined organizational fields that span the global North/South; and we have argued that the study of identity work in such contexts provides a basis to understand the linkages between individual, organizational, and global relations. Additionally, recent work points to actors who have particular potency in shaping the identity of network actors despite not, themselves, being directly involved in commercial exchange. Important and consequential questions about power and agency, and the role of identity within those questions, are thus emerging from the studies we have reviewed. As well as noting why the study of identity in networks is important, we have outlined some of the different ways of thinking about identities and networks, particularly discursive and narrative approaches. These have been applied to a host of network contexts, including sectors such as agri-food and automotive supply chains, the mining industry, nanotechnology, construction, non-profit institutions, health sector collaborations, and IJVs. At the national level, studies have encompassed developed and developing countries/ regions including Australia, Israel, India, and Africa. At the organizational level, the identities of indigenous SMEs, MNCs, retailers, environmental enterprises and cooperatives have all been explored. Finally, at the individual level, previous studies have highlighted the identity work of marketing and purchasing managers, salespeople, entrepreneurs, knowledge workers, farmers, cultural intermediaries, rural women, and scientists.
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.................................................................................................................................. We share Brown’s (: ) view that the notion of identity work can do much to bridge levels of analysis in organization studies research. His call for more studies that ‘investigate the relationships between identities and their interactions between individuals, dyads, groups, organizations, professions and communities’ resonates with our own networkorientated perspective on identity. The work summarized in the current chapter suggests that more research is required, building on extant studies and exploring new areas related to identities and networks. In advocating further work in this area, we believe that better understanding of identities constructed across organizational boundaries may contribute also to a fuller understanding of identities in other work contexts. Several studies indicate that the nature of contemporary work will accentuate the number of different boundaries encountered by individuals. Ibarra and Obodaru (: ), for example, point to the increasing salience of identity
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work for a modern workforce that needs to embrace a global outlook and work across a variety of boundaries. Petriglieri et al. ( ) employ a systems psychodynamic approach to explore how independent workers manage emotions linked to precarious work identities. Drawing on Van Maanen and Schein (), their study sheds light on alternative understandings of independent work that leaves individuals with no ‘inclusion boundary’. A study of the expanding field of similarly precarious knowledge workers shows how these individuals contract services to a variety of employers and exist ‘in the in-between’ (Fenwick, : ). Fenwick further, in a description that resonates with our understanding of identity work in IORs, explains how these workers ‘created networks and submersed themselves in these networks, but did not dissolve in them: their sense of identity in both their knowledge and their modus operandi was linked to a source of values and personal purpose located outside the organization’ (: ). We therefore believe that the tensions of identity that this review makes evident within IORs promote these contexts as a fertile ground to develop insights with implications for identity scholarship more generally. Finally, the discombobulating implications of ‘temporary organizations’ may merit further exploration at both the individual and organizational identity levels. Under such network conditions, where three or more organizations interact for a fixed period, identity work is occurring within a situation of ‘institutionalized termination’ (Lundin and Söderholm, : ). Thus Van Marrewijk et al. (: ) suggest that a temporary organization, such as a large-scale construction project, may constitute ‘a context where order and permanence are not self-evident, particularly when collaborating actors design an unusual and diffuse hierarchy’. This network context may build tensions via struggles over emerging roles which affect the sense of self of boundary-spanning participants. These concluding observations suggest that greater acknowledgement of the boundaries encountered and constructed by individual workers, managers, and other actors in IORs and networks should facilitate valuable insights into issues of structure and agency within identity work (cf. Ybema et al., ) both in and indeed in between organizations.
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An Ongoing Narrative Accomplishment .......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter calls for the endorsement of a ‘career perspective’ when theorizing identity in organizations. It argues that especially the concept of ‘career identity’ can be conducive for settling an ongoing controversy among scholars concerning temporal aspects of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ in narrative identity construction. Since continuity and change are integral to the career notion, a career perspective helps to explain the under-explored coexistence of dynamic and at the same time stable dimensions of identity. This insight is particularly relevant in light of the changing relationships between organizations and their employees, where career paths are increasingly becoming more discontinuous and therefore unpredictable, protean, and boundaryless. Moreover, the chapter argues that a career perspective on identity helps to raise critical questions regarding how widely dispersed career imperatives influence people’s career choices, and how these imperatives can be resisted.
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.................................................................................................................................. F a long time, organizational scholars have acknowledged that the meaning of work is tied to people’s sense of identity. This implies that ‘what we do’ for a living has significance for our sense of ‘who we are’ (Kenny et al., ). Rather than just being a collection of tasks, however, work can mean different things to different people. While some consider work as a ‘job’, others think of it as a ‘career’ or a ‘calling’ (Wrzesniewski et al., ). Especially the notions of ‘job’ and ‘career’ have often been contrasted (e.g. Arnold, ; Arthur et al., ). Different to the construct ‘job’, which is associated with ‘earning money’ or ‘putting bread on the table’, the career concept is associated with aspects of time, sequence, and status advancement (Arnold, ). Arthur and colleagues (: ) have provided a now widely used definition of career as ‘the evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time’.
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Interestingly, while it can be assumed that this evolving career project is intimately interwoven with people’s identity constructions within and beyond organizations (Gedro, ), the concept of ‘career identity’ (Meijers, ; Meijers and Lengelle, ), which was developed in the context of careers studies, has not been taken up in the organizational literature. And yet, as I will argue in this chapter, adding a career perspective to the study of identity can help to better understand how and why people author their identities in a cohesive way, even in light of shifting (career) boundaries (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; Hoyer and Steyaert, ). In contrast to the notions of organizational (e.g. Albert et al., ; Alvesson and Empson, ; Brown and Starkey, ) and professional (Pratt et al., ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ) identity, which have been studied and theorized extensively in the context of organizations (e.g. Alvesson et al., ; Brown, ; Ybema et al., ), career identity is not bound to a specific organization or professional role. Instead, it derives its meaning from ‘the individual’s development in learning and work throughout life’ (Collin and Watts, : ). Therefore, when ‘enacting’ their career identities (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, ), people ‘tell how the self of yesterday became the self of today and will become the self of tomorrow’ (Savickas, : ). The concept of career identity, hence, suggests that people, when narrating themselves in the moment, always speak with larger career trajectories and broader ‘life themes’ (Cochran, ) in mind that span different contexts. This framing touches upon two particular aspects of ‘temporality’ (Ricoeur, ) in the construction of identity: ‘continuity’ and ‘change’. While the potential coexistence of continuity and change, sometimes referred to as ‘confluence’ (Schmiedeck, ), has been explored elsewhere, especially with a focus on specific organizational contexts (Clarke et al., ) or situations of organizational change (Chreim, ), it can be noted that ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ are always integral to the construction of career identity. This understanding helps to inform the ongoing debate on how notions of continuity and change can be brought into a meaningful balance (Brown, ) as people make sense of their changing yet stable career identities over time. This insight is particularly relevant in light of contemporary workplace developments (Arnold, ; Chudzikowski, ; Gedro, ; Grote and Raeder, ; Loacker and Śliwa, ), where the flexibilization of labour has led to increasingly precarious work conditions (Standing, ) including temporary work assignments and short-term contracts. These developments certainly impact the once ‘mutually beneficial relationship’ (Schein, ) between organizations and employees, as the psychological contract that offered lifetime employment and job security for loyalty and hard work is becoming antiquated. Instead, new career models around protean (Hall, ) and boundaryless (Arthur and Rousseau, ) careers are on the rise. While these new career directions have been discussed comprehensively in the careers literature (e.g. Briscoe et al., ; DeFillippi and Arthur, ), their implications for people’s (career) identities in organizations are yet to be explored and theorized. In this chapter, I outline some promising avenues for this endeavour. Lastly, the chapter draws attention to the potential for critical inquiry when adding a career perspective to the study of identity. By framing identity as a culturally embedded, collective endeavour (Somers, ), a career perspective helps to explain why career goals and identities are rarely self-contained or constructed in isolation (LaPointe, ).
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It thereby invites critical questions regarding how broadly dispersed and widely accepted career imperatives—grounded in an ideology of meritocracy—influence or limit people’s career choices, and how these imperatives can be resisted. Before I commence this critical discussion, I delineate my understanding of career identity as socially constructed through narrative, discuss temporal aspects of continuity and change in the construction of career identity, and consider how a refined understanding of temporality helps to make sense of identity stability in light of constantly changing career and identity trajectories in the contemporary workplace.
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.................................................................................................................................. While organizational scholars have sporadically taken an interest in career matters, addressing issues of gender inequality (Herman, ) and agency (Fernando and Cohen, ), experiences of career transitions (Hoyer and Steyaert, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ), involuntary career exits (Fraher and Gabriel, ; Maitlis, ), as well as an increase in precarious career paths in academia (Bristow et al., ; Clarke and Knights, ) and the cultural industries (McRobbie, ), a systematic theorization of ‘career identity’ is still absent in the organizational literature. For a definition of this concept, we therefore have to consult the field of careers studies, where various scholars have tried to delineate their understanding of ‘career identity’ (e.g. LaPointe, ; Meijers, ; Pryor, ), mostly, however, with a (functionalistic) interest in career development and matching people’s identities, skills, and preferences with the characteristics and needs of organizations (Schein, ). Meijers (: ) for instance defined career identity as ‘a developing structure of self-concepts in their relation to the (future) career role perceived by the individual himself ’. Pryor () additionally proposed that one should not simply equate career identity with the sum of experiences an individual undergoes during the course of his or her (working) life. Instead, he maintained that individuals consciously link their own competencies, interests, goals, and personal values with acceptable career roles. In this chapter, I contend that Pryor’s proposition is a good starting point for theorizing ‘career identity’ in the context of organizations, as it implies a practice of ‘performing’ and meaningfully ‘assembling’ different identity positions (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, ). I frame this ‘performing’ and ‘assembling’ of career identities as a narrative accomplishment, especially since narratives are particularly apt for capturing complex identity dynamics (Benwell and Stokoe, ; Maitlis, ) along changing career paths. Through ‘career narratives’ (Christensen and Johnston, ; Meijers, ; Meijers and Lengelle, ) in particular, people can construct who they are and how they see themselves in the context of their career. They can express uniqueness and imbue their individual career choices with purpose and meaning. More generally, taking note of an individual’s ‘career history’ (Inkson, ) helps to keep the different stages of their career identity connected and ensures a sense of continuity, which allows people to ‘stay true’ to their overall career trajectory based on individual values (Hall, ; Wolf, ).
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At the same time, career narratives allow people to embark on a transformative journey where they can ‘try out’ or customize different social and professional identities (Maclean et al., ; Pratt et al., ), and in this way make space for their changing career experiences over time (Arthur et al., ; Bujold, ; Hoyer, ; LaPointe, ). Along those changing experiences, people may also alter the way in which they narrate their careers, especially concerning the selection and interpretation of significant memories (Wolf, ). Additionally, it has been argued that continuous narrative (re-)construction of one’s career identity can facilitate transformation and potentially help individuals to achieve their vision of who they want to be (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ; Wolf, ). Scholars have also suggested, however, that career narratives are not free-standing or self-contained (LaPointe, ). Instead, they are embedded in broader cultural narratives referred to as ‘master narratives’ that are available in a person’s wider socio-cultural and historic context (Somers, ). More specifically, widely dispersed narratives around ‘achievement’ and ‘personal growth’ find numerous ways of entering people’s career narratives (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; Reedy et al., ). Individuals often internalize these narratives at a young age as they are exposed to them throughout their lives through the media, market, and workplace (Reedy et al., ). By the time a person enters into the labour market, these cultural narratives have turned into career scripts that provide a blueprint for how to make attractive life and career choices (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; McAdams, ). While people may tap into their self-knowledge for making informed career decisions, the opinions of co-workers, peers, family members, and society more broadly are vital influences in career-related decision-making (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ). Rather than being personally developed choices, these decisions emerge out of social interaction, negotiation, and co-construction between individuals and communities (Gedro, ; Meijers and Lengelle, ). Even if a person’s work context changes along his or her career journey, larger cultural narratives of what an ‘ideal career’ and related to this an ‘ideal career identity’ are, will usually prevail over time (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; Reedy et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, I contend that taking a ‘career perspective’ is conducive for enriching the narrative approach to identities in organizations. A career perspective helps to better grasp the dynamic, changing, and at the same time stable and boundary-spanning dimensions of narrative identity. Thus, by touching upon temporal aspects of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’— and how they are meaningfully related in people’s career stories—in this chapter I aim to advance theorization of temporality in the narrative construction of (career) identities. While the temporal dimension of identity construction (Williams, ) has well been recognized, Brown () notes that few scholars have ventured to build on this. Instead, as Pratt (: ) contends, the explicit ‘theorizing about time in identity research is relatively
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rare’; and yet, temporality is inherent in theorizing. Paul Ricoeur (), for example, who has been most influential in narrative research on identity, strongly emphasized the ‘temporal dimension of human existence’ (Ricoeur, : ). While temporality seems to be at the heart of narrative theory (Baumeister, ; Brown, ), discussions around temporal aspects of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ in narrative identity construction remain controversial. More specifically, there is an ongoing debate concerning whether identities are unified and coherent or fragmented and contradictory (Brown, ). Those who theorize identities as coherent highlight people’s sense of continuity over time. Scholars of personality and developmental psychology (McAdams, ; Pals, ; Singer, ) in particular have conceptualized narrative identity as unified and meaningful life stories. In contrast, most narrative work in the field of organization studies—driven by scholars with postmodern inclinations (Brown, )—has treated identity as an ambiguous and ongoing endeavour (e.g. Brown et al., , ; Fraher and Gabriel, ; Humphreys and Brown, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ; LaPointe, ; Somers, ), thereby favouring notions of change and becoming. From this perspective, identities are provisional (Ibarra, ; Markus and Nurius, ), potentially contested, and incessantly reassembled through discourse (Alvesson et al., ; Brown, ). Surprisingly, this ongoing debate around change and continuity in narrative identity construction has failed to incorporate a view of people’s broader life and career trajectories. I argue that adding a career perspective to the theorization of narrative identity helps us understand how and why the seemingly incompatible aspects of change and continuity coexist in a meaningful way. As a few organization scholars have concurred, identity change and stability are not necessarily locked in ‘dynamic tension’ (Ibarra, : ; see also Brown, ; Chreim, ; Clarke et al., ; Hoyer and Steyaert, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Even though these concepts elicit radically different views, there is also the standpoint that one does not need to choose between a mainly fixed and a predominantly fluid understanding (Gedro, ). Instead, some theorists suggest that even fragmented identities can exhibit coherence, while stable identities can still be dynamic (Gedro, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). I argue that this under-explored and under-theorized coexistence between change and continuity becomes self-evident when taking a career perspective, which frames identity construction as an ongoing and constantly evolving project that is held together by meaningful and coherent life stories (Linde, ). Change is already engrained in the very definition of career identity, which derives its meaning from the evolving sequences—in others words, the ‘changes’—that people experience along their career progression (Arthur et al., ; LaPointe, ). Whenever career paths are interrupted and positions shift, new meanings have to be negotiated for people’s work and their careers (Van Maanen, ). This will have an impact on the way in which people construct their identities in a new workplace. Ibarra and Barbulescu () developed a dynamic process model that illustrates how career changers revise their narratives in response to career change. The authors analysed the ‘narrative repertoires’ that people drew on when reporting upon a career change. They suggest that career changers are able to revise or replace their previous identities by drawing on different narrative repertoires, and by adding to or subtracting from them. When internalizing these new repertoires, people may experience enduring and profound identity changes.
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This brings me to the second aspect of continuity. Expanding upon Ibarra and Barbulescu’s model, I suggest that narrative repertoires do not always get revised and replaced to stabilize a new narrative identity. Instead, certain repertoires in people’s career narratives may in fact stabilize and persist across changing work contexts. In her study of the narrative identity construction of ex-consultants, Hoyer () observed that in the course of career change, former management consultants clung to a discourse of elitism signified by ‘exclusivity’, ‘high performance’, and ‘status’ when narrating their identity in a new work environment. While some ex-consultants did so intentionally, in order to preserve an elite identity in a new work context, others who had consciously turned away from the explicitly elite environment and distanced themselves from elite aspirations, were found to continue, to appropriate, or to (unsuccessfully) denounce the discourse of elitism. This suggests that elite aspirations may be particularly appealing in the construction of career identities. Especially in times of transition, as previous studies have indicated (e.g. Beyer and Hannah, ; Ibarra, ), people hold on to that which they cherished in the past, while at the same time orienting themselves towards the new workplace (Ibarra, ). This allows different identities to coexist as people draw on multiple, and sometimes incompatible, discourses in authoring their career narratives (Clarke et al., ). Yet, while ‘identity change’ has been well documented (Brown et al., , ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ), the notion of ‘continuity’ in narrative identity construction has received relatively little attention, at least in the organizational literature. Again, continuity is fundamental to a career perspective, which integrates an evaluation of the past, the present, and the anticipated future into a meaningful life story (McAdams, ). In order to explain how continuity is achieved in people’s career narratives, Cochran () suggests that career projects are driven by broader ‘life themes’. These life themes—people’s hopes, fears, ambitions, and anxieties (Ybema, )—can be considered as recurring patterns in people’s biographies ‘that guide the person through the next phase of their existence’ (McAdams et al., : xvi), and are thus not limited to a specific period in life (Savickas, ). Life themes may develop long before a person enters work life. Fraher and Gabriel () for instance explore how stable ‘identity anchors’ such as childhood dreams can influence a person’s career identity throughout adulthood. Influenced by early memories or critical incidents, life themes indicate what people strive for more broadly as they construct their careers (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; Wolf, ), not only concerning their immediate situation, but also regarding future decisions and actions (Bujold, ). Life themes thus explicate the meanings that guide people’s career choices over time. They reflect the core thematic lines (McAdams, ) and basic values that a person aspires to. In this way, they become the guiding principles throughout a person’s career narratives (Wolf, ). One way of applying a career perspective to the study of identity in organizations—with the potential for better capturing the coexistence of change and continuity—is through an exploration of identity via people’s work and career biographies (Grote and Raeder, ), or more generally, by pursuing a life story approach to the study of identity (Linde, ; McAdams, ). Even if restricted research budgets or the imperative to ‘publish quickly’ may limit the possibilities of engaging in longitudinal studies or repeated interviewing over time, asking people to share insights on their broader life and career trajectories can provide whole-life perspectives in which both aspects of continuity and aspects of change will inevitably play a meaningful role. For a better comprehension of this coexistence,
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I further recommend investigating people’s broader life themes, which may especially be prevalent in times of transitions. More generally, I suggest that for a holistic endorsement of the identity concept, scholars should refrain from research designs that render identity as a context-limited construct per se, which ignores stable repertoires in people’s changing career narratives and trajectories.
C C D T I I
.................................................................................................................................. A good grasp of the coexistence of identity stability and identity change is particularly relevant in light of contemporary work and career developments. It has been argued that due to an increase in automation, digitalization, and international competition, the world of work has grown considerably more complex, volatile, and, therefore, unpredictable (Arnold, ; Chudzikowski, ; Gedro, ; Grote and Raeder, ; Loacker and Śliwa, ). As a result, employment relationships have become more project-based, contractualized, and short-term (Chudzikowski, ; Standing, ). Technology and flexible work arrangements have, moreover, altered the boundaries of time and space in the workplace, as employees have become ‘accessible’ during times and in contexts that have heretofore been considered as private, family, or non-work time (Gedro, ; Grote and Raeder, ; Meijers, ). For the past thirty years, the careers literature has been particularly concerned with the two influential concepts of ‘boundaryless’ (Arthur and Rousseau, ) and ‘protean’ careers (Hall, ). Common to these two concepts is the assumption that contemporary careers involve a shift from employer-managed to more self-directed efforts, focusing on aspects of adaptability, employability, and competence development according to changing market needs (Grote and Raeder, ; Mirvis and Hall, ). The boundaryless career concept (Arthur and Rousseau, ) especially highlights increased career mobility through transcending the boundaries of occupations, organizations, industries, and the work–life distinction (Arnold, ; Arthur and Rousseau, ; Chudzikowski, ; Mirvis and Hall, ; Meijers, ). The protean career concept emphasizes that careers have become more self-directed and values-driven (Hall, , ), and, therefore, more agentic in terms of how individuals make use of their time, talent, and resources (Gedro, ). It suggests an alternative understanding of career success as subjectively defined, based on personal definitions of accomplishment (Hall, ; Wolf, ). Given the strong link between work biography and identity in Western societies (Law et al., ), the rise of new career models has also spurred questions concerning how people construct their identities when conventional career structures are suspended and loyalty-based psychological contracts gradually decline (Chudzikowski, ; Grote and Raeder, ; Hall, ; Mainiero and Sullivan, ). Moreover, it raises questions about how identities can most adequately be studied and theorized under these conditions (Grote and Raeder, ; Wolf, ). These questions, I contend, have yet systematically to be addressed. One can well imagine, though, that in times where identity change and
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adaptability become imperative, leading to fragmentation and multiplicity, the notion of continuity—grounded in people’s values and broader life themes—will become ever more crucial for a simultaneous sense of identity stability. A fruitful avenue for further exploring emergent career identities under contemporary work conditions is through the concept of ‘perpetual liminality’ (Ybema et al., ), which addresses practices of identity formation wherein actors find themselves in-between two or more identity positions for a prolonged period of time. Indeed, when looking at the career paths and identities typical of today’s ‘liquid’ organizations (Bauman, ) it becomes evident that liminal positions are on the rise. Perpetual liminars are workers who step across hierarchical, professional, and organizational boundaries on a day-to-day basis, casting and recasting their identities for different audiences while establishing and maintaining multiple relationships (Ybema et al., ). Budtz-Jørgensen et al. () introduced the notion of the ‘liminal career’, that is a career in which individuals need to cope with ambiguous work relations, unclear work expectations, and uncertain career prospects. One characteristic of the liminal career is that it involves the optimization of future possibilities where employees cultivate a broad repertoire of different competencies, skills, and identities in order not to become too specialized in one area, which would make them less adaptable to the changing conditions and requirements in a particular field (Budtz-Jørgensen et al., ). Instead, employees try to enact their career identities as ‘polyvalent resources’ (Weiskopf and Loacker, : ) rather than turning into specialists who are employable only in strictly defined fields. In that sense, having a liminal career involves navigating one’s identity between different imagined career possibilities. As Bauman () notes, the challenge for professionals is then to achieve ‘fitness’ in terms of adapting one’s identity and staying open to its potential expansion in whatever direction (see also Johnsen and Sørensen, ). Turner () points out that (permanent) liminality may infuse people’s identity projects with ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety. It can thus significantly disrupt a person’s experience of identity stability, especially when they have to constantly reposition themselves across different organizational contexts and engage in intense ‘boundary work’ (Hernes and Paulsen, ). Yet, since a growing proportion of people in the contemporary workplace are engaged in transient assignments (Ybema et al., ), there have also been attempts to shift the focus from the potential negative outcomes such as identity threats (Petriglieri, ) to people’s ability to deal effectively with liminal conditions. As Hoyer () for instance observed, some people, who endorse a highly mobile career and lifestyle, may in fact thrive under liminal conditions. For them, perpetual liminality can turn into a source of stability rather than fragmentation. Borg and Söderlund () have started to explore the notion of ‘liminality competence’, a competence which makes people aware first of all of their liminal position, and secondly, helps them acknowledge the potentially positive outcomes associated with it such as greater access to different social networks, and more opportunities for learning and knowledge transfer. Rather than posing a threat to people’s sense of continuity, liminality competence may enable professionals to take advantage of liminality and the provisional identities (Ibarra, ; Markus and Nurius, ) that it offers. A high level of liminality competence could for instance imply that workers experience liminality as a form of freedom which ‘liberate[s] them from structural obligations’ (Turner, : ), prevents ‘identity closure’
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(Hoyer, ) and allows them to exploit the condition of ‘working in-between’ for their own identity construction (Borg and Söderlund, ). Liminality may thus provide people with a sense of ‘identity flexibility’ (Grote and Raeder, ), of being ready for the next change, and therefore in a good position not to miss any interesting opportunities for selfexploration, personal development, and growth. This framing of liminality can help us better understand people’s ongoing quest for identity change and personal growth, without jeopardizing their sense of career and identity stability (Hoyer, ).
T C P T C P I
.................................................................................................................................. Besides the generation of new insights on the coexistence of continuity and change, I suggest that applying a career perspective to the study of identity opens up new avenues for critically exploring how identities are constructed in the contemporary workplace. Here, I will delineate how a career perspective can illuminate power dynamics in processes of identity construction by touching upon issues of privilege, marginalization, and ideology. Concerning the aspect of privilege, the career concept comes with middle-class to upper-class overtones (Gedro, ). It implies that people who are concerned with career progression have the ‘luxury’ of being in an environment where pondering about and planning one’s career path is common. It implies guidance toward higher education, while some may have been groomed into comfortable and potentially flourishing (work) lives. This suggests that the career concept is not a neutral proposition, but a result of choice, chance, socialization, and conditioning (Gedro, ). Feminist scholars have picked up on the notion of privilege (Gedro, ; Hertneky, ; LaPointe, ; Ng et al., ), also problematizing aspects of marginalization and stigmatization (Gedro, ). Eye-catching headlines such as ‘gender equality is years away’ (Arnold, : ) suggest that men are paid higher salaries on average than women and that the gap reduction is a (very) slow process (Ng et al., ). Related to this, feminist research has shown that theories and discourses of career have mostly been based on the (limited) experiences of white middle-class men (Gedro, ; LaPointe, ). Within these framings, as Hertneky () critiqued, career development is exclusively framed as a linear, hierarchical, and upward career path, not taking note of women’s career goals which may incorporate other aspects and follow alternative trajectories (Gedro, ). Historically, women were forced to choose between having a career and having a family—a zero-sum proposition. Although the idea that women have to live up to the image of the ‘company man’ (Kanter, ) was destabilized during the s, nowadays, new gendered boundaries are constructed through the norms of mobility and entrepreneurialism (Gedro, ; LaPointe, ). Besides women, also older workers, racial and LGBT+ minorities, and people with disabilities have worked hard to construct a legitimate career position for themselves in the workplace. Yet, in various professions, prevailing gender, ethnic, and other discriminations restrict opportunities for career progression for minorities (Ashley and Empson, ; Herman, ). A career perspective can help to identify these cases of
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prevailing inequality, and suggests that much more work is needed to reach an equitable situation. Since careers can also be turned into a site of self-direction and agency (Fernando and Cohen, ), this will have broader implications for how we theorize empowerment and resistance in the context of organizations. Earlier in the chapter, I noted how career identity is rarely constructed in isolation, but shaped by widely dispersed cultural narratives, which strongly affect people’s career choices (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ; LaPointe, ; Reedy et al., ; Somers, ). To better understand this dynamic, it is worth noting that in Western societies, validation of the self is increasingly grounded in a ‘success ethic’, which is defined in terms of upward mobility as well as in material accumulation (Collinson, ). Indeed, the identity ideal promoted in the workplace today is often characterized by career success (Reedy et al., ). As McRobbie (: ) suggests, we live in a society where ‘nobody can afford to come across as less than exceptional, hardworking and talented’. This claim underlines that in parts of the world where an ideology of ‘meritocracy’ dominates, the quest for career success is deeply engrained (Brown and Tannock, ; Young, ). The ideology of meritocracy suggests that whatever a person’s social position at birth, society ought to offer the opportunity to combine ‘talent’ with ‘effort’ in order for anyone to ‘rise to the top’ of a career ladder (Littler, ). Arguably, in contemporary society, career success has become the only reliable criterion for others to assess and (potentially) grant their goodwill (de Botton, ). Moreover, what others think of a person has come to play a determining role in how people view themselves, often because they are afflicted by deep-seated uncertainties concerning their own value (Collinson, ; de Botton, ). When people lose out in (career) status (Gill, ), the social evaluative threat may translate into lower overall happiness as people confront the ‘disreputable’ fate of being deemed ordinary (Delhey and Dragolov, ). It has also been argued that ‘in a world where reputations are hard won but easily lost’ (Maclean et al., : ), career aspirations can inspire relentless competition, compelling people to work harder—even to the point of psychological breakdown (Gill, ). This competition is tied to the non-reflexive endorsement of meritocratic principles, which have been disseminated, celebrated, and largely normalized as wholly beneficial. From a critical perspective it could be argued, however, that meritocracy damages community by rendering people with important career positions in society ‘somebodies’, while their inverse hold the brutal epithet of being ‘nobodies’. For these people, the system of meritocracy adds the ‘insult of shame’ (de Botton, : ) to the injury of low status. This leads to the question of agency and whether or not people can free themselves from an ethic of success and the imperative to excel in their careers. Even if cultural narratives of achievement and career success have strong appeal, career identities are not fixed. Individual agency and the freedom to change reside in the possibility of choosing among other available repertoires within the confines of given social and historic contexts (LaPointe, ; Meijers and Lengelle, ). As Kelly (: ) notes: ‘no one needs to be the victim of his [or her] biography’. Francequin () equally contends that the important thing is not ‘what society has done to us’, but instead, how we respond to that, thereby emphasizing the human capacity for creativity and reflection (Bujold, ). The crafting of alternative career narratives can thus empower people to (re-)assume agency over who they say they are and who they hope to be, thereby opening up new ways for
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enacting career identities when writing the next chapter in their career stories (Del Corso and Rehfuss, ). A first step towards a possible alternative to competitive career thinking for individuals could be a system that is based on a plural understanding of merit, grounded on a collective and not purely individual basis. Even in the competitive work domain, people could opt to pursue their own projects in collaboration with others (Reedy et al., ). In this way, they could move beyond concerns about superiority and an individualized narrative of career progression. Instead, they could de-toxify the individualized identity project, and forge social bonds supported by collective purpose, interdependence, equality, reciprocity, and conviviality (Delhey and Dragolov, ; Reedy et al., ).
C R
.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, I have argued for the integration of a career perspective when studying and theorizing identities in organizations. As Blustein and Noumair (: ) proposed, even though there is an abundance of theories, we are still in ‘need of qualifying perspectives that function to enrich our view’. Following this call, I sought to enrich the narrative approach to identity by illustrating how a career perspective is instructive to our understanding of identity as not just limited to a current context or position, but embedded in a long-term identity project that is both stable and flexible, and closely entwined with one’s overall career trajectory. In this way, the chapter advanced the theorization of ‘career identity’ in organizations, namely as an ongoing narrative accomplishment that allows for temporal aspects of continuity and change to coexist without contradiction. The chapter also discussed how constructing a career identity remains a challenging endeavour as it involves balancing personal dreams and career aspirations with organizational realities and societal imperatives for career success (Fraher and Gabriel, ; Gill, ). Likewise, since career experiences can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they can serve as sources of shame and disempowerment (de Botton, ; Gill, ), or likewise, as evidence of strength and wisdom (Gedro, ). What complicates the matter is that career identities remain an ongoing endeavour, since societal expectations never come to a rest and organizational boundaries are constantly being refined. Given the significant and ongoing changes in the work and career landscape (Wolf, ), it could be argued that the study of career identity is more relevant today than ever before (Gedro, ). There is still little (generalizable) knowledge on how people map their identities under increasingly protean and boundaryless career conditions (Grote and Raeder, ; Hall, ). Also, since the ‘new careers’ discourse is mainly rooted in the Anglo-Saxon context, there is much room for expanding the study of career identities to European, Asian, and other regions, and for making cross-cultural comparisons (Arnold, ; Chudzikowski, ). This could be particularly valuable, considering that career identities are always embedded in ever-evolving societal, cultural, and economic contexts (LaPointe, ; Somers, ). A thoughtful engagement with the notion of career identity can also be useful in practical terms. It can be beneficial, for instance, to educational institutions that aim to prepare early
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career individuals for their professional roles (Arthur et al., ). Assuming that most future graduates will not pursue classic, linear career advancement within the confines of a single organization, with a good grasp of evolving career identities they can better be supported in their exploration of provisional (Ibarra, ), possible (Rossiter, ), or alternative selves (Obodaru, ). Organizations too could benefit from better understanding the stable and flexible nature of career identities. In order to retain their best talent, they might need to develop incentives for those who do not seek a structured and linear career path (Chudzikowski, ), while still aspiring to hold on to the life themes and values which they find meaningful. Finally, this chapter can be considered an invitation to think more broadly, deeply, and perceptively about how people in organizations make sense of their hopes, dreams, joys, and fears as they craft their career identities.
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Abstract In this chapter, the authors advance thinking on examining the key identity targets through which individuals derive a sense of self in the context of work. They focus on four organizationally situated targets or foci: ‘manager’, ‘leader’, ‘follower’, and ‘team’. These identity targets are examined along two axes: fluidity versus stability, and content versus context. Additionally, the authors advance scholarship on individual-level identity foci by advocating the value of an intersectional perspective and drawing on key notions from intersectionality literature. They define an intersectional perspective as an approach that pays conscious attention to multiple positionality and power in conceptualizing, theorizing, and analysing identities and identification. By drawing on exemplars from current studies and offering suggestions for future scholarship, they show how adopting an intersectional perspective prompts further questions and provides additional lenses for analysis and theorizing, ultimately deepening our understanding of the processes by which individuals make sense of themselves in the context of work.
I I O
.................................................................................................................................. T study of individual-level identities as they relate to management and organizing has drawn the interest of scholars from a variety of theoretical and philosophical backgrounds,
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contributing to breadth and complexity within the field (Brown, ; Caza et al., ). In this chapter, we advance thinking on the key identity targets through which individuals derive a sense of self in the context of work. We do this by advocating the value of an intersectional perspective, ‘an approach that pays conscious attention to multiple positionality and power in conceptualizing, theorizing and analysing identities and identification’. To preface our discussion, first, we review earlier assessments we made of the field (Atewologun et al., ), focusing on how key identity constructs historically located ‘within’ organizational structures (e.g. leadership), are examined in identity studies. Subsequently, we build on these arguments by proposing additional perspectives and research questions for scholars investigating individuals’ bases for identification at work, inviting them to surface issues of identity multiplicity and power more mindfully. We define identity as an individual’s answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ (Cerulo, ). We differentiate between identity, which we use in reference to specific targets of individual self-definition, such as leader or follower, and ‘identification’, which we use to refer to the process of incorporating a particular target into one’s self-definition (Atewologun et al., ). Our systematic literature review revealed nine bases for, or targets of, identity (an individual’s self-definition) and identification (the process through which individuals come to define who they are) at work. These targets were arranged into three broad categories: organizationally situated targets (‘manager’, ‘leader’, ‘follower’, ‘team’, ‘organization’), occupation-based targets (‘occupational’, ‘professional’), and general targets related to work (‘career’ and ‘work’ targets). For the purposes of this chapter, we focus our attention on organizationally situated identities, which ‘are concerned with individuals constructing a sense of self that relates to performing a role or a job in relation to others, within the organizational structure’ (Atewologun et al., : ). We contrast these with broader occupation-based or professional identity foci, construed or enacted outside organizational boundaries. We focus on this subset of targets because our review of the literature indicates they comprise a substantial part of identity related scholarship (that is, per cent of studies we located). Further, our previous analyses of these targets suggest that there is relatively more cohesion and consistency in the use of these targets or foci (compared for example to ‘work’ as an identity focus). Therefore, as examinations of ‘manager’, ‘leader’, ‘team’, and ‘follower’ are generally both commonplace and more consistently conceptualized relative to other clusters of identity and identification targets, they provide a pragmatic starting point for further enhancements of identity scholarship, as discussed in this chapter. ‘Manager’, as an identity target, entails ‘an individual’s sense of self in the context of doing managerial work that is influenced by organizational and social discourses concerning what managers do and how they behave’ (Atewologun et al., : ). For example, Watson () demonstrates both the inward and outward facing identity work individuals holding managerial roles engage in as they strive to give meaning to their managerial identities in light of the various sets of expectations held for managers within the organization. Leader identity is ‘an individual’s sense of self as someone who can guide others’ work and who receives acknowledgement of that ability from those one guides as well as the organization’ (Atewologun et al., : ). Studies examining leader identity are often concerned with individuals developing a certain set of skills or engaging in specific behaviours to influence followers (e.g. Johnson et al., ; Nyberg and Sveningsson, ).
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3: The stable context of identity foci E.g. current prevailing narratives/discourses surrounding specific occupational foci
1: The stable content of identity foci E.g. what it means to an individual to be a leader, a manager or to hold a particular type of job
4: The evolving context of identification foci E.g. critical examinations of individuals' evolving professionalization, or the precariousness of aspiring to professional ideals
2: The evolving content of identification foci E.g. what it takes to become and begin seeing oneself as a leader
. A positioning framework for individual-level identity foci related to work (Reproduced with permission from Atewologun, Kutzer, Doldor, Anderson, and Sealy, )
Follower identity is ‘an individual’s sense of self as someone who is guided by others in their work and who provides acknowledgement to those who guide’ (Atewologun et al., : ). Although follower identity is typically examined in contrast to leader identity, with research highlighting the necessity of having good followers for the success of the leader (e.g. DeRue and Ashford, ), Peters and Haslam () argue for a more nuanced understanding of leader and follower identities, demonstrating that the two are not mutually exclusive within a single individual. Team identity is ‘an individual’s sense of self in the context of the beliefs they share with a collection of workers and a sense of belonging (within and outside an organization)’ (Atewologun et al., : ). The focus of team identity research centres on factors fostering attachment to a team and the outcomes of such attachment (e.g. Ellemers et al., ; Mitchell et al., ). Following Atewologun et al. (), studies examining organizationally situated identity foci can be mapped around four broad constellations (see Figure .), based on the dimensions of stable/evolving and content/context. Firstly, identity scholars have investigated the ‘stable content’ of identity, in which the meaning of an identity target is explored. Secondly, within the ‘evolving content’ identity quadrant, research centres on how individuals develop or change a target identity. Thirdly, studies examining the ‘stable context’ of identity are characterized by a focus on how the individual’s surroundings influence the meanings attributed to identity targets. Finally, the fourth quadrant of research has been the ‘evolving context’ of identity in which the individual’s environment is examined in relation to how individuals develop or change a target identity. Having introduced an overview of the labels used by scholars to examine how individuals see themselves in relation to others within management and organization studies, and described the broad clusters into which they can be arranged, we turn now to our primary
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contribution for this chapter, the application of an intersectional perspective to such identity targets. We propose that applying intersectional thinking to understanding how individuals see themselves in relation to others in organizations can prompt new types of questions and offer additional lenses for theorizing and analyses, ultimately deepening our understanding of the processes by which individuals make sense of themselves in the context of work. Following our presentation of what intersectionality is, and the core principles of an intersectional perspective, we return to the quadrants in the latter half of the chapter to illustrate how applying an intersectional perspective can further advance understanding of individual-level identity foci in organizations.
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What Is Intersectionality? Intersectionality is ‘a framework, a theory and an approach to social justice’ (Warner and Shields, : ) that draws attention to individuals’ multiple positionality. The term has origins in critical race studies and was first used by Crenshaw () to depict the multiple marginality and consequent invisibility of African-American women in anti-sexist and anti-racist legislation. Intersectionality, broadly applied, draws out interests and implications of being at the confluence of multiple structural systems of oppression, including sexism, racism, normative heterosexuality, and other sources of inequality. As a perspective, it describes ‘a way of approaching social identities that embraces multiplicity and is neither additive nor reductive’ (Hulko, : ). Else-Quest and Hyde () summarize three fundamental assumptions of intersectional approaches: () individuals are defined simultaneously by multiple social categories (hereafter referred to as multiplicity); () power inequalities are inherent within and across these categories; and () these categories are properties of both individuals and their social context, and as a result has significance across levels of analysis. As it relates to identities and identification, thus, intersectionality draws attention to multiple identity targets and simultaneous identification processes and the power dynamics therein. Intersectionality, as it is widely applied in feminist and critical studies, is a multi-level concept that draws attention to both micro, individual-level social categorization and macro, structural systems of inequality (Carrim and Nkomo, ). For this chapter, we draw on intersectionality as an analytical framework in a flexible manner, inviting scholars to apply an intersectional perspective to the study of organizationally situated identity targets, rather than making a case to fully embrace intersectional theorizing. We define an intersectional perspective as ‘an approach that pays conscious attention to identity multiplicity and power in conceptualizing, theorizing, and analysing identities and identification’. We see synergies between studies of identity foci in organizations and intersectionality. First, intersectionality is, traditionally, congruent with social constructionist approaches and feminist standpoint epistemologies (Else-Ouest and Hyde, ; Holvino, ;
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Shields, ). Thus, philosophically, intersectionality aligns with interpretivist, critical, and postmodern approaches that are increasingly prominent in identity and identities scholarship (Alvesson et al., a; Brown , ). In general, social constructionism, interpretivism, feminist standpoints, and other critical and postmodern perspectives can be contrasted with positivist approaches as they acknowledge interpersonal meaning-making, multiple subjectivities, and power relations (to varying degrees) in the dynamic relationships between self, work, and organizations (Alvesson et al., a; Brown, ). Further, like some contemporary critical organization studies of identities (e.g. Dick, ; Rumens and Kerfoot, ), intersectionality surfaces issues of power in identity (i.e. a prescription of the self that is both individual and social), by seeking to theorize how powers and inequalities are ‘rooted in, fostered by, or perpetuated by membership in multiple social categories’ (Else-Quest and Hyde, : ). The predominant application of intersectionality in management and organizational studies is on individual subjectivities (Atewologun, ), a core facet of identity scholarship. We elaborate on two underpinning principles of an intersectional perspective, drawing primarily on Else-Quest and Hyde (). Acknowledging the broad and heterogeneous nature of intersectional studies, these authors highlight general assumptions underlying intersectional work, which we find useful to apply to individual-level identity foci scholarship. The first principle of applying an intersectional perspective to studying individual targets of identification in organizations is, we propose, that scholars conceive individuals as inhabiting locations of multiple positionality; that is, they are characterized simultaneously by multiple, organizationally situated targets. That is, within a contemporary organizational context, an individual can draw on their organizational, team, leader, and follower identities in quick succession or perhaps even in combination, in the same context. Most individual-level identity studies focus on single targets or single relationships (Ramarajan, ); despite this, lived experience and research suggests that these foci are intricately interwoven and we transition and negotiate multiple social identity categories and roles (Ashforth, ; Ramarajan, ). For instance, a surgeon leading a medical team is effectively acting as a leader and team member while conducting a surgical procedure. Studies such as Millward et al.’s () attempt to predict the salience of organizationally situated identities based on selected variables, assume single identity salience. Rather than presume that only one identity plays out at a given point in time depending on context (Epitropaki et al., ), multiple positionality calls for an assumption that people are characterized simultaneously by multiple, organizationally situated targets, thereby opening up possibilities to examine the salience of multiple and intertwined identity targets at work. For example, the extent to which a sub-unit leader (e.g. Head of Marketing) embraces or articulates a compelling marketing strategy may be influenced by their ‘follower identity’ in relation to their CEO leader. Thus, multiple positionality is important in identity-foci scholarship because it enables scholars to articulate conceptual and empirical connections between various organizationally situated foci; it also allows more inductive studies to capture the lived experience of embodying multiple foci at once. The emphasis on how multiple identities relate to each other is central to other perspectives on identities. In particular, the notion of multiplicity is pertinent to how roles or social identities are activated or reconciled relative to each other in role identity theory (e.g. Ashforth, ); and both subjective importance and situational relevance are
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deemed to predict salience of a given identity (Ashforth, ). Our point of divergence is that relative power or status signified by, or embedded within each identity target, should be considered routinely in analysing content (e.g. subjective importance) and/or context (e.g. situational relevance). A second principle of an intersectional perspective applied to individual targets of identification in organizations (drawing on Else-Quest and Hyde, ) is that power dynamics are embedded in these targets. For pioneering intersectionality feminists (e.g. the women of colour activists such as the Combahee River Collective who advocated intersectional thinking prior to the term being coined by Crenshaw, ), the focus on power stemmed from a preoccupation with social justice and inequalities embedded in social categories such as gender and race. While intersectionality typically draws on a systemic understanding of power as anchored in social structures, we explain how surfacing power dynamics both outside and within organizations can contribute to a more sophisticated conceptualization of the four identity foci and their interrelations. A traditional power analysis from an intersectional perspective entails considering how social categories such as gender, race, class, etc. shape individuals’ experience with specific foci. Certainly, there is robust scholarship theorizing how these broader social inequalities related to gender or race taint individual experience of being or becoming a leader, manager (Brescoll, ; Eagly and Karau, ; Ely et a., ; Ospina and Foldy, ), or even operating as a team member (Thomas-Hunt and Phillips, ). We also think it is worth surfacing how intra-organizational power dynamics come into play in considering identity multiplicity. By ‘power’ we do not just refer to job title or position in the organizational hierarchy, but also informal power and politics replete in organizing (Buchanan, ). Identity targets such as leader, follower, manager, and team member have differential formal and informal power bases and status (Buchanan and Badham, ), which shift in time and across context. For example, scholarship on organizational politics documents employees’ frustration with workplace politics, while at the same time stressing the prevalence of political influence and the importance of political skill in leadership and managerial roles (Ammeter et al., ; Buchanan and Badham, ). The fact that politics are experienced differently depending on seniority (Doldor, ) seems to suggest that individuals are more likely to incorporate political game playing into leader identities, compared to follower identities. Yet, when we consider power and multiple positionality, new questions arise. For instance, leader identities are likely more salient than team identities for members of senior leadership teams (e.g. corporate boards), as is the extent to which they incorporate self-construals as politically savvy players into these identities. Is there a tipping point where certain identities (e.g. leader) become more salient than others (e.g. team) as one becomes more senior and accrues power? Indeed, a recent study by Chiu et al. () suggests that whether one is perceived as a manager or a leader depends on the degree of informal social power possessed. Thus, attending to issues of power with an intersectional perspective invites scholars to further examine how membership in multiple organizationally situated identity foci is rooted in, and perpetuated by, these informal power and political dynamics in the workplace. For many mainstream, non-critical organizational scholars, an intersectional perspective will be an unfamiliar approach to understanding targets of identification. In advocating an
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intersectional perspective, we consciously restrict its application to organization studies of ‘micro’ identities and identification. We do not anticipate that all individual-level identity target scholars embrace all of intersectionality’s key tenets. We advocate for the adoption of an intersectional perspective for a number of reasons. First, multiple positionality expands our awareness and challenges us to make explicit our assumptions regarding any assumed ‘independence’, or simultaneity of identification foci, and provides the language for engaging with this, evoking concepts such as multiple, connected, confluence, combined, crossing, and juxtaposition for examination. Such an expanded view of studying multiple identity targets raises broad questions relating to the experiences, processes, and practices organizational members engage in ‘offsetting, ameliorating, intensifying, accumulating, or deepening’ (McIntosh, : ) various identity targets, for example simultaneous leaderfollower, or manager-team member identities. Second, centralizing power in combination with multiplicity prompts scholars to ask what may be rendered invisible or devalued or deemed less powerful or appealing relative to other identity targets in organizational life. Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, by way of broad application to studies of identity foci in organizations, we downplay intersectionality’s focus on social systems, social justice, and emancipatory outcomes, and apply a restricted focus on social categories as identity targets/foci. Our application of intersectional thinking to mainstream identity research may be classed as ‘weak intersectionality’ (Shin et al., ). Weak intersectionality is ‘scholarship that considers the unique outcomes produced by multiple interesting social identities, but fails to provide an interrogation of larger systems of inequality (i.e., an identitarian approach)’ (Shin et al., : ). In contrast stands ‘strong intersectionality’, which stays closer to intersectionality’s emancipatory aims, and is defined as ‘scholarship which foregrounds relationships and outcomes among multiple intersecting social categories and critiques interlocking forms of power and privilege’ (Shin et al., : ). In summary, applying intersectional thinking to individual-level identity foci studies requires a focus on multiplicity and power. Next, we return to our dimensions of individual-level identity foci scholarship, context/content and stable/evolving, and review these using an intersectional perspective.
Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Being and Becoming Yourself at Work Applying an intersectional perspective to identities and identification studies raises questions regarding foci clusters (rather than single targets or single relationship pairs) and how such foci may be enacted in tandem at a given moment in time, or how identification dynamics related to such foci interplay over time, perhaps in a developmental context. Applying an intersectional perspective to content and context raises issues relating to embodying or striving to embody multiple identity targets simultaneously on one hand, and the multiple structural positions and positioning that enable or constrain the acquisition, development, and achievement of identities, on the other. Identity content encompasses the vast array of attributes and experiences typically associated with a particular target (Atewologun et al., ). Intersectional scholars have previously drawn attention to ‘content specialization’ (Hancock, ), a sub-category of
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intersectional work. Content specialization is also described as ‘intracategorical complexity’ (McCall, ). Here, the focus is on elucidating the experiences and perspectives of members of social identity groups traditionally ignored or marginalized in scholarship. We suggest that when adopting an intersectional perspective to studies of individual-level identity foci within organizations, even where a scholar chooses to examine a single identity target, they acknowledge which other targets may have been considered and discarded or privileged to the detriment of others. Identity context captures the environment—both past and present—in which identity is enacted (Atewologun et al., ). Intersectionality posits that identities are properties of both the individual and the context, thus placing emphasis on context and structure. Where attention is paid to context, scholar(s) should tune into how physical spaces and less material structures at micro and meso (i.e. organizational) levels may influence the selection of which identity targets are practised and/or achieved/attained. According to Jones (: ) ‘intersectionality elevates the influence of context and what constitutes context’, from the immediate micro-level organizational setting to ‘macrolevel structures such as cultural background, legal system . . . and historical and current events’. An intersectional perspective in particular attunes us to how contemporary and historic sociocultural contexts give meaning to one’s social locations and multiple positionality; that is, oppression and privileges relating to identity markers such as sexual orientation, language, race, shadism/colourism, age, and class are both temporal and spatial (Hulko, ). Broadly, an intersectional perspective, as applied to examinations of identity foci within organizations prompts us to explore the ways in which current or past context and shifts therein affect how multiple identity foci are defined and experienced. An intersectional perspective also directs us to understandings of how power embedded in context (i.e. structure), and/or denoted by the content of specific foci, influence identity and identification processes. Next, we reconsider the four quadrants comprising clusters of identity foci within organizations and elaborate further on how an intersectional perspective prompts further questions and provides additional lenses for analyses and theorizing, ultimately deepening our understanding of the processes by which individuals make sense of themselves in the context of work.
. An Intersectional Perspective on the Stable Content of Identity Targets in Organizations The first quadrant in Figure . represents relatively fixed assumptions regarding what it means to an individual to inhabit leader, manager, team, or follower identities (e.g. relatively stable or defining experiences or attributes associated with these targets). From an intersectional perspective, a key question is: What does it mean to identify simultaneously with multiple targets and what are the power dynamics therein? An intersectional perspective helps explore how certain identities are nested within each other and how these identity targets are experienced simultaneously in the lived experience of individuals who embody more than one focus. Further, an intersectional perspective raises questions regarding what dynamics are revealed when we consider how membership in these multiple identity categories/foci stems from and perpetuates inequalities. Intersectionality thinking is particularly useful as leadership has often explicitly or implicitly been situated in the white male heterosexual body (as many authors, e.g. Ospina and Foldy, , have
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pointed out). Consistent with Eagly’s () observation that ‘members of outsider social groups’ encounter difficulties establishing their legitimacy as leaders, Jones () draws attention to some of the benefits of applying intersectional thinking to leadership, such as raising issues of (in)visibility, authenticity, and the role of shifting contexts (which we address in the next section). Further, paying attention to multiple positionality and power dynamics in the construction of identity foci may mitigate what Knights and Clark () critique as the tendency to focus on an individual (elite) identity target (e.g. ‘leader’ relative to ‘follower’) in identity research. For illustration, a corporate board director can be both head of a function and member of a senior leadership team. Further, the reality of today’s matrix organizational structures points to the fact that an individual may conceive of him-/herself as follower and leader on different projects while simultaneously seeing themselves as a line manager to a ‘subordinate’ working on another project. In these examples, how are leader, follower, and team member identity targets construed in combination? How does one influence the others (e.g. is one’s leadership style different as a result of also being a follower within the same context and timeframe?), how do their attributes differ, contrast, and what are the overlapping schemas? Further, certain foci are associated with greater prestige. Social identities related to gender, race, class, or sexuality impact how leader/manager, team, or follower identities are experienced and embodied, but these are still under-explored (Knights and Clarke, ). Understanding this will provide a holistic and critical understanding of how certain work-related identities are experienced in relation to others.
. An Intersectional Perspective on the Evolving Content of Identity Targets in Organizations In contrast to relatively stable assumptions about identity meanings, there is less understanding in identification studies of how individuals acquire and develop a sense of self as leader, manager, follower, and team member in conjunction with each other. From an intersectional perspective, a key question pertains to understanding the processes engaged when identifying with multiple foci over time and the associated power shifts in the relationships between targets. Studies of leader identity development and leader identification abound (e.g. Day and Harrison, ; Ely et al., ), relative to studies of managerial identity development, and hardly ever in comparison to each other (for an exception, see Caroll and Levy, ). An intersectional perspective draws attention to the identity construction processes underlying how multiple identity category membership might be shaped through time. For instance, is there a sequential development or mutual influence between follower, managerial, and leader self-construals over time? A contemporary perspective on how individuals develop a sense of self as a leader is DeRue and Ashford’s () leadership identity construction theory. DeRue and Ashford () conceive leader identity construction as a process of successive claims and grants between those who claim leadership and those who warrant it. Further applications of this theory could examine how this claiming and granting process may be shaped over time and in conjunction with other organizationally located identities. For example, how might followers’ experience of granting leadership in the past affect their (future?) leadership claims, or vice versa? Understanding such questions would help surface issues of process and temporality, generally neglected in identity scholarship (Brown, ). Such questions
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could be addressed by time sensitive (e.g. processual) research designs (Howard-Grenville et al., ; Langley et al., ; Lutgen-Sandvik ). Further, power is also central to unpacking multiple positionality in organizations including leader–follower dynamics and identities. Drawing on poststructuralist perspectives, Collinson () argues that scholarly attention should be directed to how leaders affect followers’ identities by exploring how conformist, resistant, and dramaturgical identities are enacted in the workplace. Scholars should also seek to expose power and inequality dynamics involved in how individuals construct and evolve a sense of self as leader/manager/follower or team member. How do salient social group memberships complicate how these identity meanings shift over time? For example, how do selfconstructions of gender, race, and sexual orientation shift temporally, and to what extent do they affect developing leader or follower identities? Research shows that individuals leverage gender, ethnic, and senior identities as cues and resources to negotiate power positions inherent in their juxtaposed disadvantaged and privileged locations (Atewologun et al., ). Are the processes engaged in evolving an identity, for example, as a white male leader similar or different (and in what ways?) to evolving an identity as an Asian female leader? This seems likely, as research shows that intersecting gender and ethnicity holds differential implications for Asian, black, white women and men (e.g. Galinsky et al., ); and, what are the best ways in which this can be studied? Methodologically, how do we grapple with the development of less visible, privileged, unmarked identities (e.g. able-bodiedness, whiteness)? Questions such as these are prompted by applying an intersectional perspective to understanding the evolving content of identity foci within organizations.
. An Intersectional Perspective on the Stable Context of Identity Targets in Organizations Our third cluster of studies on identities and identification focuses on elucidating how a current snapshot of the environment (such as the immediate organizational context or broader socio-demographic, e.g. migration, patterns) may affect a particular identity or identification target. From an intersectional perspective, a key question is: What are the prevailing contextual (e.g. structural, institutional or relational) factors influencing identification with multiple targets and what relations of power are at stake? As noted previously, focus on context is central to traditional intersectional scholarship. Applying an intersectional perspective to scholarship on organizationally situated identity foci draws attention to how broader contemporary societal factors affect identities and identification in organizations. This is often neglected in mainstream functionalist leadership literature (one exception being research on cross-cultural leadership, where national cultural/context is generally acknowledged as important to the formation of specific leadership prototypes) (e.g. Koopman et al., ). Social, structural, and material context affect ascription and enactment, and the degree to which a target of identification seems obtainable. We have long recognized that prevailing gender and racial stereotypes (e.g. think leader, think male/white; think follower, think female (Braun et al., ; Eagly and Karau, ; Gündemir et al., ) shape collectively held representations of socially acceptable leadership. A further avenue for applying an intersectional perspective to such studies would comprise drawing on narratives of
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leadership from diverse community contexts for insight on how these affect identity targets within organizations. For example, how may African-American men and women’s formal leadership and service roles in ‘Black churches’ influence the visibility and enactment of identity targets with which they identify at work? Thus, intersectionality channels attention to broader social structures and power inequalities beyond organizational boundaries that enable and hinder the manifestation of relatively stable identities such as leader or manager.
. An Intersectional Perspective on the Evolving Context of Identity Targets in Organizations In this quadrant are examinations of ‘contextual factors influencing the process of identification with’ (Atewologun et al., : ) manager, team, follower, and leader targets. A key question inspired by an intersectional perspective is: what are the shifting contextual (e.g. historical, narrative, or relational) factors influencing identification with multiple targets and what are the relations of power associated with them? An intersectional perspective supports further exploration of how contextual changes affect how multiple identities are experienced, and how the power inherent in certain foci shifts across contexts and time. For instance, the stigmatization of finance professions after the financial crash might lower the public prestige of leadership roles in such contexts, leading to what Alvesson and Robertson () described as teflonic identity manoeuvring—an avoidance of identity concerns among senior investment bankers. Does this weaken leadership identification in this context relative to its historic ‘idealized’ status (Carroll and Levy, )? Conversely, a context such as the UK National Health Service in light of UK austerity measures might lead to a strengthening of managerial identities because of its increasing share of management positions in recent years (Buchanan et al., ). Broader sectoral healthcare reforms arguably challenge and redefine manager and follower identity in this context, where managerialism is resisted and followers are often highly skilled individuals holding high status clinical roles. Research could also draw on diverse communities’ histories: How do histories of activism or resistance affect identity foci within organizations? For example, in their study of the identity work of South African Indian women managers, Carrim and Nkomo () show how managerial identities are shaped and reshaped from personal and social identities as well as the socio-historical political and cultural contexts within which individuals and groups grow up and are embedded. Carrim and Nkomo () found that socio-historical political and cultural contexts (including South Africa’s apartheid legacy and the fact that interviewees comprised the first generation of Indian women in senior management in their country) shaped processes of identification with the ‘manager’ identity target. To what extent is this experience manifest in other communities, for example does a history of activism in LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) communities influence identification with ‘leader’ as an organizationally situated target? As a further example, Jones () discusses how the meanings of identity foci change across space, time, and context. She illustrates this using the divergent experiences of leaders of social organizations at universities (i.e. Greek fraternities in American campuses). Jones () contrasts white fraternities’ easier access to large facilities that house
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members and provide amenities (making it easier to enact leadership and followership and team member identities), with black fraternities’ relative challenge in having legitimate spaces to meet, socialize, and reside. Parallels can be drawn between these student leadership examples and corporate organizations. In offices, the availability and layout of physical spaces (e.g. access to private enclosures; refreshments for after-work meetings) may affect how and where network or affinity group leaders and members (e.g. women’s or religious networks) can safely convene. Thus, whether and what spaces and resources are available or not for congregation may enable or restrict individuals’ identification with multiple social and organizationally situated identity targets. In summary, how does current or past context and shifts therein affect how multiple identity foci are defined and experienced? How does the power embedded in context (i.e. structure) and/or denoted by the content of specific focus influence identity and identification processes? We propose being mindful of multiple positionality and issues of power in conceptualizing, theorizing, and analysing identities and identification research. This will prompt new types of questions and provide additional lenses for theorizing and analyses, ultimately deepening our understanding of the processes by which individuals make sense of themselves in the context of work. We invite scholars interested in investigating individuals’ bases for identification within an organizational structure to use the questions posed here as a starting point for mapping the field and/or further extending current boundaries. Next, we apply an intersectional perspective for reflexivity, and conclude with a consideration of the limitations of our approach.
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.................................................................................................................................. Reflexivity entails consideration of the researcher’s influence on the research process (Haynes, ). In particular, reflexivity is regarded as a critical activity for social science scholars, who need to acknowledge the role of factors such as personal subjectivities, language, ideology, and socio-political manoeuvrings in the creation of knowledge (Alvesson et al., b; Guba and Lincoln, ; Hertz, ). Reflecting its critical roots, intersectionality recognizes, similarly, that power relations play a fundamental role in the construction of experience and knowledge (Holvino, ). Scholars have advocated different approaches to reflexivity (Hibbert et al., ). We strongly encourage that researchers studying identities and identification engage in reflexivity with an intersectional perspective as our intersectional locations and multiple positionality influence what we privilege in our scholarship. Intersectional reflexivity requires scholars to reflect on their own identities, which may be relevant to the research project and the (shifting) power dynamics that transpire throughout the research process (Atewologun and Mahalingam, ; Hulko, ; Yuval-Davis, ). In producing this chapter, we interrogated how issues of multiple positionality and power played out in our interactions and in our output. In particular, we considered how our current career positions and prevailing narratives around what ‘early or mid-career academic scholars of identity ought to publish’ influence our writing experiences. We are three heterosexual female academics, who have spent significant time in the UK but who have in the past and currently, depending on context, identify (or identified)
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differently as American, Nigerian, and Romanian. As a result, our experiences of organizationally situated identities appear to have always been in combination with our gender, cultural, ethnic, and class identities. Professionally positioning ourselves as identity scholars, we have found it challenging to expunge ‘non-work identities’ such as those relating to gender, ethnicity, nationality, and parental status, from our work. Further, directly pertinent to the production of this chapter were the positions in the academic hierarchy we inhabited and enacted. We hold different positions in our academic careers (early to mid-career), and we considered the implications (e.g. professional risks) associated with the co-production of identities-related scholarship. For example, we grappled with marrying intersectionality, rooted in critical and emancipatory scholarship, with the findings of a systematic literature review steeped in the functionalist tradition. We also considered the implications for us as equality, diversity, and inclusion scholars of advocating what some researchers (e.g. Shin et al., ) might consider a ‘weak’ version of intersectionality, due to our focus on organizationally situated identities rather than assuming an emancipatory focus. Further, we wondered whether this decision would have greater impact on members of the author team with relatively more established careers (with associated desires to establish (higher) status within various research communities), versus those earlier in their careers. The power of intersectionality lies in its being both a theoretical and analytical tool as well as a reflection of everyday lived experience of multiple positionality (Hulko, ). We highlight our experiences to acknowledge how our organizationally located identities as academic scholars influenced the production of this conceptual piece. Notwithstanding these reflections on the research process, however, we are hopeful that the product of our collaboration and the choices we have made as ‘who we are’ will offer other scholars food for thought regarding adopting an intersectional perspective in their investigations of organizationally situated identities. We also acknowledge the potential limitations of our recommendations. One limitation is that we focused only on a subset of identity targets. We did this for pragmatic purposes— these identity foci are commonly used and bounded within commonly understood definitions of ‘the organization’. However, we expect attending to multiplicity with power would also be useful in the study of other individual-level identity targets such as occupation or profession. Second, our selection of foci such as leader, manager, team, and follower are likely most pertinent to studies of more traditional forms of organizing at work. As changes to organizational structures and patterns of working continue, it raises the question of which targets become more critical in making sense of selves at work (e.g. part time worker; entrepreneur, returning worker), offering rich potential for further applications of an intersectional perspective. A final potential criticism concerns our application of intersectionality, which may be considered ‘weak’. We adopted this for the purposes of inviting ‘mainstream’ scholars of identity targets in contemporary organizations to engage with concepts inspired by intersectionality. Universal application of intersectionality to broader scholarship has been advocated in fields such as politics (Dhamoon, ), sociology (Choo and Ferree, ), and organizational studies (Holvino, ). We hope that identity scholars who may have distanced themselves from intersectionality as a niche concept, find in some of our articulations herein, material to prompt new questions concerning targets of identification at work.
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The Value of Writerly Texts ......................................................................................................................
Abstract The field of identity and, more specifically, identity work continues to blossom, encompassing contributions from different traditions of scholarship. Through an analysis of contributions in the areas of identity work and struggles, and space/place, this chapter suggests the field’s expansion in four respects: conceptual, theoretical, thematic, and methodological. The authors’ subsequent discussion draws on Barthes’ ( []) distinction between readerly and writerly texts to examine critically the writing practices through which contributions are established, and through which dialogue between different traditions and perspectives is both delimited and opened up. They conclude by offering reflections on the challenges of publishing the type of complex, plural work they are advocating, and make suggestions regarding the possibilities for ensuring identity remains a generative means of exploring the dynamics of organization.
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.................................................................................................................................. T chapter explores the writing practices that might sustain the generative potential of identity scholarship. As recent reviews capture, identity research has flourished into a nuanced field in which an array of conceptual languages have developed around a number of potentially competing perspectives (Brown, , ; Corlett et al., ; Miscenko and Day, ). Research on ‘identity work’ exemplifies the way in which a concept
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originating in a particular tradition—in this case symbolic interactionism (Snow and Anderson )—has blossomed to encompass diverse contributions that are informed by, amongst others: social identity theory, social constructionism, narrative studies, poststructuralist notions (particularly those associated with discourse), and Lacanian theories of subjectivity. For us, this profusion reflects the energy with which the term entered into organization studies. Indeed, it was the generative potential of ‘identity work’ as a means to unpack complex personal and interpersonal dynamics that attracted us to the field. To be clear, we are not opposed to the introduction of different theoretical voices and value the alternative perspectives they open up. Their proliferation, however, is not without its challenges. Those who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of how particular authors understand identity are faced with an array of interpretations of where identity resides, and the processes through which it is constituted and evolves. Such issues are no less problematic for those within the field, challenging us as writers to remain consistent in the way we mobilize concepts, conduct research, and describe and theorize what we find. Our concern is that far from the dialogue between traditions called for in recent reviews (Corlett et al., ), becoming overly disciplined in the way we produce scholarly contributions might result in identity research ploughing ever deepening furrows of parallel scholarship. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ ( []) distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, we might caricature our concerns as being with the increasingly ‘readerly’ quality of contributions. A readerly text, Barthes charges, presents a neatly packaged argument that marginalizes alternatives, thus allowing the reader to pass through unchallenged (Barthes, []). Scholarly writing is, of course, a matter of defining terms and delineating processes, but this does not necessarily mean that writing in one tradition should bracket or ignore contributions in other traditions that are directly relevant. In extremis, such an approach could stultify the field rendering it unable to acknowledge, let alone challenge, tenuous distinctions in terminology and underlying contradictions in the way identities are understood to participate in organizational life. Barthes’ preference is for ‘writerly’ texts. These raise as many questions as they answer, requiring the reader to engage in meaning making as they (re)fashion a response to the text and the world. This was what we originally found, and continue to admire, in identity research. So while we might be a little uncomfortable with the dichotomy Barthes sets up, it does provide a means to critically evaluate how far identity scholarship continues to represent the freshness and willingness to experiment that we perceived in early work. Do we still find theories/theorists introduced in a way that complements and expands the potential ways in which identity can be understood? Is there the same sense of a conceptual language being developed that affords the reader opportunities to understand and explore identity’s role in the dynamics of organizing? And does this support an expanding range of ‘thematic’ areas (e.g. when an author suggests a new area for investigation such as space/ place and identity, or a new aspect such as emotion and identity work, etc.) in which identity-related phenomena are being investigated? Finally, are the methods being used for empirical research evolving as the field advances and grows in sophistication? This chapter presents an analysis of the readerly/writerly nature of identity work research in two areas of scholarship—identity struggles, and space/place. These are prevalent themes in recent identities-themed papers. Working through scores of recent contributions, we examine the way in which the theoretical, conceptual, thematic, and method
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matters, identified above, were tackled in each paper. Some were easy to agree with, such as the ‘readerly’ way several papers seemed to usher the reader through the methods with little sense of there being any question of identity not being revealed by the analysis. Other matters drew us into debates that shaped our understanding of our undertaking. For example, the question of for whom the article was primarily written caused us to rethink the way in which Barthes’ binary might apply when the author is oriented towards identity scholars, general organization studies scholars, or a practitioner audience. Similarly, our deliberations on how far reviewers’ and editors’ expectations impinged upon authors’ crafting of writerly work provided the basis for our concluding discussion. We begin the chapter with a commentary on four key papers concerned with identity struggles (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ; Hay, ; Petriglieri et al., ; and Williams et al., ) and four significant papers on identity in relation to space and place (Elsbach, ; Tyler and Cohen, ; Courpasson et al., ; and Grey and O’Toole, ). This allows us to illustrate the sweep of development that has unfolded across the breadth of theoretical perspectives informing the identity literature and to contrast the way authors position their work in terms of its theoretical, conceptual, thematic, and method positions. We then examine critically how far Barthes’ categories might apply, and reflect upon the ways different audience groups for identity scholarship might call for different combinations of readerly and writerly writing. In concluding the chapter, we invite readers to explore the possibilities for publishing the type of complex, plural work that will ensure identity remains a vibrant and generative means of exploring the dynamics of organizing and organizations.
E I W F—U G T R D
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Comparative Analysis : Identity Work and Struggles Sveningsson and Alvesson’s (: ) definition of identity work as ‘people being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ provides a touchstone for most, if not all, of the work we examine. Given the significance of the conceptual contribution made by this paper, it is easy to forget that, thematically, it was concerned with the ‘identity struggles’ that underpinned the everyday activities of the senior manager that they shadowed in their ‘multi-level intensive study’ (: ). It therefore provides a point of reference from which to explore the diverse ways in which this thematic area of scholarship has evolved. Our selected papers indicate the ways in which the idea of ‘identity struggles’ has been: used to highlight the emotive nature of everyday managerial work (Hay, ); adopted in different theoretical framings of identity (Petriglieri et al., ); and applied to understudied groups such as retiring servicemen (Williams et al., ). It is worth noting the theoretical positioning Sveningsson and Alvesson use to open up space for their conceptual contribution. Taking ‘the “becoming” lead’ (: ) that had,
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at the time, gained prominence in the broader organizational studies field, they associate their work with poststructuralist and discursive approaches. Rather than a tight theoretical argument, then, they are explicitly focussed on the space of possibilities opened up by ‘the interplay between organizational discourses, role expectations, narrative self-identity and identity work’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ). This exploratory space reflects in the methods that emphasize staying ‘ “close” to experienced reality and everyday practice’ (: ) to provide a rich case. It is in this space that the concepts of ‘identity work’ (itself lifted from the symbolic interactionist work of Snow and Anderson ) and identity as struggle emerge as descriptive of the way the manager who was the focus of their longitudinal study copes with the ‘dynamic aspects and on-going struggles around creating a sense of self ’ (: ). A decade later, Hay () also uses the ‘interplay’ trope to foreground a close, empirically grounded, examination of everyday work. Significantly, however, Hay’s conceptualization of identity draws upon Watson’s () differentiation of the way ‘external social identities of “manager” inform an individual’s self-identity’ (Hay, : ) to argue that struggle revolves around a manager’s choices between competing discourses and the limits of available social identities. Distinguishing (‘external’) role- from (‘internal’) self-identity opens up the space in which Hay examines the ‘ordinarily suppressed emotional struggles’ (Hay, : ) that emanate from the underlying tensions and contradictions in managerial identities. As with Sveningsson and Alvesson (), the findings emerge from the coding of interview data and, as before, catalogue the way in which such tensions and contradictions are suppressed, denied, and silenced by the nature of managerial discourse. We might say, then, that the work achieves a conceptual embellishment through a slightly different theoretical stance on identity. The strength of the work, however, lies in the ‘important practical possibilities’ it offers for facilitating and engaging in ‘more realistic and helpful identity work’ (Hay, : ). In this respect, management educators and practitioner-managers as much as identity scholars are encouraged to acknowledge the emotive aspects of identity work and to explore alternatives to prevailing understandings of the ‘manager’ (Hay, : ). Petriglieri et al.’s () study of those working in the gig economy is also concerned with emotion, but the focus is less upon developing managerial awareness, and more on establishing a framework through which emotion can be diagnosed and managed. This is consistent with their theoretical stance that employs the cognitive and sensemaking approaches associated with the American pragmatist tradition (see Corlett et al., for further discussion). However, the extent to which they adhere to work associated with Social Identity Theory is marked, as is the relatively small number of cross-collaborating organizational researchers that they use to frame the research issue. So, for example, in exploring emotional dynamics they touch upon Sveningsson and Alvesson’s () definition of identity work, but turn to Snow and Anderson’s () original symbolic interactionist article to develop a position on the relation of emotion to identity. They seem, then, to bracket the literature on emotion and identity work (Winkler, ), in favour of introducing systems psychodynamics as a way of ‘theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Systems psychodynamic theories provide a novel way of examining the ‘existential’ emotions of gig workers (Petriglieri et al., : ) as they seek an equilibrium between
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underlying tensions such as the desire to be, or not to be, (with) someone (: ). However, it does mean that their study is isolated from debates on identity work. In their methods section, for example, they present the study as exploratory, inductive, ‘grounded’ research with no discussion of alternatives, or of the adequacy of this approach for ‘revealing’ emotions in face-to-face and phone-based interview data. Similarly, the argument developed in the discussion seeks to unravel problematics in relation between workidentity and emotion. Identity work, then, becomes a mediating process, a source and consequence of the management of emotion, rather than a substantive field that can help explain interpersonal dynamics. One consequence of this reversal is that rather than encourage exploration by suggesting alternatives, Petriglieri and colleagues systematize their work, providing a ‘process model’ that furnishes the reader with a relatively closedcircuit way of explaining and anticipating what unfolds for their gig workers. Williams et al.’s () study of retired servicemen’s experience of transition from military to civilian life provides insight into their identity work, and the mediating role played by the Royal British Legion as an association, and as physical facilities. The authors conducted interviews, and these were complemented by semi-structured focus groups, follow-up conversations, and informal observations (Williams et al., ). While they depart from the grounded analysis process used by Hay () and Petriglieri et al. () the thematic analysis they employ continues the emphasis upon the content of empirical data over the way in which theoretical concerns drove or developed the findings. This might have been appropriate before the field developed a range of sophisticated understandings of identity. Contemporary work, however, might be expected to offer a clear account of the conceptual and theoretical development of the findings, or at least to provide clarity over the positioning of the work and its conceptual contribution. Like Petriglieri et al. (), Williams et al.’s conceptualization of identity is underpinned by symbolic interactionism, but in this instance they mobilize Perinbanayagam’s () forms of identification. This, they argue, lends a ‘materialistic dimension to identity and “identity work” ’ (Williams et al., : ). This is a potentially interesting move. However, while identity work features in the title, abstract, and keywords, this is the first appearance of the phrase and the authors do not engage with this literature beyond citing their earlier published work. This is a pity because the physical and social aspects of the Royal British Legion, around which they focused their analysis of retired servicemen’s identity work, unquestionably play an important role in bridging between the status and certainties offered by the military, and the loss and mystification experienced in the transition to civilian life. Exploring the way material context elicits different intensities of identity work could have made a thematic contribution to the field that, in turn, might have helped managerial-practitioners explore the transitional potential of context. Our first comparative analysis spoke to the development of the identity struggle literature through an engagement with, and elaboration of, the idea of identity work. This was achieved through a variety of theoretical interpretations of identity that generate contrasting understandings of the process of identity work and the consequences of identity struggle. While in many respects this plurality is welcome, it could be argued that the field’s conceptual ‘development’ is undermined by its inability to pursue a linear process to build understanding. Hence, what we see are repeated turns to establish new conceptual contributions revealed and reflected in their empirics. There is nothing wrong with this in
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itself save that, arguably, the preoccupation with establishing what identity work means is why we are not seeing thematic developments (such as the notion of material identity work that we suggested might emerge from Williams et al.’s research) or more fulsome engagement with new areas of theory. In this respect, although these articles respond to Sveningsson and Alvesson’s (: ) call for ‘more open studies of identity’ in how they adopt inductive, ‘grounded’ methods of data analysis, the methods being used to ‘collect’ data have not evolved much beyond individual or group interviews. Nevertheless such interview methods provide opportunity for individuals to disclose identity struggle and, therefore, offer ‘rare empirical evidence’ and ‘unusual glimpses into the lived experiences’ of research participants, as Hay (: ) claims.
Comparative Analysis : Identity Work and Space and Place The materiality involved in identity work is an idea reflected in our second comparative analysis. Studies of identity work’s relation to space and place have gained significant traction in recent years. Interest in the topic extends back at least to Elsbach’s () study of ‘identity threats’ arising from flexible and non-dedicated workspaces. However, contrasting with the identity struggles literature, authors have drawn on different theorists to speak to different ways in which space and place are intertwined with identity. We consider here: Tyler and Cohen’s () exploration of the interweaving of workspace and gendered identity performances; Courpasson et al.’s () consideration of place as sites of identity work where social identities of resisters are produced; and Grey and O’Toole’s () refinement of the concept of place-identity through a study of community lifeboat volunteers. Contemporaneous with Sveningsson and Alvesson’s work, Elsbach’s () study of ‘identity threat’ is similarly based upon an empirical study of a firm in which interviews and observation of normal business interactions over an extended period were undertaken. By differentiating extant work conducted in non-organizational contexts or on changing work roles from her own study of threat to ‘existing’ (Elsbach, : ) ‘ “workplace” identities in work environments’ (: ), Elsbach constructs an empirical gap in the literature. This is complemented by a claimed conceptual gap established by the differentiating claim that identity categorizations of distinctiveness (rather than status) are most threatened when permanent physical (as opposed to ‘non-permanent’ symbolic) markers of personal workplace identities are limited or lost. This distinguishes her work from the extant symbolic interactionist literature and, in significant ways, delimits the theoretical terms through which the ‘identity threats’ in her study can be spoken of. In keeping with work using social identity and self-categorization theories (SIT/SCT) (Tajfel, ; Turner, ), a detailed account is provided of how Elsbach and a research assistant ‘performed’ the grounded analysis, including comparing findings, assessing statistically intercoder agreement, and discussing and resolving all coding ‘discrepancies’ (Elsbach, : ). Although transparent in the decisions taken, her iterative data analysis method closes down alternative interpretations by aiming to ‘explore possible explanations for findings and focus on the explanation that best fit with the data’ (Elsbach, : ). Consequently, the paper’s theoretical and conceptual contributions—summarized in an
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extensive table and detailed figure explicating the interaction of identity threat and affirmation—is tightly theorized as an embellishment of SIT/SCT’s discussion of identity categories, rather than a phenomenon that might apply in other constructionist traditions. A more ambitious work is Tyler and Cohen’s (: ) study of how women ‘consciously sought to invest meaning in their workspaces, and used them to convey meaning to others, as a way of securing their own legitimacy’ as ‘viable, intelligible organizational subjects’. The paper draws on the concept of identity work and, relatedly, identity regulation, as an active, precarious, gendered, and contested process involved in the ‘inhabitation of organizational space [as] a negotiated practice’ (Tyler and Cohen, : ). Their paper addresses the relatively neglected theme, within organization studies, of gender in the ‘burgeoning interest in organizational space, and especially its relationship to power and control’ (Tyler and Cohen, : ) and the marginal concern with organizational space and spatial performativity of gender within feminist approaches to the study of organizations. Underpinning gender performativity, they argue, is ‘the desire to project a coherent and compelling identity, one that is recognized and valorized by others’ (Tyler and Cohen, : ). Tyler and Cohen theorize their work through a combination of ‘Butler’s concern with gender materialization and Lefebvre’s account of the social production of space’ (: ) emphasizing that these authors help them establish that ‘gender materialization constitutes an important theoretical lens through which to understand the gendering of organizational space’ (: ). Whilst their paper draws on identity work (and regulation) as a supplementary concept underpinning their chosen theoretical frameworks, it nevertheless expands the theoretical positions informing identity work research. It also opens up a new thematic vein for examining the relationships between gender performativity and organizational space, by specifically concluding that the social materiality of space (and relatedly of gender) matters as it embodies ‘socially significant aspects of identity’ (: ). Methodologically, Tyler and Cohen () use still images from a video, as the basis for their focus groups and interviews with women in a single case organization. Whilst acknowledging that ‘stills are unable to capture the dynamic processes’ of organizing (Tyler and Cohen, : ), their use within the interviews (and within the paper) encourages ‘more dynamic and dialogical engagement’ (: ) with the phenomena. In support of their methodological contribution, Tyler and Cohen (: –) claim the ‘images helped [participants] to articulate thoughts, experiences and observations that would otherwise have been overlooked, or which they might otherwise have found very difficult to put into words’. Furthermore, incorporating still images within the paper is not only aesthetically appealing but provokes the reader to think about their own experiences of how gender identities are performed in and through workspaces. Aligned with Tyler and Cohen’s observation that ‘we do not simply occupy space, but rather we become ourselves in and through it’ (: ), Courpasson et al.’s (: ) work argues that places are sites where ‘alternative social norms and transitory social identities of resisters can be constructed’. They use identity theory to support their mobilization of the concept of free space in highlighting the significance of places where ‘individuals can develop oppositional identities’ (: ), in their case as resisters, and in claiming that existing research lacks specificity about how the meaningfulness of such places produce and sustain resisting practices.
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Courpasson et al. (: ) adopt a case study approach, focused upon ‘two middle managerial episodes of resistance because they highlight specific usages of places’. Whilst the study sought depth and breadth, the authors are transparent about their decision to conduct purposively selected interviewees (two senior managers, middle managers, and their team members). Similarly, they are overt about their decision to ‘emphasize and single out the most central element’ (: )—physical space—from the analysis of both cases. This guides the reader towards their argument that the managers’ sense of the potency of their resistance is heightened by their personal connection to and meaningfulness of the chosen places. However, it limits our ability to form alternative readings as other potential ‘elements’ emerging from analysis are not stated. Like Courpasson et al. (), Grey and O’Toole’s () study of volunteer lifeboaters shares an interest in the social meanings of place for organization members. They advance a concept—place-identity—derived from other fields/disciplines but, unlike Courpasson et al. foreground and ‘blend . . . established insights of identity theory from MOS’ (: ). Specifically they make clear how their ‘more social, temporal, subjective, and dynamic conceptualization’ of place-identity provides ‘an antidote’ to ‘the extant relatively static, objective, cognitive conceptualization’ which dominates the environmental psychology and social geography literatures (Grey and O’Toole, : ). In terms of method, Grey and O’Toole () take an exploratory case study approach, comprising semi-structured interviews, participant and non-participant observation, and organizational document analysis. Using such a combination of data from multiple methods and sources gives, they claim, a ‘broad and rich picture’ (Grey and O’Toole, : ) of how place interacts with identity. Analysis is described as ‘iterative’ between the ‘themes emerging from the research and concepts from the literature’ (Grey and O’Toole, : ). Beyond their core argument that place and identity are ‘holistically intertwined’ in a recursive and dynamic way, they make a methodological claim ‘that studying their intertwinement necessarily entails attention to their specificity’ (Grey and O’Toole, : ). For instance, in their empirical analysis, they claim to have given attention not only to the specificities of place and how they are used to construct identity but also to the ongoing and recursive process through which place is invested with meaning by identity. Furthermore, their methodological claim has important implications, they propose, for conducting future place-identity research in that, as researchers, we have to go to the places where ‘the unique conjunctures of things . . . which make it a place’ occur (Grey and O’Toole, : ). Our second comparative analysis has followed the thematic development of space and place in relation to identity. It is interesting to note how three of the selected articles combined theorists/theories outside the field of identity studies to open up new theoretical, conceptual, or thematic positions. For example, some work blended established insights of identity theory to advocate alternative theoretical positions in relation to conceptual language from other literatures (Grey and O’Toole, ), whilst others made connections between diverse theorists from other fields/disciplines to expand theoretical positions informing identity work research (Tyler and Cohen, ). Whilst the selected articles generally continued to adopt inductive, ‘grounded’ methods of data analysis, we observed arguments for and advancements in the methods being used for empirical research. Tyler and Cohen () combine methods to help participants’
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articulate thoughts, experiences, and observations which are difficult to express. Grey and O’Toole () not only combine data from multiple methods and sources but also highlight the methodological implications of conducting context sensitive research in the thematic area of space, place, and identity.
T F I?—R W
.................................................................................................................................. Our intention is not to label articles ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather to identify the features that open up or foreclose the exploration of identity. To some extent this helps us reflect upon our selected literatures’ contrasting trajectories. In thematic development, for instance, the lack of new substantive aspects or dynamics in the identity struggles literature might be attributed to a ‘readerly’ engagement with theory. The vibrancy of the space/place and identity literature, it could be suggested, emanates from a ‘writerly’ engagement with the novel application of alternative theoretical framings. Similarly, the orthodoxy that seems to have arisen around methods might be argued to have emerged as the literature has drifted from the writerly to the readerly. That is, the emphasis early work placed upon leveraging inductive analysis of rich data to support resonant conceptual arguments seems now to license authors to brush past questions of how identity was evidenced in the data, and how theory was used to interpret and develop the findings. However, as we prepared the overview offered in Table ., it struck us that the distinction between readerly and writerly writing often turned upon the way in which a paper admitted or excluded alternatives. So, for example, we considered the way Williams at al. () omitted connections to the wider literature on identity to be readerly. However, we contended that Grey and O’Toole’s () synthesis of different fields/disciplines to advance a conceptual contribution is writerly, despite this synthesis inevitably involving a selective reading of these sources. Our discomfort with treating Table . as a straightforward delineation of good writing is perhaps indicative of the complexities of the writing process and how one might evaluate its merit. For example, Barthes’ statement that ‘we call any readerly text a classic text’ ( []: , emphasis added) is somewhat perplexing. Barthes’ argument is that a classic text delimits how it can be understood reducing the reader to a receiver of predetermined meaning that constrains their participation in its interpretation. However, if a text is ‘classic’ then clearly it has—or had—value. Presumably it is well written, and must at some point have voiced possibilities that were not present in other contributions. At one level, Barthes’ assertion might be interpreted as a note that writing and understanding evolve such that what once was complex and challenging might in the fullness of time become passé. Our response to Elsbach’s work fifteen years after publication, and knowing the conceptual language that has developed around place and identity, may be insensitive to the ways in which her work challenged the SIT/SCT community’s understanding of how context could be an ‘identity threat’. Conversely, while we consider Sveningsson and Alvesson’s inductive analysis of rich data to be writerly in the way it considers and supports alternative approaches, we should be wary—particularly given the
Table 8.1 Readerly/writerly features expressed as conceptual, theoretical, thematic, and methods position (and expansion) Writerly features
Theoretical position (and expansion) Do we find theories/theorists introduced in a way that complements and expands the potential ways in which identity can be understood?
Delimits the theoretical terms in relation to a particular phenomenon or empirical situation e.g. adopts a slightly different theoretical position to enable conceptual embellishment of a particular phenomenon (such as ‘ordinarily suppressed emotional struggles’) (Hay, 2014: 509) e.g. introduces a conceptual/theoretical frame to reinforce extant understandings of identity (Petriglieri et al., 2019) e.g. closely adheres to a particular theory (e.g. SIT/ SCT) and uses a specific analytical frame (e.g. systems psychodynamics (Petriglieri et al., 2019) or specific self-identity categorizations (Elsbach, 2003)) to theorize a distinctive empirical situation.
Looks across perspectives to advocate the potential offered by a particular theorist or theoretical position e.g. makes clear how chosen theoretical position (e.g. processual oriented identity theory) differs from dominant theoretical assumptions in the literature (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) e.g. overlays identity theory onto a conceptual/ theoretical frame from a different field of study (Courpasson et al., 2017) e.g. makes connections between diverse theorists from other fields/disciplines to expand the theoretical positions informing identity work research (Tyler and Cohen, 2010) e.g. blends established insights of identity theory with conceptual language from other fields/ disciplines (Grey and O’Toole, 2018)
Conceptual position (and expansion) Is conceptual language developed that affords the reader the opportunity to understand and explore identity’s role in the dynamics of organizing?
Narrows perspectives by excluding alternatives or manipulating them to fit with own conceptual argument e.g. engages in a limited way with existing literature and misses opportunities for conceptual and/or thematic expansion (Williams et al., 2018)
Signals alternatives and their potential whilst framing the conceptual position and contribution of the research e.g. offers alternative language, including metaphors (e.g. identity as struggle and identity work) to disrupt dominant influential streams in the field (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) e.g. advances a concept derived from other fields/ disciplines to elaborate and enrich identity theory (Grey and O’Toole, 2018) e.g. frames the conceptual position and contribution of the research by advocating alternative theoretical positions on conceptual language developed in other fields/disciplines (Grey and O’Toole, 2018) (continued )
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Readerly features
Table 8.1 Continued Writerly features
Thematic position (and expansion) Does conceptual (and theoretical) development support an expanding range of ‘thematic’ areas (e.g. identity regulation, professional identity, etc.) in which identity-related phenomena are being investigated?
Either posits context/phenomenon as an extension of extant research (e.g. Elsbach, 2003), or as so novel as to be self-sustaining (e.g. Williams et al., 2018) e.g. problematizes contexts in which identity work typically has been researched to pose new identity-related research questions and to study conceptual facets ‘that remain fairly obscure’ (Petriglieri et al., 2019: 128).
Seeks to inform and extend while critiquing and highlighting weaknesses e.g. offers thematic expansion (e.g. identity struggles of everyday managerial work (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003); the emotive nature of identity struggles of everyday managerial work (Hay, 2014)) and highlights ‘important practical possibilities’ for engaging in ‘more realistic and helpful [managerial] identity work’ (Hay, 2014: 509); identity struggles for different occupations, e.g. gig economy workers (Petriglieri et al., 2019) e.g. opens up a new thematic area (e.g. space/place and identity) by combining theorists/theories outside the field of identity studies (Courpasson et al., 2017; Tyler and Cohen, 2010)
Methods position (and expansion) Are the methods being used for empirical research evolving as the field evolves and grows in sophistication?
Points the reader to the findings through an emphasis on mainstream collection and analysis techniques e.g. offers no discussion of method alternatives (Petriglieri et al., 2019) e.g. provides a detailed account of data analysis activities, including assessing statistically intercoder agreement, discussing and resolving all coding ‘discrepancies’ (Elsbach, 2003: 632) e.g. emphasizes and singles out the most central element which emerges inductively from data analysis, to fit with own theoretical argument (Courpasson et al., 2017) e.g. gives little indication of the way theory shaped what was sought in the data, nor how the findings were developed theoretically (Hay, 2014; Williams et al., 2018)
Provides transparency on the choices made by the author amidst alternatives in developing the findings e.g. makes clear choices by critiquing limitations of dominant methods, and advocates alternative as a methodological contribution (e.g. in giving ‘thick descriptions of identity’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003: 1188)) e.g. combines methods (e.g. images within interviews) to help participants ‘open up’ difficult to access or articulate thoughts, experiences, and observations (Tyler and Cohen, 2010) e.g. combines data from multiple methods and sources to give a rich picture of the phenomenon (Grey and O’Toole, 2018)
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Readerly features
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way in which later work has developed—that we are not calling ‘writerly’ something that has become readerly through being accepted as (classically) ‘good’. That individual texts are part of an ongoing stream of writings (a discourse) leads us to reflect further upon Barthes’ critique of the classic text. While the writerly text is deemed so for its ability to challenge expectations, it seems unrealistic to suppose this is true of every aspect. Academic publications are typically both writerly—as authors encourage the reader to explore new possibilities—and readerly as they situate and frame their work in relation to the literature. For example, we classified Courpasson et al.’s methods section as readerly in the way it restricted the analysis process towards the argument being made in the paper. Yet this arose from the writerly overlaying of new theory upon identity scholarship, and allowed the authors to demonstrate the value of their thematic expansion. If the combination of readerly and writerly features is a way of engaging the reader in such a way that directs them to question and explore targeted aspects of their understanding and experience, then we should perhaps examine how Barthes’ binary is applied when the author is oriented towards identity scholars, general organization studies scholars, or a practitioner audience. For us, Grey and O’Toole () speak directly to identity scholars. The authors craft a contribution to the identity literature, by emphasizing the limited focus on the place in which identity construction and maintenance happens and by arguing that ‘the concept of place-identity has the potential to enrich and contextualise studies of identity’ (Grey and O’Toole, : ). They strive to achieve this potential by advancing a concept derived from other fields/disciplines to elaborate identity theory. Furthermore, by blending established ontological insights of identity theory with the place-identity concept, namely in acknowledging its socially constructed nature, the work makes a secondary contribution to organizational research on space/place. This is achieved by unsettling an established concept, developed in environmental psychology and social geography, through theoretical reinterpretation. In respect of their third identity-related contribution, the recursive nature of the relationship between place and identity, they conclude their article by again speaking directly to identity scholars—this time more as practitioners of research—by reiterating the methodological implications of their study that, in ‘conducting research into place-identity: We have to go to the places where those conjunctures [of things which make it a place] occur (Grey and O’Toole, : , emphasis added). Although Tyler and Cohen’s () article opens with a citation which talks to the topic of negotiating gender identities at work, the relative priority of audiences seems to be organization studies scholars, and then identity scholars. The theoretical contribution of the article is crafted in terms of drawing together insights from two theorists to develop understanding of organizational space with identity theory introduced to draw these together. The article speaks directly to organization (and feminist) scholars in contributing ‘empirically and theoretically to a gendered understanding of organizational space as the materialization of power relations, and to a feminist analysis of the ways in which this materialization process is lived and experienced’ (Tyler and Cohen, : ). The paper explores the relationships between space, materiality, and subjectivity/identity. Whilst their paper does not overtly address practice implications, these are implied in being a study motivated by reflection on how the authors displayed themselves, as academics, in their office, and employing a method that similarly caused participants to think about their professional experiences. As readers, we agree with the authors that the still images in the
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paper are ‘compelling’ (Tyler and Cohen, : ) and thought provoking, and may ‘trouble’ others, as they did us, to appreciate how ‘ “space matters” (to) gender’ (: ). Hay’s () article appears in the journal Management Learning which aims to publish papers which are ‘impactful’ in being ‘influential both within the field of management and organizational scholarship, and in the arenas of policy and organizational practice’ (Management Learning, ). For us, Hay addresses well these two aspects and her writerly focus on ‘provid[ing] important practical possibilities to managers’ (Hay, : ) is evident in the way subheadings that managers might easily identify with are used in the findings to highlight underlying struggles that inform the complexities of organizational practice. Focus on a manager audience is also reflected in the way that Hay describes the ‘personal level’ possibilities of her work, in ‘help[ing] managers to cope better with their identity work since many managers are likely to experience similar struggles, and much could be achieved in the airing of these concerns’ (Hay, : ). Pointedly, Hay steers away from readerly practices by neither promoting a particular solution—as Williams et al. () do in their advocacy of the Royal British Legion for ex-military servicemen—nor in providing an explanatory model through which struggles inherent to identity work might be related to specific factors in a closed-circuit fashion (Elsbach, ; Petriglieri et al., ). This is not to denigrate the value of these works in providing ways-to-understand, but it is to emphasize how Hay’s work invites the practitioner-reader to engage with the ideas in a ways-to-act manner. Indeed, this is arguably what Sveningsson and Alvesson () achieved with the general organization studies audience through the resonance of their case and the potential that identity work might offer the community for explaining phenomena previously tackled through alternative theoretical lenses.
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.................................................................................................................................. Writerly texts, we argue, sustain the vibrancy of the field by opening up areas for investigation and contestation. We must bear in mind that the central challenge of the writerly is to transform the reader from a consumer to a co-producer of the text (Barthes, []: ). This is difficult given that almost by definition writerly texts can, and perhaps should, be equivocal, and at times deliberately ambiguous. Unfortunately these qualities are almost antithetical to standard journal peer review processes. To this end, we initiate here a playful exploration of the ways writerly texts might be ‘plicit’ (from the Latin root plico, meaning to fold) with the expectations of journal editors and reviewers. First, being com-plicit with the expectations of the publication process does not preclude writerly contributions. It is not that such work is confined to outlets that seek nonconventional manuscripts, but rather the complexities they offer up are targeted both to the audience they seek to address, and the interests/debates of the journal. For example, Sveningsson and Alvesson () highlight the potential of identity work to the general organization studies community. The writerly aspects, therefore, take centre stage as the contribution of the manuscript because of its alignment with the journal in which it is published (Human Relations). Tyler and Cohen (), by contrast, make writerly work im-plicit through their combination of a desire to explain their experience with a nuanced
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feminist understanding of the workplace. In combination, these problematize extant understandings, allowing them to explore the workplace’s complexities and possibilities. A similar argument can be made with reference to the ex-plicit tactics used by other authors. Hay (), for example, states her intention to provide managers and management educators, as practitioners, with different possibilities, again positioning the openended writerly material as the work’s contribution. Indeed, there are numerous ways to legitimize alternative writing practices. We are by no means the first to suggest academic writing should critically reflect on its writing practices (Alvesson and Gabriel, ; Grey and Sinclair, ; Rhodes and Brown, ). Indeed, a succession of feminist work has striven to destabilize the normative expectations of ‘science’ (Lipton, ; Phillips et al., ; Prasad, ). While it is easy to decry the status quo, forging alternatives is less straightforward. For instance, multi-plicit texts, that is, texts that respond to a range of audiences, would undoubtedly face scrutiny from reviewers and editors seeking clarity and focus. This said, as Alvesson and Gabriel (: ) argue, there is a pressing need to transcend the current ‘incrementalist and ultra-cautious attitude toward theoretical contributions, formulaic methodologies, and a standardized article presentation targeted at very narrow and sympathetic academic communities’. Their idea of ‘polymorphic’ publications is one that allows us to usurp academia’s ‘strict standards for intratribal writing’ (: ) as we consider new ways of writing through which to communicate issues of broader potential relevance to a wider range of readerships. Transcending the conventions of academic writing is, as Alvesson and Gabriel () highlight, a creative and imaginative process. What other ‘foldings’ might be revealed if we move beyond the traditional ‘plicit’ words by experimenting with different prefixes? What possibilities might lie, for example, in auto-plicit texts in which the self ’s role in the writing process is not only made explicit (Cloutier, ; Kiriakos and Tienari, ), but is critically examined in the context of those audiences involved in its construction, publication and consumption? Such a radical questioning might involve de-plicit writing that disrupts the underlying politics of representation (Phillips et al., ; Prasad, ). For us, though, unmasking the possibilities excluded in the construction of ‘identity’ scholarship is a means to an end, drawing the reader to engage anew with the field’s underlying questions concerning what we take to be ‘identity’, how this might be revealed empirically, how it should be understood, conceptually and theoretically, and indeed what implications it carries for organizational practice.
R Alvesson, M. and Gabriel, Y. (). ‘Beyond Formulaic Research: In Praise of Greater Diversity in Organizational Research and Publications’. Academy of Management Learning and Education, (), –. Barthes, R. ( []). S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities in Organization Studies’. Organization Studies, (), –. Corlett, S., McInnes, P., Coupland, C., and Sheep, M. (). ‘Exploring the Registers of Identity Research’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –.
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Courpasson, D., Dany, F. and Delbridge, R. (). ‘Politics of Place: The Meaningfulness of Resisting Places’. Human Relations, (), –. Elsbach, K. D. (). ‘Relating Physical Environment to Self-Categorizations: Identity Threat and Affirmation in a Non-Territorial Office Space’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Grey, C. and O’Toole, M. (). ‘The Placing of Identity and the Identification of Place: “PlaceIdentity” in Community Lifeboating’. Journal of Management Inquiry. doi: ./ : –. Grey, C. and Sinclair, A. (). ‘Writing Differently’. Organization, (), –. Hay, A. (). ‘ “I Don’t Know What I Am Doing!”: Surfacing Struggles of Managerial Identity Work’. Management Learning, (), –. Kiriakos, C. M. and Tienari, J. (). ‘Academic Writing as Love’. Management Learning, (), –. Lipton, B. (). ‘Writing through the Labyrinth: Using l’ecriture feminine in Leadership Studies’. Leadership, (), –. Management Learning (). Description. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/managementlearning#description. Miscenko, D. and Day, D. V. (). ‘Identity and Identification at Work’. Organizational Psychology Review, (), –. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (). The Presence of Self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., and Wrzesniewski, A. (). ‘Agony and Ecstasy in the Gig Economy: Cultivating Holding Environments for Precarious and Personalized Work Identities’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Phillips, M., Pullen, A., and Rhodes, C. (). ‘Writing Organization as Gendered Practice: Interrupting the Libidinal Economy’. Organization Studies, (), –. Prasad, A. (). ‘Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Rhodes, C. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Writing Responsibly: Narrative Fiction and Organization Studies’. Organization, (), –. Snow, D. A. and Anderson, L. (). ‘Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities’. American Journal of Sociology, (), –. Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, (), –. Tajfel, H. (). ‘The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations’. Annual Review of Psychology, , –. Turner, J. C. (). ‘Some Current Issues in Research on Social Identity and Self-Categorization Theories’. In N. Ellemers, R. Spears, and B. Doosje (eds.), Social Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. –. Tyler, M. and Cohen, L. (). ‘Spaces That Matter: Gender Performativity and Organizational Space’. Organization Studies, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, (), –. Williams, R., Allen-Collinson, J., Hockey, J., and Evans, A. (). ‘ “You’re Just Chopped Off at the End”: Retired Servicemen’s Identity Work Struggles in the Military to Civilian Transition’. Sociological Research Online, (), –. Winkler, I. (). ‘Identity Work and Emotions: A Review’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –.
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APPROACHES TO IDENTITIES RESEARCH .............................................................................................................
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Abstract Across theories of identity and subjectivity, discourse and communication are central, constitutive elements. This chapter clarifies conceptions of these notions and portrays them as separate yet connected. It then reviews four broad lines of theorizing identity in which discourse and communication are prominent: Social Identity Theory (SIT), narrative theorizing, critical/poststructural approaches, and emerging relational ontologies. In addition to drawing out contrasting conceptions of agency marking the four perspectives, the chapter shows how discourse and communication are axial to the existence, persistence, and transformation of identities. To do so, the chapter employs illustrations from sports fandom, branding, and peer bullying. The key insight of the chapter is that, across the four traditions, discourse and communication are increasingly understood not as representational, but as constitutive: identities do not draw upon discourse and communication to express themselves, but instead are generated, sustained, and altered exclusively in and through discursive and communicative practices.
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.................................................................................................................................. A social theory’s turn to language in the early decades of the twentieth century was an interrogation of dominant models of the person. Pragmatists, in response to seventeenth-century philosophers who depicted the self1 as a cognitive construct transcending experiences (Taylor, ), overhauled our conceptions of personhood by suggesting that theorizing personhood ought to address how selves experience everyday life. In so doing, they relocated the source of the self from inside (cognition) to outside (the social surround) and, thus, portrayed the experiencing subject as irredeemably bound up in communication processes (Holstein and Gubrium, ). Mead (: ) represents
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this stance well: ‘the individual reaches his [sic] self only through a process of communication with others, only through the elaboration of social processes by means of significant communication’. Pragmatist thinking, therefore, argued for the primacy of communication and discourse in the emergence and ongoing accomplishment of the self; a transcendent consciousness took a back seat. This chapter explores the legacy of this ontological shift for contemporary conceptions of personal identity (see also Alvesson, ; Brown, ; Kenny et al., ). We argue that scholars who have inherited a pragmatist conception of the centrality of discourse and communication nevertheless operate from contrasting definitions of these notions, which lead their claims about identity and its significance in organizing in rather different directions. To review these streams of thought, our discussion considers Social Identity Theory (SIT), narrative theorizing, critical and poststructuralist thought, and relational ontologies. Before engaging with these literatures, however, we describe and differentiate ‘discourse’ and ‘communication’, the twin notions upon which our review is based.
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.................................................................................................................................. The aforementioned attention to discourse and communication has occasioned great interest in the power of these concepts, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—also generated a surfeit of conceptualizations. As Kuhn and Putnam () note, these notions—like those guiding any vibrant field—have no single canonical definition; instead, they are multiple, contested, and shifting. In other words, there is no simple and stable answer to what discourse and communication ‘are’: it is important to review these, however, to provide some basic claims with which the chapter’s presentation of theories of personal identity can engage.
Discourse In organization studies, discourse is typically understood in terms of language, talk, and text. Some consider discourse to be a verbal structure, some see it as action and interaction in society akin to conversation (‘language in use’), some render it as cognition, and others define it as the social context surrounding action. These distinctions are seen in Alvesson and Kärreman (), who build on Gee’s () division of the notion into lowercase (discourse) and uppercase (Discourse), to portray four levels of discourse analysis in organization studies: (a) a micro-discourse approach, which examines how language is used in specific localized practices; (b) a meso-discourse approach (later called text-focused studies), where analysts seek broader patterns of talk and text across related contexts and activities; (c) a grand Discourse approach, where the aim is to understand how sets of discourses produce organizational reality, as in studies of organizational culture or corporate colonization of the lifeworld; and (d) a mega-Discourse approach, where the goal is to uncover institutionalized or ideological frames like those associated with globalization, neoliberalism, enterprise, or managerialism. Taking these together, discourse can be
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understood as manifest in texts and linguistic tokens that are formed and deployed interactively, cognitively, or as background context in the conduct of organizing. Recently, several authors have expressed misgivings about d/D distinctions. Some hold that the framework reinforces belief in the ontological reality of ‘levels’ of analysis, an assumption that not only reproduces disciplinary hierarchies, but which also violates the disruption of subject/object divisions central to the linguistic turn (Kuhn et al., ; Mumby, ). Others, like Phillips and Oswick (), argue for the need to develop multi-level discourse analysis, which would connect local practices with broader discursive formations—where analyses would move beyond simply naming forces that appear to be driving local texts. Criticisms such as these indicate that the d/ D classification may have outlived its usefulness; nevertheless, we continue to draw on it here because it has characterized a good deal of scholarship on identity over the past two decades.
Communication If the notion of discourse is difficult to pin down, communication is yet more slippery, both because of its disciplinary diversity and the ubiquity of the notion across fields. Seeking to reduce the complexity, Putnam and colleagues (Putnam et al., ; Putnam and Boys, ) present four dominant models of communication: (a) as media or channels for transmitting information; (b) messages that connect individuals into networks, (c) the jointly produced sequences of messages that comprise a practice, including how they unfold over time and space; and (d) the construction of meanings through negotiation and social interaction. Although the conceptions of communication in common parlance tend to emphasize the first two senses of the term, the lion’s share of thinking in the academic field of communication studies falls in the latter two categories. Contemporary thinking, as portrayed by (c) and (d), starts by arguing strongly against renderings of communication as epiphenomenal, as a mere surface manifestation of deeper psychological or sociological forces. Communication is understood as a causal and generative process on its own, one that can be neither reduced to structural mechanisms nor seen as occurring only within organizational ‘containers’. Instead, communication is portrayed as ‘the ongoing, dynamic, interactive process of manipulating symbols toward the creation, maintenance, destruction, and/or transformation of meanings, which are axial—not peripheral—to organizational existence and organizing phenomena’ (Ashcraft et al., : ; emphasis in original). Such a definition aligns with ontological commitments that understand organizations and persons as ongoing processes of meaning creation. Ashcraft et al. () offered their definition as an ‘elastic consensus’ that, at a basic level, unites organizational communication scholars. They then pursued the conception further, engaging with theorizing that sees communication as exceeding the realm of the symbolic/ideational and, thus, to implicate bodies, sites, and artefacts (as categories of what is often taken to be the material domain). They reframed communication as ‘the ongoing, situated, and embodied process whereby human and non-human agencies interpenetrate ideation and materiality toward realities that are tangible and axial to organizational existence and organizing phenomena’ (Ashcraft et al., : ). Though this is a far less elegant definition, it shows how current visions of communication seek to
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both transcend taken-for-granted ontological distinctions between the social and material and to embrace claims of constitutive force, a move manifest explicitly in the relational ontologies described below.
Distinguishing Discourse from Communication Based on the preceding discussion, one might reasonably ask whether there are significant differences separating ‘discourse’ and ‘communication’. Indeed, many scholars render these notions equivalent and interchangeable. Jian et al. (), however, offer a useful distinction, construing discourse as one part of more encompassing communication processes. For them, discourse is a noun deployed in the action of the verb communication. Ashcraft’s (: ) study of occupational identity illustrates this stance well: it envisions discourse ‘as a (semi-)coherent system of representation that crafts a context for language use’, whereas communication is ‘the basic human activity of struggling over discursive possibilities amid the material circumstances of everyday life’. Locating a history of discursive gender coding associated with the occupational identity of commercial pilots, Ashcraft showed how communicative practices utilize that discursive coding to shape the meaning(s) of pilot work (including making particular logical and emotional responses more or less permissible), frame the captain as a mythic hero, and diminish belief in the constructed character of pilot identity. This approach, then, renders d/Discourse not as interaction, but as a set of resources available for appropriation in the meaning-making process of communication. In the next section, we explore how this vision of the discourse– communication relationship appears in key theories of identity.
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Social Identity Theory Since its inception in the s and s, SIT has become a dominant approach to conceptualizing identity and identification in organization studies (Ashforth and Mael, ; Brown, ). Beginning with Tajfel and Turner’s () efforts to understand intergroup relations and conflict, SIT (and its conceptual extension, Self-Categorization Theory) has become an established way to explain how individuals incorporate group characteristics into their self-conceptions and cognitive processes. Social identity is a representation of how people define themselves in relation to the various groups with which they are affiliated. Identity, in SIT, is ‘an individual’s knowledge that he [sic] belongs to certain social groups, together with some emotion and value significance to him of this group membership’ (Tajfel, : ). As individuals connect themselves with particular groups, they incorporate assumed values, characteristics, and behaviours associated with that group into their own sense of self. This is a process of identification, and for SIT it explains both the construction of the person’s social identity
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and the shaping of the characteristics of a group. Identification begins with social categorizations, the grouping of persons by socially relevant attributes; people recognize similarities between one another in the groupings that result. These groups induce social comparisons, where the formation of differences across groups—as well as the rejection of particular groups—emerge. Importantly, SIT assumes that people are motivated to secure self-esteem through their group memberships. That drive leads them to depersonalize out-groups as they portray their in-group as superior; it also works to counteract group and organizational change because people seek stable sources of the self (Jenkins, ). As Brown () notes, however, there are competing conceptions of identification in SIT theorizing. Some restrict the notion to the cognitive domain, where an individual’s perception of belonging to a group, a sense of unity, is central (Ashforth and Mael, ; Pratt, ). Others see the connection with a collective as a foundation upon which the individual enacts the values, goals, knowledge, and prototypical member profile as his or her own (Oakes et al., ). These more behaviourally focused definitions portray strongly identified individuals as desiring ‘to choose the alternative that best promotes the perceived interests of that organization’ (Tompkins and Cheney, : ). In these formulations, however, identification can be difficult to distinguish from notions like commitment and loyalty (Pratt, ), leading Scott et al. (: ) to extend SIT thinking beyond the cognitive realm. Scott et al. () frame identification as communicative because it occurs in the interactions and behaviours that illustrate one’s attachment to a collective; identity, in turn, becomes ‘a set of rules and resources that function as an anchor for who we are’. Echoing the distinction between discourse and communication introduced above, what they call the ‘identification process’ is the ongoing enactment of the relationship between identity (as structure, or noun) and identification (as action, or verb). Others have argued that regarding identification only as attachment over-simplifies actors’ relationships with groups and organizations. For instance, disidentification is a separation of the self from the perceived organizational identity, often based on a rejection of the organization’s values and a desire to maintain the aforementioned self-esteem by creating distance (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, ). Schizo-identification occurs when actors split their identities to affiliate with some elements of the collective while rejecting others (Gutierrez et al., ). Communication scholars have noted that people can have multiple targets of identification within and beyond a given organization, and, responding to concerns that SIT’s socio-cognitive focus produces a static version of the self (see Larson and Gill, ), show how those identifications shift in response to organizational changes (Kuhn and Nelson, ; Scott, ). A key question for SIT is whether identification should be understood as cognitive or communicative—whether it occurs within the person or in interactive processes. Discerning the ‘location’ of identification is important in that it guides attention to outcomes such as decision-making (Tompkins and Cheney, ), conflict (Glynn, ), and job performance (Carmeli et al., ). One potent illustration of SIT’s claims can be seen in research on sports and fandom. Fandom is a clear-cut site of intergroup interaction, characterized by rivalries between spectator groups; between coaches, athletes, and management; between passionate fans, supporters, and those who are indifferent. It is no surprise that high levels of identification can produce ethically dubious actions like aggression and violence, often based on the categorization-based depersonalization that displays and creates in-group
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unity (Toder-Alon et al., ). At the same time, however, sports can create valuable bonds between fans, and this can even occur within other organizations, such as when employees’ process last weekend’s game at the proverbial water cooler (Swanson and Kent, ). Importantly, a heightened sense of social identification produces outcomes of value to a team’s management: spectators (fans) develop emotional ties to teams and athletes because those fans perceive a shared social identity, and ‘spectators high in team identification are more likely to attend games, pay more for tickets, spend more money on merchandise, and stay loyal to the team during periods of poor performance’ (Mehus and Kolstad, : ). Fans seek discursive resources, such as those found in broadcasts and social media, to provide them information to support their attachments (as well as their oppositions); they also engage in communicative practices that augment their identifications, such as including conversations about the team, rituals (e.g. songs sung collectively at matches), conflicts with fans of other teams, and shared expressions of anger at officials (Giles and Stohl, ). SIT provides a framework for examining the discourse centred on the creation and maintaining of identities within and between organizations through identification (see Table .). Through the creation of a sense of identity generated by identifying with (or against) in- and out-groups, scholars can further examine the discursive and communicative influences on social identities (Benwell and Stokoe, ). There is, accordingly, a relatively strong sense of agency in SIT. By this we do not mean that individuals’ intentionality and choice-making capacity is either unconstrained or held ontologically prior to group influence, nor that actors are fully knowledgeable about the antecedents and consequences of their identifications, nor that strong attachments are controllable by the person. Instead, SIT portrays individuals as engaging with, responding to, and often rejecting the social categories that discursively appeal for their identification (Alvesson, ; Scott et al., ). Moreover, individuals evaluate the identifications that comprise their identities, often with an eye to reducing uncertainty in the self-concept and to creating distance between their own self-concept and the depersonalized prototype of group membership, especially if they seek positions of leadership (Hogg and Reid, ). In other words, they do not merely inhabit group stereotypes, but often practice what van Veelen et al. () call self-anchoring: cognitively projecting a vision of the personal self onto the in-group. Across these, neither Discourse nor communication are understood as being the primary drivers of social identity and identification processes (though they are clearly important); rather, SIT’s social-psychological foundations position agents’ cognition as the primary device driving navigation through Discourses.
Narrative Theory Narratives, ongoing processes of creating, using, and arranging symbols to generate accounts for events, organize our experiences (Somers, ). Narrative approaches to identity assume humans are predisposed, through consistent social conditioning, to organize thoughts and experiences in a storied form—we are homo narrans. Narratives of the self, as accounts of the self that we tell to others (as well as to ourselves), are both expressive and constitutive of identity. In his touchstone work, Giddens (: ) theorizes that ‘a person’s identity . . . is to be found . . . in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going’.
Table 9.1 Theoretical approaches to discourse, communication, and identity Theoretical Approach Narrative
Critical/Poststructural
Relationality
Identity
Composite of individuals’ multiple group memberships
Capacity to keep a particular narrative of the self going
Fragmented self that is subject to, and of, power-laden struggles over meaning
An analytical question rather than a priori object: the result of agential cuts in a practice
Discourse
Projections of groups’ and organizations’ values; symbols that induce conceptions of in-group and out-group characteristics
Narratives as reflexively available for appropriation; life scripts from which personal narratives are constructed
Discursive formations and linguistic systems positioning actors as subjects who willingly reproduce capitalist systems
An enacted and enacting force with the potential to shape practice when conjoined with other agencies
Communication
Process of recognizing categorizations; then generating, modifying, or eliminating attachments
Site of identity work: confirmation and/or contestation of narratives
Site of control–resistance dialectics; moments when ruptures and antagonisms between discourses become evident
The practice in which (non)human agencies are (re)configured into an assemblage
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Social Identity Theory
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Narratives integrate a person’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future, often taking the form of what we could recognize as a story, with origins, episodes, and a trajectory. The creation and maintenance of these narratives are motivated, says Giddens, by a search for ontological security: a sense of consistency and orderliness, produced in part when actors develop relatively coherent narratives (i.e. those exhibiting continuity over time and across situations). The narratives we construct, in other words, aid the reconciliation of the multiplicity of identity alternatives. For instance, Bresnen et al. () found that managers in healthcare contexts who developed an overarching narrative of the self as a hybrid actor were able to reconcile competing discourses of identity; this narrative was especially useful in organizations characterized by permeable boundaries between occupational groups. For narrative thinkers, discourse and communication are central concerns. Discourse, first, has a dual manifestation. On the one hand, the life scripts, lifestyle choices, and genres of story plots from which individuals craft identity narratives can be understood as drawn from encompassing Discourses that make particular possibilities for narrative construction (im)possible (Ricoeur, ). On the other hand, those narratives that actors live out are also understood as discourses that can be externalized from any given situation and, separated this way, are eligible for authoring, reproduction, and alteration. Kuhn’s () conception of discursive resources can be a useful illustration of this model of discourse. Drawing on Bourdieu, Kuhn sees discursive resources as concepts, tropes, expressions, or other linguistic devices, appropriated from situated practice, which actors employ in accounting for past and/or future activity. Discursive resources are thus a vehicle to understand how the shaping of identity narratives can occur, allowing analysts to locate intersections between micro- and macro-discourses. Second, communication is a moment of ongoing narrative (re)negotiation: the process by which personal narratives are tested, where audiences confirm or repudiate their authenticity (McAdams et al., ). Another way of saying this is to note that communication is where identity work occurs. In contrast to acts of identification as conceived by SIT, the notion of identity work indexes ‘people being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ). Identity work, then, refers to the ways narratives get (re)formed and managed in social practice. By way of example, Ibarra and Barbulescu () portray narratives as a way to understand employees’ identities during transitions like entries, exits, promotions, or job loss. Such changes require identity work on the part of the employee, and identifying the sorts of narratives actors deploy during career transitions can shed light on how they retain ontological security in situations that might otherwise foster anxiety. If individuals create a sense of coherence between life experiences by organizing them as stories, it should be no surprise that they do the same as they engage in organizational practices to make their work lives meaningful. Wieland (: ), in a study of a Swedish branch of a large multinational corporation, found that identity work responded to two ideal selves—culturally situated and discursively constructed expectations for whom one should be—that simultaneously encouraged workers to devote themselves to organizational performance and to well-being. Though much of the identity literature emphasizes individuals’ drive for narrative coherence, Wieland argued that her participants lived
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with the inconsistent and contradictory demands of these ideal selves; they kept these discursive resources available so they could produce personal well-being in the face of work-oriented tensions. A second illustration is Brown and Coupland’s () analysis of how athletes on a professional rugby team used what they found to be threats to their (masculine) identities to create and recreate their self-narratives. Identity threats, ‘any discursively constituted thought or feeling that challenges one of an individual or group’s preferred identity narratives’ (: ), were discourses upon which rugby players drew in navigating their present and future within their sport. The players created narratives that, by dint of ‘focus, hard work, self-reliance, toughness and professionalism’ (: ), presented them as persevering, overcoming multiple threats in an epic quest to play top-tier rugby. Their narratives intersected with Discourses of masculinity, and also with the Discourses about the hazards of their work: the athletes had only a short window to achieve their dreams by displaying their talent. Brown and Coupland show that these players’ narratives, as well as the identity work players accomplished through them, were constructed, maintained, and reproduced through available discourses circulating in practices of organizing. Narrative approaches have grown significantly in recent years because they provide a valuable way to apprehend lived experiences and, in particular, for tracing how individuals pursue identity work as a response to identity threats. Moreover, the discursive resources and communicative practices associated with formal organizations are excellent sites to examine the processes of narrative (re)construction; those sites encourage analysts to recognize the multiplicity of forces that enable and constrain individuals’ agency in developing coherent and compelling narratives.
Critical and Poststructural Theory One of the key problems of the preceding schools of thought is that their version of the social world tends to be relatively restricted. They evince limited interest in addressing relations of power embedded in (macro-level) Discursive factors, as well as the relationships between d/Discourse and everyday communication (du Gay, ). Several theorists, however, have presented models for analysing the ‘Uppercase D’ discourses such as globalization, neoliberalism, enterprise, and managerialism; in this section, we combine these under the label ‘critical and poststructural’ theorizing. There are several significant differences between critical and poststructural approaches, but they are united in asking questions about how persons become enrolled in the exercise of social and organizational power. Louis Althusser () foregrounded ideology as a discursive force that operates through institutions, producing particular sorts of subjects who become willing contributors to the reproduction of capitalism. Stuart Hall (: ) summarizes this stance, highlighting power as productive of the person: ‘ “Identity” refers to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses which attempt to “interpellate”, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be “spoken”.’ In Hall’s thinking, identities are points of temporary attachment to the subject
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positions which discursive practices construct for us. For Althusser and Hall, then, it is impossible to exist outside ideology, and a capitalist ideology positions us as free subjects who knowingly accept our subjection. As Hall noted, identities are outcomes of attachment to subject positions; as a result, critical and poststructural approaches tend to favour the term subjectivity over identity to signal that the self is simultaneously subject to discourses of personhood and, simultaneously, is positioned as the subject of the experiences in which it is implicated. The term ‘identity’ fails to capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement that ‘subject’ implies: the way our immediate daily life is always already caught up in complex political and social concerns found in Discourses (Mansfield, ). The key inheritor of the Althusserian position was his former student, Michel Foucault. Foucault (, ) theorized that historically specific discursive formations created subjectivity. Once the person is constructed as the primary source of experience and responsibility, subjects can be classified and regulated—governed—within particular regimes of knowledge and power. Yet power, for Foucault, does not arise from a centre of the discursive formation, as a sovereign rules over subjects; it is ‘capillary’ in the sense of being distributed across the innumerable micro-practices through which all actors come to constitute one another’s (and their own) subjectivities. Foucault’s argument, then, is not that a monolithic mega-Discourse determines subjectivity, but that communication practices, informed by specific discursive formations, discipline subjects’ bodies and minds (Deetz, ). A related movement of scholars interested in the production of subjects through linguistic systems of knowledge and power is captured under the label poststructuralism. Though there is diversity across poststructuralists, this movement began as a reaction to structuralism’s assertion that Discourses and the binary oppositions coded into them determine social action. Poststructuralists regard subjects as positioned not by a single dominant discursive formation, but by many simultaneously. Consequently, a single, independent, and coherent self becomes impossible when acknowledging the conflicting pulls of contrasting Discursively-shaped subject positions (e.g. gender, occupation, age, class). Poststructuralists thus portray subjectivity as a process, one that sees both discourse and the experience of communication as fragmented, multifaceted, and polysemic (du Gay, ). A poststructural stance on language and experience implies an ever-present excess of meanings, characterized by antagonisms and ruptures that can open up either a generative ‘space of action’ (Holmer Nadesan, ) or, depending on the connections across available discursive resources, constrain possibilities for self-formation (Costas and Fleming, ; Kuhn, ). Normatively, poststructuralists thus urge subjects to embrace (rather than suppress) fluidity and multiplicity in their experience of working and organizing (Holmer Nadesan and Trethewey, ). Critical and poststructuralist thinking thus shares an interest in showing how subjectivities are created by a variety of discursive forces and involvement in an array of communicative practices. One important upshot of this position is a recognition that if d/Discourse and communication powerfully shape experience, subjectivity cannot be controlled by the person. Yet our social worlds foster belief in persons’ skills and careers as achievements of autonomous, self-directed selves. The disconnect between the subjectifying influence of discourse and communication on the one hand, and a belief in the self as strongly ‘in control’
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on the other, exist in dialectical fashion, creating a sense of insecurity or anxiety (e.g. Collinson, ). Accordingly, as individuals are subject to disciplinary regimes, they simultaneously ‘engage with, resist, accommodate, reproduce, and transform the interpretive possibilities and meaning systems that constitute daily organizational life’ (Mumby, : ). One line of critical/poststructural scholarship on subjectivity analyses the power of branding. Certainly, organizations have branded products for decades, but analysts increasingly recognize that the logic of branding extends to individuals as well as firms (Vásquez et al., ). Late capitalism is fully saturated by branding, making it a part of our Discursive worlds and everyday communicative practices (Arvidsson and Peiterson, ; Mumby, ). Critical and poststructural scholarship shows how subjectivities are the (un)intended targets of firms’ branding activity. For instance, Land and Taylor’s () study of a clothing company that built an image of itself as small merchant of ‘activewear’ noted that the company’s externally focused messages capitalized on the lives of its workers. Its marketing materials included humorous stories about employees skipping work to kayak and t-shirt slogans developed to reflect workers’ ‘authenticity’ (‘tattoos have to be bought; scars have to be earned’). Employees’ lives outside of work were claimed in the organization’s interest; those employees, however, saw this not as an unjustified expropriation of their private selves, but as a desirable demonstration of the brand. Subjectivity was, in other words, intimately branded. Critical/poststructural analyses of subjectivity formation extend beyond the traditional workplace to the ‘social factory’, where the production of the brand is an accomplishment of consumers, users, and observers, as well as employees (Gill and Pratt ). Brand management, in other words, requires sophisticated conceptions of discourse and communication as sites of meaning generation. Here, branding is not simply about the muscular power of a Discourse over (or upon) workers, but is about the array of communicative practices that capitalize on the very subjectivities those Discourses generate (Banet-Weiser, ). These examples show that identities are sites where varied interests battle to inscribe individuals in ways that serve entrenched interests (see Table .), but critical/poststructural scholars insist that individuals retain the agency to resist efforts at subjectification, to exploit Discursive overdetermination, and engage in identity work. Discourses, from this stance, are tools and contextual configurations that guide the unfolding practices of communication, making identity (or subjectivity) itself a nexus at which power-oriented struggles over meanings intersect.
Relational Ontologies A recent entry in the discourse and communication literature alters dramatically the conception of personal identity (but, because this perspective is still in its intellectual infancy, empirical work is relatively meagre). Building on the aforementioned linguistic turn, two contemporary movements—the practice (Schatzki et al., ) and ontological turns (Coole and Frost, )—have created interest in reframing organizational phenomena as ongoing socio-material accomplishments. Taken together, these movements comprise relational ontologies2 (or relationality, along with its terminological cousin, new materialisms). As overviews that detail their tenets are available elsewhere (e.g. Fox and Alldred, ; Kuhn et al., ; Orlikowski and Scott, ), this section only skims the surface.
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An abstraction from several bodies of thought, including actor-network theory, affect theory, performativity, agential realism, and socio-materiality, relational ontologies argue that the lessons of the linguistic turn have too often been distorted, taken to mean that the material elements of the social and organizational worlds are relevant only to the extent that actors speak them into existence. In response, relationality begins by reframing the ‘things’ of our analyses as always multiple and in process, such that the elements we conceptualize as coherent entities with relatively clear boundaries—substances—are understood as nothing more (nor less) than the relations that produce them (Emirbayer, ). In other words, the a priori separation of subject and object is no longer presumed; if a separation exists, it must be performed into existence. Accordingly, the unit of analysis shifts from substances (e.g. individuals, identifications, or narratives) to practices.3 The important question for analysts is to ascertain what forces, which extend agency beyond merely human capacities (Bennett, ), come to matter—what makes a difference, and how—in the conduct of a given practice. Relationality’s conception of agency thus differs markedly from the preceding perspectives. Agency is no longer restricted to humans—but, to correct a common misconception, it is likewise not ‘granted’ to non-human things either. Instead, agency is hybrid and distributed. If ‘things’ are relational accomplishments, so is agency: humans never act apart from a wealth of other elements, and our intentions, desires, and passions depend on sites, technologies, representations, hormones, and the like to become significant (i.e. to matter). What, then, does a relational ontology have to say about identity? Given the decentring associated with the rejection of individuals as units of analysis and the hybridization of agency, the understanding of identity shifts in three ways. First, relationality situates identity squarely within practice. Regarding identity as manifest in practices has been key to several literatures in organization studies but, under relationality, there can no longer be an assumption that persons and their identities are independent elements that participate in organizing. The image is not one of several pre-existing components coming together to produce a practice; instead, the practice is that which generates the participants through what Barad () calls agential cuts. Analysts can only say identity is relevant in a given practice when it is made to matter in practice—when that practice centres identity as a concern. Analysts must therefore defer their conceptualization of identity until (and if) the notion emerges as a figure. An example of this is in Paring et al.’s () ethnography of a project management team. Rather than assuming that (human) members possessed identities, they examined how the identity of ‘internal consultant’ was the outcome of management’s introduction of a technology into ongoing practices, when it became inserted into work routines in a way that ‘afford[ed] the performativity of the “internal consultant” identity, that is, the constitution of this social identity through the entwinement of discourses and public and repetitive sets of actions and behaviours’ (: ). Paring et al.’s study illustrates the ways relationality studies make identity a question rather than the font of action. Second, a relational ontology recognizes that discourse, human capacities, and nonhuman elements are always simultaneously enacted and enacting forces. But their productivity, as indicated above, is always rendered as a hybrid, an agglomeration of agencies (forces) that hang together as a result of the practice in question (Cooren, ). For
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instance, Hjgaard and Sndergaard’s (: ) discussion of peer bullying in schools demonstrated both enacted and enacting forces by showing how the practice brought together several forms of agency: Peer bullying enacts subjects, gendered ethnicities, as well as school walls and management technologies in particular ways. . . . subjectivities and their components as well as materialities and their components may enact and be enacted in many different, moving, and shifting ways.
Acknowledging the presence of multiple interrelated forces, a key task in research is to investigate how the configuration enacts identity as a key contributor to a given practice. Third, for analysts to grasp the modes by which identities matter in practice, looking to what individuals believe and how they report their intentions is of limited utility. Instead, as in literature on symbolic legacies (Hunter, ), identities are carried forward through time and space by the myriad components of a practice (i.e. not simply individuals). For example, writing about young men’s sexual identities, Fox and Alldred (: ) draw attention to the many forces amassed in an assemblage: ‘body and sexuality capacities are specified by myriad affects in the sexuality-assemblage deriving variously from physiology, from social interactions with peers or sexual partners, with institutions such as schools or clubs, and by things such as cars, condoms, and alcohol’. Identity is incorporated in, and transported by, multiple elements of that assemblage—not merely by an individual’s cognitions or narratives. Returning to our overriding interest in discourse and communication, relationality thus positions identity as a force participating in (organizing) practices. Communication is a name for the practice that brings the assemblage of forces together; it is the linking and connecting accomplished in meaning-making activity that accomplishes a given practice. Discourse, in turn, is one among many elements that might engage in signification (and thus become part of hybrid agency) by establishing frames for, or representations of, a given practice, as in Hjgaard and Sndergaard’s () aforementioned consideration of how Discourses of gender and ethnicity were bound up with several other elements in the conduct of peer bullying (see Table .). As a relatively new participant in efforts to theorize identity, relationality cuts against the grain of the preceding schools of thought, but enables us to ask novel questions about the import of identity in organizing.
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.................................................................................................................................. Following the trail blazed by the pragmatists, the linguistic turn (along with the associated practice and ontological turns) led scholars in several fields to understand discourse and communication as fundamental to organizing. These intellectual movements reframed identities as inherently made by the social practices in which they are implicated. In this chapter, we overviewed four approaches to understanding the relationships between discourse, communication, and identity that build on that theme: SIT, narrative, critical/ poststructuralist, and relationality. Across these, we showed that discourse and communication are malleable categories that permit multiple conceptualizations and underwrite
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models of identity that move in very different directions. This chapter is an attempt to capture this diversity in foundations and trajectories. Across the four broad perspectives, the contribution of discourse and communication scholarship is constitutive rather than representational. By this we mean that scholars increasingly understand that personal identities do not simply use discourse and communication to express (i.e. represent) pre-existing interiorities; instead, discourse and communication are axial to the very existence, persistence, and metamorphosis of identities. Recognition of discourse and communication’s centrality in the production of identities produces an assortment of research questions that have driven the fruitful lines of inquiry reviewed above. These questions concern how groups foster identifications among members, how people manage the multiple identifications that comprise their identities, how individuals respond to threats to their self-narratives, how (managerial) efforts to control identities engender resistance, and how identities are the contingent and mutable outcomes of a practice’s assemblage of interconnected elements. Tracing theories of identity and organizing, as we have done in this chapter, also suggests future developments: because discourse and communication are persistent concerns of philosophers, social theorists, and social scientists, and because discourse and communication are responsive to constant social and technological changes, theories are unrelentingly malleable. It should be no surprise, then, that visions of identity and subjectivity will be responsively mutable as well.
N . Self, in this early philosophical thought, was a conception of the person as a subject of consciousness (Taylor, ). This chapter, however, is interested in (personal) identity, an answer to the ‘who am I’ question, which involves qualities and characteristics that an individual understands as defining the person’s position in, and trajectory through, the social world. . We use the plural ontologies here to recognize the multiplicity of perspectives that fall under this broad banner; we also highlight the ontological turn involved here because the conception of relationality we develop departs strongly from routine uses of ‘relational’ in organization studies, where attention to relationships between persons is said to be key to making the phenomenon of interest operate well, as is seen in research on relational leadership. . One upshot of this is that what we take to be discursive and material elements are fully indivisible until they are made to appear detached in and through specific practices. In relationality, the notion of distinct symbolic and material domains shrivels, even if they are said to be ‘braided’ or ‘intertwined’, because both metaphors retain the notion that these components are distinct. Instead, relationality theorists see the discursive and material as two sides of the same coin.
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Abstract This chapter reviews psychodynamic perspectives on the emergence and function of individuals’ identities. It draws on traditional psychodynamic theories, which focus on identifications with early caregivers, and systems psychodynamic ones, which focus on work groups and organizations, to put forward the idea of identity as a fabrication. That is, a process of positioning the self in (existential) time and (social) space in ways that fulfil its longings, sustain its beliefs, and bolsters its relations. The chapter argues that a psychodynamic lens can enrich other perspectives on identity, and concludes with some suggestions for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. W did a Great Ape paint the Sistine Chapel? The question hit Sigmund Freud like a shot from the sling of Charles Darwin’s scientific opus. The great biologist had completed the Copernican project of demolishing anthropocentrism, putting humans in their evolutionary place away from divine imagery, righteous protagonism, the centre of creation. We are nothing but lumps of conscious flesh, Darwin had shown. Bundles of instincts, children of genes and chance, stuck on a crowded rock circling around the sun. All alone with each other. So where does art come from? And love and laws? And science itself, and God? Freud had to invent a new social science, therapeutic method, and literary genre—psychoanalysis—to answer the question: it is all work the Ape does to claim its self as Human. One can see psychoanalysis as a ‘Theory of Humanity as Identity Work’, documenting the urgency, unfolding, and panoply of failures of the human socialization project. And yet,
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Freud had little use for the concept of identity in his extensive works, and there is no entry for ‘Identity’ in Laplanche and Pontalis’ () classic The Language of Psychoanalysis. It is all the more surprising since Freud () coined the term identification and put the process of assimilating others into the self at the centre of individual development, coming to regard it ‘not simply [as] one psychical mechanism among others, but [as] the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, : ). Identification makes us human, tempering our instincts and giving appropriate shape to our ideals, Freud () argued. A theory of identification without identity might sound contradictory and incomplete. Then again, so are psychoanalytic selves. Psychoanalysis, in its various declinations, is a ‘conflict psychology’ (Levinson, : ), and views frictions within and between people as ‘unavoidable and constitutive of the subject’ (Gabriel, : ). Concerned as it is with the dynamism of the living, with psychic and social strife, psychoanalysis has long regarded the stable and unitary self (or society) with suspicion—as defensive and totalitarian. A theory of the necessity of identification and the risks of identity, then, might be a good description for psychoanalysis, whose project has been to challenge people’s unity, stability, consistency, continuity, and conformity all along. That is, the very things identity stands for. Identity, in this view, is not ignored, but repressed in Freud’s theorizing to make room for the unconscious, the central construct and controversial protagonist of psychoanalysis. And ‘unconscious’ is a covert identity for selves that do not fit the demands of one’s primary identifications (Josephs, ). To give pride of place to the unconscious and to identifications, while belittling consciousness and side-lining identity, conveys a radical statement about identity nevertheless. (Un)seen this way, identity is an embodied illusion, akin to a dream or a neurotic symptom, concealing and revealing us at once. Or put in one word, from a psychodynamic perspective identity is best regarded as a fabrication: born of emotions in relationships, weaving flesh and fantasy into a fabric that separates the self from the rest of the world and reveals the self as a unique member of his or her world. Seen as a fabrication, identity is an ongoing process of associating meanings to the self and giving those meanings a story that fulfils our longings, sustains our beliefs, and bolsters our relations. Such fabrications hold us together, bind us to others, connect our present to our past, and in so doing, they help us survive and, in the best of cases, make us feel alive.
‘T I N S T I!’ A N ‘’ P
.................................................................................................................................. The moment Donald Winnicott made his famous remark at a paediatrics conference in it was inscribed in psychoanalytic lore (Khan, ). The iconoclastic British clinician might as well have stated the obvious, from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. The child, a psychoanalytic metaphor for a person in a state of becoming, does not exist until he or she is brought to life. And we are brought to life again and again. The human self is constantly being born from the attraction and friction between impulses and imperatives, desires and demands, genetic potential and cultural norms, future and past, not-yet-self and not-quite-other.
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We cannot conceptualize childhood then, Winnicott (a) argued, or becoming, separately from parenting, or holding. The former would not exist or would soon expire without the latter, let alone acquire an identity. In Winnicott’s formulation it is ‘the environment (mother) who makes the becoming self of the infant feasible’ (Khan, : xxxvii, italics in original). In this view, the infant is not a self at birth, let alone has one. It is a body in a state of merger with a nearly divine (m)other who fulfils its needs. Until she does not. The self begins then, from rupture and wish. ‘I am . . . hungry.’ Hunger defines me, if only for a moment. It orients me, it moves me. It forces me to realize that I am separate and wanting. Once it is sated, it leaves the I behind. If I am no longer hungry, or a part of (m)other, who might I be, and whose? Psychoanalysis is a story of how people tackle those universal questions, in their place and time. Hence one might paraphrase Winnicott and affirm that there is no such thing as a psychoanalysis. A century after Freud, psychodynamic theories—as the multiplicity of theories that built on, revised, and refuted, Freud’s insights have come to be called—still retain an interest in how unconscious conflicts and identifications affect psychological and social functioning. But they diverge in many ways, being, as all social theories, the products of unique intellects in troubled times, or vice versa. Winnicott’s quip, and his life work, was a watershed moment in the history of psychodynamic theories because it marked a major shift in their trajectory. A shift from a focus on drives and repression to a focus on relationships and development, from a positivist to an interpretive epistemology, and from a detached to an engaged mode of inquiry. In the drive theory of Freud and his followers, impulse comes first. The infant imposes it onto the world, and others tame it. The other might be a significant object of desire or dread, as Klein () had it. ‘Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves’, argued Jung (: ), who defied Freud and put forward a more generative, and less mechanical, view of the unconscious. But it is only from Winnicott onwards that the other comes to life as a subject, as well as an object and an institution. The conflict that defines the body of psychodynamic scholarship, in short, is between the self as an impulse (never quite) civilized and the self as a relationship (never quite) untangled. One can also trace the trajectory of psychodynamic theories as a move from positivist, to interpretivist, to critical epistemologies (Habermas, ). Over time, the unconscious stops being the confine of universal, biological drives, and becomes a character in a cultural fiction, namely the character no one wants to see—an anti-hero to the self ’s painfully scripted identities—silent if always active, a confine still, but for those words that cannot be spoken or even thought about and yet live under our skin. If all the Freudian unconscious wants to say is ‘F**k that’, then, it is not because sexuality and aggression are universally repressed drives. It is because neither would get you far as a Jewish doctor in late nineteenth-century Vienna. In all its guises, however, psychodynamic work retains a subversive intent—subversive, that is, of the constraints and neglects of human socialization—as is most evident in its applications. The shift from drives to relations went hand-in-hand with a shift in professional stance in consulting rooms, research projects, and social commentary. Freud saw himself as an archaeologist, decoding symptoms, dreams, and associations for clues that would lead to secret conflicts from the past. Secrets that, once revealed, could turn from symptoms to stories (Phillips, ). People, according to Freud, could not be curious
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because they were too busy avoiding conflict. So the psychoanalyst did the curiosity for them, offering a space where they might reveal without having to say. Free association, and free-floating attention, was all that psychoanalytic treatment required of the client and analyst, respectively (Freud, ). It was a lot of freedom to ask. To associate freely, and to freely pay attention, were radical demands. Relational theories would come to realize that it was this unusual freedom, this encounter with an authority who cared and did not judge, who invited without imposing, that might have been healing for the neurotic, rather than any interpretation the analyst uttered from behind the couch. Held in such way, Winnicott (: ) argued, we might come alive and ‘the true self may at last be able to take the risks involved in its starting to experience living’.
B S, F I
.................................................................................................................................. If drive theories focus on what the child needs to do to survive, that is tame his or her instincts through an identification with those who have the power to fulfil and frustrate them, relational theories focus on what the child needs to encounter to sustain his or her vitality, relationships that allow the emergence of a self that feels true. The former focus on an adaptation to social demands, the latter focus on assisted experimentation. Let us review each briefly, before outlining their value for contemporary identity scholarship. Wishes of an erotic and aggressive nature, to join and to destroy, Freud () argued, have to be tempered if a child is to become a member of society. That is the work of socialization agents such as parents, teachers, or managers. Identification is the process of internalizing those figures into a superego, so that their socializing work of repressing impulses and inspiring virtue continues in their absence. In the best of cases, instinct is allowed fulfilment in a more civil guise, a process of sublimation that Freud saw in a positive light. If Da Vinci wants to sleep with Mona Lisa but he paints her portrait instead, he will make a better living and live a more productive life. As far as society is concerned, Freud () believed, science, industry, and art are better than sex and antidotes to violence. Hence his opus is ultimately a paradox: a theory of human socialization and a method to rescue our humanity from the captivity of socialization. Melanie Klein () paved the way for challenges to Freud’s focus on drives, shifting the focus to the relation between child and caretakers. The state of the infantile self, she argued, is one of confusion and terror in relation to parental power. In time, the child comes to occupy two positions: the paranoid position, marked by a splitting of the world into good and bad features, and the depressive position, marked by a recognition that the good and the bad coexist in the world, and in the self. Klein () regarded the latter as more mature and harder to sustain. Most often, Klein theorized, children deal with their ambivalence through projective identification. Rather than internalizing external sources of suppression through Freudian identification, they externalize internal sources of distress, trying ‘to manage an uncomfortable experience by dissociating from it and inducing similar feelings in another person with whom a continuing connection is established’ (Shapiro and Carr, : ). For children, projective identification is a mechanism of defence and a mode of
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expression, a way of turning inner tensions into interpersonal ones and asking for help. The attuned caretaker, Klein argued, will recognize and address the projection—you must be upset, would you like some milk?—and ‘return’ the projected material ‘in such a way that [it] becomes integrated at a more mature, realistic and adaptive level’ (Horwitz, : ). Thus the caretaker helps the infant develop towards a more integrated state, and thus analysts or consultants help their adult clients learn more about themselves and their worlds (Petriglieri and Wood, ). The ideal of integration recurs in psychoanalysis. In Klein’s view, it refers to a dialogue, rather than a Freudian truce, between different parts of the self—the forming of a constellation of object relations from psychic elements on a collision course. It involves recognition of multiplicity and resolution of conflicts. It occurs when material once segregated into the unconscious, or other people, is associated to the self once more, where it belonged in the first place. It can be not just known then, but most importantly, owned, making one more complex and less combative. A clear and singular self, for psychoanalysis, is suspicious as well as costly. It is the kind of self that people display when adults keep using projective identification as a way to ignore and displace parts of the self that they cannot own (Petriglieri and Stein, ). Winnicott, as noted earlier, made a conceptual leap from Freud’s and Klein’s theorizing, focusing on how relationships give birth to selves from the material of bodies and emotions. Before being conflicted and confused, Winnicott (a) observed, the child just is, in mother’s arms. It is in the encounter between a desiring and rejecting infant, and a caregiver with the power to sate, soothe, or frustrate—and the ability to understand and tolerate—that the infant’s sense, and later mastery, of self slowly emerges. Winnicott (a) termed this relationship a ‘holding environment’ in which the child is tended to and yet left in peace, cared for but not intruded upon. Eventually, he or she will make a spontaneous gesture and, given the space afforded, will come to wonder who did it. If it was not in response to a demand, I must have made it, Winnicott’s child concludes. And in so doing, he or she starts becoming, that is, acquires and makes up a self with its first, and for psychoanalysts most cherished, identity—true (Winnicott, b). Seen this way, the ‘true self ’ is not an impulse set free, it is the social fabrication of a valuable illusion, the experience that one can be an agent and be loved too. Winnicott never defines holding, but he is very specific about the importance of ‘studying the substance of illusion’, that is, ‘an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality’ (Winnicott, : ). The first substantive symbol, one that Winnicott pays much attention to, is the transitional object. The child’s favourite blanket or teddy bear, he observes, is neither a hallucination nor a concrete possession. ‘The transitional object is never under magical control like the internal object, nor is it outside control as the real mother is’, Winnicott (: ) explains, elaborating that ‘it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question “Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated’ (: –). A creative openness, then, not a repression, resolves the friction between inner and outer world. Healthy, for Winnicott (b: ), is an unfolding self who can afford to live in a space of possibility, ‘in an area that is intermediate between the dream and the reality, that
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which is called the cultural life’. A self, that is, which can hold on to its own fabrications in the presence of significant others. When such space is not available, the child develops a ‘false self ’ deprived of autonomy and vitality, forced to respond to too many demands. If adaptation was an accomplishment for Freud, with Winnicott it becomes a failure. Trauma is not what the environment does with the child’s instincts, but what it fails to do with its potential.
A N E
.................................................................................................................................. Winnicott’s relational revolution, which put holding at the origin of selfhood, and elevated vitality above docility, opened two avenues of inquiry. One, pursued by John Bowlby (), and scholars wishing to hold psychoanalysis within the natural sciences, set out to show how early attachments formed with primary caregivers set the norm for all adult attachments. Animal and human research on attachment styles uncovered the bases of transference (Freud, ), the habit of relating to new people using templates from the past. Another avenue, pursued by Erik Erikson, and scholars leaning into Winnicott’s dyadic social constructionism, would eventually lead to Lacan’s establishment of psychoanalysis as a critical theory (Fotaki et al., ). If Freud’s child clashes against culture, and Winnicott’s encounters it, Lacan’s child emerges from it, with a precarious selfhood that is neither adaptation nor achievement, but pure fiction. Since Lacan’s work is the focus of another chapter in this volume, I focus on Erikson here because identity gets much attention in his work, and because he moves beyond the interpersonal cocoon that fabricates the self, to consider the culture that shapes that cocoon. There was a hint in Winnicott’s work that selfhood took more than mother’s hold. For mother to hold, Winnicott (b) argued in a traditional formulation, father had to keep the household provided for. Put another way, interpersonal holding works when it is held within a steady institution. Erikson articulated the theory hidden within that metaphor, shifting the scope of psychodynamic theory from childhood to the life course. Bodies move and are moved not just in space, Erikson noted, but also in time, through relations and institutions that are more than stages to re-enact infantile dramas. Positing a universal developmental progression, Erikson () theorized a series of tensions that people face over the life course. Working through each stage meant growing up. Identity, in Erikson’s theory and times, was the challenge of adolescence. It became a problem once the person emerged from childhood into that vista point of sorts over the expanse of adult life. ‘What should I do with all my energy and future?’ asks Erikson’s adolescent. ‘It depends’, is the answer. It depends on who you are, or more precisely who you will become. Identity, then, bridges the work of childhood, becoming a self of one’s own, to the work of adulthood, bringing that self to the world. To find one’s destiny, for Erikson, is a necessity. It means to find one’s place, and it requires a particular kind of space. A space, that is, where ‘the individual through free role experimentation may find a niche in some section of his society, a niche which is firmly defined and yet seems to be uniquely made for him. In finding it the young adult gains an assured sense of inner continuity and social sameness which will bridge what he was as a child and what he is
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about to become, and will reconcile his conception of himself and his community’s recognition of him’ (Erikson, : , italics in original). Novel for the times, identity is not given, it must be crafted through ‘playful, if daring, experimentation’ (Erikson, : ). Erikson gave a name to the kind of space where identity could be crafted, or in the language of this chapter, fabricated. He called it a psychosocial moratorium, an institutionalized time and space where adolescents could do with identity what Winnicott’s () children did with transitional objects, the teddies who helped them leave mother’s arms. That is, not ask whether it was real or imagined, made or made up. When such suspension of disbelief is possible, Erikson argued, identity can serve as a conduit between inner and outer worlds, past and present, and allow the child to become an adult. Once the fabric of identity fits, one does not have to think about it, Erikson () argued. ‘An increasing sense of identity is experienced preconsciously as a sense of psychosocial well-being. Its most obvious concomitants are a feeling of being at home in one’s body, a sense of “knowing where one is going”, and an inner assuredness of anticipated recognition from those who count. Such a sense of identity, however, is never gained nor maintained once and for all’ (Erikson, : –). Seen that way, identity is a process of becoming, so to speak, a memory with a future. When people could not experiment enough, however, or were let loose too long, Erikson noted, identity became a problem, opening the way for examining identity in uncertain times. If the fluidity of adolescence is not enough to be a fully functioning adult, one short adolescence is not enough to form a lifelong identity. Uncertainty about identity is recurrent for most people, hardly confined to a set period in life or resolved once and for all. The more freedom cultures afford us to fabricate identities—and the more traditions and institutions crumble that once put us in place for a lifetime—the more elusive our identities become (Baumeister, ). Building on Erikson’s work, Kegan () noted that people need holding throughout life. Schafer (), reconciling the power of history and the possibility of experimentation, reconsidered Freud’s view that the unconscious makes a mockery of agency, arguing that once we understand our stories deeply, we might be able to author them anew. To realize our collusion in the patterns of experience and relating that trouble us, Schafer () argued, is not to acknowledge self-defeat. It is to recover agency, or find it for the very first time. He recast a successful analysis from the recognition of how little we know, to the realization of how much we can choose. Furthermore, Erikson’s move towards the psychosocial life span, and observations that institutions other than the family shape and free our selves up, opened the door to a broader search for the spaces where identities are crafted, revised, and undone.
T U P
.................................................................................................................................. Like Erikson, Wilfred Bion took psychodynamic theorizing beyond its original concern with childrearing and its consequences for adult relating. Moving past the caretaking dyad, Bion () opened a path from the nursery to the workplace. The most notable of Klein’s followers, Bion took her theorizing about projective identification to the group level,
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arguing that groups are central to the human experience. We spend our life in groups, and we are ambivalent about them. We want to belong, and we want to be separate. ‘The individual’, Bion (: ) wrote, ‘is a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his “groupishness” ’. Bion’s theorizing about groups at work built on Freud’s () suggestion that identification with a leader who represents a shared ideal holds a group together. He observed that through projective identification, people might invest not just leaders with disowned elements of the self, such as ideals, but also various collectives, such as groups of various size (Bion, ). So begun the investigation of the way people treat structure, processes, and norms as more than problem-solving and work-enabling mechanisms. They also invest in those features of organization as defences against anxieties stirred up by threats, relationships, and work itself. Combining Klein’s and Bion’s insights with systems theory (von Bertalanffy, ) a group of scholars at the Tavistock Institute in London gave birth to a body of work that would later acquire the name of systems psychodynamics (Neumann and Hirschhorn, ; for a review, see Petriglieri and Petriglieri, ). Scholars using this lens moved farther away from the traditional psychodynamic concerns with early identifications and their reverberations, to investigate the way a variety of groups, organizations, and institutions affect people’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. Systems psychodynamic scholars usually investigate the function of dysfunction (Ashforth and Reingen, ), that is, ‘the covert rationales that sustain seemingly irrational arrangements’ in organizations (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, : ). We join organizations, and give them a certain shape and norms, these scholars argue, not only to get stuff done, but also to think and feel in certain ways, and not in others. The best-known theory in this stream of work is that of social defences, that is, ‘collective arrangements—such as an organizational structure, a work method, or a prevalent discourse—created or used by an organization’s members as a protection against disturbing affect derived from external threats, internal conflicts, or the nature of their work’ (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, : ). If Jaques () was the first to theorize them, Menzies () gave a poignant illustration of social defences with her study of a nursing unit in a training hospital. While everyone complained about a system of depersonalizing work rotations, Menzies observed, there was little enthusiasm for changing it. Such resistance is not uncommon. Organizations are rife with features that people love to hate, but seldom try to change, because when one looks closer they help deal with, without thinking about, anxiety-provoking circumstances (Hirschhorn, ). In Menzies’ cases, the rotations helped training nurses learn their trade and avoid the distress of becoming attached to very ill patients. Social arrangements such as structures, processes, or norms, Menzies () clarified, are never defensive per se. People co-opt them, and protect them, to serve as such. In clarifying it, Menzies echoed Jaques’ (: ) observation that defence against anxiety is ‘one of the primary dynamic forces’ that attracts individuals to organizations. Once again, identity remained implicit in Jaques’ and Menzies’ theorizing, but not far from the surface. While being defended against anxiety by the job rotation systems, Menzies’ nurses-in-becoming were also being socialized into the clinical detachment that was expected in their future profession.
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Building on the view that social defences do more than distort organizations’ ability to accomplish their task and adapt to change (Halton, ), Jennifer Petriglieri and I have argued that social defences ‘facilitate adaptation and relatedness between self and environment—albeit at a price—and contribute to the construction of individual and collective identities. They provide shared systems of meanings that help us avoid the question, “how do I feel?” but also help us address the question “who am I?”’ (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, : ). In a stream of work that casts a developmental look on the interplay between organizational structures and people’s experience, we put forward the notion of identity workspaces, that is, institutions that serve as holding environments for identity work. We began by offering a definition of a holding environment as ‘a social context that reduces disturbing affect and facilitates sense making’ (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, : ). This definition conceptualizes holding more broadly than a caretaker’s arms. We then argued that people experience institutions as identity workspaces when they provide reliable social defences, strong sentient communities, and vital rites of passage that help them consolidate an existing identity or transition to a new one. In an empirical study, together with Jack D. Wood, we went on to show how temporary identity workspaces—organizations that promise short-term membership but permanent transformation—evoke commitment because they allow members to fabricate portable selves suited to the uncertainty of mobile careers (Petriglieri et al., ). This view balances the defensive and developmental function of holding environments, and distinguishes institutional from interpersonal ones (Petriglieri et al., ; Kahn, ). In another study, Sue Ashford, Amy Wrzesniewski, and I showed how people who cannot rely on an institutional holding environment go about cultivating one for themselves, and how such environments shield them from anxiety and allow them to make the most of the freedom in independent working lives (Petriglieri et al., ).
L I
.................................................................................................................................. There are parallels between the variety of psychodynamic perspectives on identity reviewed above, and the variety found in the identity scholarship usually cited in organization studies. Ever since William James () parsed the ‘I’ from the ‘me’, the self has been understood as both subject and object. Identity, a similarly dual concept, has been studied as an accomplishment and an endowment (Ybema et al., ), and as an interface between individuals and collectives (Swann and Bosson, ). Definitions of self and identity reflect the personal motives and cultural demands of those who strive to apprehend them in their lives and work (for reviews, see Alvesson, ; Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ). This kaleidoscopic state of academic affairs mirrors a well-documented paradox. The self encompasses multiple and conflicting representations (Markus and Wurf, ) even as it strives for unity and coherence (McAdams, ). While self might be ‘a word that everyone uses but no one defines’ (Baumeister, : ), selves need identities that define them. Scholars diverge on how much agency the self has in crafting such definitions, yet agree that ‘identities define people and make them viable as humans’ (Swann and Bosson,
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: ). Identities bind and orient the self. Valuable ones give it a place, so to speak, to go from, reconciling our competing needs to be unique individuals and members of groups (Bion, ; Brewer, ). For all their differences, the abovementioned perspectives agree that identities are experienced, defined, and sustained in relationships. Selfhood is ‘almost unthinkable without a social context’ (Baumeister, : ), and when the self becomes unmoored from clear and valued identities that make it ‘thinkable’, and felt, and active, people experience anxiety (Collinson, ). The search for identity, then, is at least in part a defence against such anxieties (Baumeister, )—and for critical scholars, a futile and anxiety provoking effort itself (Knights and Wilmott, ). If scholars of social cognition tend to focus on the soothing of social anxieties, psychodynamic scholars tend to also emphasize existential ones. They balance concerns for the place of the self in relation to others, and for the place of the present self in relation to past and imagined future ones (Petriglieri et al., ). Scholars have begun to regard the focus on identity as a cognitive structure as narrow (Westen, ). As Baumeister (: ) put it, ‘the self is a knower . . . but [it] is also and just as centrally a wanter’. Pratt and Crosina () noted that this shift takes social cognition closer to the psychodynamic theories reviewed here. One can see a parallel between the positivism of social identity theory, which casts identity as a tool for selves to join societies (Tajfel and Turner, ), and the Freudian position; between the interpretivism of symbolic interactionism, which views identity as a relational negotiation (Cooley, ; Mead, ), and the Winnicottian stance; and the deconstructionism of critical theories, which view identity as a venue for society to regulate the self (Alvesson and Willmott, ), and the Lacanian gaze. With the important distinction that identity, in psychodynamic theories, is never just a lens. It is always first a body. And emotions are not the consequence, but often the source of the quest for identity. There are hints of this perspective in organization and management studies, in statements that people need a ‘clear sense’ or ‘visceral understanding of self in [their] local context’ (Ashforth and Schinoff, : ); that affect can drive identification (Harquail, ); and that researching identity means attempting to capture ‘individuals producing a sense of self ’ (Alvesson, : ). These statements echo Erikson’s (: ) insight that ‘in the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity’. People, in other words, feel ‘who they are’ as well as know it, often feel more than they know, and the stronger they feel their identity, the weaker the need to think about it becomes (Erikson, ). This view is implicit in the conceptual tenet that identity becomes a conscious concern when it is unstable (Van Maanen, ) or ambiguous (DeRue and Ashford, ), such as when people transition between roles (Ibarra, ) or experience identity threat (Petriglieri, ). If identity consists of the meanings associated to the self (Gecas, ), psychodynamic inquiry calls into question the motives for associating (and dis-associating) meanings to it. And if the perennial debate is how much unity, and how much agency, the self really has (Alvesson, ), psychodynamic theories suggest that the answer is as much as it wishes and less than it believes. A view of identity as a fabrication that fulfils longings, bolsters illusions, and sustains relations, then, is well suited to answer calls to transcend oppositional views of the self as an agent of definition or as an object of regulation (Gabriel, ).
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It also contends that identity is constantly being fabricated, not only at critical junctures. All selves are provisional (Ibarra, ), some only more consciously so—because they are threatened, or because they are free.
W I P G F?
.................................................................................................................................. Taken together, psychodynamic scholarship suggests that without identity life might be impossible, a meaningless and often terrifying sequence of raptures and ruptures. Could the same be said, perhaps, about an academy without psychodynamic scholarship? As a body of theor(ies), psychoanalysis is only ‘one way to tell the story of the human experience’ (Mitchell and Black, : ), and as a clinical practice, Winnicott () argued, it is hardly indispensable. By and large, he wrote, ‘[psycho]analysis is for those who want it, need it, and can take it’ (: ). That is, for those who want help to locate a sense of identity that feels grounded in choice, rather than obligation, and one that makes surprise possible and relationships novel. As a challenge to collective fictions and a quest for personal truths, psychodynamic perspectives seem hardly compatible with the positivism that dominates organization studies. If you are seeking to challenge personal fictions and find collective truths, you will not want or need to use a psychodynamic lens, and likely will not be able to take it. No matter how many experiments demonstrate the operation of defensive projections (Newman et al., ), or people’s clinging to ideologies when made conscious of death (Solomon et al., ). The main heuristic of psychodynamics, the interpretation, will always feel too tentative, and too subversive, to fulfil those who need ‘proof ’. At the same time, a psychodynamic lens might be a welcome complement to the instruments of interpretive and critical scholars of identity, whose work it stands to enrich in at least four domains. Multiplicity. While much scholarship has focused on how people earn, struggle with, or lose one identity—and why—there is increasing recognition that, when it comes to identities, multiplicity is the norm (Ramarajan, ). ‘Scholars studying single identity motives do so at their own peril’, Ashforth and Schinoff (: ) admonish. It is no surprise to students of psychodynamics that we are plural and often conflicted. Scholars argue that successful role performance, and comfortable living, requires crafting a narrative to ‘resolve the conflicts and contradictions’ between different identities and motives (Ibarra and Barbulescu, : ; see also McAdams, ). Psychodynamics allow for inquiry into how people work towards such resolutions, weaving multiple fabrications into a self, alone and with others. Dynamism. There have been many calls for scholars to pay more attention to the ebb and flow of people’s sense of identity. Gioia and Patvardhan (: ) argued that we might be wrong in considering stability the norm, and conclude that ‘because we seem to be able to freeze [identity] to a moment in time, it must be a freezable thing’. Taking dynamism seriously requires asking different questions, not what makes identity solid, or shaky, but what keeps the flow smooth, or turbulent. In psychodynamics stability is often another word for stuckness (Petriglieri, ), and dynamism is the norm. With its focus on
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dynamism, as well as multiplicity, psychodynamic theorizing might be ideal to investigate multiple identities, some more desirable than others, as layers of a story (Petriglieri and Stein, ). Emotion. It is established beyond the confines of psychodynamic scholarship that unconscious affect motivates much individual and collective behaviour (Barsade et al., ). As noted above, psychodynamic inquiry is ideal to look at more or less conscious emotions as not just consequences of identity, but as a source of it. Scholars have acknowledged that people identify for emotional reasons (Harquail, ). They have also called for more attention to be paid to the emotional underpinnings of people’s experience in and of institutions (Voronov and Vince, ). The lens of systems psychodynamics, with its focus on organizations as emotion management systems (Miller and Rice, ), and perhaps as successful attempts to institutionalize emotions (Vince, ), is well suited for this line of inquiry. Vitality. A perspective on identity as a fabrication points to the importance of going beyond the study of what makes an identity viable, that is stable over time and valued in relationships. It calls for more studies about the moments and circumstances in which identity might allow us to transcend the familiar and discover our selves and the world anew (Petriglieri et al., ). If identities are inevitably plural (Ramarajan, ) and always in flow (Gioia and Patvardhan, ), and efforts to secure them are futile (Knights and Willmott, ), then the question psychodynamic scholarship might help tackle is what it takes to sustain a sense of incompleteness and complexity that feels vital, not deadly. This is, in the end, the grail of all psychodynamic theories and practices since the beginning: the search for bonds that set us free. Finally, the work of dismantling defences that keep us confined and provide containment that keeps us learning, must begin with us before we turn our lenses outwards, towards the world. Ultimately, the theoretical maps of human experience that a psychodynamic lens helps scholars draw are less like geographical rendering of a terrain, and more like the political ones that report what human activities have done with and to that territory over time (Petriglieri et al. ). While some features might appear on both, like rivers, others, like borders, will not. Because they are not geologically true: they are fabrications. And yet, being aware of those fabrications, and their political and emotional reality, might be most useful to those wishing to understand or claim the territory, to inhabit it, or to bring about change there. To call identity a fabrication, then, and to argue for the importance of studying it as such, is to diminish neither identity nor scholarship. Such fabrications, I have argued drawing on psychodynamic theories, are not distortions but necessities for the self to keep going, to be fully human, and to feel alive.
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Harquail, C. V. (). ‘Organizational Identification and the “Whole Person”: Integrating Affect, Behavior, and Cognition’. In D. A. Whetten and P. C. Godfrey (eds.), Identity in Organizations: Building Theory Through Conversations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –. Hirschhorn, L. (). The Workplace Within: The Psychodynamics of Organizational Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Horwitz, L. (). ‘Projective Identification in Dyads and Groups’. In A. D. Colman and M. H. Geller (eds.), Group Relations Reader . Washington, DC: A. K. Rice Institute, pp. –. Ibarra, H. (). ‘Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation’. Administrative Science Quarterly, , –. Ibarra, H. and Barbulescu, R. (). ‘Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions’. Academy of Management Review, , –. James, W. (). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt Jaques, E. (). Social Systems as a Defence Against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety. London: Routledge. Josephs, L. (). Character Structure and the Organization of the Self. New York: Columbia University Press. Jung, C. G. (). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House. Kahn, W. A. (). ‘Holding Environments at Work’. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, , –. Kegan, R. (). The Evolving Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Khan, M. M. R. (). ‘Introduction’. In D. W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac, pp. xi–l. Klein, M. (). ‘Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy’. Human Relations, , –. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (). Management Lives: Power and Identity in Work Organizations. London: Sage. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. (). The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press. Levinson, H. (). ‘Psychoanalytic Theory in Organizational Behavior’. In J. Lorsch (ed.), Handbook of Organizational Behaviour. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. –. McAdams, D. P. (). ‘Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self: A Contemporary Framework for Studying Persons’. Psychological Inquiry, , –. McAdams, D. P. (). ‘The Case for Unity in the (Post)Modern Self ’. In R. D. Ashmore and L. Jussim (eds.), Self and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Markus, H. and Wurf, E. (). ‘The Dynamic Self-Concept: A Social Psychological Perspective’. Annual Review of Psychology, , –. Mead, G. H. (). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Menzies, I. E. P. (). ‘A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety’. Human Relations, , –. Miller, E. J. and Rice, A. K. (). Systems of Organization. London: Tavistock Publications. Mitchell, S. A. and Black, M. J. (). Freud and Beyond. New York: Basic Books. Neumann, J. E. and Hirschhorn, L. (). ‘The Challenge of Integrating Psychodynamic and Organizational Theory’. Human Relations, , –. Newman, L. S., Duff, K. J., and Baumeister, R. F. (). ‘A New Look at Defensive Projection: Thought Suppression, Accessibility, and Biased Person Perception’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, , –. Petriglieri, G. (). ‘Stuck in a Moment: A Developmental Perspective on Impasses’. Transactional Analysis Journal, , –. Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., and Wrzesniewski, A. (). ‘Agony and Ecstasy in the Gig Economy: Cultivating Holding Environments for Precarious and Personalized Work Identities’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –.
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Winnicott, D. W. (b). ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of the True and False Self ’. Reprinted in D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac, , pp. –. Winnicott, D. W. (). ‘The Aims of Psycho-Analytical Treatment’. Reprinted in D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac, , pp. –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, , –.
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Abstract Lacan’s ideas shed light on why and how we are influenced by social structures including the organizations for which we work. This chapter explores how his insights have informed studies of identities in organizations, along with the obstacles to, and potentialities for, further research. The chapter begins by locating Lacan’s work in organizational identification scholarship, specifically the psychoanalytic approach, before offering an interpretation of concepts including signification and subjection. Two more-or-less distinct trajectories of Lacanian approaches to organizational identification are presented: one focuses on the micro-level of employees’ engagements with their organizations, the second examines the appeal of macro-level discourses regarding work and capital. Next, specific concepts inherent in a Lacanian approach to organizational identification are outlined including: affect, ‘going beyond’ subjection, gender, and finally methodological implications for empirical research. The author then discusses future ‘impossibilities’ for the study of organizational identification, and problematizes the use of Lacan’s approach in explorations of identity work. The chapter concludes with some future directions for research.
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.................................................................................................................................. L organizational scholarship is a small but growing field, with the number of publications rising significantly in the past fifteen years. In the identities in organizations literature, it occupies a distinctly marginal position (Brown, ), though recent collections including Contu et al. (), Fotaki et al. (), Cederström and Hoedemaekers (), and Arnaud and Vidaillet () have raised the profile of Lacanian approaches to identities theorizing. Lacan’s appearance in organization studies has not been without obstacles. He is often considered a difficult writer. For some, his ideas are not easily translatable into
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organizational settings because of a danger of reductionism (Arnaud and Vanheule, ). For others, the apparent complexity of his writing requires authors to work harder to make his work accessible, particularly in organization studies, an area in which psychoanalytic language is relatively unfamiliar (Arnaud and Vidaillet, ). A major concern is the temptation to create, in organizational appropriations of Lacan’s ideas, another ‘grand theory of the social’, where ‘Lacanian thought’ is presented as a singular and authoritative way of seeing the world (Arnaud and Vidaillet, : ; see also Frosh, ; Hook, ). Such posturing would contradict Lacan’s own advice for scholars: to continually remain open, and challenge the illusory lure of searches for truth and attempts at mastery that characterize social life, including academic publication practices (Fotaki and Harding, ). Norms of academic writing and publication tend to require definitive propositions, and claims to certainty. Researchers must therefore remain vigilant, not least to ensure that reflexivity concerning one’s own position is ever present (Kenny, ; see for example Driver, a, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Psychoanalysis has only recently become prominent in studies of organizational identification and identity work (Alvesson, ; Ybema et al., ; cf. Corlett et al., for discussion). Lacanian scholarship represents a ‘subset of this subset’, which also includes Freudian and Kleinian perspectives, and is typically categorized as a ‘psychodynamic’ approach to identity studies (Brown, ; see Petriglieri (), Chapter this volume). A number of differences exist between these trajectories, but an important one for organization studies is that, through his emphasis on the importance of language as a structuring feature of social life, Lacan offers an account of psychoanalysis that can be read as being both critical and progressive. Lacanian organizational scholarship often signals progressive alternatives, while aiming to critique flows of power affecting both the subject and the organization with which it interacts. Thus a Lacanian approach chimes with the core interests of critical organization theory, a field long concerned with how power operates at the level of language and the subject. Lacan’s ideas have inspired studies of organization identification, an area broadly concerned with ‘the extent to which an organization defines the self and the individual’s view of the world’ (Brown, : ). Organizational identification scholars examine how and why subjects attach themselves to powerful discourses relating to their work and organizations. This question has long consumed organization theorists, not least since the widespread turn to Foucault’s ideas on power, knowledge, and discourse, from the late s (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Knights and Willmott, ; Newton, ). With a focus on both poststructuralism and the power of language, Lacan’s ideas on the role of the psyche in the proliferation of discursive power appeal to scholars seeking new theoretical insights. Other sources provide more nuance and detail on the overall ‘schema’ proposed by Lacan for understanding how subjects come to identify with various forms of authority including those pertaining to organizations (Driver, ; Harding, ; Hoedemaekers and Keegan, ; Vidaillet and Gamot, ). Next, some key Lacanian concepts are considered.
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.................................................................................................................................. Who or what is the ‘person’ involved in processes of identification? The Lacanian subject differs from standard ideas about people (Pavón-Cuéllar and Parker, ). For Lacan, the subject is both created and also constrained by language, through its dependence for existence upon the symbolic order—a system of interlinked signifiers across which meaning is transmitted (see Pavón-Cuéllar, ; Parker, a). As people develop into adulthood, a series of ‘fictional self-narratives’ are created as they seek to retrieve a sense of wholeness with an other, which had been present in infancy but has since been lost (Hoedemaekers and Keegan : ; see also Driver, ). These narratives can only be attained through engaging with language (Lacan, ). Language thus constructs our very sense of self: ‘the symbolic provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of its being. It’s on this basis that the subject recognizes himself as being this or that’ (Lacan, : ). Subjects are compelled to articulate themselves in terms of the symbolic order in which they are enmeshed in their search for signification (Lacan, ). We cannot exist outside of language. Such attempts to attain a stable sense of identification are imaginary, however, and are prone to failure (Harding, ; Hoedemaekers and Keegan, ; Roberts, ). A lack exists within the symbolic order upon which they depend, due to the presence of the Real. While our understanding of social reality is constituted discursively, there exists at the centre of this apparent reality an aspect that can never be symbolized absolutely, which Lacan denotes the Real—a fundamental impossibility (Lacan, []). The presence of the Real means that any attempt to symbolize inevitably fails to signify definitively and also produces a leftover, a surplus. This failure and its surplus are inescapable features of the symbolic. The social is constituted through the ambiguities and tensions that result. The symbolic’s lack yields a sense of lack in the subject and this causes anxiety. Faced with the denial of a stable sense of self, subjects attempt to cover over the hole at the heart of their desired identifications. Fantasy emerges to hide the lack in the symbolic, and with the implicit promise that it can someday be overcome. Fantasy can lead the subject to identify with phenomena that stand in for the desired but impossible state of completeness; it disguises the impossibility of the subject’s return to a state of wholeness, through temporary identifications (Harding, ; Stavrakakis, ). Fantasy thus hides the inevitable failure of symbolization from the subjects engaged in it. The subject’s attachments to its self-narratives are imaginary (in that the desired sense of self-cohesion and ‘wholeness’ that they represent are never finally attainable), while its attachments to the world are often constructed fantasmatically (in that the subject’s search for unity with an ‘other’ remains ongoing and continually thwarted). At both levels the subject searches for a ‘completeness that is forever lost’ (Arnaud and Vidaillet, : ). Even so, desire to achieve these illusory aims keeps the subject locked in a relentless search that takes place through language. The subject cannot therefore be considered an entity in and of itself, but rather as a placeholder whose incoherence and instability is reflective of the fundamental lack inherent in the symbolic order: a lack that itself creates and maintains desire (Lacan, []). These ideas have implications for how one thinks about the subject of identification particularly in relation to whether this entity can be seen to possess an ‘internal’ space, a
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common concept in psychoanalysis. Refuting this, Lacan’s account of subjectification suggests ‘extimacy’ (Parker, b: ), or ‘ek-stasis’, in which the psychic ‘matter’ of the subject consists solely of that which comes from the ‘outside’—that is, the linguistic aspects of the symbolic order that construct the subject (Butler, : ). For scholars drawing on Lacan’s work including Derek Hook, Judith Butler and others, the ‘self ’ or subject is always therefore ‘beyond oneself ’: inescapably ‘other to oneself ’ (Butler, : ). This makes Lacanian approaches particularly valuable for the study of politics. The subject is constituted through the signifiers available to her and desired by her, while the range of ‘terms’ on offer in the symbolic is influenced by flows of power. Language extends far beyond the psyche therefore; what is occurring at the level of the subject is reflective of ‘concrete discourse, in so far as this is the field of the transindividual reality of the subject; its operations are those of history’ (Lacan, : ). While other schools of psychoanalysis do not tend to take power as central, for Lacan, it is constitutive of the subject. This insight has led to an enthusiastic reception of his work by poststructurally inclined theorists (Butler, , b; Laclau and Mouffe; ; Žižek, ). Specifically it appears to enrich our understanding of subjective identification with the forms of power that operate in society. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers insights into how aspects of the symbolic order including powerful discourses and norms, connect subjects in this ‘transindividual’ manner, through the reach of language, and the pull of desire (Driver, ; Harding, ; Vanheule and Verhaeghe, ). Lacanian approaches to management and organization studies and to organizational identification specifically, tend to focus on one of two levels: the ‘micro’ level of the subject who appears to identify with aspects of his or her work environment, and the ‘macro’ level of societal discourses pertaining to work and organization. These are described next.
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.................................................................................................................................. Lacan’s insights shed light on the ‘reasons’ why identification takes place. What we think of as ‘identity’ in a workplace context is inescapably structured around lack—identity is an illusory concept that always escapes us (Driver, a; Hoedemaekers, ; Kosmala, ). Even so, desire for an imagined wholeness keeps us searching. Work offers powerful sources of identification (Arnaud and Vidaillet, ; Dashtipour, ; Hoedemaekers, ; Roberts, ). Lacan helps us to understand the ‘existing-confirming recognition’ sought out by employees from dominant aspects of the symbolic including for example their perception of what it is to be a manager (Roberts, : ; see also Hoedemaekers, ). We develop affective attachments to ideals of self that we find in the workplace and, when these ideals appear to be flawed or failing, fantasy can emerge, driving us to work harder (Arnaud, ). The structural lack at the heart of our attempts at identification mean that work necessarily fails to fully satisfy the employee in her quest for wholeness, and so fantasies emerge that keep the search alive (Arnaud and Vidaillet, ; Driver, , ). In this vein, others have studied how such compelling desires for promises of fulfilment at work can lead to overly zealous attempts at identification and can mask the
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problems that this situation brings. Such imaginary over-identification can result in burnout (Vanheule et al., ; Vanheule and Verhaeghe, ). Finally, an awareness of our embeddedness, as subjects, in a desire-driven economy of signification can enable an examination of how our identifications are failing, how lack accompanies that which we most aspire to be, and how we might move beyond such imaginary subjections as a result (Driver, a, b, ; Kenny, ). Lacan’s ideas illuminate how employees, who are capable of acknowledging their position within the symbolic, and the illusory nature of their attachments to it, appear more able to face the contradictions and complexities of employment (Arnaud and Vanheule, ). Employees may in such cases be able to stand back and take a ‘meta-perspective’ albeit that this perspective will necessarily also be illusory (Vanheule et al., ). This approach has been adopted to show how, for example, social entrepreneurs cope day-to-day with the difficulty and sometimes impossibility of pursuing a ‘double bottom line’—the simultaneous pursuit of profit-oriented and social outcomes (Byrne and Healy, ; Driver, ). The coexistence of fantasmatic attachments alongside awareness of these, gives rise to a productive onward struggle towards pro-social goals.
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.................................................................................................................................. A second major focus for Lacanian scholarship involves the operation of wider societal discourses that pertain to work and organization. Such studies draw on Lacan’s writing, along with Lacanian-inspired discourse theories of the s and s including Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of social hegemony (), Žižek’s work on ideology (), and Butler’s (, b) accounts of discourse that operates through the psyche (see also Butler et al., , for an overview of conversations between these positions). Such ‘new theories of discourse’ (Torfing, )—and of identification—utilize the Lacanian notion of the Real described earlier. The existential chaos heralded by the presence of the Real is terrifying for the subject who seeks a stable sense of self within the symbolic. Thus fantasy emerges to veil the lack inherent in the symbolic other. This concept is taken up by scholars who are interested in showing how ‘negativity, gaps, absences or “lack(s)” ’ structure the discourses that we take for granted (Cederström and Spicer, : ; see also Böhm and Batta, ; Lok and Willmott, ), including ideals that tend to be celebrated in contemporary work life such as entrepreneurship (Jones and Spicer, ; Kenny and Scriver, ), new forms of policy (Fotaki, ), neoliberal market logics (Fotaki, ), and social enterprise (Dey et al., ). Such phenomena represent fantasmatic ‘objects of desire’ that offer a promise of overcoming the symbolic lack experienced by desiring subjects (Driver, : ; see also Hoedemaekers and Keegan, ). Examining fantasy in relation to dominant societal discourses can shed light on how and why people subject themselves to various ways of knowing pertaining to work and organizations, and the complex dynamics of identification, cynicism, and resistance to these discourses (see Arnaud and Vidaillet, for a detailed discussion). In their overview of extant Lacanian organizational scholarship, Arnaud and Vidaillet distinguish the two approaches described above (: ). The first relates to ‘a clinical
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orientation’ based on studies of organizational psychodynamics (in the case of micro-level studies of subjection in organizations), while the latter represents a ‘critical orientation’ emerging largely in the field of critical management studies. This distinction is helpful but in adopting it, the complexities and nuances within studies on each side of this apparent division must be acknowledged. Clearly the former tend to focus on what is happening in the organization, and how the subject relates to this, while the latter examines wider structures of power including capitalism. Even so, studies of a ‘clinical’ flavour frequently highlight the political nature of the discourses therein (see Hoedemaekers, ; Hoedemaekers and Keegan, ; Kenny, among others) while adherents of the ‘macro’ approach often discuss the dynamics of identification and subjection that enable wider discourses to persist, and how subjects are compelled by them (Kosmala, ; Vidaillet and Gamot, ). Thus, the distinction ought to be considered as a helpful heuristic with a permeable boundary—with studies of each orientation remaining careful to include insights that might easily be omitted: power in the case of ‘micro’ studies, and subject-level dynamics in the case of ‘macro’ studies.
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.................................................................................................................................. Overall, the poststructural, psychoanalytic, work of Lacan represents exciting new directions for exploring the micro-level of subjection while remaining cognizant of wider structural forms of power (Butler, ), and for understanding how and why subjects are compelled to ‘recognize themselves’ in organizational discourses (Jones and Spicer, : ). Moreover, it valuably highlights how, in so doing, subjects reproduce these forms of power (see also Fotaki, ; Harding, , ; Parker, b). Lacan’s ideas can help enrich our understanding of what Brown (: ) terms ‘discursive’ approaches to identification, which have inspired a number of studies of subjectivity and identification in organizations (Ainsworth and Hardy, ; Alvesson et al., ; Kreiner et al., ; Ybema et al., ). Taken together, it is clear that insights from Lacan’s work have the potential to deepen our understanding of organizational identification. A closer examination of existing studies yields some nuances and issues that have not yet received significant attention within this body of work and these are explored next.
Affect The role of desire in identification is clear, and is often interpreted as affect (Stavrakakis, ). Indeed, affect is increasingly seen as an important methodological concern when analysing how subjects are attached to the symbolic both at the micro and macro levels of organizations (Glynos, ; Glynos and Stavrakakis, ). The idea is that desire for recognition within the symbolic fuels identifications which are always lacking, and these
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investments are considered affective. This emergent focus in organizational Lacanian scholarship can be described as reflecting the ‘affective turn’ that took place in social theory more broadly a number of years previously (see for example Ahmed, ; Lapping, ; Massumi, ). A focus on affect has implications for Lacanian organizational scholarship concerned with the macro, discursive, level. For example, entrepreneurship is understood as an indeterminate, open signifier that operates because it structures ‘the fantasy that coordinates desire’ on the part of subjects (Jones and Spicer, : ; see also Böhm and Batta, ; Kenny and Scriver, , Stavrakakis, ). Meanwhile, affect also operates in and through people’s ‘micro-level’ workplace attachments to aspects of their job (Bicknell and Liefooghe, ; Kosmala and Herrbach, ; Vanheule et al., ). In short, powerful aspects of the symbolic order pertaining to work and organizations depend upon the ‘libidinal, affective support that binds subjects to the conditions of their symbolic subordination’ (Stavrakakis, : ). This means that it is ‘impossible to un-block and displace identifications and passionate attachments without paying attention to this important dimension (affect)’ (Stavrakakis, : ). A question emerges, however, around whether affect can and should be ‘trusted’ as a phenomenon for use in organizational research. Here it is important to differentiate between emotion and affect. For Lacan, emotions are dangerous. They can be artificial, in that they appear to be pointing to some truth pertaining to the subject that displays them; and emotions are often misleading (Lacan, ). Lacan warns psychoanalysts that emotions frequently appear to offer understanding, when they instead represent an illusory sense of depth. His cautions suggest that, for organizational scholars, research focusing on emotion, as it emerges through attachments to the symbolic, can be problematic. The resulting account merely represents the researcher’s own imaginary or fantasmatic relations to what they are studying rather than anything more significant—emotions are therefore a tempting delusion for the researcher (Cederström and Grassman, ; Driver, ; Parker, : –). The concept of emotion is, therefore, typically eschewed in favour of an emphasis on affect, and the latter has been useful in analysing identification in organizational settings (see Kenny, ; Lapping, ). Such approaches show how the desires that lead us to identify with aspects of the symbolic are not reflective of some inner emotional life, instead they appear as affects that are transindividual: part of a ‘greater social whole’ (Hook, : ). They represent the ‘engine’ of a wider affective technology of subjectivity that ensures the transmission of meaning and intelligibility between subjects. It is helpful to think of affect and desire as instances of a pulse or charge that passes through us as subjects, as we are compelled into sustaining aspects of the symbolic order (Hook, ).
Going ‘Beyond’ Subjection For both the macro and the micro approaches to identification inspired by Lacan, the idea of ‘going beyond’ the lure of one’s imaginary identifications is presented as something that may enable subjects to rework their relation with the symbolic and rethink their position. While some critics note an inherent pessimism to Lacan’s work when it comes to the potential for altering the grip of the symbolic on the subject (Jameson, ), others point to its emancipatory promise. This hopeful position is based on the idea that the Real
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prevents any final attempt at closure. Thus the position of the subject within the symbolic is never fully determined but always in flux, and revisable (Copjec, ). Copjec, for example, describes how the experience of shame can enable something of a resigned awareness of one’s location in the symbolic and thus it can yield ‘ . . . not an escape from the ontology per se, but an escape from ontology’s “pre-comprehension” of the subject’. In other words, shame prompts a temporary respite from fantasmatic attachments: an understanding of how we are compelled by them: ‘For Lacan, shame is the subject’s ethical relation towards being, his own and the other’s’ (Copjec, : ). On this view, the purpose of the analyst must be to encourage such encounters with, or at least approaches to, the Real. Organizational scholars draw upon this productive element inherent in the inevitability of the failure of signification, because it highlights and unveils the ‘imaginary nature of striving for idealistic policies and the liberating potential of accepting loss’, in the context of contemporary organizations (Fotaki, : ). At the level of the organizational subject, through speech for example, it might be possible to alter one’s relation to signifiers upon which one previously depended for a sense of identity, including relating to ideas of professionalism (Arnaud, ; Driver, a, ; Kenny, ; see also Contu and Willmott, ; Kosmala and Herrbach, ). At the more macro-level of discourse, the fundamental lack that accompanies the symbolic order can enable a space of freedom to open up, allowing subjects to resist even the most powerful discourses (Jones and Spicer, ; Stavrakakis, ). This represents a further, important, distinction between Lacanian approaches and other psychoanalytic schools of thought, which can depict organizational subjects as ‘prisoners of their psychology’ (Brown, ; Knights and Clarke, : ), providing a somewhat deterministic account of the subject’s position.
Gender Lacan’s ideas on gender are central to his work. However, this aspect is frequently omitted from studies of organization inspired by his approach (Fotaki and Harding, ; Kenny and Fotaki, ), including research on organizational identification. The basic concept of subjectivity and how it emerges, in psychoanalysis, is founded on an understanding of how subjects come to attain sexed and gendered identities as they move into adulthood—this is seen as an essential precondition of human development (Laplanche and Pontalis, ). One’s entry to the symbolic order depends upon taking a position—feminine or masculine—in relation to the phallus, the master signifier. This means that sexuation precedes and underlies all social settings including organizations. For Lacan, because language is constitutive of all understanding, both sex and gender are given to the subject through signification within the symbolic order. This means that each is only known and experienced via norms, laws, and other social structures. Sex and gender are socially constructed. Even so, these concepts play an important part in his work; the subject cannot attain self-hood without becoming gendered. Lacan’s primacy on sex and gender has generated significant controversy among feminist scholars. For some, Lacan equates the figure of the woman with that which cannot be symbolized, and thus denigrates the position of the feminine in social life. For example, when discussing signification, Lacan refers to the ‘phallus’ as the master signifier representing the centre of
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the symbolic order, anchoring its chains of sliding signifiers and stabilizing meaning around these. The phallus is thus a privileged signifier that can ‘designate as a whole the effects of the signified’ (Lacan, : ). The notorious ‘phallic symbol’ that is central to many psychoanalytic theories is not benign, according to Jameson (); it is ‘neither image nor symbol, but rather . . . the fundamental signifier of mature psychic life, and thus one of the basic organizational categories of the Symbolic Order itself ’ (Jameson, : ). For critics therefore, Lacan’s choice of word is unfortunate; its reference to a male body part, and the special position of this signifier in his schema, amounts to a reification of male dominance (Butler, : ). In Lacanian theory the penis therefore becomes ‘elevated/ erected to the structuring and centring principle of the world’ (Butler, : ). On this view, Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis can only reinforce misogyny in scholarly thought, and patriarchal social structures in practice (Fotaki and Harding, ; Grosz, ; Irigaray, , ; Kristeva, , ). A second body of work by feminist scholars offers an alternative view, grounded in Lacan’s underlying constructivism. His problematization of aspects of symbolic signification, including those pertaining to accepted norms of sex and gender, offers the potential to undo apparently trenchant norms (Brennan, ; Copjec, ; Mitchell and Rose, ). As his work represents ‘a permanently available site of contested meanings’ (Butler, : ), it can for example help to overturn gender discrimination in organizations, because it can show how such structures are ‘not ontologically given, but are arbitrary and highlytentative masquerades open to change’ (Fotaki and Harding, : ; see also Ford and Harding, ). Lacan shows how women are forced to take a subservient position in relation to men because of the expectations placed upon them in relation to their position vis-à-vis the phallus (Fotaki and Harding, ). Feminists adopting this aspect of his work argue that Lacan offers the opportunity to think about how change can be enacted, through problematizing and challenging dominant norms including those of patriarchy. Organizational scholarship tends to remain blind, both to the alleged phallogocentrism of Lacan’s work, and to feminist debates around this (Arnaud and Vidaillet, ; Harding, ; Kenny, ). This is dangerous, because it risks leading to a problematic, and unchallenged, legacy of sexism within this approach to organizational identification (see Fotaki and Harding, for a full discussion). After all, contemporary organizations are places in which gender discrimination has long persisted (Ferguson, ; Fotaki and Harding, ); it would be unconscionable for scholars of identification to import new theories that merely reinforce this way of thinking.
Methods Psychoanalysis helps organizational researchers explore the ways in which the operations of the unconscious influence organizational life (Casey, ). However, scholars interested in Lacan’s ideas must be careful; Lacan frequently warned about the dangers of transposing his ideas onto social settings. Researchers can be tempted to see their own perspectives as authoritative and final, or to apply a false coherence to an essentially contradictory social situation (Fotaki and Harding, ; Pullen, ). Scholars often fail to acknowledge their own imaginary identifications with the practice and method of research (Parker, a:
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). Moreover, Lacan provided little direction on how his work might be translated into empirical efforts in the social sciences (Parker, b). Important studies have, though, emerged (Parker, a). Thus, the methodological ‘deficit’ that was described as a feature of the fast-growing area of Lacanian organizational scholarship (Glynos, : ; see also Contu et al., ), has been somewhat addressed in recent years. The following overview refers more to the micro-level studies of workplace identification described above, than to more macro, abstract accounts of the power of discourses and ideologies. However, some insights, including those pertaining to the position of the researcher, apply to both. Scholars typically highlight attempts at signification in the speech of those they study, for example where particular words are deployed in relation to others, as people call on aspects of the symbolic order when trying to represent themselves through communicative efforts (Parker, b: ; see also Kenny, ; Pavón-Cuéllar, ). The overall aim is to explore how important elements within the symbolic structure our discourse, rather than attempting to uncover deeper meanings, because the latter exercise is necessarily mired in the researcher’s own imaginary identifications (Arnaud, ; Driver, ; Parker, b; Pavón-Cuéllar, ). This eschewing of a ‘depth model’ of the subject represents yet another difference between a Lacanian approach to organizational identification, and those drawing from neighbouring psychoanalytic schools. It is vital for organizational researchers adopting Lacanian ideas on identification to remain aware of the inevitable impossibility of this activity. Phenomena, including identifications, can never be fully signified. Lack accompanies attempts to do so, and identifications fail. Cracks and fissures emerge in the speech of the subject who attempts to identify with the symbolic, and this is why our efforts at identification can appear to be full of holes: contradictory and paradoxical (Parker, a, b). Researchers therefore try to remain aware of contradictions, mistakes, slippages, and jokes, on the part of those they study and themselves—the variety of linguistic disruptions that can occur (Hook, ; Parker, b). Finally, affect is important to study not least because it helps us to understand in more depth the ‘unconscious and unbidden investments’ that keep people attached to dominant aspects of the symbolic order (Parker, b: ; see also Stavrakakis, ). With these points in mind, authors have adopted and adapted existing qualitative analytic approaches, including those of narrative inquiry, as broad frameworks within which to carry out Lacanian-inspired studies of social settings (Driver, ; see also Hoedemaekers and Keegan, ; Saville Young, ). Again, scholars must avoid invoking a ‘master discourse’: presenting either their Lacanian-inspired methodological framing, or the emergent theoretical insights, as representing new ‘grand theories’ of the social, even where this goes against the traditional norms of academic publication in which the generation of new and ‘better’ theory is perceived as an essential requirement in conventional peer-reviewed journals (Fotaki and Harding, ; Frosh, ).
I F ‘D’
.................................................................................................................................. It is clear that Lacanian ideas have inspired a particular community of scholars of organizational identification, albeit they have had little impact on mainstream research
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in this area. Nonetheless Lacan’s work holds valuable potential for connecting the macro with the micro, showing how, as he notes, the ‘unconscious is politics’ (Lacan, quoted in Arnaud and Vidaillet, : ). What does this mean for students of ‘identity work’ in organizations? For Lacan, the idea of a definable object denoted by ‘identity’ is itself illusory, and any search for it is necessarily doomed (Bloom, ; Harding, ; Kenny, ). For this reason, it may be that Lacanian approaches are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of identity work as it is commonly defined. Identity work tends to invoke ‘the many ways in which people create, adapt, signify, claim and reject identities from available resources’, with these people depicted as ‘ “intelligent strategist[s]” who negotiate their (increasingly individuated) selves as they adapt to the vicissitudes of late modern organizational life’ (Brown, : , citing Giddens). Lacan’s theories are difficult to relate first, because of their inherent querying of the very existence of essential identities, even multiple ones, and second, their problematization of the notion of the agentic actor who can consciously choose between alternative notions of self, because of the unconscious nature of dynamics of attachment. A Lacanian account of subject formation is difficult to reconcile with the idea that identities exist and that they are ‘actively and often self-consciously constructed in social contexts’, requiring repeated acts aimed at maintenance (Brown, : ). Future studies of identification might usefully focus on how gender informs theoretical orientations, alongside affect dynamics; these represent potentially fruitful lenses for deepening our understanding of subjection and identification that have thus far been largely overlooked (for exceptions see Fotaki and Harding, ). A further focus might engage with Lacan’s own work on the concept of organization, the full potential of which has not been explored. Lacan experimented with radical and anarchist organizational structures, founding his own psychoanalytic school in Paris in . His interest was in how power operates within the organization, how knowledge is transmitted between members—in this case, scholars of psychoanalysis—and how people’s affiliations and passions for his organization might be maintained. He was, however, aware of the consequences of what he calls the discourse of the analyst within organizations, and the compelling but dangerous temptation to exert control via strengthening members’ identifications with authority (see Arnaud and Vidaillet, for a discussion). Yet Lacan’s longstanding fascination with organizations is rarely discussed (Arnaud and Vidaillet, ; Nobus, , Vidaillet, ). Of late, scholars have argued that a return to the organization theory inherent in Lacan’s work should take primacy over the current fashion for appropriating and integrating his concepts into pre-existing theories of organizing (Nobus, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Rather than a theory of organizational identification, Lacan’s ideas represent a point of departure for conceptual developments around how and why we desire attachments to the structures that shape social life. His propositions suggest avenues of thought that he characteristically refuses to map or specify. It is likely that organizational scholars of identification will continue to be inspired by the openings and affordances offered by Lacan’s writings, and by the rich potential that they offer.
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Parker, I. (). Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Parker, I. (a). Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill. Parker, I. (b). ‘Lacanian Discourse Analysis in Psychology: Seven Theoretical Elements’. Theory and Psychology, , –. Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (). From the Conscious Interior to an Exterior Unconscious: Lacan, Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology. London: Karnac. Pavón-Cuéllar, D. and Parker, I. (). ‘Introduction: Lacanian Theory, Discourse Analysis and the Question of the “Event” ’. In I. Parker and D. Pavón-Cuéllar (eds.), Lacan, Discourse, Event: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy. New York: Routledge, pp. –. Petriglieri, G. (). ‘A Psychodynamic Perspective on Identity as Fabrication’. In A.D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Pullen, A. (). ‘Gendering the Research Self: Social Practice and Corporeal Multiplicity in the Writing of Organizational Research’. Gender, Work & Organization, , –. Roberts, J. (). ‘The Power of the “Imaginary” in Disciplinary Processes’. Organization, (), –. Saville Young, L. (). ‘Becoming Other to Oneself: Misreading the Researcher through Lacanian Discourse Analysis’. In I. Parker and D. Pavón-Cuéllar (eds.), Lacan, Discourse, Event: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy. New York: Routledge, pp. –. Stavrakakis, Y. (). ‘Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment’. Organization Studies, (), –. Stavrakakis, Y. (). ‘Symbolic Authority, Fantasmatic Enjoyment and the Spirits of Capitalism: Genealogies of Mutual Engagement’. In C. Cederström and C. Hoedemaekers (eds.), Lacan and Organization. London: MayFlyBooks, pp. –. Torfing, J. (). New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford: Blackwell. Vanheule, S., Lievrouw, A., and Verhaeghe, P. (). ‘Burnout and Intersubjectivity: A Psychoanalytical Study from a Lacanian Perspective’. Human Relations, (), –. Vanheule, S. and Verhaeghe, P. (). ‘Powerlessness and Impossibility in Special Education: A Qualitative Study on Professional Burnout from a Lacanian Perspective’. Human Relations, (), –. Vidaillet, B. (). ‘Review: Lacan and Organization’. Organization, , –. Vidaillet, B. and Gamot, G. (). ‘Working and Resisting When One’s Workplace Is Under Threat of Being Shut Down: A Lacanian Perspective’. Organization Studies, (), –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, (), –. Žižek, S. (). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
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Abstract Through their performances, professional performing artists construct self-identities. They put themselves into their work, for example in autobiographical songs or through developing a distinctive style, and over time they become known for the content and tone of their performances. In addition, private aspects of who they are can become part of their public persona and audiences relate both to the art that is produced and the story of the person producing it. This chapter examines the nature of artistic performers’ identity construction through a dramaturgical lens, the construction of artistic biographies and the precarious nature of identity and performance as audiences and co-performers change. The authors consider some implications of this analysis for potential areas of focus for identity research and for modes of undertaking such research.
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.................................................................................................................................. P perform their identities continuously. They present an identity in interaction and more generally, for example, through adopting a style of dress, forms of speech, choosing friendship groups, and producing a version (or brand) of the self for consumption in social media. There can be an impression that performance is relatively superficial and that the authentic self is as much hidden by the performance as it is presented. Whilst this can certainly be true, in this chapter we will explore a literature that conceives performance differently. We explore the conceptualization of identity performance as part of a dramaturgical analytic tradition and extend this by connecting it to a dialectical perspective on the identity of performers. We then explore this through examining the construction of performers—people who are not just performing identity in the normal course of life, but whose performances are the very stuff of their identity. These people undertake a creative form of identity work (Brown, ) which is different to everyday life, as their performance is the work. Creative industries and cultural organizations are sites where performance is not only a metaphor but also a practice. The form of the creative practice is interwoven with identity in various ways (Bain, ), for example when musicians write
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autobiographical stories into songs, and as a series of songs comes to frame their identity as an artist. In this chapter, we explore musicians as an example of people whose occupational identity is highly visible and typically is encompassing of life, requiring a training of the body, development of techniques and particular senses, and an enculturation into sensibilities and language which define the person. In order to understand the construction of identities it is necessary to be able to analyse the social dynamics of interaction over time. This is enabled by the use of a dramaturgical lens (Goffman, ). Using this lens, the researcher pays attention to the context, the enactment of roles, and the reaction of audiences and mutual construction which occurs. The context includes macro discourses which provide outlines of roles and resources that actors can use. The enactment of roles is not merely the following of a script but includes improvisation and creative use of resources as people develop their own way of adopting and adapting the role. Any performance has an audience, and the audience’s reaction relates to their expectations that, in turn, relate to the context (Gell, ) and their own self-narratives (Fine, ). Interactions between performers and audience, and between co-performers, are where macro issues such as structure-agency, control-resistance, and conformity-creativity are played out. Dramaturgical approaches are associated with Symbolic Interactionism (Perinbanayagam, ) in being concerned with how people develop and use meaning in their everyday interactions. Dramaturgical analysis is concerned with behaviour and language and normally concerns itself with the micro level rather than seeking to develop highly generalized theories of society. One of the earliest proponents of a dramaturgical perspective was Burke () who saw social life as drama. Goffman () was influenced by Burke but saw drama as a metaphor and, following Goffman, dramaturgy has been applied as a way of understanding organizations (Mangham, ) and individual identities (Down and Reveley, ). For Goffman, in the drama, people present themselves to others (the audience) to seek personal acceptance and for others to see them in the way that fits with their selfidentity. Therefore, personal identity is not regarded as a stable psychological entity, but as a socially influenced and changing set of meanings associated with a person. Our purpose is to discuss how a dramaturgical approach can provide a basis for researching identity-constructing interactions and to highlight some of the questions and methodological implications of this orientation.
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.................................................................................................................................. For Goffman () when people interact they seek to influence the impression that others have of them. In interacting, messages are being sent about the person’s identity: their status, role, values, and attitudes. In particular, people are motivated to avoid embarrassment or becoming stigmatized, and so there is a self-protective aspect to their presentation of self. Goffman developed a dramaturgical analysis in which people are regarded as actors, there is a setting in which they play their roles, there are costumes and props, and there is an audience. As actors, people are not entirely ‘free’ but take up roles that are to some
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degree pre-defined. For example, the role of an orchestral conductor carries with it certain expectations, but these can be enacted in different ways (Wigley and Gulledge, ). The conductor is expected to be in charge and direct rehearsals but in so doing they might give greater or lesser degrees of interpretive freedom to players or exercise direction in a relatively egalitarian or distant style. These enactments become part of, and express, the conductor’s identity as, for example, an egalitarian conductor with versatility or a stickler for a specific form of interpretation of a particular composer. The costume and appearance of the actors is significant in projecting an identity. An orchestra dressed in formal ‘black tie’ is sending a message of formality and tradition which differs from the impression made by less formal modes of dress, for example in a folk or community orchestra (Ruud, ). This can send signals about the style of music and the expectations of audience behaviour, such as conventions of when to clap and not. The setting is also important. A performance in a formal concert hall where there is a clear distinction between performers on stage and an audience in the auditorium gives a different impression to an ‘out-reach’ concert in a village hall or a flash mob performance in an airport where the physical and social distance between performers and audience is minimized (Donald and Greig, ). These settings have implications for interactions. For example, players may not interact directly with audience members who sit in respectful silence in a concert hall, but might make eye contact, smile, and interact in other ways with the ‘audience’ in an airport as those people who are also ‘passengers’ carry on with their travel. In other words, the staging of a performance includes an element of ‘distancing’ in which the performers occupy a separate identity group from the audience both by their activity and their physical and psychological separation from the audience. The audience, however, is less cohesive as an identity group. Although in formally staged settings, there may be expected behaviours and they may form shared identities as fans of a particular band or style of music, their performance as audience is rarely central to their personal and occupational identity in the way that it is for the performers (Bailey, ). For Goffman, an ‘audience’ is not synonymous with an audience for a concert in the way we have described. Rather, each actor can be an audience for the other, so the players are also an audience, watching and responding to the actions and interactions of the others: such as fellow players, the conductor, audience members, and press reporters. Goffman emphasizes what he calls the front and back regions. The front region is where the actors are on stage and seeking to make a positive impression on the audience. The back region is where actors may not have fully to inhabit their role. The audience (in one sense) is not present and the actors may be preparing for the next performance or working through an analysis of a past performance with fellow performers. What may be appropriate in the back region, for example, expressing the view to colleagues that today’s audience is particularly ignorant, could be entirely inappropriate for a successful performance in the front region. However, various studies in performance and other contexts have shown the importance of back-region talk between people who have a common identity and purpose (Ross, ). The building of trust and even expressing negative opinions about others can help them prepare to re-enter the front region and treat the audience with respect having got the negativity ‘off their chest’. This kind of process also acts as a form of socialization in which members new to the group of performers learn the tacit rules of where and when to express themselves, and how to do so.
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These forms of enactment around the performance are particularly noticeable when they are constrained, for example in a business context (Gotsi et. al., ) or go wrong. Beech et al. () discuss the case of an operatic company in rehearsal for a major performance. As the rehearsals progress, a number of problems emerge. One is that the lead soprano (in her first major solo role) has strong views about her own performance and disagrees with the music director about how best to produce her voice for the show. This leads to her subverting musical directions initially in relatively subtle ways, but eventually quite overtly. Another major change is the eventual withdrawal and substitution of the lead tenor. This occurs mainly through his declining confidence and gradual erosion of his feeling of himself as a performer. Both of these changes take place over time and are facilitated by backstage social interactions and processes. The soprano is initially distant from the chorus members but then forms close contact with them and seeks to incorporate them as supporters for her interpretation. Conversely, the tenor, although liked by the cast, becomes more remote and isolated and becomes distanced from the group. For both the soprano and the tenor these frontstage (non-)performances were not merely career changing but identity changing. Ultimately, the tenor retired from being a musician altogether, whilst the soprano went on to further success. The style of her performance was crucial to her identity construction, to how others in the industry perceived her ability and future roles that built her professional biography. It also had an impact for some on their perceptions of what she was like in her motivations and willingness to be part of the group. In a different context, theatre-making, dancing, and other elements of group-bonding were part of challenging traditional, binary gender identities amongst LGBTQ groups (McGinty, ). Herdt (: ) has argued that sex differences are culturally and historically constructed norms and that what really counts is ‘the cultural meaning of sex assignment in the world and its symbolic treatment of the person’. In other words, although gender may be commonly thought of as determinate and determined, what it means to be a gender varies with cultures and period of history and is not unchanging or non-negotiable. Kirtsoglou () studied how an affective community of gay women in Greece negotiated their identity in the context of the gender norms prevalent in Greek culture. The women chose to keep their sexual identities hidden and sought to be unclassifiable and achieve a disruptive fusion in their performance of self. Following Butler (), Kirtsoglou regards the group as enacting a performative realization of gender in which there is a break between the gender of the performer and the gender of the performance. The members of the group produce appearances that range between ‘unisex’ and ‘highly effeminate’ and they perform in ways that take on masculine tropes. For example, in the culture there were genderspecific dances in which women performed ‘belly-dances’, producing a particular image of desirable femininity which was supported by other women, but assumed by all to be desirable by men. In complementary fashion, men performed dances such as zeibekiko which was regarded as displaying manly characteristics of expansive gestures and vigour. The women in Kirtsoglou’s group performed the zeibekiko and also drank excessively in induction rituals in a way that was typical of men. In doing this, there was a claiming of an identity that both bonded the group and overtly resisted social norms of identity classification. Typically, achieving the requisite performance ability in professional artistic practice requires many years of training, practice, and rehearsal (Beech and Broad, ). Although
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it is true that some forms of performance do not rely on technical competence, in many fields it remains the case that a high level of proficiency is the norm for a career of any length. Gaining technical skills is not a trivial addition to one’s repertoire, but, rather, becomes part of an identity (Gabor, ). The body changes during and because of skill acquisition (Cunliffe and Coupland, ). For example, musicians playing string instruments develop calluses that (ironically) reduce the sensitivity in their fingers, thereby enabling them to play with greater sensitivity over prolonged periods of time. This physical development is somewhat painful and the change has to be preserved throughout the performing career. Bodily changes are especially notable in artistic forms such as dance that require specific physical achievements (Daprati et al., ), which in turn require the attainment of a particular physique. The discipline of training to achieve both the physique and the artistic ability can be so demanding that it requires extraordinary dedication and determination. Hence the statement: ‘I am a dancer’ is not just descriptive of what a person does but also says something about their mental attitudes and their embodiment of their art which is necessary for, and part of, their performance. Similarly, elite athletes and sports people are dedicated to physical discipline which changes their ability, bodily shape, and identity. Unlike actors, sports people and dancers often have a relatively brief performing career, and the centrality of performance to the self is evidenced by the difficulties that people experience at the point of retirement. This can mean a re-storying of identity, sometimes in a way that seeks to capitalize on the former identity as a performer (Coetzee, ). Thus, from the dramaturgical perspective, identity is performed as people inhabit roles and interact with others. This may entail inhabiting more than one role at a time. Actors in an in-group support each other and socialize each other into the ‘appropriate’ performance of self for group membership. Equally, out-groups provide a contrast from which the ingroup dis-identify and distinguish themselves, and this is particularly noticeable as people cross identity boundaries, for example into and out of being a performer, and challenge boundaries, such as gender identities, in performance. In performance identities, embodying the identity is important and this includes not only the acquisition of technique but also transforming the body in order to perform. In some arts the transformation may be relatively modest but in others, such as dance, it can be very significant and sometimes damaging.
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.................................................................................................................................. Performance and performers present peculiar complexities and ambiguities for scholars of identity. As a member of the audience of a dramatic performance, we hold in our minds the parallel identities of the actor and the character they portray. We (mostly) recognize the actor and character as related but entirely distinct identities. The case of a traditional scripted play is, in some respects, more straightforward in this regard than many other instances of performance. How do we understand the nested notions of identity around some of the contemporary performances devised and offered by artists such Adrian Howells,1 in which the boundary between performer and performance is deliberately ambiguous, creatively blurred (e.g. Bissell, )? Moving beyond performances that may
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yield particular themes and ideas that can, more or less, be expressed directly through language, how do we understand identity in more abstract performative forms, such as contemporary dance or classical music, in which the performer (often) engages with some kind of ‘text’, but one that does not, in the end, refer directly to particular themes or ideas? The complexities and ambiguities in performer identity have been the object of discussion since ancient times. Plato was no great fan of artists, but his dialogue Ion (Plato, ) engages with some of the key ideas in performance and performer identity. In Plato’s dialogue, Ion is a great rhapsode, a reciter of epic poetry, who is at the very peak of his game, having recently returned from winning a major competition for rhapsodes. Plato’s ventriloquist’s dummy, Socrates, interrogates Ion the performer to understand what it is that he does in the moment of performance. Does he deploy skill and artistry (a word with problematic connotations: artful, artifice, artificial . . . ) to deceive his audience into believing his characters, or is he, perhaps, inspired by the poet’s text to feel in himself their emotional states, and so present them authentically? Is he, in the end, a deceiver, creating an artifice for his paying audience, or the humble vessel for a more-or-less divine experience of the poet’s genius? To elaborate the latter of these two possibilities, Plato presents a striking image—the poet, performer, and audience as a chain of ferromagnetic rings, in which the performer’s role, as the link between poet and audience, is to pick up the magnetic field of the poet’s insight and transmit it to those who hear his performance, creating a moment of communion between the (absent) poet and the audience. Plato’s ideas point to two competing notions of ‘identity’ in thinking about performance. Plato’s performer-as-skilled-deceiver seems to emphasize an element of personal, individual, identity: skills in the rhetoric of performance, perhaps drawing on aspects of lived experience to conjure up emotional states that remain under the overall control of the performer (what is known as ‘dual consciousness’ in Diderot and Grotowski (Trenos, )). On the other hand, Plato’s performer-as-magnetized-ring sublimates the performer’s self into a moment of identity between the poet, performer, and audience. In this case, the performer is not an independent person but a medium through which the poet/ author’s identity is expressed: a channel through which the poet connects to the audience. Poor Ion is a straw man, and Socrates (Plato) runs rings around him, challenging him to decide which of the two options he has presented is correct, in a binary choice. After a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing, the rhapsode opts for the ignorant nobility of the humble vessel, or magnetized ring. Thus, performers are, in Plato’s analysis, essentially without agency; they are mere channels for the poet’s genius. The conclusion of Ion is strangely unsatisfying in the way it collapses in such a peremptory way the fascinating dialectic that has been set up—and, more generally, Plato’s Ion has been heavily critiqued (see, for example, Glucker, ). That dialectic is, however, fascinating in the way it mirrors competing attitudes to identity in performance: the view that focuses on the performer as a unique individual whose particular character, life story, insights, and skills are the objects of interest; and the idea that the performance is a moment of quasi-mystical identity between audience, performer, and (if relevant), ‘author’, in which the greatest achievement of the performer can be to disappear ‘into’ the moment of performance. What is especially interesting about these two notions of identity is the extent to which they still surface in discourses around performance. The aspiration to remove oneself from
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the performance is, for example, a recurring theme in musicians’ writing about the act of performance, particularly in Western art traditions. For many musicians in those traditions, ‘authenticity’ stands opposite to ‘idiosyncrasy’ (‘mere idiosyncrasy’ as the great Bach pianist Rosalyn Tureck called it). The ambition is to create a performance that is ‘faithful’ to the ‘work’—an attitude known as werketreue, in which the ‘work’ is imbued with qualities and dimensions that will be revealed in a performance that is ‘self-less’. In the werketreue tradition, the work (and the ‘composer’s intentions’) are given such central significance that the performer is expected to disappear behind them (Hunter and Broad, ). On the other hand, the idea of the performer as a unique and exceptional individual at the very centre of their performances also holds great power and enacts a long tradition in which ‘life’ and ‘art’ are united in the construction of the performer’s identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. Performer identities are constructed through life stories (Watson, ), often presented in biographies—either detailed journalistic or academic accounts or short pen pictures with which performers are introduced on websites and in programme notes (Dobrow, ). These accounts of identity construction can be seen to include elements of Goffmanian dramaturgy and Platonic dialectical identities. For example, accounts of Niccolò Paganini’s performances on the violin foreground his extraordinary physical appearance, which Paganini was careful to promote and exaggerate through his carefully chosen clothes. At the time, there were wild rumours of ‘dalliances with the devil’ which were the source of his virtuosity. These false rumours were useful in the promotion of concerts and so were cultivated. At the same time, however, those accounts highlight the sense of Paganini being lost in, or given up to, the performance, and of a sense of transcendent union in the audience—music, performer, and audience all fused in a performative moment. The dramaturgical presentation is itself a performance. The protagonist is both visible/apparently accessible and mysterious. There is brilliance and darkness, and the two are entwined, making the performer not one of the audience or common people, but ‘paying a price’ which in some sense justifies their distinction without negatively stigmatizing their outsider credentials. Miles Davis is regarded as one of the leading innovators in jazz in the twentieth century. He was a trumpet player and band leader and is the subject of several biographies (Carr, ; Kahn, ). A common theme in the way his identity is narrated includes a chronology of live and recorded performances, stages with a changing cast of actors, which were seen as key to his story of a succession of innovative masterpieces. His career started playing with Charlie Parker and subsequently he formed his own band with an unconventional line-up to record ‘Birth of the Cool’. Despite success, Davis moved on, forming a new band including John Coltrane, adopting a new style and recording ‘Kind of Blue’, the biggest-selling jazz album of all time. Davis, though, moved on again, influencing jazz fusion with a new band and the album ‘Bitches Brew’. Davis’ identity is thus constructed as someone seeking new innovations, working in a succession of partnerships which produced new sounds and then moving on to the next innovation, regardless of the
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potential for alienating his audience, but being incredibly successful through this way of being. However, another construction is ‘revealed’ in other Davis biographies. Szwed (), for example, explores Davis’ periods of depression, drug addiction, on-stage and public conflicts with other musicians, acrimonious band break-ups, and a series of personal relationship problems. This is presented as a counter-narrative—a conflictual backdrop against which Davis still managed to be creative. However, this counter-narrative can be seen as a complementary identity construction, common to many stories of leading jazz figures in the bop and post-bop eras. Indeed, there is almost an assumed complementarity between personal turmoil and professional creativity. This is, perhaps, an observable version of a construction of identity through dramatized performance. The character is created not excluding the ‘undesirable’ elements. The apparent conflicting traumatic life beyond most norms works in dramatic support of the story of artistic success, making it more human, tragic/epic (Brown and Humphreys, ), and interesting beyond the musical detail. It could be argued that Davis’ performance of a ‘jazz life’ was crucial to what made him ‘different’ and a figure of fascination which contributed to his commercial success. Davis, like Paganini, is presented as ‘other’, different to ‘normal people’ and dangerous in being a drug addict, and adopting costumes and performances of extremes; and yet, he is apparently accessible, understandable, and human in his frailties. Arguably, these differences in identity make the connection to the audience stronger as there is an apparent ‘fairness’ to the distribution of talent balanced with the likelihood of a deal with the devil/ life of pain and extremes which most audience members would not want themselves. Paganini and Davis could be regarded as extreme cases, but it is interesting to look at how performer identities replay certain tropes. Originally writing in the s, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz () examined artists’ biographies to identify recurring themes in the stories that had been told about them. They demonstrated common motifs, such as the notion that the great artist will be, initially at least, self-taught (Davis, for example attended music college, but dropped out), and that his genius is displayed at an early age (Davis being recruited by Charlie Parker at the age of seventeen). All the artist biographies Kris and Kurz examined were of ‘great men’, and although more recently examples such as Janice Joplin, Amy Winehouse, and Whitney Houston fit a similar pattern, it is noticeable that they displayed masculine-style alcohol and drug consumption and other masculine behaviours (Kirtsoglou, ). In a seminal article on the biography in art history, Griselda Pollock () gives a critique of the process of biographical writing about artists (she writes about the visual artist, but her arguments are widely applicable): The art historian produces a monograph which . . . traces the life of a special kind of person, the artist, from birth to death, within the narrow limits of only that which serves to render all that is narrated as signifier of artistness. (Pollock, : ; our italics)
Pollock suggests that biographical details become important only inasmuch as they point in some way to a feature of the subject that underlines his or her status as artist. Biographical details are not so much particulars about the artist as a person, but, rather, about the person as artist. Pollock offers an assessment of biographies written by a third party, but her comment takes on a different resonance when applied to the sorts of biographical comments that the
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artist makes in presenting themself—in, for example, the biographies that are often included in performance programmes, or in interviews, or autobiographies. The details that are included—whether they deal with the bare facts of biography or more fanciful ‘seminal moments’—are so often selected because, in Pollock’s works, they are effective ‘signifier[s] of artistness’. Hector Berlioz’s splendidly entertaining and highly misleading Mémoire (Berlioz, ) is an early example of a tradition of thinking in which the identity of the individual, with all his or her artistic idiosyncrasies, takes centre stage.
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.................................................................................................................................. There is a certain precarity to a performed identity—and that is part of the magic of performance: it could go wrong at any moment. When the performance stops, the identity is under threat (Ybema et al., ). For performers there is often a strong connection to the self through performance. It is notable that if the performance begins to be ‘of the wrong sort’ it can require identity work to repair the damage. Beech et al. () trace the career of a musician who was highly innovative and ‘cool’ in the s and s and who is highly regarded by new generations of musicians. He still performs at large-scale concerts and on TV, has received national awards for his contribution to music, and is something of a ‘national treasure’. Yet, he still had to make sure that he is performing ‘the cool musician’ to the researchers. He did this by down-playing his national status and emphasizing how much he played with young musicians and is ‘always jamming with them’. When the younger musicians were interviewed, they described him as a father figure, and while deemed not to have ‘sold out’ there was clearly a degree of charitable acceptance of him by the current generation. In many senses, this is a significant achievement of identity in a genre that focuses on novelty and youth in its marketing and performance such that the dramaturgical presentation of older stars often harks back in dress and image to younger days. Hence, there can be a disconnection to the self as time moves on and a need to repair the identity to gloss over or incorporate inconvenient changes. For Cross (), there is an inherent ambiguity to performance and musical recital in particular. The meaning of a performance cannot be separated from the context within which it happens. Rather, the meaning of performance and performed identities both gather meaning from the social context and contribute to the future construction of those contexts. For performers, other performers are a crucial part of the context, and while this may be a creative collaboration, it can often be a site of struggle and contestation. For example, Hoedemaekers and Ybema () discuss the rivalry between the two musicians in the rock band Judas Priest, both of whom saw themselves as the ‘lead’ guitarist. Similarly, in their primary research on Open Swimmer, there was a degree of struggle between Ben and the band. Ben had developed musically within the band and operated as part of the whole. Although Ben had written the music for the new album, the ‘sound’ was a band performance, not Ben’s. Ben had also recorded a solo album but this was ‘skirted around’ in the band and Open Swimmer only played the band music, even though the most recent compositions were solely Ben’s work. Therefore, there can be a complex
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dynamic in which the performers are associated with a group identity, and this is part of what enables them to continue to relate to an audience and therefore perform in a profitable way. Yet, there can be a growing apart and need to express individuality, though to do so might risk commercial failure, external criticism, and negative views of in-group members. This is an example of the significance of development over time. A band forms a group identity through performing and establishing a biography. This can be a constraint on the individuals within the band. If contributions start to feel unfair or there are differences in performance contributions, there can be pressure to separate, and while this may solve immediate problems of performance, it changes both group and individual identities. Connections to audiences are also part of the dynamic of performance identities. One issue common across a range of genres is the tendency of audiences to hark back to ‘the classics’ while the performers want to move on to new innovations (Kolb, ). In orchestral work, the introduction of new composers is notoriously difficult, with far larger audience attendances for high-recognition composers. Similarly, the industry of pop and rock music (Frith et al., ) creates a demand for repetition of hits that occupy a place in the identity of audiences—often connecting to remembered or imagined moments of personal significance, which can be ‘replayed’ by the audience as they are replayed by the band (or reconstituted members thereof). Gell () assumed that in artistic production, the artist was the initiating agent and the audience were the consumer of the ‘art object’. In this case, the demands of the audience constrain and strongly influence what the performer can produce.
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.................................................................................................................................. We have explored the performance of identity in cases where performing is the occupational identity and also frequently a self-identity. For these performers, what they do is a form of self-expression and their choice of repertoire, composition, and establishment of a biography occur through their practice of being themselves. The learning and socialization process may include not only skills and techniques which set them apart from others, but bodily changes which enable them to express emotion and meaning in a way that an audience cannot. However, as Gell () argues, the artist is not fully separate from the audience. The performance is only ‘complete’ if it is perceived and valued. For many of the performers in the studies we have cited, there is a significant distinction between professionals and amateurs. The differences are not (only) in skill and accomplishment, but in a whole-hearted embracing of a need to perform: personally, artistically, and economically. If a performer stops performing, they are no longer themselves. Equally, if they continue to perform, but are no longer ‘cool’, their identity has changed. There is a significant part of the identity that is an overt acceptance by other performers, and this acceptance (or denial) follows the tacit rules of identity-group membership such as what it means in any particular context to be ‘cool’. The dramaturgical approach, following Goffman (), has argued that, at least metaphorically, we are all performers. We present a version of ourselves, dressed for the part,
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using props and inhabiting a staged setting. It may be typical that people have more than one identity performance, which may be a way of relating to different audiences, but this is not to say that the performance of self is superficial. The performance is what is perceived by others and what they interact with—it has ongoing facticity. People may have other possible performance styles, some of which may display deliberate choices to send particular messages in specific settings, and others of which may be ‘natural’ and uninhibited, but from this perspective it can be argued that their overall identity is a composite of their total performances. Goffman’s work has been criticized from a number of angles (Riggins, ). His definition of the context of a drama was confined to places and this limited the use of the concept. Subsequent views have broadened this to the general social context of the drama and we would regard this refinement as important for enabling a more comprehensive understanding of how actors construct and use meanings, for example, by drawing on popular and macro discourses. Psathas () argued that Goffman’s dramaturgy failed to develop concepts sufficiently to produce an explanatory theory which could be applied across different situations. However, what it does provide is a set of conceptual tools which enable researchers to develop ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, ) and grounded analysis (Glaser and Strauss, ) which offers the possibility of practice-led theorizing and an avoidance of over-generalization. We have focused on artistic performers because they offer an ‘extreme case’ of performed identities in that they are literally performing. We believe this is helpful in highlighting the nature of roles that people inhabit and the relationships between performers and audiences and between co-performers. It is also helpful in demonstrating the precarity of performance and consequently the potential threats to self-identity when performances go wrong or relationships change. Although we have used an extreme case, the dramaturgical metaphor can also be applied more generally to other professions and organizational roles. For example, it can be used to understand the role of leadership and the variety of ways that followers react to leaders (Collinson, ). Equally, it can be applied to specific practices, for example how exotic dancers in clubs seek to construct a positive self-identity in the face of stigma and disapproval. In a contrasting case, Cain () uses the dramaturgical lens to analyse how workers in a hospice cope with the stress of their work. This includes the use of ‘dark humour’ in the back region where workers relate to each other in a way that patients and their families would be uncomfortable with, but this back-region enactment of a different part of their shared identity enabled the workers to interact with patients in a considerate way in the ‘front region’ of the hospice. These forms of analysis have certain facets in common. The performance is not regarded as inauthentic or a superficial way of hiding the truth from others. Even in challenging environments and stigmatized occupations, the workers were performing a version of themselves that they had to be able to live with and include in their ongoing narrative of self. The performances included roles which were ‘pre-formed’ in the sense that there are expectations in any particular setting of performers and audiences, and these expectations relate to broader discourses such as what might be expected of musicians, leaders, or health workers. However this does not mean that people have no leeway in how they enact roles. Unlike Felstead (), we would not conclude that a dramaturgical analysis is separate to other
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identity and social dynamics such as control and resistance. Rather, we would see organizational dramas as the site in which such dynamics are enacted and played out. Therefore, a dramaturgical perspective points towards researching the dynamics of identity. Performance is, by its nature, a process of interaction and this orientation focuses attention on what roles people occupy, how they occupy those roles, and what happens in their interactions with others. This includes issues such as how people cope with the imposition of expectations, the impact of stigma and prestige, how boundaries are negotiated, and how performances accumulate over time to establish an identity. In order to address such questions, research methodologies need to be sensitive to dynamics and to be able to access both front-region and back-region behaviour. Qualitative research techniques, particularly those used in ethnographic research, are likely to be particularly applicable. Interviews may be sites where a performance of self is given, but this alone is unlikely to give sufficient insight into how social dynamics proceed. Observation and participant observation are suited to gaining trust and access to the back region performances and to being able to interpret behaviour in the front region. It may be helpful to use autoethnographic techniques in which the researcher both participates and undertakes critical selfreflexion to generate an ‘insider view’. In addition, multi-researcher ethnography could help gain access and insight into how people inhabit different roles such as performer and audience member or leader and follower. We started this chapter with the claim that people perform their identities continuously. These performances are in a dynamic relationship with the performances of others. Performers are simultaneously the audiences for others, and the way that performances are conducted both reflects and constitutes the social context. Given this dynamic complexity, research is unlikely to produce simple answers. Rather, it can provide insights on social process and the ‘how’ questions of identity enactment, producing rich pictures which illuminate the complexity.
N . Adrian Howells (–). Glasgow-based English performance maker who played a significant role in the development of one-to-one performance. Howells’ performances often involved his working with an audience of one according to a loose performance score, exploring ideas around intimacy and relationships, often by enacting and/or appropriating rituals from daily life (such as hairdressing, for example, in Salon Adrienne of ).
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Herdt, G. (). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hoedemaekers, C. and Ybema, S. (). ‘All of Me: Art, Industry and Identity Struggles’. In N. Beech and C. Gilmore (eds.), Organising Music: Theory, Practice, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Hunter, M. and Broad, S. (). ‘Reflection and the Classical Musician: Practice in Cultural Context’. In J. Rink, H. Gaunt, and A. Williamon (eds.), Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kahn, A. (). Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and the Making of a Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo Press. Kirtsoglou, E. (). For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relations in a Greek Provincial Town. London: Routledge. Kolb, B. (). ‘The Effect of Generational Change on Classical Music Concert Attendance and Orchestra’s Responses in the UK and US’. Cultural Trends, (), –. Kris, E. and Kurz, O. (). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment [Based on Die Legende vom Kunstler, published in (Vienna: Krystall Verlag). English translation prepared by Alastair Laing and revised by Lottie M. Newman. Additions to the original text by Otto Kurz]. New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press. McGinty, L. (). ‘The Collaborative Theatre-Making Project: The Space to Challenge, Explore and Reimagine Accepted Mythologies’. Research in Drama Education, (), –. Mangham, I. L. (). ‘Vita Contemplativa: The Drama of Organizational Life’. Organization Studies, (), –. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (). ‘The Definition of the Situation: An Analysis of the Ethnomethodological and Dramaturgical View’. Sociological Quarterly, (), –. Plato (). The Selected Dialogues of Plato, trans. and ed. B. Jowett and H. Pelliccia. New York: Random House. Pollock, G. (). ‘Artists, Mythologies and Media: Genius, Madness and Art History’. Screen, (), –. Psathas, G. (). ‘Early Goffman and the Analysis of Face-to-Face Interaction in Strategic Interaction’. In J. Ditton (ed.), The View from Goffman. London: Macmillan, pp. –. Riggins, S. (ed.) (). Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ross, D. A. R. (). ‘Backstage with the Knowledge Boys and Girls: Goffman and Distributed Agency in an Organic On-line Community’. Organization Studies, , –. Ruud, G. (). ‘The Symbolic Construction of Organizational Identities and Community in a Regional Symphony’. Communication Studies, (), –. Szwed, J. (). So What: The Life of Miles Davis. New York: Random House. Trenos, H. (). Creativity: The Actor in Performance. Berlin: de Gruyter. Watson, T. (). ‘Narrative, Life Story and Manager Identity: A Case Study in Autobiographical Identity Work’. Human Relations, (), –. Wigley, R. and Gulledge, E. (). ‘Leadership in the BBC Philharmonic’. In N. Beech and C. Gilmore (eds.), Organising Music: Theory, Practice, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identi-ties’. Human Relations, (), –.
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, , - A Phenomenological Perspective .......................................................................................................................
Abstract Identities form and develop through the experience of encountering the world on a day-today basis. The world we encounter is pre-interpreted, it presents itself to us as a largely undifferentiated and tacit background against which we organize our experience and make sense of ourselves. Pre-interpretation means that it is often difficult to disentangle identities from the worlds we inhabit unless something goes wrong and we are compelled to take notice of, and reflect on, the situation at hand. This chapter proposes a phenomenological perspective on identity based on the concept of ‘noise’. Noise refers to any instance that violates the background expectancies of everyday life and calls for interpretation on the part of those who experience it. The author argues that noise can pose identity threats when it challenges the ‘pre-interpreted world’ that we would normally take for granted and enact in everyday situations. At the same time, noise also provides researchers with an opportunity to account for the ways in which individuals experience and understand the worlds of which they are part.
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.................................................................................................................................. S identity—people’s subjectively construed understandings of who they were, are, and desire to become (Brown, )—poses two important interpretive challenges. First, identity refers to meaning making activities that largely occur in the sphere of the inner self and are, therefore, difficult to observe. Second, identity processes are largely opaque because they mostly rely on background assumptions that are undiscussable and taken
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for granted. To address this dual challenge, in this chapter I take a phenomenological perspective on identity, which looks at identity through the lens of noise (Patriotta, ). Phenomenology is oriented towards the study of human experience in everyday life (Berger and Luckman, ; Schutz, ). More specifically, a phenomenological view aims to bring into focus the meanings that individuals create out of their encounters with the world, and the symbolic activities that they employ in making sense not only of the world, but of themselves (Bruner, ). Within this framework, I define noise as any disturbance that somehow upsets the status quo and calls for interpretation on the part of those who experience it. From this standpoint, noise refers to any instance that violates the background expectancies of everyday life. Noise and silence are ontological categories in the sense that they underpin human perceptions of everyday situations. Noise evokes the experience of disorder, multiplicity, dissonance, movement, unfamiliarity, interruption, and irregularity. In contrast, silence is associated with perceptions of order, unity, harmony, stability, familiarity, continuity, routine, and regularity. The interaction of ‘noise’ and ‘silence’ provides the soundscape of everyday life and thereby shapes people’s experience of ‘being in the world’ (Heidegger, ). As a result, we encounter situations that are more or less familiar, more or less dissonant, and more or less problematic, depending on the context in which they occur and are subjectively experienced. In my own research, I have often studied noise as an occasion for sensemaking and identity work. For example, I have looked at how individuals and groups make sense of themselves through the experience of breakdowns (Patriotta, ; Patriotta and Lanzara, ), miscommunications (Patriotta and Spedale, ), errors (Catino and Patriotta, ), surprises (Patriotta and Gruber, ), and negative evaluations (Curchod et al., ; Curchod et al., forthcoming; Patriotta and Brown, ) in a variety of organizational settings. I have found that these manifestations of noise often speak to larger phenomena and signal what people take for granted in their ordinary practices and routines (Patriotta, : ). Identity scholars have indirectly considered the notion of noise as a relevant aspect of identity processes. For example, Petriglieri () has elucidated how identity threats may undermine the value, meanings, or enactment of a particular identity. From this perspective, identity threats associated with role transitions, denied promotions, end of career decisions, and other forms of workplace disruptions, provide a trigger for identity work (Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ; Pratt et al., ; Vough and Caza, ; Vough et al., ). The latter is conceived as the range of activities individuals engage in for ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising’ their self-meanings in the context of their occupations and organizations (Alvesson and Willmott, : ; Caza, Vough, and Puranik, : ). While these studies have considerably advanced our understanding of identity dynamics in the context of organizations and occupations, their focus has largely been on local processes of identity construction, disruption, and repair. Less attention has been paid to how these identity dynamics are inserted in broader processes of worldmaking (Goodman, ). This is an important omission, because, as Berger and Luckmann (: ) have pointed out, identity ‘remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’ (cited in Brown and Coupland, : ). In this chapter, I argue that noise illuminates the ways in which individuals organize their everyday experiences and understand themselves in the context of worlds they
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inhabit. In the next section, I present a phenomenological view of identity, which assumes that people create their own subjective and intersubjective meanings as they interact with the world around them. In particular, I focus on how noise intervenes in the connection between identity construction and pre-interpreted worlds. In the following two sections, I provide two illustrations of the interplay between noise and identity by presenting, first, a fictional tale of noise and then a confessional one. I conclude with some remarks on how noise can inform scholarly investigations on identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. Identities form and evolve through the experience of encountering the world on a day-today basis. Understanding individual identities, therefore, requires getting inside the worlds within which those identities are enacted. A phenomenology of identity takes as its foremost task the study of what Schutz (), following Husserl, called the ‘lifeworld’— the taken for granted stream of everyday routines, interaction, and events through which individuals organize their experience. The phenomenological tradition has conceived the lifeworld as the cognitive horizon within which individuals seek to realize their projected ends (Buxter, ). Philosophers and sociologists have variously characterized this cognitive horizon. Heidegger founds his phenomenology on the experience of ‘being in the world’, meaning that existential identities can only be understood in the context of the world we inhabit and experience on an everyday basis. For Habermas, the lifeworld is the social background to communicative action, ‘a culturally transmitted and a linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’ (Habermas, , : ). Goffman (: ), developing a situational perspective, uses the term ‘habitable universe’ to refer to the ‘seemingly unlimited number of different situations and acts through which [individuals] realize their nature and destinies’. In the process of organizing everyday experience, individuals subject the phenomenological world to the test of practice. William James, linking truth to the nature of experiencing, argued that ‘Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they “hang together”, or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice’ (James, : –). As a pragmatist, he was interested in the ‘working world’, that is, the world that we take as real. In turn, this working world can be phenomenologically described as: . . . a buzzing, pulsating, formless mass of signals, out of which people try to make sense, into which they attempt to introduce order, and from which they construct against a background that remains undifferentiated. (James, , cited in Czarniawska, : )
James’ quote reminds us that the world we encounter is noisy and that it is in the context of noise that individuals make sense and figure out who they are, which poses a significant cognitive challenge. On the other hand, identity construction relies on pre-existing classification systems that pre-interpret the world through ready-made categories so that we can
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perceive the mass of formless signals as an orderly and coherent world. For example, institutions are pre-interpretation mechanisms, designed to harness noise and keep it in the background. As Douglas pointed out: All the classifications that we have for thinking are provided ready-made, along with our social life . . . How can we possibly think of ourselves in society except by using the classifications established in our institutions? (Douglas, : )
Pre-interpretation sheds light on the nature of individual experiencing and, thereby, resonates with the characteristics of the phenomenological worlds identified above (Patriotta, : ). However, the concept highlights three important aspects of identity and meaning making processes. First, pre-interpreted worlds are pre-given and holistically structured: because of pre-interpretation, the world we inhabit presents itself to us as a ‘self-evident and compelling facticity’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ), a largely undifferentiated background in which we ‘see’ without ‘noticing’ (Garfinkel, ). Second, pre-interpretation is a sensegiving mechanism, which partially relieves individuals from the burden of needing to think (Gehlen, ). More specifically, pre-interpreted worlds provide the discursive resources through which individuals make sense of themselves. As a result, self-identity unfolds as a reflexively organized narrative—an ongoing soliloquy developed from participation in various experiences, which produces a sense of ontological security (Giddens, ). Third, preinterpretation organizes individual experiences into familiar and manageable categories so that the everyday world becomes understandable and, therefore, habitable. Pre-interpretation partially removes unknowns, uncertainties, and personal insecurities, thus making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar. Pre-interpreted worlds, being socially constructed, are inherently vulnerable and susceptible to the challenges of noise. In fact, they can be thought of as a more or less stable backgrounds that we can more or less take for granted and against which we can exercise everyday practices, construct routines, and, ultimately, function efficiently. The emphasis on more or less indicates that the stability of a pre-interpreted background is subject to disruption, it holds ‘until further notice’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ). It is, therefore, important to distinguish between two primary modes of encountering the world and to consider how different encounters may affect an individual’s sense of self (see also Heidegger, ). As Alvesson and Wilmott (: ) have pointed out, in comparatively stable or routinized life situations, the link between individuals’ identities and pre-interpreted worlds is invisible and largely taken for granted. Institutions and organizations project hegemonic discourses that are generally accepted and provide reliable sources of identification. Situations are experienced as largely familiar, the narrative of self-identity runs fairly smoothly, and identity is reproduced on an ongoing basis. Identity work largely occurs in the background to address minor disruptions in the smooth flow of everyday activities (ibid.). The link between the self and the world becomes particularly exposed during instances that breach the familiarity of pre-interpretation. According to Goffman (: ), when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ In routine situations the question is asked implicitly and individuals proceed to get on with their daily lives. However, ‘in times of confusion and doubt’ individuals are forced to engage with the details of the situation in an explicit manner. From an identity perspective, noise marks the transition from business as usual to situations that potentially challenge our way of making sense of the world. Noise emerges, for example, in the form of
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disruptive events, unsettling encounters, traumatic experiences and surprises, as well as more constant strains (Alvesson and Wilmott, : ). When this occurs, individuals may experience feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety that call into question their own sense of biographical continuity (Giddens, ). Noise undermines the intelligibility of everything else we thought was going on around us, thus generating a diffuse sense of disorientation and disorder. More specifically, noise may interrupt the smooth experience of living in the present and potentially break the temporal unity of the self. The emergence of a current problem forces the individual to disconnect from the ongoing flow of action and engage in retrospection. Thus, borrowing from Mead’s terminology, the totality of the acting self (the ‘I’) is temporarily separated from the situational self (the ‘me’) (Mead, []). These experiences may challenge the smooth functioning of self-identity narratives and trigger identity work (Snow and Anderson, ; Watson, ). Identity work aims to reassess the world we inhabit while generating new reflexive understandings of ourselves. Based on the above discussion, I propose a model, depicted in Figure ., of how noise affects the interaction between identities and the worlds in which those identities are enacted. Noise calls into question the ordinary background—or pre-interpreted world—that individuals take for granted in their everyday practices and routines. An increased level of noise is likely to pose identity threats. When people feel their selves have been violated, they will invoke the ‘self ’ in their description of what happened (Bruner, ). In other words, noise triggers narrations of the self, with the aim to neutralize, modify, adapt, deflect, defend against, mitigate, or even capitalize on the threatening situation and achieve
PRE-INTERPRETED WORLD sensegiving
SOCIAL ORDER
sensemaking SELF
NOISE
IDENTITY THREAT
‘I’
IDENTITY WORK
REPAIR
‘Me’
. Pre-interpretation, noise and identity processes
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repair (Brown and Coupland, ). Repair is a form of identity work. At the micro level, it requires reconciling the split between the holistic ‘I’ and the situational ‘me’. At the macro level, it entails connecting identities to the broader worlds from which they acquire meaning, and rethinking that connection in order to re-establish a coherent sense of self. In what follows, I present two tales of noise that illustrate the framework presented in this section.
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.................................................................................................................................. The Curtain, by Milan Kundera (), is an essay in seven parts on the art of the novel. The essay outlines Kundera’s views on the evolution and role of the novel in Western civilization, and analyses how great novels reveal previously unrecognized aspects of our existence. In a particularly salient passage of the essay, Kundera recalls a long-forgotten novel by his fellow-countryman Jaromir John entitled The Internal-Combustion Monster ().1 The novel tells a story that takes place in Prague in around , during the early years of the Czechoslovak Republic. Kundera summarizes the plot of the novel as follows: A Mr. Engelbert, a forestry official in the old regime of the Hapsburg monarchy, moves to Prague to live out his retirement years; but coming up with the aggressive modernity of the young state, he has one disappointment after another. A highly familiar situation. One aspect, though, is brand new: for Mr. Engelbert the horror of this modern world, the curse, is not the power of money or the arrogance of the arrivistes, it is the noise; and not the age-old noise of a thunderstorm or a hammer, but the new noise of engines, especially of automobiles and motor-cycles, the explosive “internal-combustion monsters”. Poor Mr. Engelbert: first he settles in a house in a residential neighborhood; there cars are his first introduction to the evil that will turn his life into an unending flight. He moves to another neighborhood, pleased to see that cars are forbidden entry to his street. Unaware that the prohibition is only temporary, he is exasperated at night when he hears the “internalcombustion monsters” roaring again beneath his window. From then on he never goes to bed without cotton in his ears, realizing that “sleeping is the most basic human desire and death caused by the impossibility of sleep must be the worst death there is.” He goes on to seek silence in country inns (in vain), in provincial cities in the houses of onetime colleagues (in vain), and ends up spending his nights in trains, which, with their gentle archaic noise, provide him with a slumber that is relatively peaceful in his life as a beleaguered man. (Kundera, : –)
The story of The Internal-Combustion Monster depicts a relationship between an individual (the forestry official), a pre-interpreted world (the city), and the eruption of noise (see Patriotta, : –). What does noise tell us about the identity of Mr Engelbert, the world he identifies with and the identity work he does in response to a breach of everyday expectations? The story can be analysed according to the model portrayed in Figure .. () Mr Engelbert lives in the countryside surrounded by the familiar noise of hammers and thunderstorms. This is noise he has made a connection with, internalized, and taken
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for granted over the years. () When he moves to the city, he encounters a new type of noise: that made by traffic and automobiles. The experience of an ‘unknown’ type of noise produces a threat to identity, a temporal disconnection between the holistic ‘I’ anchored to the rural world and the situational ‘me’ facing the encounter with the city. As a result of noise, Mr Engelbert’s sense of biographical continuity is interrupted; his ontological security is shaken. () Mr Engelbert realizes the importance of sleep and moves across the city, seeking shelter from noise. In the process, he connects the adversities of the present to basic human desires and ruminations about death. () Mr Engelbert ends up sleeping in trains and coping with a type of noise he is familiar with. Repair is accomplished by compromise and by restoring some continuity with the past. We should notice that noise is present throughout each stage of the identity cycle, albeit in different forms: it changes across contexts, it shifts between background and foreground, it becomes more or less familiar. This suggests that identity is a matter of perspective from which a particular type of noise is experienced. The story of The Internal-Combustion Monster exposes identity work as the phenomenological process of encountering the world on a day-to-day basis. It portrays Mr Engelbert’s transition from one pre-interpreted world (the countryside), with its familiar noise of hammers and thunderstorms, to another (the city), characterized by the noise of traffic and automobiles. This transition is experienced as problematic. To Mr Engelbert, city noise is quite distant from the ‘natural’ and reassuring sounds of the world he had left; the noisy world of modernity seems formless, unpleasant, uncomfortable, confusing, conflicting, and chaotic. Unable to recognize familiar sounds, Mr Engelbert loses the capacity to sort out stimuli in order to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. The appearance of sounds that are unfamiliar and unexpected challenges pre-interpretation and triggers identity work aimed at repairing an unrecognized situation. By temporarily upsetting the order of things that Mr Engelbert would normally take for granted, noise reveals—and at the same time questions—the connection between the everyday life of a forestry official and the city, between an individual and a pre-interpreted world. Noise exposes Mr Engelbert’s understanding of himself within the world he inhabits. To cope with existential anxiety and re-establish a sense of order and continuity, Mr Engelbert has to engage in a quest for meaning—epitomized by the frantic wandering in search of silence. Identity and meaning are finally restored through connecting the current situation with a familiar experience of the past (the noise of trains). The compromise solution achieved by the forestry official highlights the precarious outcomes of identity work and the ongoing exposure of the self to identity threats. The method of inquiry adopted by John—which literally involved following noise in the field—may constitute the most fascinating feature of this story. It has two aspects. First, the novelist has chosen to focus on an individual’s experience of an incipient phenomenon. At the time when the events narrated in this story were taking place, the number of automobiles and motorcycles circulating in Prague was, we may surmise, very small. Paradoxically, this is precisely what made the phenomenon of noise so conspicuous. Within a context where environmental sonority was still limited, the irruption of noise turned out to be a sort of ‘cosmology episode’ for Mr Engelbert, an event that abruptly displaced him from his established habits of thinking and acting, and seriously impaired his sensemaking (Lanzara and Patriotta, ; Weick, ). Today, we live in a world of noise and traffic, one in which noise has receded into the background and is no longer noticeable. Consider the modern city as a pre-interpreted
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world: as I walk along its streets, I am largely unaware of the plethora of signals it is sending out: I do not notice the multiple elements that go to make up a city—the buildings, the streets, the traffic, the crowds of pedestrians, the signs, the infrastructures. Instead, I experience the city as a cohesive unit. I see the forest, but I do not notice the trees, so to speak. This is because pre-interpretation is a source of ontological blindness: it conceals meanings that we take for granted within an undifferentiated background. As a preinterpreted world, the city does a great deal of ordering on our behalf, and provides a relatively stable background for thinking and acting. From this perspective, pre-interpreted worlds overcome bounded rationality by encoding and institutionalizing meanings that help individuals make sense of themselves in relation to the world they inhabit. Second, the novelist has chosen to focus on a small event with wide consequences. In Prague, Mr Engelbert is confronted with a world that is profoundly different from the one he has left. National independence, democracy, capitalism, and technological innovation have turned Prague into a symbol of the modern city. Empirically, however, the feature that strikes him most is not the novelty of the changed political climate, but the increased level of noise. An apparently insignificant change in the soundscape—a reversal in the mundane categories of silence and noise—generates a sudden loss of sense and leads to the dissolution of a hitherto stable identity. Noise therefore becomes a proxy for the discomforts of living in the city in the face of incipient modernity, a tangible manifestation of a grand reality that is cognitively experienced in a more immediate and direct manner.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a referendum on June , . per cent of the participating UK electorate voted to leave the European Union. The referendum’s result will end the arrangement whereby European citizens could relocate to the UK and enjoy residency rights. It forces non-British people to certify their legal status or accept their foreignness. Brexit can be seen as an instance of institutional breakdown, a controversy around sovereignty and national identity. It introduces a new classification system that challenges the categories of borders, customs, trade, residency, and citizenship, among other things. This creates legal uncertainty, which requires the negotiation of new legislation and the creation of new forms of governance. Zooming in on my personal experience of this event, Brexit appears as a conspicuous manifestation of noise erupting into everyday life and challenging the world that I would normally take for granted. From an identity perspective, and as an Italian living in the UK, some key questions arise: How to continue functioning in a world that has suddenly become dysfunctional? How can I make the transition from one world I could identify with to another world, which is less familiar and in which I have to find new forms of identification? The confessional tale of Brexit exposes a problematic connection between an individual’s identity and the political institutions in which this identity is inscribed. As for the previous tale, identity processes can be analysed using Figure .. () The starting point is the established social and cognitive order associated with EU membership. As a European citizen living and working in a member state, I can enjoy free movement and residency rights. My national identity is not a matter of concern. My self is
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in harmony with the pre-interpreted world in which my everyday life unfolds. () Just like the noise breaking into the existence of Mr Engelbert, Brexit can be considered a cosmology episode, which produces a sudden loss of sense and identity (Weick, ). Brexit makes one (me) feel unwanted, it formalizes and accentuates the distinction between home and foreign citizens. It forces one to choose between being a permanent resident and being a permanent foreigner. My everyday world becomes hostile; my sense of belonging is called into question; my sense of foreignness is heightened. Distinctions emerge: politically, as factions of ‘remainers’ and ‘leavers’; culturally, as oppositions between ‘us’ and ‘them’; materially in the form of geographical borders. What was previously tacit and blended becomes visible and differentiated. () The noise associated with Brexit draws attention to the question ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ and it requires consciously attending to the current situation. Cognitively, noise exposes March’s distinction between the logics of consequences and appropriateness (March and Olsen, ; March and Weil, ). It generates fundamental identity questions: What kind of person am I? What kind of situation is this? What would a person such as I do in a situation such as this? (March, ; Patriotta, ) Having spent half of my life working outside my home country, the European Union (EU) provided a main source of identification during my professional and existential journey through Italy, France, the UK, Holland, and then the UK again. By uniting the countries I lived in, it offered a way of connecting the dots. Probably because of the EU, I never really developed a hybrid national identity; there was no need. Like noise for Mr Engelbert, Brexit interrupts my sense of biographical continuity, it creates a split between identities (the ‘I’ and the ‘me’), generating a feeling of being stuck in the middle. Connecting the dots backward, I feel that my Italian identity had been partly lost. Connecting the dots forward, I cannot see myself living in the UK for much longer. We had family discussions about what to do and whether to relocate back to Italy, reflected on professional implications and how our job status would change, we even became more mindful of our neighbours, most of whom had probably voted for Brexit. () Repair is accomplished through compromise and by applying for settled status in the UK. In my application, I had to produce a number of official documents: passports, tax declarations, pay slips, utility bills, bank statements, my marriage certificate, my daughter’s birth certificate. The bureaucratic process made me aware of the plethora of institutions on which my identity as a UK resident is dependent. It also made me aware that institutions anchor identities and simultaneously expose their vulnerability. The two tales analysed above portray instances of existential noise that challenges the pre-interpreted world that was previously latent and taken for granted. Each tale foregrounds a distinctive type of modernity, which calls into question existing ways of enacting identity (Giddens, ). The man of noise of the first tale is confronted with an incipient type of modernity, epitomized by the advent of the institutions of capitalism and phenomenologically experienced in the form of chaotic traffic noise. The tale of Brexit exposes the challenges of ‘liquid modernity’, that is, a ‘condition of the world in which social forms and institutions can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long’ (Bauman, : ; cf. Ahuja, Nikolova, and Clegg, Chapter this volume). Both tales convey the dramatic impact of noise on one’s sense of self, which stems from the sudden disappearance of the pre-interpreting mechanisms that once provided the stable foundations for making sense of one’s ‘being in the world’. In combination, they illustrate a path of changing identities at different stages in the evolution of contemporary society. The man of noise
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loses the sense of security offered by life in the countryside and struggles to develop a coherent identity in the noisy world of cities: because of the absence of familiar categories, the city cannot serve as a frame of reference for Mr Engelbert’s actions and long-term life plans. My experience of Brexit is similar. As a modern migrant, living in a quasi-nomadic condition, I can withstand multiple but fleeting social experiences. However, even in liquid times, individuals attempt to grasp anything that provides the foundation for the construction and maintenance their identity. As a result, my own sense of identity slips as soon as the anchoring to a solid institution like the EU melts away (Bauman, ). Finally, it is important to notice that the same analysis developed in relation to the impact of Brexit on the identity of European citizens could be applied to the self-identity of British citizens. Brexit is an instance of divorce and it displays dynamics that are common to any instance of separation. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage with the identity work of British citizens in response to Brexit. However, since the result of the referendum the noise around Brexit has not disappeared. Rather it has been a permanent feature of media headlines, it has fuelled daily debates on what the future will look like, and it has revealed profound divisions within British society. Beyond the simplified outcome provided by the referendum and the tautological mantra that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, the decision to leave Europe has generated an ongoing quest for national identity meaning. Recounting the story on a daily basis, on a variety of different media, is, arguably, a spectacular form of collective identity work.
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.................................................................................................................................. Silence and noise are ontological categories, which take hold of an individual both cognitively and emotionally (Le Breton, ). Noise is eventful: it is always associated with a source and it has boundaries (the before-during-after noise). From this perspective, events are intrusions of noise into everyday life, instances that interrupt the smooth flow of everyday action. Noise signals a tangible presence—it places the self in the presence of others or others in the presence of the self—and, therefore, invites reflection and engagement. Silence, on the other hand, is associated with pre-interpretation. It is the undifferentiated background, which we are familiar with and take for granted. Silence is limitless, faultless, uninterrupted, devoid of history; it evokes absence. Pre-interpreted worlds make our existence inhabitable and comprehensible, until something goes wrong. Noise reminds us that the familiar world we inhabit is nothing more than a necessary, but very fragile convention. Identities are sensitive to what is going on; they are vulnerable to things that go wrong. Noise draws attention to our sense of what is going on and how it affects our sense of self. Transitions from silence to noise are important occasions for sensemaking and identity work. When noise erupts, pre-interpreted worlds come to the fore, triggering sensemaking, and the self becomes actively present in order to take care of the situation at hand. However, addressing the situation at hand might require questioning one’s connection with a pre-interpreted world and rethinking or reworking that connection. The tales of noise described above suggest a research process for studying identity processes (see Patriotta, : –).
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Following noise in the field. When studying identity processes, we normally look for patterns and seek to detect regularities in actions and behaviour. Placing an emphasis on noise prompts researchers to direct their attention towards strange facts, and to listen to variations in the levels of everyday noise. Noise places individuals in a situation in which they are disoriented, out of place, far from home. For the observer, this breach of familiarity provides a productive opportunity to get to know what is normally unknown, unspeakable, and taken for granted: what is noise to the actor is a message to the observer. Following noise in the field requires listening to situations growing noisier or quieter, and observing how individuals engage with the identity threats potentially ensuing from unsettling events. Understanding what noise stands for. Noise elucidates the phenomenological tenet ‘finding the remarkable in the mundane’ (Silverman, : ). According to Serres (), noise is the ‘third element of human existence’: it connects the knower to the known, individuals to pre-interpreted worlds, small events to grand realities. This connection is based on interference: noise is a form of resistance to the obvious, a distortion of meanings that we normally take for granted. As such, it requires decipherment, it invites reflection, and it may trigger identity work. For example, The Internal-Combustion Monster and the tale of Brexit illustrate how noise can induce figure/ground reversals that provide access to narratives of self-identity and prompt individuals to reflect on the worlds they inhabit: cities, organizations, institutions, and societies. A focus on the mundane experience of noise helps scholars understand identity processes as inscribed in broader social structures, routines, technologies, norms, and conventions. Theorizing noise. The world that we encounter as individuals and that we observe as scholars is riddled with tensions between order and disorder, routine and breakdowns, silence and noise that form the baseline of everyday action and which constitute the context for sensemaking. Noise provides scholars with a lens for connecting identities to facts and things in the world. Theorizing noise is about connecting the experience of events that are strange and irregular to orderly frameworks, codifying the complexity of ‘the buzzing, pulsating, and formless mass of signals’ that is the social world.
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.................................................................................................................................. Theoretically, this study invites identity scholars to pay greater attention to the ways in which identity is inserted in processes of (pre-)interpretation and reality construction. Noise helps illuminate these processes by exposing the precarious connection between individuals and the worlds they inhabit. Pre-interpreted worlds provide the backdrops against which individuals construct their identities. By organizing a mass of formless signals into a coherent order they help individuals cope with their existential anxiety and confer a sense of ontological security. At the same time, identity construction is a form of resistance against the pull of pre-interpretation. That is to say, pre-interpreted worlds allow us to affirm who we are as well as define who we are not. From this perspective, identity work is a position-taking process in which individuals continuously adjust between identification with an organized world and opposition to it. This tension is beautifully captured by Erving Goffman:
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Without something to belong to, we have no stable self . . . Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks. (Goffman, : –)
Identity emerges in the cracks of pre-interpreted worlds. Studying noise is about focusing on the cracks to understand the often elusive link between identity and the worlds we inhabit.
A I would like to thank editor Andrew Brown for his valuable feedback on a preiovus version of this chapter. Parts of the materials contained in this chapter are based on ideas adapted from the author’s following article: Patriotta, G. (). Cities of noise: Sensemaking, sensemakers and organized worlds. Academy of Management Review, , , pp. –.
N . The novel was originally published in Czech under the title Moudrý Engelbert. An English translation of the novel is not available and I am relying here on Kundera’s translation of the novel’s title.
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Garfinkel, H. (). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gehlen, A. (). Der Mensch: seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Wiesbaden: Academische Verlagsgesellschaft (Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press, ). Giddens, A. (). Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London: Harper & Row. Goodman, N. (). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Habermas, J. (). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. . Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functional Reason. Boston: Beacon Press. Heidegger, M. (). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. London: SCM Press (translated from the German, Sein und Zeit, ). Ibarra, H. (). ‘Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Ibarra, H. and Barbulescu, R. (). ‘Identity as Narrative: Prevalence, Effectiveness, and Consequences of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transitions’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. James, W. (). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover (original work published ). James, W. (). ‘Pragmatic Theory of Truth’. In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. . New York: Macmillan, pp. –. John, J. (). Moudrý Engelbert. Praha: Melantrich (original work published ). Kundera, M. (). The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: HarperCollins (translated from the French, Le rideau: an essai en sept parties. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, ). Lanzara, G. F. and Patriotta, G. (). ‘Technology and the Courtroom: An Inquiry into Knowledge Making in Organizations’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Le Breton, D. (). Du silence. Paris: Éditions Métailié. March, J. G. (). A Primer on DecisionMaking. New York, NY: Free Press. March, J. G., and Olsen, J. (). ‘The Logic of Appropriateness’. In M. Moran, M. Rein, and R. E. Goodin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. March, J. G., and Weil, T. (). On Leadership. Oxford: Blackwell. Mead, G. H. (). Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition, ed. C. W. Morris. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (originally work published ). Patriotta, G. (). ‘Sensemaking on the Shopfloor: Narratives of Knowledge in Organizations’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Patriotta, G. (). ‘Cities of Noise: Sensemaking, Sensemakers and Organized Worlds’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Patriotta, G. (). ‘Imagination, self-knowledge, and poise: Jim March’s lessons for leadership’. Journal of Management Studies. In press. Patriotta, G. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Sensemaking, Metaphors and Performance Evaluation’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, (), –. Patriotta, G. and Gruber, D. (). ‘Newsmaking and Sensemaking: Navigating Temporal Transitions between Planned and Unexpected Events’. Organization Science, (), –. Patriotta, G. and Lanzara, G. F. (). ‘Identity, Institutions and New Work Roles: The Case of a Green Field Automotive Factory’. American Behavioral Scientist, (), –. Patriotta, G. and Spedale, S. (). ‘Making Sense through Face: Identity and Social Interaction in a Consultancy Task Force’. Organization Studies, (), –. Petriglieri, J. L. (). ‘Under Threat: Responses to and the Consequences of Threats to Individuals’ Identities’. Academy of Management Review, (), –.
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Pratt, M. G., Rockmann, K., and Kaufmann, J. (). ‘Constructing Professional Identity: The Role of Work and Identity Learning Cycles in the Customization of Identity among Medical Residents’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Schutz, A. (). Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Serres, M. (). ‘Exact and Human’, trans. W. Woodhull and J. Mowitt. SubStance, , – (translation of ‘Exacte et humaine’. Hermès V: Le passage du nord-ouest (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ), pp. –). Silverman, D. (). A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Snow, D. A. and Anderson, L. (). ‘Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities’. American Journal of Sociology, , –. Vough, H. C., Bataille, C. D., Noh, S. C., and Lee, M. D. (). ‘Going Off Script: How Managers Make Sense of the Ending of their Careers’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Vough, H. C. and Caza, B. B. (). ‘Where Do I Go from Here? Sensemaking and the Construction of Growth-Based Stories in the Wake of Denied Promotions’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, (), –. Weick, K. E. (). ‘The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –.
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Abstract Concern with the limitations of discourse-focused theories to understand and explain environmental change, the refugee crisis, the lived effects of increasing inequalities and other undoubtedly material experiences have led to a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, arts and humanities. This chapter explores the implications of this turn for identities theories in management and organization studies. Identities theorists have drawn on materialities as a discursive resource rather than as agentive actors and this chapter illuminates the value of understanding ‘non-sentient’ actors as active agents in the construction of identities. It focuses on the influential work of the theorist Karen Barad, outlining her theoretical approach and exploring how it has been taken up in management and organization studies. The chapter explores some of the mistakes that can easily be made in applying her ideas, but also the value of grasping her work’s complexities. It shows how the approach could expand upon the findings of two studies, one well-established and one recent, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of new materialism for understanding organizations in the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of the current epoch.
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.................................................................................................................................. T have been several attempts to organize the huge number of publications on identity in management and organization studies (MOS) into categories (e.g. Alvesson et al., ; Kenny et al., ). The ‘category’ I am concerned with here is that (or those) which encompass(es) poststructuralist and interpretivist approaches, where concentration has been largely upon how identities arise or are constituted within and through discourses. The predominant focus upon (broadly defined) discourse(s) arises from ‘the discursive turn’ when postmodernism and poststructuralism gained intellectual legitimacy (Cooper and Burrell, ) and other critical perspectives, Marxist materialism in particular, slipped into the intellectual shadows (Ashcraft et al., ; Phillips and Oswick, ). The pendulum is
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swinging again, and there is now something of a materialist ‘turn’ within the social and managerial sciences (Ashcraft et al., ; Phillips and Oswick, ). It is known by a variety of labels, but the term I will use, for reasons explained below, is ‘new materialities’. The materialist ‘turn’ is inspired by a growing realization that the one binary poststructuralism did not deconstruct was that of the ‘material/discursive’ (Alaimo and Hekman, ). Rather, poststructural theories did away with the binary, arguing that the material can be accessed only through the discursive so a separate and distinct entity, the material, is impossible. Materialities are not so easily disposed of, and indeed ignoring them may be unethical, as St. Pierre et al. () point out: the torture at Guantanamo Bay, refugees fleeing from wars, global warming, etc., are material practices. In our own field of MOS the rise of the ‘new precariat’ alongside ever-increasing managerialism and assaults on dearlywon employment rights may be understood through language but their effects are felt viscerally. That is, we may need discourse to understand and articulate suffering, but shattered bodies, homes, careers, and environments cannot be reduced to the non-material. Further, there are convincing philosophical arguments against excluding materialities from our thinking. The starting point for understanding new materialist theories is, therefore, with their attempts to rethink ontology. This does not involve throwing out the discursive baby and retaining its material bathwater: the explanatory power of both is needed but neither should be privileged (Alaimo and Hekman, ). There is no resurrection of Marxist materialism, just the opposite, with the denominator ‘new’ in ‘new materialism’ deliberately chosen to distinguish contemporary accounts of materialities from Marxist theory. The rethinking of ontology begins with the understanding that material ‘objects’ are (i) not passive participants in social worlds but (ii) are immanent and lively. New materialist theorists, therefore, regard both language and matter as agentive, living energies (Colebrook, ). Explorations of materialities in organization studies are increasing in number and perhaps ambition but there are as yet very few studies that explicitly explore materialities in relation to workplace/organizational identities or identity work, as evidenced by the lack of attention paid to them in recent reviews of the identities in organizations literature (Brown, ; Caza et al., ). The time is ripe to make good this gap. My tasks in this chapter are to convince readers of the explanatory fruitfulness of what I will call ‘materialidentities’ and to provide some ideas about how to develop the field. I will begin by outlining some of the philosophical underpinnings to some new materialist theories. My main focus is on the influential work of Karen Barad, but I will also briefly discuss the work of Arthur Schopenhauer to illuminate the long philosophical heritage within which new materialities may be located. The emphasis on philosophy is necessary both in understanding the theoretical underpinnings of material-identities, and to ensure that materialidentities are not assumed to just add and stir ‘things’ into previous approaches. It is important to note that studies exploring the agency of materials are located in a variety of perspectives, many of which do not draw on the approach I am discussing here. For example, Cnossen and Bencherki (), writing within the tradition of the communicative constitution of organization, illuminate how organizations endure in time because of formations of artefacts into assemblages. These artefacts include space, which, they argue, is an active and important actor in the endurance of emerging organizations. Kivinen and Hunter () follow a line of thought through Celia Lury’s work to explore the
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development of gendered media brands through assemblages in which artefacts, including brands, are agentive. Such approaches are separate and distinct from the Barad-informed perspective I discuss here. I am not aiming to refute critics who argue that it is absurd to assume, firstly, that objects are not discursive constructs and, secondly, that they have agency. My objective is to suggest the roots of such critiques lie in a positivist, empiricist tradition rather than the idealist ontology of poststructural thought. I will then briefly outline new materialism’s influence in management and organization studies. This is followed by a discussion of one of the very few papers that explicitly explore materialities and identities in MOS, whose attempt at using a Baradian analysis proves particularly informative, albeit not in the way the authors may have intended. I conclude by illustrating how a material-identities approach may offer greater analytical depth to identities perspectives.
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.................................................................................................................................. New materialist perspectives cover a broad range of theories, including actor-network, non-representational and assemblage theories (Fox and Alldred, ), socio-technical ensembles, Pickering’s mangle of practice, Knorr Cetina’s object-centred sociality, material sociology, and others (Orlikowski, ). My focus here will be largely upon feminist new materialism because of the quality of the debates amongst those theorists who are rejecting ‘all-is-discourse’ perspectives. For example, Alaimo and Hekman () write that the linguistic turn proved enormously productive in understanding women’s position but at the same time limited what could be said and known, particularly in relation to bodies. Now, at a time of major technological and other changes, ‘we need ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world—ways that account for myriad “intraactions” (in Karen Barad’s terms) between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal, and technological’ (Alaimo and Hekman, : ). This requires a major shift in perception towards the understanding of matter as something that is not mute and inert, but has agency. To this end, the long-held belief (in modernist cultures) that there is a definitive break between sentient and non-sentient actors is challenged, as is any distinction between the cultural (traditionally marked as male) and the natural (the subservient female other of culture). The notion that sharp boundaries divide the sentient subject from the non-sentient object collapses as the focus becomes one of exploring the ‘emergent interplay’ (Tuana, : ) through which ‘realities’ emerge and identities are constituted. The argument fits well with poststructuralist theories of identities that favour process and situatedness in the moment rather than continuity and transcendence. New materialist theories understand that language, matter, technologies, and other elements intra-act in the formation of subjects or ‘reality’ (Hekman, ). They entail a shift in perspective from working with human(ist) ideas about matter to working with material organisms and things themselves. Rather than understanding commodities, machines, and the forces of production as solely human-made phenomena, as Marxist
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materialism had done, new materialism seeks to understand how the human emerges through intra-actions with commodities, machines, forces of production, and so on, as historian LeCain () writes. Put bluntly, ‘the things we interact with are an inescapable part of who we are’ (LeCain, : ). The theoretical underpinnings for this philosophy owe much to the influence of Karen Barad’s theory of performativity. She combines quantum mechanics with feminist and poststructuralist theory. Her inspiration is the physicist Neils Bohr, who observed that measuring devices are not merely objects whose purpose is the measuring of something else, but agents that actively constitute that which they measure. Fundamental to new materialities thought, this requires close scrutiny. ‘Experimental apparatus’ (in which are included ways of thinking and seeing) face an indeterminate mess of potentiality (or ‘agentially intra-acting components’ in Barad’s (: ) terms). The ‘apparatus’ decides what, from that swirl of possibilities, shall be admitted into ‘reality’ and what excluded. It draws a sharp dividing line (an ‘agential cut’) that eliminates numerous possibilities and elevates (what appears to be) a singular object to the status of ‘the real’. Thus representations of what we call ‘objects’ are privileged, and numerous other potentialities are unrepresented and erased from thought. In summary, what are assumed to be ‘individual entities with separately determinate properties’ (Barad, : ) are, rather, condensations or traces of multiple practices that measuring devices, including the human ‘observer’, actively produce. As Barad (: ) writes, the Cartesian distinction between ‘object’ and ‘agencies of observation’ breaks down. Important here is the understanding that although there may not be an independent reality, there are real, material phenomena. Such phenomena are Barad’s primary ontological unit. Phenomena ‘do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting agencies’ (Barad, : ). They are ‘condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement’ (Barad, : ). This challenges the Cartesian heritage in Western thought that assumes objects to be ontologically distinct from each other, already existing before meeting any other object. New materialist theories ask how ‘things’ come to be understood to be separate and distinct objects. Barad provides a methodology for exploring this question: she argues that objects become objects through ‘boundary-drawing practices – specific material (re)configurings of the world – which come to matter’ (Barad, : ). (An example might be a tree: Why is ‘a’ tree regarded as one biological object rather than, say, a multitude of phenomena, including what we call leaves, bark, roots, branches, and so on? What boundary-making practices put these all together into one ‘object’?) These phenomena are, emphatically, not singular, static entities, as a metaphysics of individualism would have it. Barad (: ) argues that phenomena should be understood as ‘entangled material agencies’ that emerge through constitutive practices. So far this is not new: Foucault’s genealogy of sex, as Barad points out (: ), exposed the category of sex as a mechanism that unifies what are otherwise discontinuous elements and functions: but she also observes that although Foucault emphasized the material nature of discourse, he was not clear about that material nature (Barad, : ). Butler (, ) did some of the crucial work of elaborating Foucault’s thesis, but her work appears similarly bedevilled, in Barad’s account, by its inability to clarify the material nature of discursive
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practices (Barad, : ). Thus, Barad argues, the necessity of developing a robust theory of how material forces, including the body, ‘actively matter to the process of materialization’ (Barad, : ). Barad’s task becomes that of developing a theory of ‘intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements’ (Barad, : ). ‘Inter-action’ implies that bodies may interact without materially affecting each other; ‘intra-action’ emphasizes that bodies can only emerge through entangling themselves within and through the numerous discourses/materialities/affects/etc. that allow them to emerge. The neologism ‘intra-actions’ thus captures the idea that entities are not ontologically separable. This opposes the metaphysics of individualism that has dominated in Western thought with an understanding of the ontological inseparability of determinate entities (Barad, : ). What is important here, in what Barad calls her theory of agential realism, is that boundaries of objects or subjects should not be presumed or taken-for-granted (the desk on which my keyboard rests should not be regarded as an entity called ‘a desk’ that has clearly demarcated boundaries); rather we should ‘investigate . . . the material-discursive boundary-making practices that produce “objects” and “subjects” ’ (Barad, : ). In Baradian terms, intra-actions within and between sub-systems and sub-systems’ sub-systems, all of which are entangled within and through each other, performatively constitute what appear to be the ‘boundaries’, ‘entities’, or ‘objects’ that I am calling ‘my desk’, ‘its contents’, and ‘myself ’. Barad argues that phenomena categorized as ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ should be read through each other diffractively so as to understand the enactment of boundaries and their constitutive exclusions (Barad, : ). By ‘diffractive’ she refers to the need to avoid putting texts and thought against each other (my interpretivism against your positivism, for example) and instead reading them through one another to engender creativity and the unexpected. She exemplifies this in her own book () in her diffractive reading of quantum mechanics and feminist philosophy. In this approach, ‘matter’ must be included as an active participant in performativity (Barad, : ): matter is ‘neither fixed nor given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things. Mattering is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences’ (Barad, : ). This is why in previous work (Ford et al., ) I and colleagues have argued that Butler takes us to the level of the iterated movements that constitute sentient actors moment-by-moment-by-moment, but Barad invites us to analyse each of those re-iterated micro-movements and especially to include the influence of non-sentient actors. Note that discourse remains important in this approach to understanding materialities: Barad suggests (: ) that a specific body’s ‘differential materialization is discursive – entailing causal practices reconfiguring boundaries and properties that matter to its very existence’. Barad’s attempt to summarize her thesis in a diagram (: ) is well worth studying. The diagram illustrates how many intra-acting genealogies are entangled in the constitution of what appears as an entity. Barad’s ideas are part of an intellectual history that rejects presumptions of the fixity of individual subject/objects. Arthur Schopenhauer (–), who himself builds on the works of Bishop Berkeley, Hume, and, notably, Immanuel Kant, argued that the ‘I’ emerges
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from an energy that he called ‘will’. Anticipating and influencing modern science and Freudian theory, he understood that this energy is everywhere, in/through/around/between all becoming-objects. It objectifies itself in physical substances and bodies, and some of those bodies then develop minds as subsidiary by-products (Magee, : ). It follows, as Magee (: , emphasis added) summarizes, that ‘Empirical reality is experience, which [is not] . . . a duality, partly mental and partly material, but . . . all of one category’. I find this ‘will’ easiest to understand as something coursing through the human subject that is experienced, unknowingly save in extremis, as a blind striving to stay alive. For Schopenhauer, that will’s coagulation into ‘I’ requires objects. ‘Without the object, [and importantly] without the representation [of that object], I am not a knowing subject but mere, blind will; in just the same way, without me as subject of knowledge, the thing known is not object, but mere will, blind impulse’ (quoted in Magee, : ). It is the impingement of objects on the senses that carves a self out of the energy that is will. That is, there can be no object without a subject but also no subject without an object. The impingement of objects on the subject is experienced as percepts, or impressions, that are then translated by the mind into concepts. In Schopenhauer’s words, ‘while the nerves of the sense-organs invest the appearing objects with colour, sound, taste, smell, temperature, and so on, the brain imparts to them extension, form, impenetrability, mobility, and so on’ (quoted in Magee, : ). That is, materialities precede language. In short, for Schopenhauer, experience of objects exists before that experience is translated into words or discourses, and so language is a secondary factor, emerging out of the material world rather than being prior to it. Schopenhauer thus provides strong philosophical foundations for new materialities theories. He undermines the distinction between materialities and discourses, turning on its head the taken-for-granted and usually unexamined assumption in modernist economies that objects have no agency. Anthropologists who have turned the lens of other cultures back on Western economies would find nothing unusual in this: communities immersed in various forms of animism would regard the Western distinction between active-subject/passive-object as highly peculiar (see the discussion in Holbraad and Pedersen, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. There is now a growing body of work within MOS influenced by Baradian-inspired new materialities theories. Orlikowski’s () essay introduced the concept of agentive objects to the discipline. Her argument that ‘there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social’ (Orlikowski : ) has been highly influential. She emphasizes that materialities should not be regarded as ‘pre-formed substances’ but as ‘performed relations’ (Orlikowski : ). There are no ontologically separate, essential subjects and objects interacting and influencing each other, she writes, but rather there is a ‘constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life’
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(Orlikowski : )—the socio-material. Her paper appeared as Barad’s book-length exposition of her theory of performativity, Meeting the Universe Halfway (), was published. Since then, new materialism’s emerging influence in MOS has been explored in two review essays (Ashcraft et al., ; Phillips and Oswick, ), and debated in ongoing but inconclusive discussions in Journal of Management Studies (Hardy and Thomas, ; Orlikowski and Scott, ; Putnam, ). Hardy and Thomas (: ) for example, reject the claim that ‘discourse studies cannot de facto address materiality’. That is true, as they evidence using Foucauldian theory, but new materialist studies, located in theories that collapse boundaries and regard materialities as agentive, do far more than ‘address’ materiality. In Orlikowski’s response () to Hardy and Thomas, Orlikowski, now writing with Scott, had Barad’s book to draw upon, and the focus in this later paper is not on sociomateriality but the material-discursive. The entanglement of discourse and materiality, in which neither is privileged and each is constituted through the other is, they argue, ontological and, further, ‘discourse cannot exist without being materialized’ because it ‘lacks an independent, self-contained existence apart from material instantiation in some form’ (Orlikowski and Scott, : ) and therefore researchers’ focus should be on ‘materializations – how discourse is materially enacted in practice’ (Orlikowski and Scott, : ). This is an important and useful observation, guiding theorists towards explorations of ‘how discourse becomes materially enacted in practice’, and taking us beyond the well-established focus on discourses. There is a steady increase in the numbers of studies by MOS researchers drawing on new materialities theories, but few explore materialities in relation to identities. Some studies of identities use the term ‘materiality/ies’ but not in a fully-theorized way. For example, Meisenbach () assumes ‘materiality’ refers to conditions of work and what is done, and treats the material as a passive backdrop. Of more relevance is Symon and Pritchard’s () exploration of smartphones’ role in identity work. They use a socio-material lens originating in Pickering’s ‘mangle of practice’. Interested in ‘the material agency of smartphones that connect humans with other humans, within a network of other entangled human and material agencies’ (Symon and Pritchard, : ), they understand that identity work involves an ‘enmeshing of material affordances, human understanding, situated practices and cultural discourses as a socio-material assemblage’ (Symon and Pritchard, : ). They conclude that ‘we are produced by our technologies as connected selves while simultaneously producing the technologies as tools of connection’ (Symon and Pritchard, : , emphasis in original), and that the mangle of practice is not determinative so varieties of identities can emerge. That is, ‘instead of responsive, employees may be produced as technologically unsophisticated or dangerous; instead of involved, as politicking or automatons; instead of in-demand, as isolated or inattentive. Thus, we argue that such identities do not reflect invariant categories of employee but are temporal and situated’ (Symon and Pritchard, : ). A material-identities perspective, rather than the socio-material lens drawn on by Symon and Pritchard, would arrive at somewhat different conclusions. Co-production, even if simultaneous, implies two ontologically separate actors, each influencing the other. It follows that, secondly, rather than different identities (responsive or dangerous, etc.) the analysis would argue that different manifestations of the identity of ‘employee’ emerge
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through the entanglement of smartphone and employee. A material-identities perspective located in new materialist theories would thus be keen to explore what makes possible such different manifestations. At the time of writing one of the very few studies in MOS that is specifically concerned with what I am calling material-identities is Hultin and Introna (). It is invidious to select one particular publication as an example of how not to do something, but a paper that has the potential to set a precedent deserves particular attention. The authors studied three sites in reception units for asylum seekers in Stockholm. The sentient actors focused on are reception officers and asylum seekers, with the non-sentient actors including furniture (desks and chairs), glass walls and windows, and, of most interest to the authors, tickets issued to claimants. They argue that the different material actors in the three sites produce diverse subject positions, and thus different ‘identity workings’. They situate their account within a Baradian framework, and use Althusser’s theory of interpellation as developed in Judith Butler’s work (see Harding et al., , for a previous use of this approach). Hultin and Introna describe ‘the case officers and asylum seekers conduct[ing] themselves very differently [across the three sites] in their mundane everyday work practices (in spite of the fact that they are essentially doing “the same work”)’ (Hultin and Introna, : ), arguing this is because ‘in each of these material-discursive sites, they become hailed differently’. There is much that is of interest in Hultin and Introna’s paper, but it is problematic from a Baradian perspective because their analysis revolves around two interacting categories, officer and asylum seeker, that remain ontologically distinct from each other. These actors, influenced by agentive non-sentient actors, may behave in different ways in the different spaces, but they remain the ‘officer’ who processes applicants and the ‘asylum seeker’ who arrives to be processed. This contradicts Barad’s () emphasis on distinguishing between mixtures and entanglements. A mixture is a description that fits the world as conventionally conceptualized, in which a composite of elements with separately determinable values or attributes relate to each other. An entanglement refutes the Western metaphysical notion of categories, rejecting any concept of distinct and separable entities; rather, there are differentiated states of a single entity. Analyses of intraacting actors should explore how boundaries, here ‘officer’ and ‘applicant’, and indeed ‘tickets’, ‘furniture’, and ‘dress’ are drawn and how these boundaries come to be regarded as natural and unquestionable. Indeed Hultin and Introna’s research methodology does that very work of which Barad is critical, in that they draw sharp boundaries between ‘officers’— they interview them and report their speech in the paper—and ‘applicants’ who are deemed to be unavailable for interview because of research ethics. This is itself a positioning device that determines who can and cannot speak and be heard, and who has and does not have power. If we follow Davis’ (: ) explanation of Barad when she writes that ‘Difference is not a joining of two separate categories, but instead implies a differentiation within one system, where the differentiated parts are entangled such that they cannot be distinctly and separately identified’, then a Baradian analysis would understand asylum seekers and officers not as different from each other (two separate but inter-acting systems), but as a single system in which actors, including systems of global politics and the machinations of the military-industrial complex, are entangled each within all others, forming not a passive base but intra-acting, agentive actors.
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Similarly, materials that Hultin and Introna argue are agentive cannot be regarded as agentive actors without much further analysis. For example, Hultin and Introna argue that numbered tickets that asylum seekers take on arrival at the centres are agentive in that they organize what then happens. If we add ‘ticket’ to a quote from Barad, the prematurity of this conclusion becomes clear. She writes: ‘matter [the ticket] does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter [the ticket] is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity’ (Barad, : ). That is, if matter is phenomena in intra-action then a ticket does not of itself have agency or the power the authors claim: tickets become objects that have agency because of the numerous phenomena that congeal at the site of the ticket. The exclusion of analyses of even some of these phenomena gives nothing but a ‘reductive materiality stripped of the animating effects of culture and sociality’ (Wilson, , cited in Davis, ). In other words, the argument that ‘the ticket itself becomes hailed into a position of the one that legitimately identifies, categorizes and sequences cases . . . [with an] authority that can be called upon’ (Hultin and Introna, : ) is unsustainable without understanding of ‘the animating effects of culture and sociality’. Or, as Davis (: ) observes of another author’s mis-reading of Barad’s work, ‘The conceptualization stays within the binary notion of western metaphysics, where each category is an independent and discretely bounded entity that meets and interacts [not intra-acts] with other, similarly bounded entities.’ I have explored Hultin and Introna’s paper at some length because it illuminates how a study can explore how the material, such as public space, influences the interactions of two discrete categories of actors and can do this to good effect. What it does not do is adopt a material-discursive Baradian analysis. My own work, with colleagues, is not exempt from such criticism (Ford et al., ; Harding et al., ). In the concluding section of this chapter, in which I attempt to demonstrate a material-identities approach in practice, I will try to do better.
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.................................................................................................................................. There are several interesting studies in which material objects feature as aspects of identity work, notably in relation to attire (for example, Guy and Banim, ; Humphreys and Brown, ; Rafaeli et al., ). However, materialities appear in such studies as a discursive resource rather than an agentive actor. To illustrate the interpretive power of a Baradian-influenced, material-identities approach, and ways of going beyond materialitiesas-discursive-resources, I will draw on the paper by Rafaeli et al. () and, briefly, the recent study of space/place and organizational identity by Liu and Grey (). Rafaeli et al.’s () paper adopts a Goffmanesque approach to analyse how dress functions to help individuals ‘manage their role behavior’ (Rafaeli et al., : ). They study administrators in a business school in the USA, concluding that dress is a ‘concrete and visible’ symbol, and that individuals possess elaborate and structured knowledge of
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dress’s symbolic function in organizational roles. Participants possessed a conscious knowledge that informed their choice of attire, that is they dressed conservatively so as to display the ‘attributes of being professional, business-like and coordinated’ (Rafaeli et al., : ). They had, furthermore, ‘a fairly complex and comprehensive map for appropriate dress. . . . Dress in this organization displayed diluted stratified homogeneity’ (Rafaeli et al., : ), that is, there was variation in attire between sub-groups, but homogeneity within each sub-group. Rafaeli et al. indicate, no doubt unintentionally, the agentive power of attire, in observations such as ‘Appropriate dress not only helped women enter roles, but also enhanced how they executed the duties associated with their roles. The process through which such enhancement occurred was built on the inherent ability of dress to evoke certain feelings in both role occupants and target persons’ (Rafaeli et al., : ). Thus attire is a supporter, a facilitator, and has ‘inherent abilities’. Furthermore, that dress could ‘invite sexual attention’ that would ‘produce discomfort’ (Rafaeli et al., : ) illuminates the differential agency of different types of clothes. But to merely reinterpret dress as agentive rather than passive would do little other than to reverse the polarities of influencer/influenced, and to fall into the trap of regarding clothes and the people who wear them as bounded entities that inter- rather than intra-act. Understanding of the constitution of ‘the’ phenomena whose identity is that of business school administrator therefore requires the analysis to be broadened to far more ‘agentially intra-acting components’ (Barad, : ) that, in intra-acting, constitute each other and the wider ‘system’ of the business school. Indeed, it is striking, on reading this study two decades after its publication, how much is left out of the analysis. The methodology section states that the researchers observed the physical environment in which participants worked but, except for allusions to different offices, place is absent from the analysis. There are brief references to students and corporate customers but they do not form part of the analysis, and neither do academic staff who are there only as a statistic. Power is excluded from the analysis as is gender, despite per cent of faculty members and per cent of MBA students being male, and per cent of support staff female. Only a tiny minority were not from the white ethnic majority. Clothes and how and why they have been chosen are described in depth but there is no critical analysis of the type of dress worn. From a material-identities perspective the administrators and the clothes they wear are analysed as if they are isolated islands touched only by taken-for-granted norms that circulate in the wider organization. A material-identities interpretation of Rafaeli et al.’s rich data starts from the recognition that administrators and their attire are just two of the numerous individuated phenomena that emerge through agential cuts that draw boundaries between, say, academic/student/ administrator, and lecture theatres/academic offices/administrative offices/corridors and so on. Analysing administrators’ attire, therefore, illuminates how the business school as an apparent entity with the id-entity of ‘business school’ is constituted and how the identity of administrator is at the same time performatively constituted. Let us start with a description of a space within the business school chosen by Rafaeli et al. to illustrate the detailed observations they made. It has wooden doors and a ceiling made of a grey metal. This ‘strikes me as very male and military-like’, the observer had noted (Rafaeli et al., : ), going on to say that ‘They bestow the place with an official,
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efficient but cold feeling. The adornments on the walls are pictures of the various graduating classes from to . The pictures are sombre, serious and in black and white, noticeably dominated by men.’ This description, not analysed by Rafaeli et al., not only captures the gendered hierarchy of the business school, but pronounces a normative masculinity that is cold and colourless. In other words, the very space of the business school is a material force pregnant with the norms of organizational masculinity that govern the terms through which agents intra-act to constitute themselves and ‘the’ business school. Contrast this with the descriptions of the clothes worn by the female administrators. Although described as ‘conservative’ they are colourful and carefully accessorized. One wears a red and black outfit with black earrings (Rafaeli et al., : ), another a grey plaid suit with a tan silk blouse, gold brooch and grey shoes (Rafaeli et al., : ), another a bright orange outfit (Rafaeli et al., : ). They wear symbols of femininity, such as jewellery, scarves, flowers in the hair, frills, lace, and high heels (Rafaeli et al., : ), and are told they should wear skirts, not trousers. Their elaborate and structured knowledge of how to dress is thus the knowledge, firstly, of how to dress as women. We are given no information about how the academic faculty dress, but we can imagine that the vast majority who are male would dress very differently, if only in wearing trousers rather than skirts. If matter is agentive and differentiating, as Barad () argues, then this colourful, female dress not only does the work described by Rafaeli et al., it also performatively constitutes the wearer as female (see Kelan, , for a Butlerian analysis of the performative powers of dress). But a material-identities approach goes further in exploring how such attire is actively engaged in constituting the (invisible) male academics and thus the masculine business school, for the administrators’ attire has boundary-drawing capabilities: it divides the school into two domains, one male and one female, one subordinate to the other. The subordinated other is immediately identifiable by its clothes, and these clothes determine the territory its wearers can enter (administrative offices rather than lecture theatres, say). This appears to be contradicted by the observation in Rafaeli et al.’s study that administrators choose clothes that they think are mimetic of the people with whom they are required to inter-act: casual for student-facing work; smart suits for meeting people from corporations. This desire to merge with the other seems to contradict the description of their attire as colourful and female—the male students and male corporate customers they meet would be dressed in the uniform of the businessman or the student, respectively the sober suit and casual jeans. I suggest this apparent paradox is resolved through understanding how the administrators’ clothes prevent such a merger: the clothes’ boundarydrawing capabilities extend to sustaining an agential cut between different identities, so administrators and students are rarely mistaken for each other, nor corporate customers and be-suited administrators. The clothes actively mark out who is and who is not an administrator. Rafaeli et al. describe how sex must not intrude. Jeans must not be too tight, miniskirts should not be worn, anything that might hint of sex are ‘not the norm’ (Rafaeli et al., : ). This unquestioned and taken-for-granted norm begs the question of why clothes should be chosen that disguise and avoid displaying bodies. The genealogy of the university is that of a space in which the mind dominates the body. A material-identities analysis
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would go beyond the familiar feminist argument that women’s bodies contradict the Cartesian separation of mind from body (de Beauvoir, ), to argue that the possibility of women’s bodies doing such a thing is itself a differentiated state of the entity that is the business school. The possibility is an active agent in the performative melee. By disguising their bodies women’s attire constitutes the academic system as a place where brains are valorized, and the body negated. Note that no one quoted in the study referred to inter-actions with academics, but the administrators’ female clothes do far more than distinguish administrator from soberly attired academic. Rather academic, administrator, student, and corporate customer are not bounded entities. Each may appear to be demarcated from the other but they emerge as seemingly separate and distinct entities only through their intra-actions—the academic is not the administrator nor the student nor the corporate customer but each identifies itself in its difference from all these others and clothes agentively carve out the differences. The administrators’ attire can be seen, even in this brief sketch, to do far more than simply contribute to the administrators’ work and their identities as administrators. As an agentive actor in intra-actions with numerous other actors including norms and discourses, it constitutes the various identities of business school, academic, student, norms, etc., so that individual people take on specific identities through the agentive cut made by the attire, and in taking on those identities they are constitutive of, even as they are constituted by, ‘the’ business school. Further, the attire takes on its specific form through these intraactions: it does not exist separately and distinctly as a bounded entity, but itself emerges as ‘administrators’ attire’ through those very phenomena it, at the same time, brings into being. It can be seen that one of the major advantages of this theory’s application is that it reduces the possibilities of taking too narrow a focus when exploring identities. It prevents us stopping our analyses too soon, and it disrupts the taken-for-granted. A question that guides the analysis is: ‘What is so taken-for-granted here that I am failing to see it?’ A rather obvious taken-for-granted in Rafaeli et al.’s study is gender and gendering, but there are others such as, for example, assumptions held by participants in the interviews that ‘corporate customers’ need to be treated as special, and that part of this special treatment includes dressing in a certain way. Why? The sharp divide between ‘casual’ and ‘smart’ clothes is ripe for critical analysis, especially as ‘smart clothes’ are, at least for the women in this study, not very comfortable. That leads to further questions about workplace norms and perhaps insights into micro-acts of violence. Another question that might be asked is: How did each (apparently individual) ‘thing’ I am analysing at the moment come to become ‘an’ entity? This encourages an exploration of history and how histories continue to be played out in the present. For example, it would be useful to explore how clothes became gendered, what norms were woven into clothing that are still caught up in the stitches and the cut of today’s attire, and how these norms inform present-day practices. The history of the university may also provide useful paths for exploration and understanding. A very useful recent study that asks just such a question and incorporates such depth of thinking in its analysis of history is Liu and Grey’s () study of a university building. Using archival sources, they illuminate how a contemporary university building still resonates with the gendered assumptions that were incorporated into its structure when
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it was opened in . That is, ‘Buildings and other spatial features of organization are highly significant ways in which history is embodied, understood and deployed in order to answer the question of “who we are as an organization” ’ (Liu and Grey, : ), and thus ‘historicized space’ articulates contemporary organizational identity. They explore the socially produced space of the college, and analyse how that space mediates past and present, with what might otherwise be forgotten or dismissed as interesting but nonagentive relics continuing as lively informants of today’s organization. Liu and Grey () illuminate the value of peering behind a snapshot of the present so as to understand how history makes possible the existence and coming together of the entities contained within that frozen present moment. A material-identities perspective would go further in requiring understanding of ‘multiple practices of engagement’. This suggests that what is absent from Liu and Grey’s paper is the occupants of the present-day space, both sentient and non-sentient. How, for example, does lecture theatre technology insert itself into the history that is recounted, and how does history insert itself into that technology? Without incorporating these ‘material forces’ that ‘actively matter to the process of materialization’ (Barad, : ) then this fascinating study remains an exploration of interacting categories: gender, space, documents—rather than an analysis of the phenomena ‘the College’. Asking the question of what is taken-for-granted in Liu and Grey’s paper leads, firstly, to the puzzle concerning their assumption that organizations have a sense of what they are, that they have identities. The very first sentence of the paper’s abstract is: ‘How do buildings contribute to an organization’s sense of what it is?’ The concept of ‘organization’ is nebulous, so presuming that organizations have a sense of self is problematic, if not reifying. A material-identities perspective would not dismiss the issue out of hand, however, nor would it require an exploration of what is understood by the term ‘organization’. Rather, it would analyse how the sense that an organization has a sense of itself comes to emerge. Archival sources become agentive actors in this exploration of the conception of ‘an organization’, as do the traces of those archives in contemporary documents, spaces, and places, but other actors need to be incorporated into the ongoing intra-actions between material and discursive resources. Rafaeli et al.’s study of clothing, replicated in Royal Holloway, could provide a fascinating and useful contribution. Another taken-for-granted assumption is Liu and Grey’s distinction between nostalgia as invoked history (their interpretation of Brown and Humphreys’ () study of place and identity) and a somehow more ‘real’ history contained in archives. Archives, as Derrida () argued in Archive Fever, are always constructed: there are processes of selection of what is and what is not included in the archive, and the documents and artefacts contained within it are open to a variety of readings, those readings being themselves informed by other archives that influence what is read and how it is read. In Baradian terms, the measuring device (here the human researcher) actively produces the ‘object’ that is studied through erasing from thought and thus existence other potentialities. Barad, however, rescues the archive through insisting that the very existence of an ‘archive’, one that has its own librarian, is an agentive participant in the entity called ‘the organization’, as would be ‘invoked history’, as, similarly, would be the argument that attempts to distinguish between the two. These are not separate and distinct entities or practices, but are co-constituting, intra-acting participants in carving out the phenomena that is ‘Royal Holloway’.
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Again, a material-identities perspective points to ways of interrogating the assumptions we take with us into our research, so as to push beyond the restraints we have unreflexively imposed upon thinking.
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.................................................................................................................................. A question that bothers me is: Is this ‘new materialities’ turn little more than a way of expanding academic thought to offer new, perhaps more complex, insights, through incorporating that which has been rejected from analysis during the era of discourse’s dominance? I suggest it should be more than this, else it risks becoming a fad that will pass away sooner or later. I am writing this at the beginning of , a period of deep uncertainty. The rise of right-wing populism and the effects this may have on peace and prosperity, alongside major concerns about the environment, warnings of an approaching global recession, deep divisions between populations, increasing inequalities and a host of other concerns, require in-depth understanding of this present moment if solutions are to be found. Organizations have been complicit in the emergence of these major problems and worries, so the better our understanding of ‘organization’ the more successful might be implementation of solutions. Material actors, sentient and non-sentient, are undoubtedly involved in the new politics, so how they effect identities cannot be excluded from our analyses. This points to what is missing from my brief extensions of others’ work: an analysis of power. It is not only that lack of space has limited this demonstration of the potential of using material-identities perspectives, but also that Barad’s own account tends to ignore power. This is an unfortunate exclusion for any critically-oriented analysis of identities in MOS, but one that can be fairly easily remedied. On the other hand, it could be that the theory offers potential for new understandings of how power works in organizations. Specifically, at present the power that may allow right-wing populists to wreak similar havoc to that wrought by their twentieth-century predecessors needs to be understood. They have little influence without being able to form or call on organizations to effect their wishes. MOS researchers, therefore, have a political role and an ethical imperative to find ways of better understanding the constitution of identities. Material-identities theory is perhaps one such way.
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Barad, K. (). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Brown, A. D. and Humphreys, M. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Place: A Discursive Exploration of Hegemony and Resistance’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Butler, J. (). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (). Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Caza, B. B., Vough, H., and Puranik, H. (). ‘Identity Work in Organizations and Occupations: Definitions, Theories, and Pathways Forward’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Cnossen, B. and Bencherki, N. (). ‘The Role of Space in the Emergence and Endurance of Organizing: How Independent Workers and Material Assemblages Constitute Organizations’. Human Relations, (), –. Colebrook, C. (). ‘On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Political of Unactualized Potential’. In S. Alamo and S. Hekman (eds.) Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. –. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (). ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction’. Organization Studies, (), –. Davis, N. (). ‘New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-Biologism’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, (), –. De Beauvoir, S. (). The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Taylor & Francis. Derrida, J. (). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ford, J., Harding, N., Gilmore, S., and Richardson, S. (). ‘Becoming the Leader: Leadership as Material Presence’. Organization Studies, (), –. Fox, N. J. and Alldred, P. (). ‘Social Structures, Power and Resistance in Monist Sociology: (New) Materialist Insights’. Journal of Sociology, (), –. Guy, A. and Banim, M. (). ‘Personal Collections: Women’s Clothing Use and Identity’. Journal of Gender Studies, (), –. Harding, N., Ford, J., and Lee, H. (). ‘Towards a Performative Theory of Resistance: Senior Managers and Revolting Subject(ivitie)s’. Organization Studies, (), –. Harding, N., Lee, H., and Ford, J. (). ‘Who is the Middle Manager? On Constituting an Organizational Self ’. Human Relations, (), –. Hardy, C. and Thomas, R. (). ‘Discourse in a Material World’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Hekman, S. (). The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Holbraad, M. and Pedersen, M. A. (). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hultin, L. and Introna, L. (). ‘On Receiving Asylum Seekers: Identity Working as a Process of Material-Discursive Interpellation’. Organization Studies. doi: ./. Humphreys, M. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Kelan, E. (). Performing Gender at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kenny, K., Whittle, A., and Willmott, H. (). Understanding Identity and Organizations. London: Sage Kivinen, N. H. and Hunter, C. (). ‘ “Brand Work”: Constructing Assemblages in Gendered Creative Labour’. Human Relations, (), –. LeCain, T. J. (). The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liu, Y. and Grey, C. (). ‘History, Gendered Space and Organizational Identity: An Archival Study of a University Building’. Human Relations, (), –.
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Magee, B. (). The philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Meisenbach, R. J. (). ‘Working With Tensions: Materiality, Discourse, and (Dis)Empowerment in Occupational Identity Negotiation among Higher Education Fund-Raisers’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Orlikowski, W. J. (). ‘Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work’. Organization Studies, (), –. Orlikowski, W. J. and Scott, S. V. (). ‘Exploring Material-Discursive Practices’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Phillips, N. and Oswick, C. (). ‘Organizational Discourse: Domains, Debates, and Directions’. The Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Putnam, L. (). ‘Unpacking the Dialectic: Alternative Views on the Discourse–Materiality Relationship’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Rafaeli, A., Dutton, J., Harquail, C. V., and Mackie-Lewis, S (). ‘Navigating by Attire: The Use of Dress by Female Administrative Employees’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., and Mazzei, L. A. (). ‘New Empiricisms and New Materialisms: Conditions for New Inquiry’. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, (), –. Symon, G. and Pritchard, K. (). ‘Performing the Responsive and Committed Employee through the Sociomaterial Mangle of Connection’. Organization Studies, (), –. Tuana, N. (). ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’. In S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. –. Wilson, E. A. (). Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Exploring the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract A considerable body of work uses a sensemaking lens to understand identity processes in organizations. From this perspective, identities are constructed and maintained as individuals attend to, bracket, and draw on cues to enact meanings about who they are. At the same time, however, theories of identity have also been called upon to explain sensemaking. This is not surprising, since sensemaking is grounded in identity construction. As such, the two literatures have multiple, sometimes complicated, points of intersection. In this chapter, the authors explore the complex relationship between identity and sensemaking. They begin by articulating the assumptions that a sensemaking lens brings to identity. Next, they detail several ways in which the relationship between identity and sensemaking has been described in the existing literature. Then, they propose an understanding of the relationship between identity and sensemaking that integrates and extends previous research. The authors conclude by suggesting avenues for future research focused on the interplay between identity and sensemaking.
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.................................................................................................................................. M scholars utilize a sensemaking lens to understand identity and identity processes in organizations. Unlike other frameworks that scholars draw upon to understand identity (Stryker and Serpe, ; Tajfel and Turner, ), sensemaking is not aimed specifically at articulating identity processes. Nevertheless, the literatures on sensemaking
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and identity intersect in a variety of ways. The exact relationship between sensemaking and identity, however, is not always clear. In fact, some researchers equate identity processes and sensemaking, using the terms interchangeably. For example, Kohonen (: ) refers to ‘sensemaking (or identity construction)’, Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly () use the term ‘identity sensemaking’, and Moore and Koning (: ) state that they see ‘identity work as a process of sensemaking’. In this chapter, we explore the literature at the intersection of identity and sensemaking, seeking to gain greater clarity about the relationship between the two, and help pave the way for future exploration in this subfield. We begin by overviewing what a sensemaking perspective implies for our understanding of identity in organizations. Then, based on a review of scholarly work that explicitly addresses individual identity1 and sensemaking, we articulate four ways of thinking about the relationship between sensemaking and identity. Building on these insights, we ultimately argue for an integrative approach that conceptualizes identity and sensemaking as two interwoven, recursive processes. We conclude by articulating some ways in which the relationship between identity and sensemaking can be further developed, both theoretically and empirically, in future research.
A S P I: D A
.................................................................................................................................. Both identity and sensemaking have been conceptualized in a multitude of ways. Here, we draw from recent reviews of these literatures (e.g. Ashforth et al., ; Brown, , ; Caza et al., b; Maitlis and Christianson, ) to provide a definitional foundation for exploring the relationship between sensemaking and identity.
Identity Identity refers to individuals’ answers to the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who are we?’ (Ashforth et al., : ) and can encompass collective memberships (Ashforth and Mael, ), interpersonal relationships (Ashforth et al., ; Sluss and Ashforth, ), roles (Stryker and Serpe, ) as well as personal attributes (Brewer and Gardner, ). Importantly, individuals do not have a single, monolithic identity; rather, they have multiple identities which may be more or less salient (Stryker and Serpe, ). Organizational scholars’ study of identity falls into several clusters. Here, we briefly review those that have also been included in studies of sensemaking. First, studies of identity are often concerned with identification, or the degree to which individuals define themselves in terms of a particular target, often their organization or a group within that organization (Mael and Ashforth, ). In this work, the emphasis is on the degree to which individuals do or do not include a specific target in their representation of self (e.g. Bergami and Bagozzi, ). Second, research has explored identity motives, or what drives individuals to identify or not identify with particular targets. While scholars have identified
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several different motives for identification, including needs for affiliation/belongingness, and uncertainty (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Hogg and Mullin, ; Wiesenfeld et al., ), the self-enhancing benefits of identification have received the most attention (Dutton and Dukerich, ; Smidts et al., ). Third, other research has taken a more processoriented view of identity, conceptualizing it as continually in flux, or as flow (Gioia and Patvardhan, ; Hatch and Schultz, ) and examined questions relating to identity stability and change over time. Important in this line of research is the constitutive process of ‘identity work’—the cognitive, discursive, physical, and behavioural activities that individuals engage in to create, repair, maintain, and revise identities (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Brown, ; Caza et al., b; Snow and Anderson, ). While identity can be thought of as one’s understanding of oneself, identity work turns our attention to processes through which this understanding is formed, maintained, or changed over time. Below, we elaborate on how each of these identity-focused constructs have been implicated in the research on sensemaking.
Sensemaking Sensemaking is the process through which individuals make meaning of novel, unexpected, or equivocal experiences (Maitlis and Christianson, ; Weick, ). It is prompted by situations such as unexpected setbacks (Vough and Caza, ) or ambiguous or uncertain events (Louis, ; Weick, ) that lead people to ask ‘What’s the story here?’ (Weick et al., ). It is the process through which individuals in organizations ‘translate data into knowledge and understanding about the environment’ (Weick, : ). Sensemaking ensues as individuals craft explanations by extracting cues from the environment which they use to organize a plausible account (Maitlis and Christianson, ; Weick et al., ). Importantly, sensemaking is not simply a cognitive process, occurring within the minds of individuals. People make sense of a situation by acting and assessing the consequences of their actions, and engaging in a range of social practices (Gephart, ; Maitlis, ; Wrzesniewski et al., ). Through these actions and interactions, sensemakers inevitably change the world that they are working to understand. Hence, a key feature of sensemaking is enactment, or ‘the process in which organization members create a stream of events that they pay attention to’ (Orton, : ), producing opportunities and constraints that did not previously exist (Weick, ). This is what distinguishes sensemaking from interpretation. A sensemaking perspective has four clear implications for the study of identity. First, sensemaking brings a constructionist lens to identity, seeing the sensemaker as ‘an ongoing puzzle undergoing continual redefinition’ (Weick, : ). Thus, the self is the fundamental target of sensemaking: an equivocal problem being defined and redefined through interaction with others. Identity is produced through talk and action, and its legitimacy is negotiated as individuals work out, in different social contexts, who they can be. From this perspective, identity is dynamic, mutable, and evolving. As a result, the aim of sensemaking-based identity research is often to explore the various identity work processes involved in the construction, maintenance, and change of identities (Brown et al., ; Ibarra, ; Ybema et al., ).
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Second, in contrast to several other approaches (see Caza et al., b), sensemaking tends not to privilege a particular source of identity. In fact, sensemaking has been used to explore a whole range of individual identity types including leader identities (Kohonen, ), personal identities (Koerner, ), organization-based identities (Pratt, ), and occupational identities (Ashforth et al., ). Combined with the constructionist stance of sensemaking, this breadth around identity source highlights the processes underlying identity, rather than the content of identities. Third, sensemaking implicates the behavioural component of identity. Here, the self is considered a work in progress, extracting cues from a continually enacted environment. As Weick (: ) observes, ‘People learn about their identities by projecting them into an environment and observing the consequences.’ In other words, people define themselves based on their interpretations of what happens as they act in the world. These actions and interpretations are, in turn, shaped by their self-definitions. Enactment and recursivity are thus important features of a sensemaking perspective to the study of identity. Finally, this perspective emphasizes the construction and use of plausible and coherent stories. As individuals make sense of their experiences, they put order to those experiences through the creation of a narrative that can reasonably explain the events (Weick, : Weick et al., ). Sensemakers do not settle for any explanation, but instead strive to construct coherent, continuous narratives of who they are, developing accounts of their lives that are the sensible result of a series of related events or cohesive themes (Gergen, ). From this perspective, identity is understood as narrative in form (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Maitlis, ; Ravasi and Schultz, ). Such identity narratives, shaped by shared expectations and cultural norms (Ibarra and Barbulescu, ), provide a coherent understanding of who we were, who we are, and who we will become. While, collectively, these ways of thinking about identity distinguish the sensemaking perspective from other common identity approaches such as social and role identity theories, some of these attributes also underpin much of the constructivist writing that has explored issues of identity over the last couple of decades. In particular, constructivist approaches also highlight the dynamic, narrative-based, and action-driven nature of identity (e.g. Brown and Coupland, ; Down and Reveley, ; Knights and Clarke, ; Linde, ; McAdams et al., ). In the remainder of this chapter, however, we draw on research that has explicitly combined sensemaking and identity in order to explore the relationship between the two.
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.................................................................................................................................. To understand better how identity and sensemaking are linked, we first searched for research that included both individual identity and sensemaking and then examined how the relationship between the two was conceptualized and depicted in each case. Through this process, we uncovered four ways of thinking about the relationship between sensemaking and identity, captured by the following questions: How does identity impact sensemaking? How does sensemaking impact identity? What role does sensemaking play in identity
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Question 1
Identity
Question 2
Sensemaking
Sensemaking
Question 3
Identity
Question 4
Identity
Sensemaking
Sensemaking
Identity
Identity threats lead to sensemaking Sensemaking impacts level of (e.g. Vough & Caza, 2017) identification (e.g. Pratt, 2000)
Sensemaking as identity work tactic Identity work as core component of (e.g. Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008) sensemaking (e.g. Weick, 1995)
Identity as resource for Sensemaking influences nature of sensemaking (e.g. Beyer & Hannah, identity work (e.g. Vough et al., 2002) 2015)
Sensemaking as mechanism Identity as important target through which identity work occurs for sensemaking (e.g., Schabram & (e.g. Koerner, 2014) Maitlis, 2017)
Identity need as determinant of sensemaking (e.g. Brown et al., 2008) Identity constrains sensemaking (Murphy, 2001)
Sensemaking allows for re-establishment of identities (Quinn & Worline, 2008)
Sensemaking as stage in the identity Identity work as sensemaking cycle (e.g. Rothausen et al., 2017) work process (e.g. Kanji & Cahusac, 2015) Identity as response to action in sensemaking process (e.g. Grant et al., 2008)
. Four relationships between identity and sensemaking
processes? What role does identity play in sensemaking processes? Figure . summarizes the core findings related to each question. A fundamental distinction between them is whether they view sensemaking and identity as separate or whether they view them as overlapping parts of a single process. Research tackling the first two questions tends to separate sensemaking and identity and address how one impacts the other. The second pair of questions assumes sensemaking and identity are component parts of one another; either sensemaking as an element of a larger identity process, or identity as a component of an overarching sensemaking process. Notably, across articles, the focal identity construct differs (e.g. identity, identity work, identity motives, or identification), and we attempt to be explicit about the focus of each work as we discuss it. Additionally, some papers we reviewed address the identity–sensemaking relationship in multiple ways. Thus, the inclusion of any one paper within a section of our framework should not imply that is the only approach taken by the authors. After we outline how authors have answered each of the questions, we then summarize the relationship between them, ultimately suggesting an integrated approach that we hope will form the basis for future research.
Question : How Does Identity Impact Sensemaking? Perhaps the most straightforward way scholars have examined the relationship between identity and sensemaking is by investigating when and how who we are affects how we make sense of events that we encounter. This work suggests that identity precedes and influences sensemaking. Cornelissen (: ), for example, proposes that identity is one of the multiple determinants of how individuals make sense of events. From this perspective, identity can lead to and shape sensemaking in a variety of ways.
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To begin, sensemaking can be triggered by threats to one’s identity. Identity threat occurs when individuals experience the potential for harm to one or more of their identities (Petriglieri, ). For example, in their work on people engaged in ‘dirty work’, Ashforth and Kreiner () suggest that sensemaking is likely to be particularly prominent, especially early on, as individuals face identity threats due to the disparaged nature of their work. Examining injured musicians, Maitlis () further elaborated on the ways in which threat leads to sensemaking. She found that physiological trauma threatens musicians’ identities, serving as a jolt that interrupts existing ways of thinking and behaving, thereby triggering sensemaking. Yet, it is not only a threat to current identities that catalyses sensemaking. Theorizing about the impact of a failure in career advancement, Vough and Caza () proposed that sensemaking is prompted when individuals’ hoped-for future selves are threatened by a denied promotion. Here, the identity threat engendered by the denied promotion triggers sensemaking about, one’s failure to progress, individuals’ strategies moving forward, and their possible selves. Thus, threats to existing and hoped-for future identities can be an impetus to sensemaking, both about the self and the situation. Other research shows how identities can serve as resources or orienters during sensemaking. Here, identity does not necessarily initiate sensemaking but is drawn upon in the course of sensemaking. For example, in their study of how previous roles influence individuals’ experiences in new jobs, Beyer and Hannah (: ) include identities as a type of personal resource that new hires deploy as they make sense of their new roles. Specifically, they suggest that newcomers with diverse prior identities are able to adjust quickly to the new settings because they have a rich toolkit of resources to draw from during sensemaking. Others have investigated how existing aspects of identity orient the objectives for sensemaking. Brown and colleagues () draw on Coopey and colleagues’ () work to highlight how individuals’ identity narratives influence the sensemaking process, leading individuals to develop differing accounts of the same set of events. In particular, as people strive to satisfy various identity motives such as self-enhancement and self-consistency, they construe events in ways that meet those needs. In addition to triggering and orienting sensemaking, existing identities can also constrain sensemaking. In a study of airline staff, Murphy () showed how gender identity constructions around the feminized accommodating role of flight attendants served as a barrier to sensemaking in a crisis. Because they understood their role to be providing a service and being a calming presence, flight attendants had difficulty responding authoritatively in an emergency, or even seeing this as a possibility. Weick (: ) highlighted a similar dynamic in the context of Union Carbide employees in the Bhopal disaster when he observes, ‘people see those events they feel they have the capacity to do something about’. In sum, both theory and empirical evidence underscore the notion that identities impact sensemaking. Threats to identities can initiate sensemaking, yet strongly held identities can also inhibit sensemaking in threatening situations. Identities can also provide resources for, motivate, and orient sensemaking. Thus, even in exploring the unidirectional relationship between these concepts, there is some complexity. One thing that distinguishes this set of work from those that follow is its focus on the influence of identity in shaping sensemaking processes. Here, individuals have particular identities that serve as inputs into, or shapers of, the sensemaking process. While this way of thinking does not preclude downstream identity change, the predominant focus of this work is answering questions related to when, how, and why identity serves as an antecedent to sensemaking.
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Question : How Does Sensemaking Impact Identity? Scholars have also investigated the inverse of this relationship: sensemaking as a shaper of identity. As we make sense of the world around us and the situations we find ourselves in, we form, reconsider, reassess, or confirm how we understand ourselves. Due to the more dynamic nature of identity from this perspective, studies tend to explore how sensemaking leads to shifts in identity, levels of identification, or identity work. For example, sensemaking can shape the degree to which individuals identify—or have a feeling of ‘oneness’—with a collective (Mael and Ashforth, ). For example, in Pratt’s () influential work on Amway distributors, sensemaking prompted by corporate practices such as ‘dream building’ and ‘positive programming’ led distributors to develop either positive or ambivalent identifications with Amway, or in some cases to disidentify with the company. These individuals’ identity-based attachments to Amway were a function of their sensemaking about the company. Building upon this work, Karreman and Alvesson () found that due to managers’ attempts to control meanings in a large IT/ management consultancy firm, there were only two possible identity-based outcomes of the sensemaking process: positive or ambivalent identification. Any other type of identification (e.g. disidentification) would almost guarantee a departure, voluntary or involuntary, from the company. Sensemaking also shapes identity through its influence on identity work. In some cases, the kind of sensemaking that takes place affects the kind of identity work that is done, as was the case in Pratt and colleagues’ () study of medical residents’ identity customization. Here, they found that sensemaking about high magnitude discrepancies between who one was and the work one was doing resulted in identity work that drew on additional identities in the form of either identity patching or identity splinting. Sensemaking about low magnitude discrepancies, in contrast, did not require other identities, and resulted in identity enrichment. In another study, Vough and colleagues () found that as individuals made sense of their retirement experiences, it triggered identity work about who they were relative to the retirement experience. Specifically, managers and executives drew upon extracted cues from their environment to make sense of whether the process of retiring was an identity threat or an identity opportunity. In turn, their construction of retirement as threat or opportunity led to different kinds of identity work through which they maintained, enhanced, protected, or restructured their identities. However, sensemaking does not only lead to the creation of new identities, but also can help individuals bolster and maintain existing identities. In a compelling study of the passengers aboard United Flight , Quinn and Worline () suggested that the passengers used the resources at hand in order to impute sense into their terrifying and confusing experience which ultimately allowed them to re-establish personal identities as well as develop a collective identity. For example, passenger Mark Bingham used the time and telephone available to him to call his mother, a relationship that made sense to him. In so doing, and through his mother’s expression of belief in him, Mark was able to regain his sense of self as trusted and believed son. Thus, sensemaking may enable identity-related processes that involve maintenance as well as change. Engaging in sensemaking about the events that happen to people can lead them to adjust or reconfirm who they are. These can occur through shifting identity-based
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attachments or engaging in identity work to update the content of their identities. Research in this vein again presumes two separate constructs and a unidirectional relationship between sensemaking and identity. In contrast to this and the preceding set of studies, other research has conceptualized the relationship between sensemaking and identity as more interwoven and inseparable. In this research, the focus is very much on identity work, the process through which identity is formed, maintained, or revised. Below we first explore the role of sensemaking in identity processes, and then the role of identity in sensemaking processes.
Question : What Role Does Sensemaking Play in Identity Processes? In this body of research identity work is seen as a broad, overarching process, of which sensemaking is one component. In Lutgen-Sandvik’s () work on bullying, for instance, alongside reconciling, repairing, grieving, and restructuring, sensemaking is regarded as one of seven forms of identity work individuals engage in when responding to bullying. According to this research, sensemaking is an interpersonal process that seeks to resolve ambiguity around environmental perceptions, identify the causes of the abuse, and validate the value of the self. Sensemaking can also be viewed as a mechanism through which identity work occurs. Ashforth and Schinoff () theorize that sensemaking is an integral process that helps individuals construct and situate personal identities in their endeavour to become a desired self. In her research on workplace courage, Koerner () depicts sensemaking as the intermediate mechanism in an overarching identity work process. Here, identity tensions prompt a sensemaking process which takes place through courage-based identity work. The result of this process is the ultimate reconciliation of the initial identity tension. Finally, Tracy and colleagues () detail how humour functioned as a sensemaking device that aided new human service workers to overcome identity threats and collectively construct more positive identities at work. Kanji and Cahusac’s () work represents yet another way in which sensemaking can be seen as part of a larger process of identity construction. These authors studied how professional women transitioned to staying at home after they became mothers, with an emphasis on the identity repercussions of this transition. They depicted a fourstage model wherein women shift from experiencing threat to their professional identities to accepting their at-home identities and looking towards the future. While sensemaking occurred to some extent at each stage of identity work, it played an especially prominent role in the second stage. In this stage, women dealt with regret and loss, felt satisfied with looking after their children, found ways to do work at home, and engaged in collective sensemaking with other women about employment. In an interesting reversal of this work-to-home transition, in their study of how Japanese housewives become involved in social enterprises, Leung and colleagues () found that ‘emergent identity work’ occurred through a spiralling process of action, learning, and sensemaking. Here again, sensemaking is viewed as one of the stages in a multi-stage identity work process.
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In sum, some authors suggest that sensemaking plays an integral role in identity work. Specifically, sensemaking has been conceptualized as a tactic parallel to other tactics, a mechanism through which identity work occurs, and a stage in the identity work process. Identity work and sensemaking are not separate processes influencing one another, rather they are intimately interwoven such that identity work is the overarching process in which sensemaking is carried out.
Question : What Role Does Identity Play in Sensemaking Processes? Other scholars invert this relationship, arguing that identity work is one of many processes that occur when individuals engage in sensemaking, and investigate the various roles identity work plays in the larger sensemaking process. This research often draws directly from Weick’s () foundational book on sensemaking in which identity construction is one of seven key properties of sensemaking. For instance, Boudreau and colleagues (: ) premised their paper on the notion that the establishment and maintenance of identity is one of the ‘core properties of the sensemaking process’. Similarly, the stream of research on critical sensemaking draws on Weick () to cast identity construction as one component of the critical sensemaking (CSM) process. Mills and colleagues (: ) characterize the relationship between the two processes in this way: ‘Sensemaking describes a process of identity construction whereby individuals project their identities into an environment and see it reflected back. Through this process, they come to understand what is meaningful about their own identities.’ They later refer to identity construction as ‘a pivotal element of critical sensemaking’ (Mills et al., : ), again suggesting that identity construction is but one part of the process. Similarly, Carroll and colleagues (: ) write ‘we conceptualize CSM as a continuous socio-psychological process where individuals exercise power through multiple relationships and construct identity through meanings within the framework of the influence of rules, discourse and formative context.’ As such, CSM includes identity work alongside other processes such as striving for plausibility and the exercise of power (see also Tomkins and Eatough, ). In a study of animal shelter workers, Schabram and Maitlis () showed that individuals engaged in sensemaking about their identities when they encountered unexpected and often shocking challenges in the work that they believed they were called to do. For example, finding themselves engaging in mass euthanasia when they had thought they were going to improve the lives of animals disrupted workers’ accounts of themselves (their identity) as well as their sense of purpose. Through sensemaking, these individuals revised their identities (e.g. from being uniquely gifted to help animals to being uniquely able to bear the burden of the work) and their reasons for being there, allowing them to make their lived experience of shelter work plausible. Rothausen and colleagues () also argued that identity is an element of a broader sensemaking process and suggested that identity processes constitute one of two sensemaking assessment cycles. Their in-depth analysis of leavers and stayers revealed that when individuals are thinking about leaving their work, they engage in sensemaking cycles focused on identity and on well-being. Specifically, they found that the individuals they interviewed
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used cues from their environment to assess threats to six core elements of identity: purpose, trajectory, relatedness, expression, acceptance, and differentiation. Once a threat was assessed, they engaged in behaviours to cope with this threat, with the objective of lessening its impact. The authors found that a similar but separate cycle occurred for well-being. Grant and colleagues () take yet a different tack to understanding the role of identity processes in the broader sensemaking process. These scholars use a sensemaking lens to investigate how organizational giving programmes led to affective organizational commitment. They suggest affective commitment develops through two prosocial sensemaking routes, one concerning the individual and one concerning the company. At the individual level, employees began by contributing to the cause. They then made sense of this act by interpreting their contribution as an act of caring. This interpretation, in turn, reinforced their personal prosocial identity. This reinforced identity was perceived as a psychological benefit from organizational membership that employees returned via affective commitment. Thus, personal reinforcement of a prosocial identity serves as an element of the prosocial sensemaking process that is an outcome of the interpretation of one’s actions. Taken together, this research addresses sensemaking as a more general process that includes identity work within it. From this perspective, identity processes accompany other processes that assist individuals in making sense of their experiences. The core difference between this and the previous body of research is authors’ focus on understanding sensemaking or identity processes. The chosen emphasis determines which of these constructs is primary and which is more secondary.
An Integrated Model of the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking According to our analysis, there are four key ways that the previous literature has conceptualized the relationship between identity and sensemaking. One of the core differences in these conceptualizations is whether these two constructs are viewed as more static and unidirectional or dynamic and embedded. Questions and view identity as influencing sensemaking and sensemaking as influencing identity. Questions and , instead, see sensemaking and identity as embedded in one another. Between and , the difference lies in whether sensemaking or identity is the overarching process of which the other process is a part. While on the surface these perspectives may seem conflicting, we suggest that they may ultimately be compatible, each representing partial snapshots of the larger set of relationships between sensemaking and identity. Weick () proposed that the sensemaking process depends on double interacts, meaning that our understanding evolves as we act in response to others’ responses to our actions. In a parallel fashion, we suggest that identity and sensemaking exist in the form of a double interact. Our identity influences how we make sense of an event, which in turn can change our identity. As this identity changes and we face new occasions in which sense must be made, this new identity shapes sensemaking in response to these new events. All of this occurs within a social context in which others are part of both our sensemaking and our identity work. Thus, in line with Gendron and Spira (: ), we see sensemaking and identity work as two intertwined processes that have a recursive effect on one another.
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.................................................................................................................................. In the process of constructing this chapter, we found ourselves often struggling to understand how scholars have articulated the relationship between sensemaking and identity. This led us to believe that there is considerable conceptual ambiguity that may impede the progress of fruitful further research in this domain. Accordingly, we call for those studying these phenomena to be more explicit about how they view the relationship between sensemaking and identity. This will involve clearly identifying which elements they are observing, measuring in their data, or theorizing about. At the same time, we encourage scholars not to be too narrow in their focus. Instead, they might consider their positioning within the broader framework we provide as a way of situating their findings and conclusions relative to the other components of the dynamic and recursive relationship between sensemaking and identity. In the remainder of this section, we briefly outline some ideas for future research at the intersection of identity and sensemaking. Most of the work we reviewed emphasized the relationship between current identities and sensemaking. However, scholars have increasingly recognized that there are a variety of identities beyond current identities that can have an impact on employees’ understandings and actions. Specifically, employees have past identities (Strahan and Wilson, ) that may linger on beyond when they are still relevant (Wittman, forthcoming). They may have future identities, both desired and feared, that are used as goalposts to assess current situations (Markus and Nurius, ; Strauss et al., ). They also have identities related to whom they chose not to become (Obodaru, ). How each of these identities shapes the sensemaking process is an important avenue for future research. Thus, we call for greater attention to the various types of identities that can play into the sensemaking process and how they may interact during sensemaking. Another important direction for identity researchers taking a sensemaking perspective is to seek to better understand identity plurality in organization. As organizational scholars, we often privilege one identity in our theorizing and empirical investigations. Yet, individuals do not check their other identities at the door when they come to work (Ramarajan and Reid, ) and can be multifaceted even within their organizational roles (see Creary et al., ; Ramarajan, ; for a review). Furthermore, the changing nature of the economy, which promotes short-term engagements with organizations and even occupations, means that more workers will have multiple work identities over the course of their careers and sometimes even hybrid work identities (Caza et al., a; Leavitt et al., ). Despite the reality of identity plurality, our examination of the literature suggests that while a sensemaking lens would seem to be ideally suited for examining the experience and implications of identity plurality, past research has largely failed to do so. The two pieces that explicitly address this issue illustrate the future opportunities for investigating sensemaking around multiple identities. First, Vough () investigated how individuals made sense of their professional, occupational, and workgroup identities, finding that individuals used different logics as they made sense of each. Second, Sluss and colleagues () described how one’s relational identification with one’s supervisor could generalize to identification with one’s organization via behavioural sensemaking. Specifically, their theorizing suggests that to the extent that the behaviours consistent with their relational identification with their supervisor (e.g. helping and fulfilling expectations)
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are aligned with organizational goals, employees will infer through sensemaking that they identify with the organization. Taken together, these pieces indicate that we cannot assume that sensemaking is similar across different types of identity targets and that sensemaking may also form a bridge between various identities. There are, no doubt, many other pathways scholars could take to explore sensemaking in the context of multiple identities. One reason why issues of identity plurality may have been largely overlooked in existing sensemaking research is the emphasis on the creation of a plausible identity narrative. Thus, one particularly intriguing lingering question is how do individuals construct plausibility and coherence among multiplicity? We know that individuals can be motivated to construct coherent identity narratives (Ibarra and Barbulescu, ; McAdams, ), but how are they able to construct such narratives when they are simultaneously multiple things? There are at least three possible answers to this question. First, individuals may create multiple identity narratives, one for each central identity and engage in practices that allow these storylines to coexist. Alternatively, individuals may create narratives that make sense of the intersecting elements of their multiple identities, reconciling them into a single plausible narrative. Finally, individuals may come to terms with their narrative incoherence (Gergen and Gergen, ). It is also possible that individuals experiment with all three approaches and even employ them at different times. In addition to tackling these new research questions, our understanding of the relationship between sensemaking and identity would also benefit from a broadened methodological repertoire. The study of identity from a sensemaking perspective has been very largely inductive, with most studies utilizing qualitative interviews as data. As we turn towards identifying mechanisms and contextual moderators, we may benefit from opening the door for more quantitative investigations in order to isolate and understand the nature of these mechanisms. For instance, experimental studies that manipulate identity characteristics such as salience and observe the effect of this manipulation on sensemaking processes would be enlightening. Such studies could be conducted either in the field or in the laboratory. One example of such a study is Leavitt and colleagues’ () study of dual occupational professionals. These authors demonstrated that individuals make different moral judgements depending on which occupation is most salient. These findings suggest that context (and its priming of particular identities) shapes the way individuals make sense of moral situations. Similarly, Hekman and colleagues () found that whether physicians viewed their work through the lens of diagnosis or treatment depended on their occupational and professional identities as well as the perceived regulatory focus of their colleagues. Another important methodological consideration for future research is to make an effort to gather more dyadic level data, using either quantitative methods or qualitative, conversational analytic approaches. While the socially constructed nature of both sensemaking and identity work is well accepted, researchers often fail to gather the dyadic level data required to truly understand these relational processes.
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.................................................................................................................................. A sensemaking lens helps identity scholars to understand and articulate the dynamic, narrative, and enacted aspects of identity and identity processes in organization. While
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research in this area is flourishing, the nature of the relationship between sensemaking and identity is often ambiguous. In order to bring clarity to this subfield, we have articulated four different ways of thinking about this relationship found in previous research and then argued for an integrated, dynamic perspective. We see great opportunities for future research on sensemaking and identity and believe that continued empirical and conceptual work at the intersection of these domains stands to make valuable contributions to our understanding of both identity and sensemaking.
N . While there is also work examining identity and sensemaking at more collective levels (e.g. organizations), due to the focus of this handbook, we draw primarily on work examining individual level identity processes.
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Weick, K. E. (). Making Sense of the Organization. Oxford: Blackwell. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., and Obstfeld, D. (). ‘Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking’. Organization Science, (), –. Wiesenfeld, B. M., Raghuram, S., and Garud, R. (). ‘Organizational Identification among Virtual Workers: The Role of Need for Affiliation and Perceived Work-Based Social Support’. Journal of Management, (), –. Wittman, S. (Forthcoming). ‘Now Bygone or Lingering On? Deidentification and Identity Stability Responses to Role Change’. Academy of Management Review. Wrzesniewski, A., Dutton, J. E., and Debebe, G. (). ‘Interpersonal Sensemaking and the Meaning of Work’. In R. M. Kramer and B. M. Staw (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. . Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, (), –.
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Class, History and Field Structure .......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter explores what the conceptual artillery of Pierre Bourdieu might do for identity studies. Five key identity papers are read through the conceptual prism of Bourdieu in order to identify critical junctures where identity and Bourdieu might meet. Beyond this, new areas of methodological inquiry are identified for identity studies from a Bourdieusian perspective. Specifically, it is argued that identity studies could be enriched by methodological expansion both backwards into history and outwards towards the meso and macro levels of field and society. In practical terms, this implies that identity studies pay greater attention to three key issues: history, field and class.
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.................................................................................................................................. P Bourdieu is one of the leading sociologists of the twentieth century (Savage, ). Compared with Foucault, however, Bourdieu’s influence on identity studies remains under-developed, and in this chapter we explore the implications of his work for the study of identities in organizations (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ; Caza et al., ; Ybema et al., ). We identify three areas where identity studies would be enriched by reference to Bourdieusian insights: a greater attention to history; a positioning of identity projects within wider field and societal dynamics; and a greater appreciation of class. Collectively, exploiting these insights would amount to a methodological expansion for identity studies. The chapter is organized as follows: first, we sketch Bourdieu’s central concepts; second, we conduct a Bourdieusian reading of five significant studies on identity; finally, we outline a Bourdieusian approach to the study of identity, highlighting various future avenues for research.
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.................................................................................................................................. We introduce Bourdieu’s work by adumbrating his ‘master concepts’. We begin by outlining ‘the field’, before turning to ‘habitus’ and then a discussion of different forms of ‘capital’. In each case, we briefly discuss the implications for identity before proceeding to a more detailed reading of five key papers on identity through the prism of these concepts.
The Field: ‘Rules of the Game’ According to Bourdieu, the complexity of late modern societies is reflected through their organization into a series of semi-autonomous fields. Fields are both the building blocks of society and areas of social activity that are relatively autonomous and that have developed their own set of rules and organizational arrangements. They are a social space that positions different groups of people in a hierarchical fashion, where some groups are accorded positions of prestige, while others are relatively powerless. Bourdieu employed the metaphor of ‘the game’ to describe the process through which social actors vie for power and prestige in a field: They are, rather, bearers of capitals and, depending on their trajectory and on the position they occupy in the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and structure) in capital, they have a propensity to orient themselves actively either towards the conservation of the distribution of capital or towards the subversion of that distribution. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, : –)
Conversely, there is a countervailing force for reproduction as powerful groups seek to protect their interests and marginalized groups accept their lot in the field. The relevance of the field for individual identity is that it sensitizes the researcher to the context that confers a position on the individual: is a person high status? Low status? Somewhere in between? Is a person attempting to preserve their high status? Are they insurgents trying to change the field? A field is bound together by what Fligstein and McAdam () refer to as ‘internal governance units’. Internal governance units are structuring devices that bind a field together, such as a regulatory body or a collective organization. Internal governance units are a manifestation of doxa, the Bourdieusian concept that refers to the firmly held beliefs within a field: the ‘right, correct, dominant vision which has more often than not been imposed through struggles against competing visions’ (Bourdieu, : ). Doxa¹ is cast as self-evident, natural and preordained but is a socially constructed outcome of struggle that confers on elites the power to ‘name’ and ‘define’ the game: ‘What is thinkable and unthinkable, expressible and inexpressible and valued or not, is the product of the field structures within which they arise and the principles of legitimation operating there’ (Grenfell and James, : ). Doxa frames what is at stake within a field and to work relies on illusio, i.e. social actors’ belief in the game itself. Illusio is the process through which actors are invested in the stakes of the game. An example of this is ‘A journals’ within the field of management and organization theory. Many people within the field take their ‘superior’ quality as selfevident and this belief justifies the vast effort invested in attempting to publish in them: the rewards, effort and investment all feed off each other to create illusio. Similarly, in their
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study, Lupu and Empson () frame the long hours working culture prominent in large professional service firms as an example of illusio—workers put up with the arduous working environment because they believe in the overall worth of the game itself. Elsewhere, Kerr and Robinson’s () analysis of post-Soviet Ukraine illustrated how Ukrainian modernizers were invested in the illusio of ‘the West’. Fields are not transparent or non-hierarchical spaces. They are the outcome of previous and ongoing struggles: there are winners and losers. One of the means through which they are reproduced is symbolic violence, the process through which marginal actors within a field accept the categorizations and judgements of the field that actively marginalizes them (Savage et al., : ). Understanding how identities are forged within the context of a field is, we argue, important in making sense of the hierarchies and divisions that structure social spaces.
Habitus: ‘Feel for the Game’ If the field structures the ‘rules of the game’, what does this mean for social agents within the field itself? This brings us to the concept of habitus. It is both Bourdieu’s most controversial concept and the most crucial to his understanding of social actors within fields. Bourdieu asserts that the habitus is ‘a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, : ). What this definition points to is that an individual’s habitus is shaped through their practices of childhood and experience of school, and supplemented through the development of a secondary habitus in the workplace or other institutions. The habitus provides a matrix that generates ‘structuring practices’. Otherwise put, habitus is history congealed within an individual. However, while social actors are shaped by their pasts, they possess an almost infinite capacity for imagination and innovation. In other words, the habitus is a generative structure, not merely a determining one (McNay, ).² In our studies of partners in Big accounting firms (Carter and Spence, ; Spence and Carter, ; Spence et al., ), we reported on accountants drawn from relatively modest backgrounds who ascended to elite positions as partners within large accountancy firms. In the process, the partners acquired the habitus required to be credible as members of the business and professional elite. Their lives as partners drew on a secondary habitus that, at first glance, was substantially different from their primary habitus. On closer inspection, the practices that shaped them at school, especially through participation in competitive team sports, were useful in the Big accounting field. In this sense, there was an interplay between their primary and secondary habitus. In contrast, if a social actor confronts a field that is unfamiliar, such as working-class students attending an elite university, then ‘resulting disjunctures can generate not only change and transformation, but also disquiet, ambivalence, insecurity and uncertainty’ (Reay et al., : ). The point being that a social actor’s habitus can be inconsonant with the demands of the new field. Bourdieu uses the concept of hysteresis to explain when the conditions of a field change, but an individual’s habitus fails to adjust. These are ‘critical moments when it misfires or is out of phase’ (Bourdieu, : ). In effect, this is a situation where the existing habitus ‘dispositions become dysfunctional and the efforts they make to perpetuate them help to plunge them deeper into failure’ (Bourdieu, : ). The problem of hysteresis can be particularly
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acute in periods of crisis. In contrast, if a social actor’s habitus corresponds with the ‘rules of the game’, they will have a ‘feel for that game’. Identity theorists might see ‘habitus’, with its focus on forming cognitive, conative, and affective dispositions (Wacquant, ) as synonymous with ‘identity’.³ If identity is seen ‘as a dynamic, multi-layered set of meaningful elements deployed to orientate and position one’s being-in-the-world’ (Karreman and Alvesson, : , cited in Brown, : ), then the consonance between ‘habitus’ and ‘identity’ would seem rather tight. However, we should stress the proviso that habitus brings with it a focus on historical processes of formation and links the micro level of the individual self with the meso level of the field and beyond to macro levels of the economy and society. The conceptual integration of history, field and society is fundamental to understanding the formation and functioning of habitus. To strip away any of these factors is to diminish the conceptual force of habitus. Indeed, as will be illustrated below, studies of ‘identity’ often lack this socio-historical positioning.
Capitals Fields are structured in accordance with ‘the three fundamental guises of capital’: social, economic and cultural. As a concept, social capital has generated enormous interest over the last two decades (Spence and Carter, ). Social capital refers to the networks a social actor is part of and how those networks can be mobilized to their advantage (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, : ). The premise underpinning social capital is that a social actor’s embeddedness within a network or access to other networks is a source of potential value to that individual. To be rich in social capital is to be able to access resources that are not open to those outside the network. The quintessential example of social capital in education is the British public school, the ‘old school tie’, which is an established social fact in British life. In their analysis of the British elite, Reeves et al. () conclude that while their grip on power has receded somewhat in recent decades, ‘Elite schools remain extraordinarily successful at producing Britain’s future elites’ (Reeves et al., : ). They continue, ‘there remains two distinct trajectories through Britain’s elite institutions: one for old boys and one for everyone else’ (: ). In a similar vein, Kerr and Robinson’s () analysis of elite bankers explores the historical dominance of bankers drawn from the privileged elite of society—who exhibited high levels of homogeneity—and their displacement by a new breed of banking executives. The social capital of the traditional banking elite comprised fairly predictable billings of top public schools, gentlemen’s clubs, Oxbridge and brief service in elite military regiments. The ‘new breed’ social capital is more improvised, and in Kerr and Robinson’s () article, took the form of social bonds created at the Scottish Development Company.⁴ The broader point being that some spaces are highly institutionalized hubs for the creation of social capital, while other spaces can produce useful social capital but are bounded by a specific time and place. Kerr and Robinson’s argument highlights how social capital, in turn, created a specific form of cultural capital that was valuable to its possessors as they forged their banking careers. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital helps explain the reproduction of elites through the education system (Bourdieu and Passeron, ): ‘academic qualifications are to cultural capital what money is to economic capital’ (Bourdieu, : ). For Lareau and Lamont (: ) cultural capital’s efficacy rests in improving ‘our understanding of the process through which social stratification systems are maintained’. Bourdieu’s
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foundational argument was that educational institutions—such as elite schools and universities—upheld and transmitted the values of elite culture. Consequently, it was straightforward for pupils drawn from elite backgrounds to engage with the curriculum, as they were already very familiar with elite culture. In contrast, for working-class pupils, much of the curriculum was alien and, therefore, more difficult to master. Ultimately, it was more straightforward for members of the elite to perform well, thus naturalizing their advantages over those lower down the social hierarchy. Accordingly, those who are richly endowed with cultural capital are likely to be drawn from privileged positions in society: thus, cultural capital plays a role in reproducing and perpetuating both social closure and inequality (Emmison, ). Simply put, Bourdieu argues that a mastery of ‘legitimate’ culture confers advantages on social actors (DiMaggio, : ). Economic capital is the access that a social actor has to financial resources. This in its simplest form is cash and bank accounts or, perhaps, bank loans and other forms of credit. In its more complex form it would be the social actor’s ability to access complex financing arrangements—such as credit default swaps, synthetic derivatives, or collateralized debt obligations. These three forms of capital interact in order to structure fields and position social actors therein. Moreover, each field places distinct values upon different forms of capital, the most legitimate in any given field taking the supernumerary role of symbolic capital, a shorthand for which is honour or prestige. The different forms of capital have far-reaching implications for identity, as they provide an understanding of the structural resources that make possible a particular identity: to be a successful modern artist is an identity made possible by the field of modern art. Existing within the field are various subject positions. For instance, British Painters, a modernist publication lists artists as follows: ‘tradition’, ‘European avant-garde’, ‘American avant-garde’, and ‘British Art’ (Grenfell and Hardy, : ). These subject positions draw on different capitals. For example, in some professions (relating to religion, literary criticism, elite broadcasting and diplomacy) economic capital is relatively unimportant as the doxa of the field is configured around aesthetic and evaluative judgements that privilege cultural capital. In contrast, in professional service firms, it is the ability to generate economic capital that is often most valued (Carter and Spence, ; Spence et al., ). Different forms of capital are convertible and exchangeable according to the rules of the game that pertain to a specific field. For instance: economic capital can be converted into cultural capital, perhaps through the acquisition of expensive artworks or through sending a child to an elite school; social capital can be converted into economic capital, through accessing opportunities from a network; cultural capital can be converted into economic capital, through selling a piece of art or signing a lucrative recording contract in the music industry. The values of capitals can change over time in specific fields, as Kerr and Robinson’s () analysis of the replacement of a more aristocratic banking elite by an arriviste yet culturally more attuned troupeau demonstrates. As the values accorded to capital change within a field, so do the identities of those who rise to prominence therein.
Reflexivity In many ways, the Bourdieusian conceptual toolkit is a series of methodological pointers rather than a theoretical framework to be proven or disproven. Indeed, methodological
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reflexivity features prominently in Bourdieu’s writings. Specifically, researchers are asked simultaneously to do sociological work and undertake a sociology of themselves. This ‘sociology of sociology’ means attending to the ways in which research objects are defined and explored by researchers and developing an overarching sensitivity to the role of the researcher in producing and reproducing ideas that themselves become active tools of classification in the social space. For example, as we research ‘successful professionals’, ‘leaders’, ‘managers’, etc. we must ask ourselves what our research is doing to stabilize the meanings attached to these research objects. This is something that many researchers, Bourdieusian or otherwise, sometimes neglect (Bourdieu and Wacquant, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The preceding section has outlined some of the key tenets of Bourdieusian thought. The premise of the chapter is that Bourdieu has much to offer the study of identity. To illustrate this, we offer a close reading of five identity studies from a Bourdieusian perspective. We have chosen these studies specifically because they have been highly cited and/or have appeared in a range of prestigious journals, both North American and European. The purpose of these readings is to highlight areas in identity studies that overlap and are consistent with Bourdieusian thought as well as omissions that a Bourdieusian might take identity studies to task for.
Aspirational Identities and the Paras Thornborrow and Brown () offer a compelling account of life in the British Parachute Regiment, known colloquially as ‘the Paras’. Founded during the Second World War, from the outset the Paras were intended to be an elite force. Thornborrow and Brown illustrate how the culture of the Paras, as the ‘toughest’ regiment of the British Army, was maintained through recruitment, socialization, and ongoing organizational rituals. This is heightened by the Paras being ready for immediate deployment, should the need arise. Thornborrow and Brown offer a reading of the Regiment focused on ‘aspirational identities’. The article demonstrates that members desire to be regarded as ‘real’ (in the sense of authentic or genuine) paratroopers. There are preconditions for this, but the prime criterion is to have seen combat. Paras that have not fulfilled this condition may not be credited full status. Those who have been in battle present difficulties for those who have not. For Thornborrow and Brown, ‘aspirational identity’ is what binds the Paras. Our reading of Thornborrow and Brown suggests that an appropriate starting place is to understand the class position of the paratroopers and the standing of the military as a field. Aside from middle-class officers, most of the recruits were drawn from working-class environments low in economic and cultural capital. Many of the recruits are from troubled backgrounds, where violence is a central part of a precarious existence. Poor performance at school combined with physical toughness are integral to the primary habitus of a Para. Other recruits are the sons, brothers and grandsons of Paras and their early life socialization (primary habitus) infuses them with the values and culture of the regiment. In an
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important respect, the masculinity prized in the field of the Paras is one that is a throwback to the industrial age of organized capitalism where working-class males often engaged in pugilistic pursuits, whether through organized boxing clubs or fights between rival gangs. It is also a hallmark of ‘warrior masculinity’ (Hopkins and Noble, ), a cultural trope that is long established in British culture and has its antecedents in the creation and maintenance of the British Empire. This is significant as it relates to UK working-class culture and expectations. Moving from a broader societal level to the field of the military, the Parachute Regiment is high in symbolic capital as a martial force, yet it is also viewed within the British Army as ‘extreme’. This raises interesting questions of ‘dangerous’ identities. The Paras habitus is bound up in highly stylized understandings of masculinity—where honour, respect and physical toughness are privileged. This, we conjecture, is a case where the primary habitus of a Para maps very neatly onto the secondary habitus of being a paratrooper. The doxa of the army privileges tradition, discipline, teamwork and professionalism; within the subfield of the Parachute Regiment, these are all present but masculinity comes to the fore and violence is part of the doxa of the field. Embodied cultural capital is a crucial element, with great attention paid to the creation of a martial bodily helix. The illusio here is that being a Para is highly valued and worth the physical challenges and risks associated with such an identity. The arduous training and constant drills combined with the rationalized myths of the Regiment reinforce the illusio. Hysteresis is an omnipresent spectre: is one ‘really’ a paratrooper or an impostor? This Bourdieusian overlay, we suggest, would enrich Thornborrow and Brown’s study by situating paratrooper identity projects within wider fields and societal dynamics. The driving concept of an aspirational identity does not, from this perspective, exist in a vacuum but can be made intelligible by reference to the historical formation of the individual paratrooper and their positioning within the wider social space, both historically and contemporaneously. The role of the field—the Parachute Regiment—allows us to understand how the ‘rules of the game’ are configured in ways that privilege physical and mental toughness. The comparative autonomy of the field helps explain how these values have endured, while in broader society they are anachronistic. Of the Paras themselves, a Bourdieusian analysis would seek to understand how they constructed specific forms of cultural capital within the Regiment, but also their pastimes outside of it. It would also focus on the construction of social capital within the Regiment. With Thornborrow and Brown, a Bourdieusian analysis would reveal what it was that made a competent or successful member of the Regiment. Beyond Thornborrow and Brown, it would view an aspirational identity as merely part of the illusio of ‘the Paras’ as a field. Lastly, a Bourdieusian analysis would take us from the ‘here and now’ of the Paras to their personal backgrounds and thus to social class.
Provisional Selves Ibarra’s () study examines the identity transformations that individuals experience when transitioning from technical analysis roles into managerial and client facing roles in investment banks and management consultancies. She explores how these professionals observe role models, experiment with provisional selves and internalize feedback on performance, thus building up a new identity. A wealth of insights into each of these
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areas is offered to illuminate a process that is daunting, uncertain and fraught with anxiety, yet navigated more or less successfully by professionals within the firms under study. Reading the study through a Bourdieusian prism, the career transition is a rather minor episode in a longer saga of identity transformations undertaken by individuals. The interviewees in the study held MBAs from elite US business schools. In this respect, we are dealing with social actors with considerable institutionalized cultural capital. This is suggestive of a previous habitus formation that is not insignificant. These are a group of privileged individuals who arrive in their firms, not as some tabula rasa, but substantially pre-socialized and predisposed towards firm socialization processes, yet the implication of the study is that ‘desired future selves’ (Ibarra, : ) are more important sources of influence than past selves. Bourdieusian work shows that those navigating tricky career paths are influenced strongly by their previous formative experiences both in the home and in educational institutions (Lupu et al., ). In Bourdieusian terms, their secondary habitus is linked inextricably to their primary habitus. In contrast, Ibarra’s study is broadly ahistorical—we know little of the interviewees’ lives or indeed career trajectories. Similarly, the analysis falls silent on whether the subjects are members of elite dynasties or whether the MBA is part of a social mobility project. Instead, the account is frozen in the ‘here and now’ rather than reflecting on the social forces that have shaped actors. This criticism notwithstanding, the article contains many fascinating excerpts relating to embodied cultural capital, such as the dress sense, locution and conduct that need subtly to be honed depending on one’s position in organizational hierarchies. Our main concern is that none of this enterprise is sufficiently historicized or contextualized. We are essentially looking at one group of aspirant, elite professionals mimicking and obtaining feedback from a more senior group of elite professionals, most of whom have very similar backgrounds in terms of class and race. This homology is important in the context of these identity projects as, in effect, we are witnessing the social reproduction of an elite. The individuals occupy specific positions in various fields whereby they possess the requisite capitals to be credible in the transition from a technical to a managerial role. The concept of illusio, for example, might be evoked to probe why these individuals feel that pursuing a vice president position in an investment bank or a management consultancy is, for them, valuable. In effect, they make considerable investments and sacrifices to pursue their chosen career: the question ‘what makes it worthwhile?’, is unexplored.
Sexual Heterodoxy in the Church Creed et al. () narrate the fascinating story of how Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Church ministers in the United States engage in ‘identity work’ to reconcile their sexuality with their religious beliefs. Focusing on the identity narratives of individuals, Creed et al. () simultaneously explore the ways in which these are tied up with processes of institutional change, positing that identity work has the potential to challenge institutions. Specifically, looking through the prism of institutional theory, the authors: seek to know more about the antecedent microprocesses (processes that occur at a micro-level through which the experience of institutional contradictions can actually lead to changeoriented agency). (Creed et al., : , original emphasis)
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In privileging antecedents, history features in their analysis. The study shows how individuals, earlier in their lives and professional careers, internalized institutional contradictions in the form of explicitly homophobic attitudes and teachings alongside religious narratives of compassion and love. As GLBT individuals, this combination of contradictory ideas and attitudes led to feelings of shame, denial, and compartmentalization. In Bourdieusian parlance, they experienced ‘hysteresis’—their subjective state was out of sync with the objective situation prevalent in the field. Individuals found various ways to reconcile these contradictions, reading spiritual texts in new ways that permitted them to make their sexuality integral, rather than antithetical to, their vocations (Creed et al., : ). To do this, they found themselves challenging doxic, heteronormative beliefs that may or may not be traceable back to canonical texts. These ‘identity reconciliations’ then constituted embodied challenges to the churches of the GLBT ministers, all of whom were pursuing careers in an environment that was uncertain how to deal with them. In one sense, it would be very easy to repaint this story in a Bourdieusian hue, substituting ‘hysteresis’ for ‘the internalization of institutional contradictions’, or ‘doxa’ for ‘institutional norms’. Where Bourdieu might be more helpful is in moving beyond the micro level. Field is a meso-level concept that simultaneously pays attention to the micro and the macro levels. For a study such as Creed et al. (), which explicitly seeks to address agency, situating the individual strategies of the GLBT ministers within the wider field of the Church more concertedly would permit consideration of the extent to which these individual success stories have had wider institutional/contextual reverberations. Although it is clear that the existence of openly GLBT ministers constitutes a challenge to the Church, the study does not say whether the Church itself has changed as a result of these individual identity projects. How possible is it now to be openly gay as a minister? In short, statements about agency require consideration of meso/macro levels of analysis. Moreover, describing them as individual identity projects and focusing on micromechanisms possibly only covers the thin end of a more hefty identity wedge. In this study, there is no wider sense of how networks or wider field dynamics were leveraged in the course of these individual struggles. The ministers are depicted as lone wolves pursuing isolated identity projects, yet the commonalities in their struggles are clear, suggesting that there was possibly a more collective identity project underway for GLBT ministers. Exploring how social capital was mobilized or accumulated could shed further light on whether or not such identity projects are likely to be successful or not. Applying some Bourdieusian methodological prescriptions would in this instance achieve two principal objectives: enrich the answer to the study’s central research question around the role of identity projects in constituting change-oriented agency; and shed further light on the fieldlevel factors that lead to more or less successful identity projects for individuals.
Elite MBAs and Portable Selves Petriglieri et al. () explore the efforts of managers to create ‘portable selves’ that are adaptable and malleable for the fast-changing context of the contemporary career. Focusing on the transitional period of a one-year MBA programme, the authors examine the psychological processes that individuals experience as they leave behind the certainty of their employer and seek to cultivate a skill- and mindset that will prepare them for a future
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that is uncertain and most likely characterized by change and subsequent identity transformations. Recognizing that contemporary careers require periodic, if not perpetual, reinvention of the self, Petriglieri et al. (: ) examine how individuals can ‘craft stable and hopeful selves’ that can also cope with uncertainty. They find that individuals on the MBA programme navigate their studies with the aid of either an exploratory/humanistic or an adaptive/instrumental ethos. The former denotes a voyage of self-discovery, realizing over time what is important to them and what they would like to do with their lives; the latter denotes a more strategic concern to assimilate the characteristics necessary to succeed in various well-remunerated career paths in the corporate world. Together, these approaches—the exploratory and the adaptive—are oriented towards preparing individuals to assume positions as ‘global leaders’ in different contexts in the future. Petriglieri et al. ()—with the help of psychoanalytic concepts— chart how individuals ‘split’ themselves into either exploratory or adaptive types or, in some cases, reconcile the two, arriving at a place where they psychologically feel comfortable with who they are and more sanguine about their professional prospects post-graduation. Essentially, the MBA programme helps individuals to craft ‘portable selves’ that can be taken into different geographical and professional contexts and succeed in leadership roles. Not unlike Ibarra’s () study, Petriglieri et al. () offer insights into the psychological transitions that individuals experience in preparing themselves for the contemporary workplace and, in particular, leadership positions. In Bourdieusian terms, the study offers insights into the habitus formation of ‘global leaders’. The study usefully shows some of the self-delusion and psychological blind spots that these individuals possess, as they are being forged and cemented in situ. Where a Bourdieusian approach could enrich the study is by expanding its methodological scope. In particular, the paper says little about the particular institution where these individuals study other than that it was globally ranked # for the three years prior to the empirical work being undertaken. It is, the reader surmises, clearly an elite institution that credentializes and refines already well-heeled and substantially well-formed individuals. As with Ibarra (), the backstory or primary habitus does not feature in the analysis. Beyond this, the role of the institution in bestowing particularly valuable forms of cultural capital onto individuals could be brought into the analysis, to show how the psychological and dispositional elements that are so deftly described intertwine with the prestige of the institution to create institutionally sanctioned archetypes of the ‘global leader’. Notwithstanding the need for anonymity, the role of the institution in the context of the wider field is, arguably, given insufficient attention. Relatedly, in methodological terms, more reflexivity would, we suggest, be beneficial. A ‘sociology of sociology’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, ) has not been undertaken, i.e. the authors have not explicitly considered the extent to which they are constructing and peddling contingent and potentially problematic notions of what a manager, leader or professional is. Social capital also could feature more strongly. As it is, the paper only mentions in passing the phenomenon of ‘strengthening bonds with others engaged in similar careers’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). To what extent are these bonds productive for future career transitions? How does the alumni programme work? Methodologically, by only focusing on a snapshot in time—a one-year period of career transition without much consideration of what came before or after—the study offers narrow insights. From a Bourdieusian perspective, greater historicization
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would be appropriate, as would situating the study in a wider context in order to understand what happens to the careers of these individuals post-graduation and where they end up in various fields and/or the field of power.
A Bitter-Sweet Symphony Knights and Clarke () focus on academics working in UK business schools to explore the ways in which insecurities and identities are intertwined. Drawing on psychoanalytic, sociological and philosophical frameworks, the authors classify individuals into three categories of impostors, aspirants and those preoccupied with existential concerns. Taken collectively, they show that modern-day academics are riven with ‘nagging doubts that we fall short of fulfilling the demands associated with being a ‘proper’ academic (aspirant), that our knowledge is too flimsy to be described as scholarly (imposter) or that its content is ultimately meaningless (existentialist)’ (Knights and Clarke, : ). The explanations that the authors find for this lie in the UK managerial culture oriented towards performance measurement, audit and accountability. In Bourdieusian terms, Knights and Clarke () usefully link the micro level of the individual with the meso level of the dynamics that pertain to the academic field. They show that individuals are in a permanent state of hysteresis and that, interestingly, insecurity might be an omnipresent feature of the contemporary workplace. This is a tantalizing conclusion, although one is suspicious methodologically that the authors have explicitly privileged frailty and insecurity from the outset. While not denying that these characterize modern-day academic selves, the lack of attention paid to the converse is troubling. Would different conclusions have been reached had the authors looked for those at the opposite end of the spectrum who felt knowledgeable, scholarly and generally comfortable in their own skin? As it stands, the article conveys the impression that business school academics are a group that are deeply cynical, insecure and generally unreconciled to their professional existence. This is questionable and implies that the authors may have been ‘captured’ by their own theoretical assumptions. Again, the injunction to undertake a sociology of sociology and think reflexively about what research object is being constructed is apposite. Moreover, the subjects in Knights and Clarke’s research are without history. If, for a moment, we accept the insecurity thesis advanced by the study, no convincing explanation is provided for why the individuals say these things, other than the prevailing performance culture that permeates academia. Other psychoanalytic explanations for academics’ insecurities might be offered by delving more substantially into their pasts. Sociological perspectives are also used putatively to explain insecurity, but from our reading of the paper, society is largely absent from the analysis. Can insecurity be explained by, for example, some academics having grown up on council estates and feeling that this is ‘not the place for them’, or is existential pondering—which is characteristic of those who can afford the luxury of thinking beyond ‘practical reason’ (Bourdieu, )—more prevalent among those from privileged backgrounds? These questions are not posed, such is their ahistoricization and decontextualization. Without more history and more context, it is hard to draw robust conclusions about insecurity, its sources and why it might be more characteristic of some academics than others. Instead, we are told simply that insecurity is an ineradicable feature of the academic self.
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.................................................................................................................................. The central argument of this chapter is that Bourdieu’s work has much to offer the study of identities in organizations. Our aim has not been to proselytize for Bourdieu but to bring his theorizing to identity conversations. Our engagement with the identity literature has been that of intellectual tourists. Clearly, identity studies offer one approach to understanding the modern workplace in wealthy post-industrial countries. ‘Identity’ is now firmly established as a master concept within organization and management theory (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, , ). With the exception of Thornborrow and Brown (), the articles we analysed focused on the Brahmin caste of modern life: often elitist, focusing on upper middle-class professionals (Brown, ) yet making sweeping generalizations about ‘the modern workforce’ or ‘contemporary careers’. Indeed, this empirical privileging of the managerial class in identity studies was recently noted by Brown (: ) in a review of articles published in Organization Studies: A strikingly diverse range of individuals, organizations and occupational groups from around the world have been the target for studies of identities in Organization Studies, ranging from middle class Japanese housewives (Leung et al., ) and Italian religious communities (Giorgi & Palmisano, ) to Finnish fathers (Eräranta & Moisander, ) and public sector workers in the UK (Thomas & Davies, ). This said, most interest has centred on predictably conventional groups, notably managers and other professionals working in law firms (Brown & Lewis, ; Kuhn, ), marketing and advertising practices (Alvesson, ; Ellis & Ybema, ), healthcare (Doolin, ; Croft et al, ; Currie et al., ), education (Boussebaa & Brown, ; Knights & Clarke, ) and MNOs. (Koveshnikov, et al., ; Srinivas, )
Beyond this empirical fixation on the professional classes, it is noteworthy that studies on identity tell us much about the ‘here and now’ but are far less sensitized to the historical development of identity or the context that sustains an identity (Knights and Clarke, ). Much research on identity focuses on the micro level and narratives taken during a snapshot in time. This narrow methodological privileging of the ‘here and now’ is a strength in one respect, permitting detailed and fine-grained analyses of particular identity struggles. However, it is a weakness in other respects. We argue that identity should take history more seriously: how do the possibilities for such identities change over time? What are the intergenerational shifts between different identities? A focus on the prosopography of groups of individuals—their habitus and the capitals that individuals draw on—and how identity interacts with fields and broader social forces over time, constitutes a means for gaining a richer understanding of the broader meanings, interactions and constitution of identities. Our second point is that, even studies of individual-level identities should widen their canvas to consider broader field dynamics and societal shifts. Our suggestion is that researchers could fruitfully engage with identity within a field and an identity within society. Thus, a focus on meso and macro levels can help understand the complexities of identity projects and their implications for individuals in terms of wider career strategies
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and field dynamics. What are individuals struggling for? What are they trying to achieve? How do they understand the world? What connections do they make with one another? How do different groups relate to one another? A more developed sense of the macro is required in order to situate (potentially) isolated and selective empirical exemplars appropriately, highlighting their representativeness or otherwise. A political economy of identity would, perhaps, help overcome some current limitations. Thirdly, class is the concept that dare not speak its name in identity studies. Rarely are we provided insights into the class origins of the people whose identities are studied. We argue that class needs to be written front and centre into identity studies. In addressing class, there are two broad means of proceeding. The first is a traditional reading of class based on an assessment of the material conditions of an individual or group of individuals (Goldthorpe, ). Such a conception accords primacy to the occupation a person belongs to, which is treated as a proxy for social class. This means of classifying people reached its zenith at the high point of industrial society, where there were sharp cleavages in Western populations. An alternative approach to the study of class is explicitly Bourdieusian, developed by Savage et al. (), who recast the definitional categories of class into less substantialist categories based on their economic, social and cultural capital and that relates to class relations as they exist in a post-industrial society. A commitment to understanding class incites a broader political agenda: identity scholars should, we argue, ask themselves, ‘what social function does my work fulfil?’ That is perhaps the ultimate promise of adopting a Bourdieusian position. Bourdieusian scholarship has the potential to enrich the study of identity by expanding methodological horizons to include history, field and class. By placing identity within a meso and macro context, it is better positioned than extant studies of identity to understand the cross-currents and waves that shape modern identities. Through an examination of the capitals that competent social actors in particular fields draw on in order to build their reputation, a Bourdieusian position can take us to the heart of how meaning is constructed. That the world is socially constructed is an insight that should be tempered by recognition that such constructions are deeply embedded within broader social structures and capitalist relations. This recognition allows the study of identity to move beyond the narrow prism of the individual in the ‘here and now’ and embrace a richer identity-infield and identity-in-society analysis.
N . Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of doxa shares many similarities with Steven Lukes’ ‘rd Dimension of Power’. . The generative capacities of habitus are disputed. Burawoy (), for instance, argues that habitus marks ‘total submission’ to the established order (Burawoy, : ). Bourdieusian thought turns on this point: if his critics are right and social actors are incapable of exercising agency the Bourdieusian becomes little more than a reproduction theorist whereby actors simply reproduce broader social structures. Such an interpretation leaves little room for individual agency. Bourdieusians reject this interpretation. . Indeed, it is interesting that Bourdieu himself uses the word ‘identity’ only sparingly in his writings and certainly not in a way that elevates it to a conceptual level.
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. Similarly, Crossley’s () analysis of social capital in the development of punk rock pointed to the importance of a clothes shop on the King’s Road in London in serving as a hub for the creation of social capital.
R Alvesson, M. (). ‘Talking in Organizations: Managing Identity and Impressions in an Advertising Agency’. Organization Studies, , –. Ashforth, B. E. and Schinoff, B. S. (). ‘Identity under Construction: How Individuals Come to Define Themselves in Organizations’. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, , –. Bourdieu, P. (). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (). La distinction. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (). Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant L. J. D. (). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boussebaa, M. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Englishization, Identity Regulation and Imperialism’. Organization Studies, , –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities in Organization Studies’. Organization Studies, (), –. Brown, A. D. and Lewis, M. A. (). ‘Identities, Discipline and Routines’. Organization Studies, , –. Burawoy, M. (). ‘The Roots of Domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci’. Sociology, (), –. Carter, C. and Spence, C. (). ‘Being a Successful Professional: An Exploration of Who Makes Partner in the Big ’. Contemporary Accounting Research, (), –. Caza, B. B., Vough, H., and Puranik, H. (). ‘Identity Work in Organizations and Occupations: Definitions, Theories, and Pathways Forward’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., and Lok, J. (). ‘Being the Change: Resolving Institutional Contradiction through Identity Work’. Academy of Management Journal, , –. Croft, C., Currie, G., and Lockett, A. (). ‘The Impact of Emotionally Important Social Identities on the Construction of a Managerial Leader Identity: A Challenge for Nurses in the English National Health Service’. Organization Studies, , –. Crossley, N. (). ‘Pretty Connected: The Social Network of the Early UK Punk Movement’. Theory, Culture & Society, (), –. DiMaggio, P. (). ‘Classification in Art’. American Sociological Review, , –. Doolin, B. (). ‘Enterprise Discourse, Professional Identity and the Organizational Control of Hospital Clinicians’. Organization Studies, , –. Ellis, N. and Ybema, S. (). ‘Marketing Identities: Shifting Circles of Identification in Interorganizational Relationships’. Organization Studies, , –. Emmison, M. (). ‘Social Class and Cultural Mobility: Reconfiguring the Cultural Omnivore Thesis’. Journal of Sociology, (), –. Eräranta, K. and Moisander, J. (). ‘Psychological Regimes of Truth and Father Identity: Challenges for Work/Life Integration’. Organization Studies, , –. Fligstein, N. and McAdam, D. (). A Theory of Fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Giorgi, S. and Palmisano, S. (). ‘Sober Intoxication: Institutional Contradictions and Identity Work in the Everyday Life of Four Religious Communities in Italy’. Organization Studies, , –. Goldthorpe, J. (). The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grenfell, M. and Hardy, C. (). ‘Field Manoeuvres: Bourdieu and the Young British Artists’. Space and Culture, (), –. Grenfell, M. and James, D. (). ‘Change in the Field—Changing the Field: Bourdieu and the Methodological Practice of Educational Research’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, (), –. Hopkins, P, and Noble, G. (). ‘Masculinities in Place: Situated Identities, Relations and Intersectionality’. Social and Cultural Geography, (), –. Ibarra, H. (). ‘Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Karreman, D. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Making Newsmakers: Conversational Identity at Work’. Organization Studies, (), –. Kerr, R. and Robinson, S. (). ‘The Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the Habitus: Dissent and Transition to the ‘Corporate’ in Post-Soviet Ukraine’. Organization, (), –. Kerr, R. and Robinson, S. (). ‘From Symbolic Violence to Economic Violence: The Globalizing of the Scottish Banking Elite’. Organization Studies, (), –. Knights, D. and Clarke, C. A. (). ‘It’s a Bittersweet Symphony, This Life: Fragile Academic Selves and Insecure Identities at Work’. Organization Studies, (), –. Knights, D. and Clarke, C. (). ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Koveshnikov, A., Vaara, E., and Ehrnrooth, M. (). ‘Stereotype-Based Managerial Identity Work in Multinational Corporations’. Organization Studies, , –. Kuhn, T. (). ‘A “Demented Work Ethic” and a “Lifestyle Firm”: Discourse, Identity, and Workplace Time Commitments’. Organization Studies, , –. Lareau, A. and Lamont, M. (). ‘Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments’. Sociological Theory, (), –. Leung, A., Zietsma, C., and Peredo, A. M. (). ‘Emergent Identity Work and Institutional Change: The “Quiet” Revolution of Japanese Middle-Class Housewives’. Organization Studies, , –. Lupu, I. and Empson, L. (). ‘Illusio and Overwork: Playing the Game in the Accounting Field’. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, (), –. Lupu, I., Empson, L., and Spence, C. (). ‘When the Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Enduring Influence of Upbringing on the Work–Family Balance Decisions of Professional Parents’. Human Relations, (), –. McNay, L. (). ‘Gender, Habitus and Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity’. Theory, Culture & Society, (), –. Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. () ‘Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage’. The Academy of Management Review, (), –. Petriglieri, G., Petriglieri, J. L., and Wood, J. D. (). ‘Fast Tracks and Inner Journeys: Crafting Portable Selves for Contemporary Careers’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Reay, D., Crozier, G., and Clayton, J. (). ‘ “Strangers in Paradise”? Working-Class Students in Elite Universities’. Sociology, (), –. Reeves, A., Friedman, S., Rahal, C., and Flemmen, M. (). ‘The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment to ’. American Sociological Review, (), –. Savage, M. (). Social Class in the Twenty First Century. London: Penguin. Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., Le Roux, B., Friedman, S., and Miles, A. (). ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’. Sociology, (), –.
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Spence, C. and Carter, C. (). ‘An Exploration of the Professional Habitus in the Big Accounting Firms’. Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Spence, C., Dambrin, C., Carter, C., Husillos, J., and Archel, P. (). ‘Global Ends, Local Means: Cross-National Homogeneity in Professional Service Firms’. Human Relations, (), –. Srinivas, N. (). ‘Could a Subaltern Manage? Identity Work and Habitus in a Colonial Workplace’. Organization Studies, , –. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (). ‘Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services’. Organization Studies, , –. Thornborrow, T. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘ “Being Regimented”: Aspiration, Discipline and Identity Work in the British Parachute Regiment’. Organization Studies, (), –. Wacquant, L. J. D. (). ‘Habitus’. In J. Beckert and M. Zafirovski (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, (), –.
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RESEARCHING IDENTITIES .............................................................................................................
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, , Putting the Sociological Imagination into Practice .......................................................................................................................
Abstract A conversation in which we hear an individual ‘working on their identity’ in negotiation with a researcher is used to develop a broadly applicable conceptual scheme for the study of identities and organizations. The crafting of concepts is an essential part of all scientific endeavour but it is often done less well than it might in studies of identity-related issues in organizations. To improve the quality of conceptualization in this area the organizational sociologist must be clear and explicit about their methodological assumptions. A valuable way of doing this is by adopting a Philosophical Pragmatist epistemology focusing on ‘the way the social world works’ alongside an ontological processual/relational conception of the nature of organizations and the nature of human beings. Working within these assumptions, a four-fold conceptual scheme is put forward, this encouraging researchers to examine the interplay between self-identity, social-identities, identity work, and personas. A typology of social-identities (sociological discursive phenomena) is also presented to increase the power of the basic scheme, all of this being intended to be helpful to researchers interested in the relationship between human identities and organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. A concepts of identity and identity work to organizations is one of the most fruitful means available for improving our understanding of ‘how things work’ in the organizational dimension of social life. It is also one of the most rewarding ways of doing research as it offers the possibility of satisfying the normal human curiosity we all have
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about how people come to be as they are. It is in this spirit of human curiosity that I present a conversation I had with Frances Suter, a Human Resources manager in an industrial organization, as part of an ethnographic study. These words were recorded as part of a formal interview but it is important to note that the interview took place in a participant observation research context. This meant that I had worked alongside Frances for some months prior to this interview-conversation and, indeed, would continue to work with her until the end of my research year in the organization.¹ Without the benefit of any formal definition of terms at this stage, please read these words as an example of someone who, as they speak, could be said to be ‘working on’ their identity. Following this, I will make use of this slice of research material to develop an analytical scheme which is intended to be constructive and helpful to all researchers interested in the relationship between human identities and organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. Although I think we know each other rather well, Frances, I would like to start by asking you to say a little bit about yourself. Let’s imagine that someone were to say to me ‘Tell me briefly who this Fran Suter is that you interviewed today at work?’ What would you like me to say to them about ‘who Fran Suter is’? ² Well, that must depend on who is asking you the question, mustn’t it? If it were Graham in Birmingham [the main board HR Director] asking you, I would want you to say that she is the brilliant young woman in our function in the Midlands region who is really making a difference to the way we do management. I mean, she does all the necessary HR things but she always weighs up what is best for the business. You could say that to people in your Business School as well. Yeah. What if I were speaking to someone with no connection to the business world? Oh my goodness, I’d die if you said something like that, especially mentioning ‘HR’. I’m going to a wedding next week and I won’t know most of the people there. So I hope you’d say the ‘young woman’ bit again—I like that—but emphasize that I am a rather shy but interesting person who loves music, sport and, actually can tell jokes really well when the situation arises. If you said something like that to these people, it would help me quite a lot. I’ve already been thinking about how I can avoid saying to anyone at the event that I am in HR management. I’d keep things vague with something like ‘Oh, I’m in the electronics industry’ and then quickly get them onto something like Wimbledon or films. I’m actually very involved in hockey but I need to be careful about that. Some men think you are a bit masculine if you let on that you play hockey. And I must admit that I have to be careful about my joke-telling too. I know one or two hearty sporty pint-drinking girls. That is not me—or I should say, that must not be me. You’ve got to be careful, at least when you are younger, when you are letting people know who you are. Do you actually have a clear idea of who you are—to yourself that is? You’ve got to, haven’t you? You’d go crazy if you were simply jumping from one performance to the next.
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You mean being a business-oriented HR manager in the morning, a shy party-goer in the evening who can nevertheless turn into a joke-teller before emerging at the weekend to wield a hockey stick. Yes, it’s funny isn’t it? I sometimes feel that there are some odd contradictions between the different facets that make up ‘me’. And are these contradictions a problem to you? Now, I have thought about this. You have to exploit your weaknesses to build on your strengths, I think. As a child I was always pretty wise about what was going on. But I sort of hovered in the background most of the time. As I grew up I knew that I couldn’t really go on like that. But this fear in life of being too much ‘up front’ has meant that I have recently turned away from actually playing hockey. I love the game but prefer to be the club secretary, organizing things rather than doing, you might say. What about at work? Um, let me think. Well, I don’t think about hockey at work; I never even mention it. I suppose it’s possible that I prefer to do HR rather than being an operations or line manager in the same way I want to stay off the actual hockey field. No, the important thing is this: as you know, HR work, in practice, comes down to managing other managers. And I can do this because I see a lot of these tough male managers who dominate this organization as less confident, beneath the surface, than they like to pretend. My own unsureness about myself in the world helps me identify with them and, quite frankly, a lot of the time it helps me build them up so that, sitting alongside them, we can work together to avoid the sort of simple short-term solution that they typically want to go for in peopleproblem situations. I don’t think that this means I would not be a good line manager—or that I am not a good hockey player for that matter—it’s just not me and, in the end, I think I can contribute more this way. There you are. And I can’t help wondering whether you, Tony, started off in industry as both an HR person and a part-time academic researcher because of a preference for making an indirect sort of impact rather than being an up-front ‘doer’. And, of course being an academic sociologist, what is that about? I think we’ll save that for the pub. For the moment, though, I’d say . . .
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.................................................................................................................................. At this juncture, we can pull back from this small ethnographic episode prompted by this latter turn in the conversation to make the observation that when we are doing identity-related research we are not neutral observers of the way our research ‘subjects’ work on their identities. In presenting ourselves to those with whom we are doing our research, we ourselves inevitably have to do ‘identity work’—however we might define this; and if we are doing ethnographic organizational research we have to spend a lot of time establishing and maintaining our relationships. And this means working with others on just who we are and what our interactions with them mean—both for their benefit and for our own. Identity work is something we all do, all of the time, constantly shaping our own idea of who we are and how we are to be seen and treated by others as we go on through life and the world moves on around us. At this point, I risk moving too carelessly and informally into generalizations about people and their worlds. That, however, is what, ultimately, we are meant to be doing as
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organizational researchers. But, at this stage, we need to change gear to formalize a little more the thinking behind what has been said so far. The obvious thing I might be expected to do now would be to offer formal social scientific concepts of identity and identity work. Indeed, this is what we need to move on to, with a view to adding constructively to the stock of conceptual resources which currently exists.³ The crafting of concepts is at the heart of all scientific work. We cannot provide any kind of systematic investigation of the social world without clearly defining the terms that we are applying to our observations, notes, and field experiences. But before we move on to this we have to note some of the dangers that can arise with identity-based writing and research. Although it is not my intention to provide in the present chapter a formal critique of existing literature in the identities and organizations field—other chapters provide this very effectively—I feel bound to comment that I find student after student, doctoral researcher after doctoral researcher, and academic seminar member after academic seminar member failing to conceptualize ‘identity’ sufficiently clearly or convincingly. Similar problems to these arise in a disturbingly high proportion of submitted papers that I review for academic journals. The difficulties here probably arise as much as anything from the difficulty that dogs the social sciences generally: the problem that the terms we use in our scholarly work are frequently taken from everyday language use. The most obvious example here is that of ‘class’—a term that is common in everyday talk. Over the history of sociology, researchers have striven to demarcate their own technical use of various concepts of ‘class’ from the inevitably ambiguous and meaning-shifting language of the everyday discussions of social inequalities. It often seems, however, that much less rigour has been applied by researchers using the notion of identity. In ordinary conversation we slip back and forth between using the word identity to refer to who a person thinks they are (what Frances was presumably referring to when she said ‘It’s not me’), to applying it to identities that are made available to us or are thrust upon us in society (Frances’ ‘hearty sporty pint-drinking girls’) and, next, applying it to the images of themselves that people present to others around them (the ‘brilliant young woman’ HR specialist that Frances hopes the HR director might see her as). The academic researcher loses precision and scientific rigour if they switch back and forth between different notions of ‘identity’ in this way. Identifying a way forward on this matter is a central concern of the present chapter. Convenient as it might be, however, social scientists cannot jump straight into conceptualization and the defining of terms. Before choosing one’s concepts one must make clear the methodological frame of reference that one is applying in one’s work: the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are being made and the broad assumptions that are being made about human beings and about organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. At the very opening of the present chapter, reference was made to ‘how things work in the organizational dimension of social life’. To see this as a purpose of social science research is to adopt a simple but very powerful epistemological stance. It releases us from those agonized debates that organization studies students are frequently put through, pressing
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them as to whether they should work as, say, critical realists or social constructionists. Instead we can follow the basic proposition of Philosophical (or ‘American’) Pragmatism (Keleman and Rumens, ). This is the proposition that we drop any notion of pursuing complete or final truths about the world (a key idea in ‘scientism’) and, instead, direct our investigations towards producing understandings of the aspect of life that we are looking at which would better equip someone (the reader of our research, most obviously) to cope with that aspect or area of life better than they would if they adopted a different understanding. There is thus no true, best, or perfect theory of organizations or identities but there are some research-based and/or experience-based accounts of how organizations and human activities within them work that would better help us cope or survive in an organization than others—whether this be as a worker, manager, client, owner, victim, or would-be saboteur of that organization. It is unlikely that Frances Suter was aware of pragmatist philosophy but she echoed its ideas when she talked (on a later occasion) very critically about the ‘HRM’ degree module she had done in her management studies at university and how it operated with what she called a ‘model’ of management in which senior managers identified a clear and explicit business strategy upon which the head of HR would base a clear strategy that HR staff would then pursue with the use of ‘neutral and objective management tools like personality profiling, behavioural metrics and all that’. None of this was nonsense, Frances said, but that this kind of ‘road map of what HR is about’ was of ‘absolutely no use’ when she started work as an HR graduate trainee in a large organization. I made the claim to Frances that my own sociological undergraduate experience had enabled me, on entering industry, to ‘learn the ropes’ (Becker et al., ) of ‘real life’ managerial work very fast indeed and she leapt upon the ‘learning the ropes’ phrase. She talked of how much more helpful to doing HR management work were ‘political skills, intuition, persuasion techniques and such things’ as opposed to ‘pushing corporate documents at line managers or baffling them with the pseudo-magic of HR techniques’ when you were learning the ropes of the ‘organizational sailing ship’. Frances spoke of being tempted to look for a job teaching HR in a management studies department and presenting a ‘truer’ picture of HR—truer, that is, than the one with which she had been presented at university. She would, in effect, be applying philosophical Pragmatist principles to business school teaching. In bringing these epistemological matters (and the Pragmatist approach to what philosophers call ‘truth claims’) into the discussion with Frances Suter about the ‘realities’ of doing HR work we are moving into ontological territory. Where epistemology deals with what and how we can know about the world and examines claims to truth-telling, ontology concerns itself more with ‘being’ aspects of the world. This takes us, in the present context, into matters of the nature of organizations and the nature of the human beings— individuals whose ‘identities’ we are interested in.
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.................................................................................................................................. When we study organizational activities and identity matters relating to them, we need to be clear to ourselves and to those who read our research just what we take organizations
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and those involved in them to be. To help here, it is possible to identify two basic conceptions of organizations that are available to us. One of these, we can characterize as a rational-system frame of reference (Watson, ) and it would appear to be one favoured by the academics on Frances Suter’s degree course. Here, organizations are regarded as entities: systems of managerially designed rules and roles which exist in their own terms and are the outcomes of managerial organization designs and choices of particular structural and cultural arrangements. Organizations are seen as functioning to meet explicit organizational goals or strategic aims through the following of rational systems of rules, procedures, and techniques. Pragmatist principles would not encourage us to say that this set of ideas is wrong or straightforwardly untrue. However, they would invite us to look to studies of what actually (rather than ideally) occurs in organizations to identify a conception of organizations which is ‘truer’, not in an absolute sense, but in the sense that it would be more helpful to us if we were to try to cope with life in organizational settings—to involve ourselves in a role within, or in relation to, actual organizations. An alternative emergent-relational set of ideas about what organizations are can be put together, taking inspiration from various trends in organizational and sociological theorizing—those emphasizing emergence, social processes, and relationality (Chia, ; Donati, ; Hernes and Maitlis, ; Langley et al., ; Mische, ) but, above all, from ethnographic and participant-observation research in organizations (Watson, , ). Rather than existing as entities or ‘things’, organizations are regarded as relational phenomena: sets of relationships and associated understandings which are always emergent; emerging from processes of exchange, negotiation, organizational politics, conflict and compromise. Whereas rational-systems thinking emphasizes the rational dimension of organizations, the emergent-relational view balances this with recognition of the importance of emotion and the ways in which the feelings and private/personal wants of managers, workers, and customers are relevant to their behaviours. Closely paralleling the rational-system view of organizations is a rational-system view of the human being (Watson, ). In this, people, just like organizations, are entities that exist in their own terms, centred upon an essential true or ‘real’ self. In contrast to this, an emergent-relational view of individuals would see them as social beings whose individuality only becomes possible as a result of relating to other people. In the rational-system view of individuals, something apparently centrally implicit in the style of classic HRM thinking which Frances complained of, people possess a more-or-less fixed set of personality traits and bring to the organization various needs which, in turn, create ‘motives’ propelling them towards particular behaviours (Hosking et al., ). In contrast, an emergent-relational view of people sees individuals as always in a process of ‘becoming’. People have emergent identities rather than fixed personalities and, in the light of how they interpret their situation, they make exchanges with others and, indeed, engage in conflict with others, to deal with their material and emotional circumstances—with people’s feelings about the world and their reasoning capacities mutually influencing each other. The key, Pragmatist, argument is that people involved in or with organizations will be better placed to succeed in whatever their personal projects are—making a living, say, or pursuing a career, buying goods and services, investing in shares, or politically challenging corporate interests—if they make emergent-relational types of assumption about social, organizational, and human dimensions of existence than if they are guided by rational-
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systems assumptions. It is the case that some organizational actors intuitively think and act in this way. Organizational sociology—through its research and its theorizing—can nevertheless systematize, broaden, and deepen this more ‘realistic’ way of understanding the organizational dimension of our lives. We must note, this superior way (superior, that is, in Philosophical Pragmatist terms) of understanding organizational life, has at its centre the notion of identity. And it is a version of the idea of identity which is processual or emergent and which emphasizes the human being as an active and assertive being rather than as a passive role-player (Joas, ). Thus, a concept of identity work is clearly helpful as a device for systematizing further this insight. If such a concept is going to be applied sociologically then it needs to give full weight to the fact that whilst individuals in part make their own lives and identities, they do so in a societal and cultural context where there is a continual interaction between the ‘self ’ aspect of identities and their ‘social’ aspect. Thus, we are encouraged to put forward, as we shall shortly, the twin pair of concepts, selfidentity and social-identities, these being linked by notions of identity work and persona.
S-I, S-I, I W, P
.................................................................................................................................. This four-fold scheme is proposed as an analytical device to enable the sociological analysis of the relationship between organizations and human identities. A sociological perspective is necessary here because organizations are sociological phenomena. They are essential features of all contemporary societies. Whereas it might be argued that identities can be examined from a psychological perspective—because one aspect of identity relates to human individual differences—it would be fatally reductionist to look at organizations in psychological terms. Then again, it is possible, if not vitally necessary, to recognize that, in one dimension at least, identity is a sociological phenomenon. Hence the scheme presented here conceptualizes ‘social-identities’ as aspects of societies and cultures and not as dimensions of individual existence. This is necessary to enable us to apply what Mills () (who, incidentally, early on identified himself as ‘Charlie Mills’ before rerepresenting himself to the world as the more authoritative sounding ‘C. Wright Mills’) called the sociological imagination. This is a way of looking at the social world as an intersecting of, on the one hand, the individual person and, on the other hand, the historical and social structural context in which they live. Human beings are the makers of the organizations and societies in which they are located but they are, at the same time, also made by organizations and societies. Their self-identities as well as the personas they present to the world around them emerge from the interplay between their thoughts and actions in the world and the social identities that societies and organizations make available and/or thrust upon them. Let us now formalize this with a sociologically robust conceptual scheme (see Figure .). One of the advantages of this analytical scheme is that it does not incorporate a simple concept of ‘identity’. It thus avoids the ambiguity that is inherent in the word ‘identity’ and which leads to the slipping and sliding that we see in everyday conversations (and in more
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SELF-IDENTITY
SOCIAL-IDENTITIES
An individual’s notion of who and what they are
A culture’s stock of notions of who or what any individual might be
IDENTITY WORK The process whereby individuals strive to shape a relatively coherent and distinctive self-identity and present various personas to others in various contexts
PERSONAS The various public and private selves which an individual presents to others in the various circles in which they mix
. Four dimensions of human identities and identity-making
naïve social science writing) between what we might call the internal aspects of human identity and its external aspects. It might not matter, for example, if in informal conversation a woman tells us ‘I changed my identity when I got married’. But if we want to understand more fully what is going on here—which we most certainly would if this person were a social-science research subject—we would want to know whether this was simply a matter of a change of name and title or a more complex matter of the person changing their conception of who they were as a person. We would thus consider how their self-identity had changed: what shift had occurred in their notion of who and what they are. And as we investigated this further we would want to know what shape social-identities such as ‘married woman’ or ‘wife’ took in the particular social milieu in which they lived their lives. In this, we would be looking at how they were drawing upon or influenced by their culture’s stock of notions of who or what any individual might be. Further analysis of this person’s life would take us into questions about ways in which they have changed how they act and present themselves to, say, their own and their partner’s families, their work colleagues, and their friends. Here we are considering what Goffman () famously called their ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ and what we here conceptualize as a set of personas—the various public and private selves which an individual presents to others in the various circles in which they mix. These personas may at times be very close to, if not identical to, culturally available social-identities. This is more likely to be the case in very simple or ‘traditional’ societies where, for example, a son or daughter might closely follow their father or mother in the roles and demeanours they adopt in their lives. In modern societies with more complex divisions of labour and cultures the individual is typically faced with a myriad of choices about how they are to present themselves to the world. Every individual has to manage their lives in this identity-related way as their life moves on through different sets of circumstances, whether this be a matter of getting married, of
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joining an organization, or of retiring from or being made redundant from an organization. If the individual is to be a sane and effective social actor, they must maintain a degree of coherence and consistency in their sense of who they are. Given that they are social or cultural animals, humans are not left to do this privately or ‘in their own heads’. They do it with constant reference to the culture and the discourses around them by engaging in identity work. They strive to shape relatively coherent and distinctive self-identities and present various personas to others in various contexts. If we are to research identity work processes of individuals, we must always ensure that we look at the whole person. Too much research only looks at people in the organizational context and thereby ends up talking about people having, say, ‘managerial identities’, ‘professional identities’, or ‘entrepreneurial identities’ (for example, Dent and Whitehead, ; Duening, and Metzger, ; Hay, ). In doing this, researchers are mistaking certain organizationally located personas that people present to them in the organizational setting. If we are going to talk about people’s self-identities then surely we must look at their lives outside the organization as well as within it. Further, we need to look at how people make sense of the variety of personas that they adopt across different parts of their lives. This is decidedly to reject the notion that people, other than in cases of mental illness, can have ‘multiple identities’. The study of identity work processes is very much the study of how people create coherence and consistency in their notions of self (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Identity work, then, is done at work and it occurs away from work. And it is done all the time. We are doing it when we decide whether or not to take a handbag into a corporate meeting or when we decide whether or not to wear a tie when attending a promotional interview. But it is important to recognize that identity work will be a relatively more or a relatively less self-conscious process depending on the circumstances at any particular time. People’s awareness of identity-managing is greatest at times of significant role shift in their life-careers—the above examples of retirement and redundancy mentioned above being clear organizational examples. In personal research on people setting up their own businesses, for example, I found it common for individuals who were doing this because they were being pushed out of employment in work organizations saying things like, ‘It really had me asking who I was’, ‘I nearly broke down because my whole identity was being fractured’, ‘I had to create a new me that others who know me would find convincing’ (cf. Gabriel et al., ). And, as I write, I hear in my mind the words spoken to me yesterday as my hair was being cut by a young woman barber who had recently been dismissed by her employer who locked her out of the premises that she had been running: ‘It was, actually traumatic. I found myself wondering just who I am’. Having now found a new job, it appeared that part of Rasika’s ongoing identity work, her repairing of her notion of self, was to narrate to friends and customers the rather dramatic events surrounding her removal from the previous business.
E R S I
.................................................................................................................................. A danger we have to be aware of when deploying the concept of identity work is that of overemphasizing the extent to which individuals are knowing and active authors of their own selves and the scriptwriters of the personas they choose to present in different parts of
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their lives. Whilst it is helpful up to a point to see people as ‘self-inventors’, two important qualifications have to be made to this. First, it has to be acknowledged that people work on their self-identities and personas in negotiation with others. Frances Suter’s joke-telling persona, she told me, when I asked her one day why she was always so serious in meetings with the trade union representatives, was one with which she always ‘trod very carefully’. Early in her career in the organization, she had told a joke in the hope of breaking the ice in a meeting with production managers and found that it led to an embarrassing silence. She said, ‘I tried it once and never again— just as once, in my early days here, I came to work in trousers and was, in effect, punished all through the day or—well, punished for what, for goodness sake?’ Whilst this might seem like a trivial illustration of the processes of everyday identity work in organizations, it has to be recognized sociologically as relating, not simply to existing gender social-identities, but to basic structural and cultural gender inequalities and the ways these are intersectionally related (Rodriguez et al., ). Fascinating as it may be to look at the foibles of everyday organizational behaviours and individuals’ personal dilemmas, serious sociological work involves us in looking at the broader organizational and societal implication of mundane social practices. Questions of identity are increasingly being placed at the centre of debates about the nature and future of contemporary societies (Appiah, ; Fukuyama, ). Second, we need to recognize that identity work can involve resisting the imposition of social-identities on oneself as well as embracing them (see Thomas and Davies, for some organizational examples). One of the organizational social identities that Frances Suter and her two women HR colleagues had to resist all the time was that of a ‘do-gooding female HR type’. I first came across this concern in the organization when, early on, I met a colleague of Frances who told me that she had read some of my work when she was a student. ‘So, I know’, she said, with a broad smile on her face, ‘that you are a sociologist’. She went on to observe that I always avoided mentioning ‘that part of your identity’ when introducing myself to people in the organization; instead, I talked about being a researcher from the university’s business school. We might note that this comment nicely illustrates the extent to which research subjects can be as astute about the identity work engaged in by researchers as researchers are about the identity work of these ‘subjects’. But, what Jane Tallis went on to talk about was a sociology-related aspect of her own identity work when she joined the organization as a graduate apprentice. I was regularly asked what I had studied at university and I only once ever mentioned sociology. I learned very quickly that people in the business world equate sociology and social work and I reacted with horror when it was suggested by this manager that my career ambitions perhaps had to do with doing social work in the business setting.
After this, Jane said that she tended to say things like ‘Oh, I studied economics and stuff ’. Whilst this was ‘not a total lie’, it was a ruse that Jane fell back on throughout her training to emphasize that she was a ‘hard-headed and business-oriented’ person. In this account of Jane Tallis’, we see personal identity work moving over from resisting an organizational social-identity to actively embracing one that was felt to ‘go with the grain’ of the managerial culture. This managerial culture was not just a business-focused one. It was also a masculine one in which the organizational notion, or social-identity, of ‘woman graduate trainee’ were linked to societal stereotypes of women as relatively ‘soft-hearted’
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and less business-focused than men. The three women HR specialists, as a group of friends and colleagues, were very explicit about this tendency in various conversations with me. I mentioned, over our lunch sandwiches one day, how I had observed that each of them tended to use very similar language when justifying company HR policies to line/operations managers. They regularly talked of the policies and practices that they had to justify as being ‘better for the long-term of the business’. This was deliberate, the three women said. Given the double ‘problem’ of being both women and ‘HR folk’ they had to avoid using criteria like ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, or ‘better for the employees’. In fact, each of the women said that such notions were important to them in what, sociologically, we would call their self-identities. These aspects of self-identity were private ones, however, and were not to be visible in the workplace personas that the women presented to their male managerial colleagues.
T V T S-I
.................................................................................................................................. In looking at the above examples of individuals (and, in part, a group of individuals) resisting and moulding social-identities, we have moved our attention back and forth between social-identities within the organization (a ‘do-gooding female HR type’ for example) and social-identities in society (‘soft-hearted women’). These social-identities are, of course, deeply implicated in each other and they continually tie in with various wstereotypical social-identities, and formal or ‘official’ social-identities, like that of ‘manager’. Noting these various dimensions of the social-identity aspect of identity work in organizations raises the possibility creating a typology of social-identities that could be applicable across research projects generally. Here are some of the categories that suggest themselves.
Historical, Literary, and Media Social-Identities In childhood, each of us encounters many different types of person in fairy tales and children’s books. Many of these will stay with us and function in our emergent notions of self as ‘types’ which we might emulate or be determined to avoid as we grow up. More than one industrial manager whom I have interviewed over the years has talked about military leaders they encountered in ‘war stories’. And in adult literature, operas, television dramas, and newspaper reports one similarly encounters figures that move beyond simply functioning as ‘role models’ and become almost standardized social-identities. Conversations with police officers about their notions of self and work role often lead to the citing of cultural-model police figures which act in some cases as positive or admirable socialidentities and, in other cases, as negative ones.
Social-Category Social-Identities Every society has its own set of social-identities, ranging from ones of class and status, gender, nationality, ethnicity and the like. In considering the self-identities, personas, and
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identity work of our three case-study women HR managers we observed the importance of gender social-identities. We noted how the women were determined to avoid any ‘softhearted’ connotations of feminine social-identities. Yet it would appear that they worried about alienating the managers they worked with by bringing any excess masculinity into their personas—whether, in the case of Frances Suter, this was by telling jokes, talking about hockey, or wearing trousers. We have to be aware, here, that there were no non-HR women managers in this organization in the period when these three women were developing their HR manager personas. Personas and social-identities must always be understood in the light of the peculiarities of particular social times, particular organizational circumstances, and the circumstances of an individual’s life.⁴
Formal-Role Social-Identities This is the category into which we put the social-identities of ‘manager’ and ‘HR manager’ that we have met. These are occupational locations and these sit alongside positions of rank (the ‘main board HR Director’ social-identity that Frances mentions in her interview) or citizenship. All the individuals considered here were British citizens but Jane Tallis did talk to me at one stage about her own identity work as someone ‘married to an immigrant—a non-British man’ who at times felt ‘marginalized’ in her social life outside of work. The formal-role social-identity is clearly that of a (non-) British man. This is a fairly straightforward matter, unlike the social-identity of ‘immigrant’ to which Jane also makes reference. Whilst in any society there is likely to be what we might term an ‘official’ socialidentity ‘immigrant’. But the term ‘immigrant’ is also used in connection with what is classified below as cultural-stereotype social-identities. Jane Tallis spoke about this on a different occasion from the one above. She narrated how a warehouse manager had sought her advice on how he might tackle some of what he called ‘racial prejudice’ problems in his department. He was particularly exercised by the way some of the day-shift workers insisted on calling two of the ‘dark-skinned’ night-shift workers ‘immigrants’ when, as he put it, ‘They are as Nottingham born and bred as you and me’. Such are the subtleties and complexities of the processes whereby people deploy social-identities in the day-to-day aspects of the social construction of reality.
Local-Organizational Social-Identities Every organization has social-identities which are components of its distinctive culture and in the organization we have been looking at there was not just the obvious ‘HR types’ but distinctions between different types of engineer (‘software types’, ‘designer blokes’) and different types of manager (‘operations managers’, ‘strategic managers’). This type of social-identity plays a significant role in the ‘we and them’ aspects of organizational life. In the telecommunications company this was the case where structural arrangements led to interdepartmental tensions such as those between operational managers and design engineers. Typical here was the operations managers’ gripe about designers ‘over-featuring’ telephones and thereby creating difficulties in assembly processes. This was often expressed in the ‘bells and whistles’ language of the next category of social-identity—the ‘localpersonal’ one.
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Tensions between members of different departments such as this design-manufacturing one or tensions between Human Resources and ‘line managers’ are usefully categorized as ‘local-organizational’ because they tend to take a particular shape which differs from organization to organization. In any given organization, however, there may arise socialidentities which are unique to that organization and its particular history. This was the case in the GPT (GEC Plessey Telecommunications) business under scrutiny here as a result of the fact that there were managers in the business whose earlier careers had been in the GEC component of the GPT joint venture and these had to work alongside ‘Plessey men’ who told me on various occasions that they worked with ‘Plessey values’ which, they claimed, inevitably clashed with ‘GEC ways of doing things’. Thus we get social-identities of ‘Plessey folk/men/types’ and ‘GEC men/types/bastards’!
Local-Personal Social-Identities These are characterizations that various others make of individuals, in the context of specific situations or events. In the GPT study (Watson, ), I heard things like ‘he is a typical old style profit-plus manager’ and ‘I don’t want to be seen as one those “promote me please” pushy graduate managers’. Each of these local social-identities had purchase as a result of the significant organizational and business changes that were occurring in the business at the time of their currency—as was the notion of a group I heard referred to ‘dyed-in-the-wool bells and whistles design engineers’. The shift towards the more ‘business-minded’ managerial style mentioned by the HR women was encouraging criticisms of non-‘cost conscious’ managers who continued to look back to the days when government contracts based on a cost-plus principle were the mainstay of the business. The shift was also encouraging criticisms of designers who wanted to put as many features into the products as they could think of, regardless of whether ‘customer demand’ for these features existed.
Cultural-Stereotype Social-Identities At times during the research one felt that what I have characterized as ‘local-personal’ social-identities were becoming organizational clichés—crude stereotypes that were utilized within interpersonal and, sometimes, interdepartmental rivalries. And alongside these were standard social stereotypes like ‘Welsh windbag’ and ‘boring bean counters’—‘most of the finance department’, I was told (see Koveshnikov et al., ).
F
.................................................................................................................................. Identities and identity work processes are topics for research, inside and outside organizations. The present chapter has advocated the use in organizational research of a fourfold set of concepts: self-identity, social-identities, identity work, and personas, and has offered the above typology of social identities. These are proposed as means rather than ends in themselves. They are devices or resources that we might utilize to improve
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our understanding of ‘how things work’ with regard to human beings in and beyond organizations. As with any tools, some are better—more helpful—for the job at hand than others (Watson, ). By the same token, the social identity of organizational sociologist, social scientist, or researcher is a more helpful one to adopt in their occupational identity work than one of, say, ‘identity researcher’. Academics and researchers, like everyone else, necessarily engage in identity work and as part of this they are tempted to forge identity groupings that locate them in the scholarly division of labour and give them the satisfaction of ‘belonging’ to a coterie of, say, ‘identity researchers’. What we need to remember is that cobblers warrant being socially identified as shoemakers by virtue of the shoes they produce rather than by the hammers, needles, and awls that they deploy. If we wanted to be cobblers producing shoes that would be valued and useful to walkers, workers, or dancers we would be choosy about the tools with which we equipped our workshop. The same can be said of the sociologist and the organizational researcher. The conceptual apparatus that has been offered in the present chapter is to be judged in terms of how helpful it is to the task of understanding the general processes through which human lives and organizations are shaped in contemporary societies.
N . This study led to a research monograph (Watson, ) and a series of journal articles. The research material being used in the present chapter has not, however, been used in previous publications. It is drawn from the sizeable archive of field notes and transcripts which I, like most researchers who spend extensive periods ‘in the field’, have amassed. . Pseudonyms are used in presenting research data. . The concept of identity work was originally developed and used in sociological research on nonorganizational topics (Snow and Anderson, ), for example. As far as I am aware, the first use of the notion in organizational and management studies was in my own work (Watson, : ). The notion was used in an informal way. It was not utilized as a formal analytical device. In the course of examining the talk of Jeremy Sneinton I wrote of how, ‘In the process of speaking he is speculating about himself; he is working things out. In talking to me about his career, he is also making sense for himself of who he is . . . Jeremy Sneinton, in the process of speaking, is doing “identity work”. In the process of answering my questions and trying to make sense for me of the relationship between what he does in his work and what “sort of person” he is he is also making sense for himself of who and what he is. This, I suggest, is part of the normal way in which the human animal maintains a concept of “self”. It is a concept always in process. Our idea of self, or identity, is neither pregiven when we are born, nor does it become fixed in the process of our “growing up”. It is always emergent; it is part of the continuous process through which we come to terms with our changing world through a process of shaping our “selves”. Processes of talking (always intimately bound up with processes of thinking . . . ) are vital to the ways in which we do this.’ A formal concept of identity work eventually appeared in the organizational studies literature in an important journal article (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). It came to play a formal and central role in my own research (Watson, , for example)—work that is refined and built upon in the present chapter. . This point is strongly emphasized in my work on ‘entrepreneurial action’ (Watson, ). The concept of identity work is complemented here with one of emergent life orientation—the meaning
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attached by an individual at a particular stage of their life to their personal social circumstances; meanings which predispose them to act in particular ways with regard to their future, including their relationship to work and consumption. This concept is firmly grounded in an epistemology of emergence and links a person’s identity work to their circumstances at a specific time in their biography.
R Appiah, K. A. (). The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. London: Profile Books. Becker, H. S., Geer, B., Hughes, E. C., and Strauss, A. L. (). Boys in White. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chia, R. (). Organizational Analysis as Deconstructive Practice. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Dent, M. and Whitehead S. (eds.) (). Managing Professional Identities. London: Routledge. Donati, P. (). Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Duening, T. N. and Metzger, M. L. (). Entrepreneurial Identity: The Process of Becoming an Entrepreneur. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Fukuyama, F. (). Identity. London: Profile Books. Goffman, E. (). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gabriel, Y., Gray, D. E., and Goregaokar, H. (). ‘Temporary Derailment or the End of the Line? Managers Coping with Unemployment at ’. Organization Studies, (), –. Hay, A. (). ‘ “I Don’t Know What I Am Doing!”: Surfacing Struggles of Managerial Identity Work’. Management Learning, (), –. Hernes, T. and Maitlis, S. (eds.) (). Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing. New York: Oxford University Press. Hosking, D. H., Dachler, P., and Gergen, K. J. (eds.) (). Management and Organization: Relational Alternatives to Individualism. Aldershot: Avebury. Joas, H. (). Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Keleman, M. and Rumens, N. (eds.) (). American Pragmatism and Organization. Farnham: Gower. Koveshnikov, A., Vaara, E., and Ehrnrooth, M. (). ‘Stereotype-Based Managerial Identity Work in Multinational Corporations’. Organization Studies, (), –. Langley, A. N. N., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van de Ven, A. H. (). ‘Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Mills, C. W. (). The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mische, A. (). ‘Relational Sociology, Culture, and Agency’. In J. Scott and P. J. Carrington (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis. New York: Sage, pp. –. Rodriguez, J. K., Holvino, E., Fletcher, J. K., and Nkomo, S. M. (). ‘The Theory and Praxis of Intersectionality in Work and Organisations’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Snow, D. A. and Anderson, L. (). ‘Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities’. American Journal of Sociology, , –. Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, (), –. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (). ‘Theorising the Micro-Politics of Resistance: Discourses of Change and Professional Identities in the UK Public Services’. In S. R. Clegg (ed.), SAGE Directions in Organization Studies, vol. . London: Sage, pp. –. Watson, T. J. (). In Search of Management. London: Cengage Learning. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Narrative, Life Story and Manager Identity: A Case Study in Autobiographical Identity Work’. Human Relations, , –.
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Watson, T. J. (). ‘Entrepreneurship in Action: Bringing Together the Individual, Organizational and Institutional Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Action’. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, (–), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Organizational Identity Work as Valuable Analytical Resources’. In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Watson T. J. (). Sociology, Work and Organisation. London: Routledge.
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? Comparing Grounded Theory and Phenomenology as Methodological Approaches to Identity Work Research .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract Qualitative researchers have employed a variety of distinct methodologies to examine individuals’ identities in organizations. There is, however, limited guidance to help researchers choose between these methodologies to select the approach that is best suited to answer their research questions. Compounding the methodological complexity facing researchers is the growing variation within each existing methodology. This diversity remains under-examined in the limited scholarship that compares methodologies. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to consider the variation between and within two distinct methodological approaches to the study of identity work: grounded theory and phenomenology. The chapter establishes some of the key similarities and differences in terms of these methodologies. It then offers guidelines to support researchers in making informed methodological choices to better address the needs of their research.
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.................................................................................................................................. T growing corpus of identity scholarship has brought with it a considerable variety of research methodologies. As Brown (: ) points out, the study of identities is ‘characterized by distinctive ontological and epistemological assumptions and often diverse methodological preferences’. Compounding the methodological complexity facing researchers is the growing variation within many existing methodologies. For instance, established methodologies such as grounded theory (Charmaz, ) and phenomenology
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(Gill, ) both contain distinctive types, which themselves draw on different assumptions. As such, there is no orthodox or standard type of methodology but rather a selection from which researchers must choose. Comprehending such plurality is challenging because of the paucity of guidance to help researchers choose between these methodological types to select the most appropriate approach to answer their research question. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to consider the variation between and within two methodological approaches to the study of identity: grounded theory and phenomenology. I establish some of the key similarities and differences of these methodologies and then offer guidelines to support researchers’ selections. I consider these methodologies in terms of the stream of identity research known as identity work. Identity work refers to ‘people being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ). Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine this definition, it is important to acknowledge that differing definitions coexist and compete (Brown, ; Watson, ). Nonetheless, this focus on identity work allows me to illuminate the distinctions between two different methodologies by examining how they approach similar phenomena and contribute to the same body of research. This chapter proceeds as follows. I begin by discussing the plurality of different approaches to the study of identity work and justify my focus on grounded theory and phenomenology. I then consider grounded theory and explore traditional and constructivist types. Following this, I discuss phenomenology and explore descriptive and interpretive types. This allows me to develop a series of guidelines for selecting a methodology to help researchers choose between different types of grounded theory and phenomenology. I offer some suggestions for future scholarly work to develop these methodological guidelines before concluding.
R I I W
.................................................................................................................................. Scholars have employed a variety of methodological approaches to study identity work. Indeed, scholars of identity work have employed biographical (Down and Reveley, ), ethnographic (Thornborrow and Brown, ; Watson, ), historical (Anteby and Molnar, ), and narrative (Brown, ; Humphreys and Brown, ) methodologies. In this handbook, contributors also discuss the use of fictional sources (Learmonth and Griffin, ) and video diaries (Zundel, et al., ), among other approaches. In this chapter, I have focused on two methodologies: grounded theory and phenomenology. I have selected grounded theory as it is a well-used approach to research in the field of management and organization research (see Locke, ; Suddaby, ), and has been employed in a variety of studies of identity work (e.g. Clegg et al., ; Kreiner et al., ; Pratt et al., ). By contrast, phenomenology is a relatively rare methodology in the field of management research (Gill, b; Holt and Sandberg, ), particularly in the study of identity work (but see Gill, a). These two methodologies serve as helpful counterpoints to draw out the other’s key features, as the elements of popular methodologies are
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frequently taken-for-granted while those of less well-known methodologies are often unclear. In addition, I explore the variations in both grounded theory and phenomenology that rest on different assumptions and have different research aims. Their comparison, therefore, highlights their respective similarities and differences. Table . provides a summary of the key features being compared within and across grounded theory and phenomenological methodologies. In the table, rows serve as categories to illuminate the distinctive attributes of each methodology. In this chapter, I elaborate on and explain the points summarized in this table to guide identity researchers in their methodological choices. This chapter does not provide complete or exhaustive explanations of how to conduct a grounded theory or phenomenological study, though I refer to sources that do provide such instruction. In this chapter, I examine different features of these methodologies to draw comparisons between them, to establish their key similarities and differences. The intention is to help researchers understand which methodology is most apposite to their research needs before they become more familiar with the nuances of their employment.
Table 18.1 A comparison of grounded theory and phenomenological methodologies Grounded theory
Phenomenology
Traditional
Constructivist
Descriptive
Interpretive
Proponents
Glaser and Strauss (1967)
Charmaz (2006)
Giorgi (1985)
Smith et al. (2009)
Disciplinary origin
Sociology
Sociology
Psychology
Psychology
Aims
Establish the essence Explore in detail how Construct interpretive Discover participants are theories to understand of a particular substantive making sense of phenomenon meanings and actions or formal their personal and and how people theories that social world construct them explain behaviour
Participants/ Theoretical sampling sampling
Theoretical sampling
Key concepts Constant comparison informing Theoretical the saturation analytical process
Bracketing (epoché) Idiographic Constant comparison (co-constructed data) Imaginative variation Inductive Interrogative Meaning units Theoretical saturation Rendering through writing
Applications Kreiner et al. in identity (2006) work research
Aujoulat et al. (2008)
At least three
Willig (2008)
One or more
Gill (2015a)
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Further to this end, I also describe, briefly, an example study to illustrate how each type of methodology has been used to examine identity work. Grounded theory, particularly in its traditional form, is much more widely cited and used in studies of identity than other methodological types described here, but I provide a single exemplar study for each methodological type for balance. Some of these studies engage more explicitly with the extant body of identity work scholarship than others, though all examine processes of identity construction.
Grounded Theory Developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (), grounded theory is a qualitative methodology to inductively generate theory. Glaser (: ) defines grounded theory as ‘a general methodology of analysis linked with data collection that uses a systematically applied set of methods to generate an inductive theory about a substantive area’. Grounded theory is a product of Glaser’s training in quantitative techniques of sociology and Strauss’ education in symbolic interactionism and medical sociology (Fendt and Sachs, ). Since its development in the s, grounded theory has gained considerable purchase throughout the social sciences. Grounded theory can be understood, in part, as a response to the extreme positivism and deductive approaches that had permeated most social research at the time of its development (Charmaz, ; Suddaby, ). Several different forms of grounded theory have been developed and employed over its fifty–year+ history. While Glaser continued to advocate the original formulation of grounded theory, often described as ‘traditional’, Strauss and other colleagues began to advance what has been called ‘evolved’ grounded theory (Mills et al., b; Strauss and Corbin, ). The ‘evolved’ grounded theory adopts a relativist ontological position that differs from traditional grounded theorists’ attempts to discover the truth that emerges from data representative of a ‘real’ reality (Glaser, ; Mills et al., b). Despite Strauss and colleagues’ apparent rejection of a ‘positivistic position’ (Strauss and Corbin, : ), there continues to be varying interpretations of the assumptions underpinning their evolved approach (Charmaz, ). This reflects their lack of explicit attention to ontology and epistemology. In contrast, Kathy Charmaz developed a constructivist grounded theory, which explicitly discusses its ontologically relativist and epistemologically subjectivist assumptions (Charmaz, ). Her approach differs by emphasizing the researcher-as-author as constructor of the grounded theory, thereby rejecting the notions of emergence and objectivity found in earlier formulations. In the following subsections, I examine the differences between the traditional and constructivist types of grounded theory. I then explore the implications of each type for the study of identity work.
Traditional Grounded Theory Glaser and Strauss’ () original or traditional type of grounded theory is one of the most dominant methodological approaches employed by qualitative researchers across the social sciences (Charmaz, ). The core aim of this methodology is to generate theory. The authors employ the word grounded to underline that the theories developed by their methodology ‘must be contrasted with “grand” theory that is generated from logical
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assumptions and speculations’ (Glaser and Strauss, : –). This methodology can be used to develop two types of theory: substantive and formal. Substantive theory is theory that is developed for an empirical area of sociological inquiry, and the authors provide examples such as patient care or professional education. Formal theory is theory developed for a conceptual area of sociological inquiry, such as stigma or power. Considering differences and similarities between the data allows a researcher to ‘generate abstract categories and their properties, which, since they emerge from the data, will clearly be important to a theory explaining the kind of behaviour under observation’ (Glaser and Strauss, : ). The authors clarify the function of such grounded theory: the sociologist with theoretical generation as his major aim need not know the concrete situation better than those involved in it (an impossible task anyway). His job and his training are to do what these laymen cannot do – generate general categories and their properties for general and specific situations and problems. These can provide theoretical guides for the layman’s action. The sociologist thereby brings sociological theory, and so a different perspective, into the situation of the layman. This new perspective can be very helpful to the latter. (Glaser and Strauss, : )
The sampling advanced by the traditional type of grounded theory is known as theoretical sampling. This is the ‘process of data collection for generating theory whereby the analyst jointly collects, codes, and analyzes his data and decides what data to collect next and where to find them, in order to develop his theory as it emerges’ (Glaser and Strauss, : ). Central to this sampling approach is the idea that while the initial decisions for the collection of data are based only on a general sociological perspective and on a general subject or problem area, the process of data collection is controlled by the emerging theory. In this way, the initial sampling decisions are not based on a preconceived theoretical framework. A key concept in grounded theory is constant comparison, which underpins and enables its unique process of constructing theory. The constant comparative method, as it is known, involves comparing elements such as emergent concepts and categories throughout the duration of the research and ensures the researcher’s theorizations remain grounded in the data (Glaser, ). The constant comparative method involves four stages: () comparing incidents applicable to each category, () integrating categories and their properties, () delimiting the theory, and () writing the theory. In the first stage, the analyst codes incidents in the data into as many categories as possible, comparing incidents against one another to create new categories. In the second stage, the analyst compares incidents with the emergent categories, thereby supporting the integration of categories and their properties. If ‘the data are collected by theoretical sampling at the same time that they are analysed (as we suggest should be done), then integration of the theory is more likely to emerge by itself ’ (Glaser and Strauss, : ) Third, reduction refers to the analyst discovering underlying uniformities in the original set of categories or their properties, which can then formulate the theory with a smaller set of higher level concepts. This process concludes sampling at the point of theoretical saturation: when no additional data or insights can be found with which to develop properties of a category. Fourth, when the researcher is convinced that their analytic framework forms a systematic substantive theory or explanation of behaviour, then they can publish their results.
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One example of scholars employing grounded theory to study identity work is Kreiner et al. (). The authors examined how members of a particularly demanding occupation, Episcopal priests, conduct identity work to negotiate an optimal balance between personal and social identities. The authors ‘followed the tradition of grounded theory’ in their design and analysis, before concluding at the point of ‘theoretical saturation’ with explicit reference to Glaser and Strauss (Kreiner et al., : –). This allowed the authors to build a grounded, theoretical explanation for the patterns observed in informants’ words and to represent identity work in the actual words of informants and in the basic codes used in analysis. The resulting model of identity work illustrates the complex interactions between individual and situational influences as individuals strive for optimal balance. Their model shows how individuals employ various identity work tactics to differentiate (segment) or integrate (merge) their individual and social identities. Their study therefore highlights how the traditional type of grounded theory can be applied to the subject of identity to provide explanations and predictions, in this case how individuals engage in identity work to balance between being ‘true to oneself ’ while trying to comply with identity demands and role expectations.
Constructivist Grounded Theory Kathy Charmaz () was one of the first researchers to describe her approach explicitly as constructivist grounded theory (Mills et al., b). This type of grounded theory methodology has proved popular across a range of different disciplines, including nursing (Mills et al., a) and psychology (Fassinger, ). Many aspects of constructivist grounded theory are similar, if not the same, as the traditional type. For instance, both employ the constant comparative method, theoretical sampling, and saturation. Underlying constructivist grounded theory, however, is a distinctive set of assumptions and aims. Charmaz (: ) explains the core of this distinction: In the classic grounded theory works, Glaser and Strauss talk about discovering theory as emerging from data separate from the scientific observer. Unlike their position, I assume that neither data nor theories are discovered. Rather, we are part of the world we study and the data we collect. We construct our grounded theories through our past and present involvements and interactions with people, perspectives, and research practices.
Constructivist grounded theory, therefore, seeks to keep the researcher close to the participants and to maintain the participant’s presence throughout the research process (Mills et al., b). This type of grounded theory seeks to develop interpretive theories. Interpretive theories ‘aim to understand meanings and actions and how people construct them’ (Charmaz, : ). These theories are developed through the theorist’s interpretation of the phenomena studied. Interpretive theories ‘allow for indeterminacy rather than seeking causality and aiming to theorize patterns and connections’ (Charmaz, : ). These theories, to a greater extent than the traditional type of grounded theory, bring in the subjectivity of the actor and recognize the subjectivity of the researcher. Charmaz embraces the process of theoretical sampling found in the traditional type of grounded theory. Theoretical sampling relates only to the development of theories and is not concerned with representing a population or generalizability (Charmaz, , ). Her approach, however, emphasizes the need to appreciate the role of the researcher in
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shaping the collection and analysis of data. Charmaz holds that the researcher actively constructs data in concert with his or her participants. As she goes on to argue, ‘[u]nlike Glaser, I assume that the interaction between the researcher and the participant produces the data and therefore the meanings that the researcher observes and defines’ (Charmaz, : ). In this way, constructivist grounded theory holds that the researcher is a co-producer of the data. As such, Charmaz encourages researchers to become self-aware about how and why they gather the data, thereby rejecting the idea that such data is waiting to be discovered in the field (cf. Glaser and Strauss, ). The analytical process varies between traditional and constructivist types of grounded theory. The key concept of constant comparison is also employed in constructivist grounded theory, to guide the generation of successively more abstract concepts and theories. Charmaz (), however, encourages researchers to immerse themselves in the data to embed the narrative of the participants in the construction of theory. As Mills et al. (b) point out, this immersion occurs through the use of coding language that is active in its intent and that ‘helps to keep that life in the foreground’ (Charmaz, : ). Charmaz notes that ‘objectivist grounded theorists remain separate and distant from research participants and their realities’ (Charmaz, : ). This is an important distinction as it informs the differing theoretical outcomes between traditional and constructivist grounded theory. For constructivist grounded theory, there is no single theoretical explanation of one reality but, instead, multiple realities. As such, ‘knowledge – and theories – are situated and located in particular positions, perspectives, and experiences’ and any theory is an imaginative interpretation (Charmaz, : ). Such constructivism, therefore, fosters researchers’ reflexivity about their own interpretations as well as those of their research participants. This also manifests in what Charmaz (: ) describes as rendering through writing, using rhetorical devices and linguistic techniques to mirror how the theory was constructed; for instance, using language to covey the role of emotion. This contrasts with the ‘conventional reporting’ found in traditional types of grounded theory (Charmaz, : ). An example of scholars employing Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory is Aujoulat et al.’s () study of how the experience of illness can disrupt identities. They studied forty chronically ill patients in Belgium and Italy, to understand the process of empowerment as it may occur in patients whose experience of illness has at some point induced a feeling of powerlessness, which they conceptualized as a threat to their senses of security and identity. With reference to Charmaz, the researchers employed grounded theory as a flexible set of inductive strategies to building theories from within the participants’ own frames of reference (Charmaz, ). The researchers found that most participants were found to be struggling between two dimensions of identity work. The first was the process of separating their identity as an ill person from previous identities by ‘Holding on’ to previous social roles and self-images and trying to take control over the diseased body. The second was the process of integrating their identity as an ill person into a coherent whole by ‘Letting go’, and thereby learning to identify and accept both the boundaries and possibilities linked to their being ill. By reconceptualizing patient empowerment as evolving from a threat to one’s senses of security and identity, the authors offered a deeper and more nuanced insight into how patients can be empowered. This centred on integrating different and sometimes conflicting aspects of one’s self to develop a renewed and valuable sense of self, which
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entailed differentiating one’s self from illness and by integrating illness into a reconciled self. Their study indicates how constructivist forms of grounded theory can be used in terms of identity to draw on rich narrative accounts as the basis for the construction of theories with explicit reference to the interactions between researchers and participants.
Phenomenology The term phenomenology refers to the study of phenomena, where a phenomenon is anything that appears to someone in their conscious experience (Moran, ). This explicit focus on experience is at the heart of all types of phenomenological research. Two variants of phenomenology have become particularly prominent: descriptive and interpretive (Finlay, ). Building on Gill (), we explore these two variants that offer different ways to examine individuals’ experiences. They each draw on the ideas of different phenomenological philosophers, with descriptive types employing aspects of Edmund Husserl’s ideas and interpretive types drawing on elements of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Edmund Husserl is widely recognized as the father of phenomenological philosophy and his work directly informs ‘descriptive’ phenomenological methodologies, which seek to describe the essence of experiences. Husserl (translated by Palmer, : ) states that the term phenomenology designates two things: ‘a new kind of descriptive method which made a breakthrough in philosophy at the turn of the century, and an a priori science derived from it’. Husserl refers to his descriptive method as ‘reduction’, which underpins the analytical process of several phenomenological methodologies. By disconnecting from, or transcending, the natural attitude of the ‘everyday life’, Husserl argued his approach accessed “transcendentally” purified phenomena’ (Husserl, : ) that was free from everyday assumptions. Amedeo Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method is a highly cited and explicated type of phenomenology (see Wertz, ). Giorgi (a) has detailed his modifications to Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy to create a psychological phenomenology and a phenomenological science. His phenomenology aims to establish and present the essence of a particular psychological phenomenon (Giorgi, , , ). Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, developed his own type of phenomenology philosophy, which he described as the science of the being of entities – ontology’ (Heidegger, : ). Heidegger explores the human experience of being, which he terms ‘Dasein’. He states that the ‘methodological meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation’ and that ‘Phenomenology of Daesin is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of interpretation’ (: emphasis retained) Heidegger brings interpretation to the fore and is clear that we cannot bracket our assumptions. Jonathan Smith’s interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a recent type of phenomenology (Smith, ) that emphasizes interpretation in line with Heidegger. It has become increasingly used across the social sciences, yielding hundreds of studies (Smith, ).
Descriptive Phenomenology Amedeo Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method aims to establish and present the essence of a psychological phenomenon, where an essence is the essential structure of a
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psychological experience (Giorgi, , ). He argues that a phenomenological description is achieved through a direct grasping of the essential structure of phenomena as they appear in consciousness. Descriptive phenomenologists seek to clarify the nature of the phenomenon being studied in a scientific sense to explicate the essence of an experience irrespective of the individuals involved, such that idiographic details are discarded or typified and generalized (Finlay, ). Giorgi (, b) provides detailed instruction to other researchers seeking to employ his descriptive method. In terms of sampling, Giorgi calls for at least three participants as ‘a sufficient number of variations are needed in order to come up with a typical essence’ (Giorgi, : ). A small number of participants enables researchers to assess all data. Data is the description of a situation by an experiencer (Giorgi, a) and is usually collected through interviews. Giorgi posits that his approach calls for the performance of ‘scientific practices’ (Giorgi, : ), so as to separate it from the philosophical practice proposed by Husserl. He thus terms it a modified Husserlian approach (Giorgi, ), which requires the researcher to ‘bracket personal past knowledge and all other theoretical knowledge . . . so that full attention can be given to the instance of the phenomenon that is currently appearing to his or her consciousness’ (Giorgi, b: ). He outlines four analytical steps. First, a researcher reads the full description provided by a participant of a specific experience. Second, a researcher reads these descriptions to identify ‘meaning units’. Meaning units are the separate sections of an interview that present a change in meaning for the participant, in relation to a phenomenon (Gill, ). Third, a researcher examines such meaning units through imaginative variation. Imaginative variation entails a researcher thinking about aspects of an experience, adding or removing aspects until the resulting transformation no longer describes the experience underlying an experience (Spiegelberg, ). Fourth, a researcher integrates these meaning units into a consistent statement of the structure of the phenomenon, which equates to its essence. The research outcome of this methodology is, therefore, distinct from the previously examined types of grounded theory, as it does not offer a theoretical explanation but, instead, a descriptive statement that describes the essence of a phenomenon. An example of a researcher employing descriptive phenomenology to examine identity work is Willig’s () study of what it means to individuals to engage in practices which are physically challenging and risky. She built on previous research that highlighted how ‘identity work was an important part of the bungee-jumpers’ motivation for perseverance with the sport’ as they sought to construct a high risk identity that offered a range of psychological and social benefits (Willig, : ). Willig interviewed eight extreme sports practitioners, including skydivers and mountaineers. She was guided by descriptive phenomenological approaches that were ‘influenced by Giorgi’s (Giorgi, , ; Giorgi and Giorgi, ) descriptive pre-transcendental Husserlian phenomenology’ (Willig, : ). Her aim, therefore, was to identify the basic structure of a phenomenon based upon the convergence of participants’ accounts. Willig identified nine themes that structured a description of the essence of participating in extreme sports: context, challenge, suffering, other people, mastery and skill, contrasts, being in the present, compulsion, and pleasure. Identity emerged as a crucial component of this essence, as the participants’ experiences only became possible when they developed certain expertise that involved status and identity formation within the context of a community of likeminded and supportive
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peers. Thus, the participants experienced a sense of being at risk of serious injury combined with feeling ultimately safe through the construction of a new personal identity. Her study demonstrates how descriptive types of phenomenology can be applied to the study of identity to establish the essential structure of certain psychological experiences that is typical across a population.
Interpretive Phenomenology Smith’s interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) aims to understand the meanings that experiences hold for participants (Smith and Osborn, ). IPA’s idiographic focus, such that it seeks to understand individuals’ contextualized experiences, renders it distinct from those phenomenological approaches that seek to establish essences, such as Giorgi’s descriptive method. Smith and colleagues () have provided detailed guidelines in terms of how to employ IPA and encourage the expansion of interpretive phenomenology from psychology into cognate disciplines, for researchers seeking to examine the experiential. IPA’s idiographic nature shapes its approach to sampling. In seeking to capture and convey the richness of a particular person’s experience, Smith has argued for single case studies where a single participant is used (Smith, ). Others have described this as a ‘less is more’ approach and noted that ‘the mean number of participants involved in IPA research to date is ’ with the larger sample sizes being a function of the use of focus groups or comparison groups (Reid et al., : ). While IPA can employ observations and focus groups, as they are helpful for researchers to understand particular contexts (Smith et al., ), data collection usually involves semi-structured interviews. Smith and Osborne () outline four stages of inductive analysis for researchers. The first is reading one transcript closely to establish emerging themes that capture the ‘essential quality’ of the respondent’s comments. The second is clustering together connected or related themes to create master themes. Third, a researcher uses the emergent themes from the first transcript to guide the iterative analysis of other transcripts to create a final table of master themes. Fourth, the outcome of the analytical process is a set of themes, ‘often organised into some form of structure (a coding overview, table of themes, hierarchy, or model)’ (Reid et al., : ). These themes structure an analytical commentary or narrative of the researcher’s interpretation of the participants’ accounts with reference to verbatim extracts. This outcome is distinct from types of grounded theory, as IPA does not offer a theoretical explanation but instead an interpretive phenomenological account. This interpretive account is distinct from those found in descriptive phenomenology (e.g. Giorgi, ) that purports to establish an essence as its idiographic focus presents its participants’ accounts as bound to a particular content. As Smith has noted, IPA studies are also ‘interrogative’, as their results ‘do not stand on their own, but rather are subsequently discussed in relation to the extant psychological literature’ (Smith, : ). An example of a researcher employing an interpretive phenomenological approach to study of identity work is Gill’s (a) study of management consultants’ mental health. Gill sought to understand the implications of consultants’ elite identity constructions. He adopted ‘an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach’ and noted that a ‘distinctive feature of IPA is its commitment to a detailed interpretative and idiographic
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account’ (Gill, a: ). By establishing common themes across the participants and providing narrative extracts, Gill showed how the continual promotion of identity work to build and maintain an elite identity, within the consulting firm, leaves many of the consultants feeling acutely anxious about their status. This study highlights how interpretive types of phenomenology can be applied to the subject of identity to understand how individuals experience and make sense of their identity constructions, without seeking to generalize beyond a small population and respecting contextualized differences in people’s experiences.
G S G T P M
.................................................................................................................................. There is no orthodox or standard type of grounded theory or phenomenology. As noted earlier, the four methodologies contained in the typology are not exhaustive. Numerous other types exist, each with their own characteristics, across grounded theory (e.g. Corbin and Strauss, ; Dey, ) and phenomenological research methods (e.g. Benner, ; Moustakas, ; Sanders, ). This chapter does, however, help to guide researchers through some of the existing methodological variation by highlighting the key and often distinctive features of each of these four types. Below, I offer some guidelines to help researchers choose between these four methodologies to adopt one that is most apposite to their research needs. These guidelines draw on the previous section’s comparisons of the research aims, sampling, and key analytical steps associated with each type of methodology.
Research Aim(s) The question that a researcher is seeking to answer and the intended outcomes should inform their choice of a methodology. Grounded theory and phenomenology serve different purposes. Grounded theory seeks to generate an inductive theory. Phenomenology seeks to understand lived experiences. At the simplest level, therefore, researchers need to establish if they are ultimately seeking to build theories or to provide an account of lived experiences. A theory, according to Glaser and Strauss (: ) ‘provides us with relevant predictions, explanations, interpretations, and applications’ that can provide a deep explanation of the kinds of behaviour or situations under observation. In contrast to such abstract explanations, a phenomenological account offers insight into how individuals experience and understand a phenomenon. Beyond this core distinction, different types of grounded theory and phenomenology have distinctive aims (see Table .). These aims reflect a certain set of epistemological and ontological assumptions. For example, traditional grounded theory seeks to discover theoretical explanations. Constructivist grounded theory holds that we construct our
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theories with our participants and through our interpretations, thereby producing ‘a’ theory rather than ‘the’ theory. Similarly, while descriptive phenomenology seeks to describe a typical essence, interpretive phenomenology seeks to describe a contextualized lived experience. A researcher should consider the assumptions underpinning a research project and how they align to an appropriate methodology.
Sampling The types of methodology discussed in this chapter offer very different prescriptions for sampling. Across the various types of grounded theory, theoretical sampling informs the selection and number of participants up until the point of theoretical saturation (Charmaz, ). By contrast, phenomenology typically requires small samples without any point of saturation, as exemplified in the types discussed in this chapter. There are exceptions to this, such as Benner and colleagues’ adoption of theoretical saturation within their type of interpretive phenomenology (Benner, ). Furthermore, even in the two types of phenomenology discussed in this chapter, differences in sampling persist. Interpretive phenomenologists, such as Smith et al. (), can and often do interview a single participant. Descriptive phenomenologists, like Giorgi (), require at least three participants.
Key Analytical Steps The different types of methodologies discussed here employ often overlapping methods of data collection. The methodologies considered in this chapter all use interviews. Grounded theorists frequently perform observations, though, and this is less common in interpretive phenomenological studies (though some types explicitly encourage observations; see Benner, ). In addition, Jonathan Smith has noted that he is ‘generally cautious or sceptical’ regarding the use of focus groups, as semi-structured interviews are ‘more obviously consonant’ with IPA’s commitment to ‘detailed explorations of personal experience’ (Smith, : ). Nonetheless, Smith does not rule out such methods and notes that the use of focus groups is ripe for exploration. Each type of methodology also advances its own analytical steps and terminology. Thus, the selection of a specific methodology also guides the researcher along a certain course of action. For instance, the constant comparative method (Glaser, ) is central to both types of grounded theory considered in this chapter. While constant comparison has some similarities to the iterative analytical processes found in descriptive and interpretive types of phenomenology, in which phenomenologists constantly check their interpretations against available data (Smith and Osborn, ), it remains a distinct concept. Constant comparison involves many stages and ‘combines systematic data collection, coding, and analysis with theoretical sampling in order to generate theory’ (Kolb, : ). Thus, the constant comparison method in grounded theory is more than just another name for a similar process found in phenomenological studies but guides the research towards the construction of theory.
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F R C
.................................................................................................................................. The comparisons within and across the methodological approaches provided in this chapter have begun to chart the contours of different qualitative research methodologies. This is an important if small step in addressing the limited methodological guidance available for identities and identity work scholars. There are many other favoured methodologies within the social sciences beyond grounded theory and phenomenology. Though it is beyond the scope of a single chapter, much more work is required to develop a more detailed map of the methodological terrain. This would serve researchers by allowing them more easily to understand key differences and varying assumptions between multiple methodologies. Such a map would inform researchers’ methodological choices and, potentially, open new opportunities to investigate established phenomena, thereby generating novel insights and contributions. It may also support cooperation and understanding between scholars who have traditionally employed one or a small number of methodologies. At the very least, a broader understanding of the ever-growing variety of qualitative methodologies employed by social scientists would foster stronger and more apposite connections between research questions and the collection and analysis of data. Such a map could also move beyond the consideration of methodologies as ostensive routines of action that guide research (Feldman and Pentland, ) and examine how they have been, continue to be, and could be performed in different ways. For instance, while grounded theory and phenomenological research tend to focus on the examination of contemporary sources, there is an opportunity to develop clear guidance in terms of how to collect and analyse historical sources (see Gill et al., ). In addition, there are many studies that have used mixed methods, combining quantitative and qualitative studies, for both grounded theory (Kreiner et al., ) and phenomenology (Gill et al., ). Further mapping of the terrain might consider how different methodologies can interact and inform one another to yield new approaches to the study of identity. Related research questions include: What makes each methodology, or methodological type, unique? How might these unique features enable or constrain multiple methodologies being integrated to develop new approaches? The growing plurality in qualitative research methodologies provides considerable opportunities to understand identity in many new ways. Such plurality also yields increasing complexity and makes comprehending the range of different approaches difficult, thereby preventing many of the opportunities for identity scholarship from being realized. In response, this chapter has begun to address this problem by considering the variation between and within two popular methodological approaches. These comparisons serve to support researchers in navigating the complexity of methodological decision-making and support the development of new insights into identities in organizations.
R Anteby, M. and Molnar, V. (). ‘Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm’s Rhetorical History’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –.
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Practising Reflexive Researcher Identity Work ......................................................................................................................
Abstract Research often entails engaging with others from a different race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, or other identity marker. These encounters can lead to a ‘bending back’ on the self that challenges taken for granted aspects of our research identity. This chapter explores the ‘spaces of possibility’ created in the encounter between researchers and research subjects. Drawing on encounters from her own fieldwork, the author explores being both an insider and outsider in the research process and how this led to different kinds of shared identity work, as well as the ways in which she has been ‘undone’ by her encounter with others in the research process.
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.................................................................................................................................. R is the ability of individuals to ‘consider themselves in relation to their social contexts and vice versa’ (Archer, : ). A distinguishing feature of reflexivity is its selfreferential characteristic of bending back some thought upon the self (Archer, ). Being reflexive researchers means thinking about our own identity and how it contributes to the construction of meaning in the research process (Phillips and Hardy, ). It means acknowledging that research processes act on us and that our identity work is inevitably shaped and informed by the people we encounter in the field (Gilmore and Kenny, ). Academic conventions mean that the ways in which researchers relate to, and are shaped by, our research subjects are often written out of the research process. In this chapter, I write about my own experiences of doing research and being ‘undone’ by my interactions with ‘others’ in the field (Butler, ). Writing about this doing and undoing makes me vulnerable. It could become egotistical navel gazing (Cunliffe, ) or a romanticizing of the self (Coffey, ). But the value of grounded, reflexive accounts of research practice is
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that they can show how researcher identity is sustained, challenged, developed, and undone through processes of social interaction (Brown, : ). In this chapter, I examine my identity as a researcher, I also explore how it intersects with other identities: as an older woman; a mother; and a non-Indigenous Australian. In highlighting this reflexive identity work I also explore how we might ‘grow and change alongside’ our theories (Hibbert et al., : ). In the reflections below, drawn from three different research projects, I plot points in my ongoing reflexive identity work as a researcher. Coupland and Brown (: ) stress that identities need to be studied ‘on location’ so that identity processes, practices, and power relations are made visible. The research sites discussed below have played a crucial role in my ongoing process of becoming a researcher and in the way I have come to think about the academic craft of generating knowledge. I share excerpts from interview transcripts, fieldwork notes, and a self-reflexive interview to document my identity work as a researcher and to demonstrate how we can be ‘undone’ by our research. I put the spotlight on myself, the researcher, to explore the relationships between identity and reflexivity in the research process and show how doing research can lead to feelings of doubt, frustration, and confusion as researchers experience being both the same and different to our research subjects (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, : ). I also want to acknowledge how as researchers we rely on others gifting their stories to us, often in situations of unequal power (Flanagan, ). In the chapter, I explore reflexive identity work as a practice that seeks to understand the power relations of location and position, which is aware of the possibilities of appropriation, and tries to avoid it, that eschews the constraints of disciplinary theories and methodologies, and avoids categorization that enables exploitation (Skeggs, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Reflexivity arises out of processes of social interaction (Callero, ). There is a long tradition of reflexive research in organization studies with several scholars identifying how reflexivity shapes interactions in the research process (Alvesson et al., b; Cunliffe, ; Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ; Ford et al., ; Gilmore and Kenny, ; Hardy et al., ; Hibbert et al., ; Holland, ; Humphreys, ). Being reflexive during fieldwork can help researchers question the social processes of their research and the impact that they might have on the research outcomes, as well as bringing to the fore the power relationships between participants and researchers (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ). Writing reflexively can be a device to gain the trust of readers; however, reflexivity requires us to acknowledge that this writing is itself a construction (Alvesson et al., b). Researcher narratives can be a way of reflexively returning the author openly to the research text (Humphreys, ). Ford et al. (: s.) argue that the reflexive academic writer will be concerned with issues of voice, prompting the reflexive question, ‘How is it that I am speaking?’ Hardy et al. () argue that reflexivity needs to extend beyond concerns with the researcher to considering how the researcher and the research
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community produce the research subject. Such a reflexive stance can also enable intellectual critique as the researcher examines the impact of the knowledge norms and conventions of their academic discipline and opens themselves to ideas from other disciplines (Holland, ). Finally, being a reflexive researcher can also involve deconstructing texts to reveal alternative meanings (Alvesson et al., b). The common theme in all these approaches is the need to conduct research in a way that ‘turns back upon, and takes account of, itself ’ (Hardy et al., : ). If we fully embrace the concept of reflexivity in the research process, then we can begin to understand the ways in which our research constructs both the research subject (Hardy et al., ) and our identities as researchers (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ; Ford et al., ; Gilmore and Kenny, ). We come to the research setting as ‘selves-in-process’; just as we are biographers of others, we are also biographers of ourselves (Coffey, : ). Reflexivity enables us to probe and intentionally surface these identity relations (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ). Identity work is also an inherently reflexive, relational process: individuals negotiate who they are and their position in relation to others to narrate a ‘precarious sense of [their own] coherence and distinctiveness’ (Alvesson and Willmott, : ). Identity is always discursively and reflexively understood (Kuhn, ) and our identities are ‘ad hoc and positional’ (Brown, : ). Identity refers to our ongoing efforts to answer the twin questions, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How shall I relate to others?’ (Alvesson et al., a; Brown, ). To be able to answer these two self-directed questions, we need to ask a third question, which is directed to another, ‘Who are you?’ This question is central to recognition of oneself and therefore to reflexivity. It is built on the assumption that ‘there is another before us whom we do not know and cannot fully apprehend’ (Butler, : ). This is reflexivity incited by another, so that one person’s discourse leads another person into self-reflection (Butler, : ). In the case of research, the research subject’s discourse will lead the researcher to engage in self-reflection. Our identity is reliant on the other because ‘we cannot exist without addressing the other and without being addressed by the other . . . there is no wishing away our fundamental sociality’ (Butler, : ). Being separate from, but also interdependent with others creates the ‘irreducible ambiguity that lies at the heart of identity construction’ (Collinson, : ). Identity work can give rise to insecurity and uncertainty (Collinson, ) and unresolved antagonisms (Clarke, et al., ). Research is also a relational process in which identity work takes place and this process can generate feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and confusion as researchers struggle with choices about respondent relationships, relevant data, and ethical dilemmas (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ; Locke et al., ). Fieldwork can generate moments of ‘biographical disruption’ where the interplay between the inner self and the social self is disrupted and the individual is faced with having to reconcile (Watson, ) or incorporate (Clarke et al., ) contradictions between an inner and outer self. These episodes can trigger more intense and active identity work as well as greater reflexive awareness of identity (Alvesson, ) on the part of researchers. The nature and intensity of the identity work that takes place within the research process will be influenced by the ‘insider/outsider’ status of the researcher and the positioning of the researcher as ‘same/different’ to/from their research subjects (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ). Being an insider—part of the community that is studied—can help to build
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rapport and access information (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ). Being the same gender, race, age, or sexuality as our respondents can make it easier to ‘enact connectedness’ with our research participants and to ‘walk alongside’ them as we generate insights about them (Hibbert et al., : ). Although not necessarily realized at the time, this research process may also generate insights about ourselves as researchers (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ). The identity work that takes place in the research process will be much more intense and observable when the researcher is an ‘outsider’ and/or ‘different’ to their research subjects. Researchers can experience a sense of powerlessness when they experience being a stranger in a research setting that is unfamiliar, and this outsider status can involve distinct identity challenges (Gilmore and Kenny, : ). In the sections below, I share data and reflections from three research sites. In the first research site, I experienced being an ‘insider’ and the ‘same’ as my research respondents, while in the second, I experienced being ‘different’ and an ‘outsider’. In the third section, I have placed myself in the position of research subject and share reflections from a self-reflexive interview with my PhD student, Stephanie Dunk, in which I explore how I have been ‘undone’ by my encounter with an ‘other’ (Butler, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In the sections below, I explore what it means to ask ‘who am I?’ in the context of the research process and the meaning I reflexively attach to myself as a researcher (Brown, : ). The three reflections highlight different levels of reflexivity (Holland, ). In the first reflection, I explore reflexive moments ‘in time’, as well as the reflexive moments ‘after time’ when the interview has become a research artefact (Riach, : ). In the second reflection, I explore the emotional dimension of reflexivity and what it feels like to be a stranger in the research setting (Gilmore and Kenny, ), as well as the power relations inherent in such contexts (Skeggs, ). In the third and final reflection, I explore a potentially more radical form of reflexivity that adopts a posture of vulnerability that requires the researcher to be receptive to the limits of knowing (Page, ).
Shared Identity Work in the Research Process The data in this section of the chapter are drawn from long, semi-structured interviews exploring the discursive construction of age and intergenerational relations in the Australian division of a large, global engineering firm. I often joke when presenting the findings from this research that I am embracing my research fully by engaging in ageing myself. That joke always gets me a few laughs, but there are other aspects to my ageing female corporeality that have shaped the way that I have engaged with my research subjects and the themes that I am drawn to in the data. Here I want to focus on two conversations with older women¹ employed in administrative support roles. Returning to these interviews and focusing on both my responses and those of my interviewees allows me to show how ‘both researcher
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and respondents influence each other . . . and the identity work that takes place in such conversations’ (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, : ). Apart from being ‘older’, these women and I had other similarities: like them, I began my paid working life in administrative roles and I was cognizant that if I had not made the choice to leave the workforce and go to university then I could have been doing similar work to my respondents. This was not a sense of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, rather it engendered in me a respect for these women who disclosed throughout the interview the strong attachment they had maintained to work despite facing change in both their work and personal lives. In short, I could identify with these women and in returning to the transcripts, I could see how I used this identification, not only to build rapport but also to engage in my own identity work during the interviews. In the two short interview excerpts below, I adopt the approach advocated by Hibbert et al. (: ) to ‘see ourselves as fellow participants with our research “subjects”, seeking to walk alongside them’, to generate insights about them. Of course, as a ‘fellow participant’, this research also generated insights about me. The first reflection is from an interview with Gloria. Very early on in the interview told me that she was . Our conversation following this demonstrates identity work that helped to build rapport quickly between Gloria and me. More than this though, it also allowed Gloria to position herself as someone who is older but does not look older: Gloria: I turned last year. Leanne: Oh, wow. Gloria: Yeah! Leanne: You look fabulous. Gloria: Thank you. Leanne: Do you feel – do you get that comment a lot? Gloria: Yeah, a lot of people say to me you don’t look and I think it’s probably in my genes because my mum’s and she doesn’t look . Leanne: You’re very – quite modern in your dress. Gloria: Yes, do you think I’m dressed too young? Leanne: No, not at all. Gloria: It’s funny you should say that because all this stuff that I’ve got on is Motto. Do you know the brand Motto? You should check it out. Gloria and I share an ageing corporeality, and this allowed me to connect with her early in the interview process. Together, we engaged in identity work as older women. In this exchange, we co-construct my identity as a ‘sympathetic observer’ (Hardy et al., : ). Gloria worked hard to look younger than her age and assumed I did too, and I went along with her by responding as required, complimenting her and reinforcing her identity as an older woman who did not look her age. Throughout the rest of the interview, recognition of a shared intercorporeal vulnerability (Tyler, ) constituted both a ‘spoken and unspoken’ bond as Gloria and I ‘collaborated’ in co-constructing a shared narrative (Riessman, : ) as older women. In the second reflection, a comment that another respondent, Christine, makes about a young colleague with a ‘terrible memory’ leads to a short exchange about our sons. In retrospect, I am surprised by how quickly I share something very personal with Christine, given I had just met her and we were only minutes into the interview. At the same time,
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I am conscious that this is exactly what I hope my interview respondents will do, i.e. open up to someone they have just met. This exchange is a reminder that we bring ourselves to the interview space and that the interview is a ‘porous and dynamic relational context’ (Hibbert et al., : ). Christine: We’ve got a young girl in our team, and she would only be in her early thirties. She has a terrible memory. When you’re trying to teach her something, she has to have screen shots for everything so that she can remember to do it. Leanne: I’ve got an eighteen-year-old, who’s got an absolutely dreadful memory, but I think it might be deliberate. Christine: Is it a male, it is! I’ve got two male sons. Leanne: Me too. They are a bit like chalk and cheese though. I don’t know about your boys, but mine are very different. Christine: Yeah, well mine are too. Leanne: The younger one, I don’t know if it is, sometimes my fault? But he has a complete incapacity to remember anything. Christine: Well my youngest is now , so he had better start. Leanne: So, do you think that this organization values older workers? In the moment captured above I have ‘stepped outside the research protocol’ (Riach, : ) and engaged in discursive identity work as a mother. The last line of the extract from the interview shows that I am also quick to reset the research protocol, as I abruptly re-focus the conversation on age in the organization. Outside the space of the interview, I ask myself, ‘What had happened that morning with my son to trigger such a response during the interview?’ This exchange reminds me that interviewing is ‘a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information’ (Gould, cited in Riessman, : ). In both the reflections above, my research respondents and I not only ‘produce the unfolding account’ of the interview (Riessman, : ) we also engaged in shared identity work that constructs us as older women and as mothers.
Reflexive Vulnerability In the reflections above there is an easy rapport and openness between myself and my respondents. Undertaking fieldwork, however, can be a lonely experience. This sense of loneliness can be exacerbated if the research is being conducted a long way from home, as was the case for me when I travelled to the Northern Territory of Australia, some , km from my home in Sydney, to undertake an extended period of study. My research was with an organization providing financial services to Indigenous Australians living in remote communities across ‘the top end’ of Australia. During this fieldwork, I noted in my journal on more than one occasion that I ‘felt like a “shag on a rock”’. This Australian colloquial expression is used to capture a sense of isolation and loneliness. This sense of standing out, like a shag on a rock out at sea, was exacerbated by my different skin colour. Unlike the interviews with the older, white women with whom I was able to ‘enact connectedness’ (Hibbert et al., : ) in the context of Indigenous communities the colour of my skin made it clear that I was an ‘outsider’. During the fieldwork my status as both an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’ shifted
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and was renegotiated (McCorkel and Myers, : ). Despite centrally-authorized open access to the organization, the Indigenous workers refused to participate in the face-to-face interviews. I had been allocated a room in head office to conduct interviews and for three days I sat there waiting, but no one came to speak to me. I felt rejected, awkward, and anxious. On day four, I gave up waiting and started hanging out in the tearoom, engaging in informal conversations. These informal chats led to invitations from the Indigenous customer service officers to sit alongside them while they did their work. I had been naïve and ignorant to think that I could enact connectedness with the Indigenous staff because a chasm of difference located in a history of colonization and dispossession separated me from them. I had to confront my location and position in this research: ‘a position of mobility and power, a mobilization of cultural resources’ (Skeggs, : ). Rather than asking Indigenous research subjects to sit and meet with me on my own terms and to talk about things that I had deemed important, I was required to sit by myself and to reflect on my own practices, cultural baggage, and assumptions. I had to engage in what Spivak (: ) calls ‘unlearning one’s privilege as loss’. Engaging in this reflexive practice, and becoming attuned to my own position of power, opened me to the power relations at play in the organization. Hanging out with the tellers as they worked allowed me to understand that a lot of their job involved checking and compliance. I would not have gained these insights if I had done what I originally intended to do and interviewed the Indigenous staff. Throughout the fieldwork, I saw front-line Indigenous staff taking lots of time and care to check identities and verify signatures both at the front counter and over the phone. The tellers explained that if they make a mistake then they had to repay the money. One young teller explained how she had had to repay $A because a man came in and used fake ID to take money out of another’s account. I came to understand how a focus on compliance thrust the white, female managers into the role of ‘overseer’ (Bell, ) of their predominantly female Indigenous staff. I saw and felt these power relations play out at first hand, when I joined a white manager on a safe audit in the remote community of Ramingining. We had flown kilometres east from Darwin across northeast Arnhem Land in a four-seat Cessna and had arrived unannounced at the Ramingining office. Ramingining seldom receives visitors and the four Aboriginal women who work in the branch were acutely aware that they were being ‘checked up on’: As the audit is carried out every note and coin is counted while the customer service officers continue their work of serving the steady stream of people who come to the front counter of the branch. The branch is clearly a place for people to come and meet and chat to the bank staff. There were lots of people milling around and children climbing all over the front counter. No customers are allowed inside the branch. The Ramingining women are ‘shy’ at first, as is the young Aboriginal head office teller who has come to do the safe count. While she liaises with these women daily, this is the first time she has visited a remote Indigenous community and she explains later over lunch that she is both nervous and excited about visiting the community which she said was a ‘world away’ from her life in Darwin. The count has shown the safe to be short by $A.. The young Darwin teller is clearly embarrassed and uncomfortable while Sandra, the Training Manager, to cover her unease, talks too much. I sit quietly in the corner. I am desperately hoping that they find the $A.. I even consider giving them $. out of my purse. How wrong that would be! The tension in the room builds but amongst all this tension, Joanie, the Supervisor of the Ramingining is certain the $. can
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be accounted for. I am struck by her confidence. And she is right – the $. is accounted for. Relief is palpable all round.
Gilmore and Kenny (: ) have written that the common experience for researchers of being immersed in ‘an unfamiliar social setting in which one is a stranger’ is rarely acknowledged. I admit that being a ‘shag on a rock’ was confronting and troubling. I had to acknowledge and work with this discomfort by ‘adopting a posture of alert vulnerability’ that involved a ‘recognition of difference rather than a position of empathetic understanding that tends to reduce difference to the same’ (Jones and Jenkins, : ). This vulnerability was very different to the ‘enacting connectedness’ (Hibbert et al., : ) outlined in the first reflection from my research into age relations. In this research, my identity was that of outsider and dealing with feelings of angst and vulnerability that come with being different and distant from my research subjects was a condition of my researcher subjectivity (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, ).
Reflexive Recognition The final piece of research I will discuss began as a project exploring the stolen wages of Indigenous workers (see Kidd, ). Early in the research, my co-author Talila Milroy, a Yindjibarndi woman, said that she had been talking about our project with her maternal grandmother, Bigali Hanlon, and that Bigali was willing to share her story about being stolen² and her fight for wages compensation in the Western Australian commission.³ Bigali shared her story in an interview with Talila, telling her about being taken from her mother at the age of four and placed into a children’s home and later, unpaid domestic service. She also shared with us three folders of documentation kept on her by the State from the time she was born until she left State ‘care’ at the age of , as well as giving us access to a short film that she was making about her life with her daughter, Jodie Broun. Bigali’s generous gift was given on the condition that Talila and I would tell her story. Talila and I were mindful of the need to involve Bigali in telling her story and have shared our writing with Bigali as part of the research process (Collier and Wyer, ). We are also conscious of the interplay of our own voices and Bigali’s voice and have worked not to privilege ourselves and exclude Bigali’s voice (Cunliffe, ). These reflexive concerns have shaped the way that Talila and I engaged with Bigali’s story; however, something more has been taking place in this research process that extends beyond my identity as a researcher. I have been conscious that Bigali’s story has been acting on me in some way. As Butler (: ) posits, ‘an account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself ’. This primarily ethical relation brings us back to the identity questions posed at the beginning of the chapter. Bigali’s story has led to my own selfreflection and to the question, ‘who am I?’ (Butler, ). To explore this question and to attempt to understand the ethical relation that the research has established, I adapted a methodological technique proposed by Gilmore and Kenny () and asked my PhD student, Stephanie Dunk, to interview me as a critical friend. Gilmore and Kenny () argue that the emotional engagement of researchers with their research experiences is still under-explored, especially the ways in which researchers
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themselves are changed by their interactions with the people they study, and propose a ‘pair interview’ method for enhancing researchers’ self-reflexivity. My interview with Stephanie took the form of a self-reflexive account with the deliberate aim of exploring aspects of the research encounter that had not previously been explored or written up. The semistructured interview drew on an interview protocol of questions drawn from a literature review of papers on reflexivity. The questions generated by this review are listed in the appendix to this chapter and offered as a guide or starting point for other researchers wanting to interrogate and probe their researcher identity through a self-reflexive interview. The reflections below are from that interview where I aim to explore how Bigali’s story has been acting on me: Leanne: Bigali gave her story on the condition that we would tell it. She wants people to hear it, so that is important. When you hear someone else’s story, it impacts on you and it changes you and I guess I’ve never really engaged with someone else’s story in the way that I have with Bigali’s story or the parts of the story that we are seeking to bring to the fore – I am very mindful of that. I keep going back to Bigali’s story because the whole academic process requires me to, and every time I do, I feel like I am stuck. Not stuck with it but stuck by it. Maybe I need to get past that thinking I need to do anything. I feel quite mute, which is pretty unusual for me (laughter). I feel lost for words. I feel a sense of responsibility because it is her story and I want to honour it and I feel it has had its impact on me and I find it hard to articulate. Stephanie: Is it changing the way you think about yourself? Leanne: Part of this story is also working out my story. I have discovered that ancestor was an Indigenous woman and I struggle with that. Because I engaged so much with Talila and her grandmother’s story, I wouldn’t want to seen to be making any claim to being Indigenous. I think part of working this through, is working through my own identity and what that might mean for me. I don’t think it is changing the way that I think about myself, but it has made me think why wouldn’t I seek to know? Why wouldn’t I go out and find out about that part of my ancestry? I think if I am researching other people’s stories I should probably find out about my own story. As a way of honouring that woman [my ancestor] who has never been allowed to be part of my family’s story. Nobody talked about her because there would have been a lot of shame about that. My sense of frustration with not being able to articulate a coherent account of what it meant to find out about my Indigenous ancestry and what it might mean for me as I engage in research about and with Indigenous people, has at times led me to turn away from this research. Yet, Locke et al. () encourage researchers to turn towards and embrace not knowing; but the experience of not knowing is difficult to cultivate. The space of the selfreflexive interview allowed me to turn towards not knowing, enabling me to see, as Butler () has argued, that producing coherence accentuates our ‘undoing’ rather than alleviating it: Stephanie: Has this story changed the way you approach other research? Leanne: I think it has. I guess for me it is thinking about the nature of this kind of research and reflecting on what it does to you as a researcher. It’s about challenging the
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idea of creating some kind of coherence. Which is part of my own struggle because I find it hard to articulate the impact that this has had on me but maybe all I need to do is talk about the fragments of the experiences and not worry about it being coherent. Stephanie: Like an undoing Leanne: Like an undoing of my research persona. There are the fragments here of the ‘vulnerable methodology’ proposed by Page (: ) that questions what is known and asks, ‘What might come from an opening in not knowing?’ Page (: ) suggests that a receptivity to not knowing and remaining with uncertainty may be integral to methodological approaches. The methods we employ must allow us to be open to ‘responding to what is not understood, to what unsettles existing knowledge, and to that which cannot be explained easily through causal relations and claiming to know the other person’s intention’ (Page : ). Stephanie closed the interview with a question drawn from Cunliffe (: ): ‘so what are you going to do now?’ What am I going to do now? That’s a really good question. I think what is holding me back. Why don’t I just explore and see what happens and that is like an extension of honouring Bigali’s story. Bigali has told her story to me and there is a lot of her story that she didn’t know until she got those folders and there is a big part of my story that I don’t know about and there are people in my family who have that story so it wouldn’t be that hard for me to find out. I figure if I am going to keep writing about Indigenous issues then I need to see where I sit in all of that. So, what am I going to do, I am going to find out more about my story (Leanne).
Holland () argues that while reflexivity may be a fundamental human capacity, it can be a struggle. Part of this struggle is working through my own relationship to another’s story. Am I in danger of fixing Bigali, so that I can construct my own sense of self? Is this use of the other to know myself another form of colonialism (Ahmed, )? There is certainly a need to recognize that my ability to be reflexive via the experience of Bigali is a privilege, a mobilization of cultural resources (Skeggs, ). Listening to the story of another compels me to turn to my own story and question my own location, position, and culture. This thinking and writing about the self, marks the ‘beginning of my journey, not my final destination’ (Coffey, : ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In concluding, I return to Holland’s () observation that there are different levels of reflexivity and that it operates in different ways. I see the different effects of reflexivity on identity work as I reflect on myself through the three research projects set out above. The reflections also highlight the fact that there is no single researcher identity—rather the identity work of the researcher is a ‘movement in and out of space, cultural resources, places, bodies and others’ (Skeggs, : ). The focus shifts from the ‘what’ of identity to the ‘how’ of identity work (Ainsworth and Grant, : ) in the research process. The first reflection showed that the research context can be a site for shared identity work. Sharing
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identity categories, such as gender, age and race, with our research respondents can position us as the ‘same’ and ‘insiders’ in the research context. This positioning helps to build rapport and ‘enact connectedness’ and it also allows the researcher to develop different conversations with the data (Hibbert et al., : ). It also highlighted the porous and open nature of the research interview and how as researchers we bring more than our research identities to the research process. The second reflection highlights the emotions involved in the reflexive identity work that takes place in the research space. Feelings of loneliness and anxiety were features of this research project. These feelings generated by my position as an ‘outsider’ and ‘different’ created a sense of vulnerability. These feelings and the responses of the Indigenous respondents led me to change my approach to the research that alerted me to the power relations at play in the organization. It also led me to interrogate my ‘own location, positioning and cultural resources’ and the limitations of my capacity to know (Skeggs, : ). Here my reflexive, identity work involved ‘being self-reflexive about my own beliefs, values, and so on, and the nature of our relationships with others’, as well as, ‘being critically reflexive’ about social structures, and knowledge bases (Cunliffe : ). In the third reflection, I explore how a biographical research project has ‘undone’ my own identity and how this has led to questions about voice and power in the research process. This research has opened me to a ‘posture of alert vulnerability’ that is focused on ‘learning from difference rather than learning about the Other’ (Jones and Jenkins, : ). This is more than feeling vulnerable, it is working through what it might mean to abandon ‘the myth of representational clarity and total accessibility to the Other’ (Jones and Jenkins : ). As Skeggs (: ) argues, ‘if we need to interrogate ourselves at all it is to stop us fixing others in place so that we can theorize the benefits of mobility’. It involves staying with not knowing what to do or say (Page, ). Turning to not knowing, moves us away from the need for narrative coherence that often writes out complexity (Butler, ) because coherent accounts can impose a reified order (Ahmed, ). I have become alert to the need for a reflexive movement in my identity work as a researcher from telling to listening. As Skeggs (: ) argues, the question is not ‘can the subaltern speak?’ but rather, ‘can we hear?’ Huggins (), writing about the constant demands on Indigenous Australians to tell their stories, asks, ‘Do others really listen?’ It is listening that can discourage the ‘presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for’ the other (Alcoff, : ). Listening can quell the compulsion to give a coherent account of oneself. It can also move us from a mediated knowing of the Other to an immersive, proximal way of relating that opens ways of engaging in the kind of mutual recognition necessary to overcome hierarchical organization of difference (Ahmed, ). Cunliffe () argues that reflexivity challenges us as researchers to question knowledge and our own ways of being and encourages us to take a leap into the constantly shifting ocean rather than researching from the security of the shore. My reflexivity has led me into new theoretical waters. I find myself swimming in the seas of feminist philosophers, postcolonial scholars and Indigenous feminists. The theoretical currents are strong and sometimes I find myself out of my depth. Being open to new ideas from other disciplines and new styles of thought (Gilmore and Kenny, ; Holland, ) has moved me from an understanding of knowledge as a means of ‘knowing how’ to an early recognition of the ‘potential of knowledge as a falling
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short’, and an openness to the vulnerability ‘of not knowing in advance’ and being open to the unfamiliar (Page, : ). My identity work takes the form of a ‘contextualized imagining, sensing and connecting occurring in subjectal space’ (Cunliffe, : ). In my reflexive research practice, I am seeking to be open to: not one “moment” but many; not one “voice”, but polyvocality; not one story, but many tales, dramas, pieces of fiction, fables, memories, histories, auto-biographies, poems and other tests to inform our sense of lifeways, to extend our understandings of the Other, to provide us with the material for “cultural critique”. (Lincoln and Denzin, cited in Coffey : )
Such an approach has moved me beyond concerns with authorial identity and ‘speaking for’ research subjects (Hardy et al., ) to a focus on the ‘spaces of possibility’ created in the encounter between myself as a researcher and research subjects (Cunliffe and Karunanayake ).
.................................................................................................................................. P O S S I B L E Q U E S T I O N S F O R T H E S E L F -R E F L E X I V E RESEARCHER INTERVIEW Identity ‘Existential: Who am I and what kind of person do I want to be?’ (Cunliffe, : ) How do you position yourself as researcher? (Flanagan, ) How has that changed over the course of the research? How did the research begin? How did you secure access? (Gilmore and Kenny, ) Did your positioning change during the conceptualizing and writing phases? (Flanagan, ) What embodied responses did (do) you have to the research? (Flanagan, ) What power relations were you aware of during the fieldwork? (Flanagan, ) Were there any sticky, tricky, or messy moments that required ‘in the moment’ ethics? (Flanagan, ) What were moments of emotional intensity during the research? (Gilmore and Kenny, )
Method How did you decide on the voice for the piece? Has your own voice changed through writing up this research? (Cunliffe, ) How did you decide how to frame the data? (Parr, ) What did you leave out? (Parr, )
Change Were there particular moments, insights, issues that struck you? (Cunliffe, ) Were there particular moments in the research that changed the way that you thought about what you were doing? Or changed your perspective in some other way? (Tomm, ) ‘So what are you going to do now?’ (Cunliffe, : )
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N . I have given the two women pseudonyms. . The ‘Stolen Generations’ is a term that has come to represent one of the most oppressive of institutionalized dispossessions enacted by the white colonial administration in Australia from the s up to and including the s. Throughout this extensive period, Aboriginal people were subjected to extreme forms of surveillance and children categorized as ‘half-caste’ were removed from their Aboriginal families and placed into state care where they could be taught proper ‘civilized ways’ under the protection of Aboriginal Welfare Boards. The Australian Human Rights and Equality Opportunity Commission’s report, Bringing Them Home, estimates that in the period to between and per cent of Aboriginal children were removed from their mothers (Langton and Barry, ). . State management of the wages taken from Indigenous workers and children led to fraud, mismanagement, and misuse. These wages, along with other State and Commonwealth entitlements such as maternity benefits, invalid and widow pensions, are collectively known as ‘stolen wages’ (Kidd, ). In October , the Federal Government held a Stolen Wages Senate Inquiry. This inquiry received submissions and published a report, Unfinished Business: Indigenous Stolen Wages. The report recommended that state governments allow better access to archives, fund education campaigns, and provide legal research to support claimants in seeking compensation for wages or benefits never paid. Stolen Wages Commissions were held in four states: Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales.
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Coffey, A. (). The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Coffey, A. (). ‘Ethnography and Self: Reflections and Representations’. In T. May (ed.), Qualitative Research in Action. London: Sage, pp. –. Collier, A. and Wyer, M. (). ‘Researching Reflexively with Patients and Families: Two Studies Using Video-Reflexive Ethnography to Collaborate with Patients and Families in Patient Safety Research’. Qualitative Health Research, (), –. Collinson, D. (). ‘Identities and Insecurities Selves at Work’. Organization, (), –. Coupland, C. and Brown, A.D. (). ‘Identities in Action: Processes and Outcomes’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, , –. Cunliffe, A. L. (). ‘Reflexive Inquiry in Organizational Research: Questions and Possibilities’. Human Relations, (), –. Cunliffe, A. L. (). ‘On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner’. Journal of Management Education, (), –. Cunliffe, A. L. (). ‘On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner Redux: What Does it Mean to be Reflexive?’ Journal of Management Education, (), –. Cunliffe, A. L. and Karunanayake, G. (). ‘Working within Hyphen-Spaces in Ethnographic Research: Implications for Research Identities and Practice’. Organizational Research Methods, (), –. Flanagan, P. (). ‘Ethical Beginnings: Reflexive Questioning in Designing Child Sexuality Research’. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, (), –. Ford, J., Harding, N., and Learmonth, M. (). ‘Who Is It That Would Make Business Schools More Critical? Critical Reflections on Critical Management Studies’. British Journal of Management, , s–s. Gilmore, S. and Kenny, K. (). ‘Work-Worlds Colliding: Self-Reflexivity, Power and Emotion’. Human Relations, (), –. Gould, S. J. (). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton. Hardy, C., Phillips, N., and Clegg, S. (). ‘Reflexivity in Organization and Management Theory: A Study of the Production of the Research Subject’. Human Relations, (), –. Hibbert, P., Sillince, J., Diefenbach, T., and Cunliffe, A. L. (). ‘Relationally Reflexive Practice: A Generative Approach to Theory Development in Qualitative Research’. Organizational Research Methods, (), –. Holland, R. (). ‘Reflexivity’. Human Relations, (), –. Huggins, J. (). Sister Girl: The Writings of Aboriginal Activist and Historian, Jackie Huggins. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Humphreys, M. (). ‘Getting Personal: Reflexivity and Autoethnographic Vignettes’. Qualitative Inquiry, (), –. Jones, A. and Jenkins, K. (). ‘Rethinking Collaboration: Working the Indigene-Colonizer Hyphen. In N. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, and T. Smith (eds.), Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –. Kidd, R. (). Hard Labour, Stolen Wages. ANTaR report, August. New South Wales: Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation. Kuhn, T. (). ‘A “Demented Work Ethic” and a “Lifestyle Firm”: Discourse, Identity, and Workplace Time Commitments’. Organization Studies, (), –. Langton, M. and Barry, K. (). ‘Aboriginal Women and Economic Ingenuity’. In M. Gatens and B. Caine (eds.), Australian Feminism: A Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K., and Feldman, M. S. (). ‘Perspective—Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the Role of Doubt in the Research Process’. Organization Science, (), –. Lincoln, Y. S. and Denzin, N. K. (). ‘The Seventh Moment: Out of the Past’. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), The Landscape of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –. McCorkel, J. A. and Myers, K. (). ‘What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field’. Qualitative Sociology, (), –.
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Page, T. (). ‘Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice’. Feminist Review, , –. Parr, M. (). ‘Venturing into the Unknown of Ethnography: Reflexive Questions to Love and Cautionary Ethics to Live By’. Reflective Practice, (), –. Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (). Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction. London: Sage. Reissman, C. K. (). ‘When Gender is Not Enough’. Gender and Society, (), –. Riach, K. (). ‘Exploring Participant-Centred Reflexivity in the Research Interview’. Sociology, (), –. Skeggs, B. (). ‘Techniques for Telling the Reflexive Self ’. In T. May (ed.), Qualitative Research in Action. London. Sage, pp. –. Spivak, G. (). The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. S. Harasym. New York: Routledge. Tomm, K. (). ‘Interventive Interviewing, Part II: Reflexive Questioning as a Means to Enable SelfHealing’. Family Process, , –. Tyler, M. (). ‘Reassembling Difference: Rethinking Inclusion through/as Embodied Ethics’. Human Relations, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, , –.
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Studying Identities in Talk and Text ‘In Situ, In Vivo’ ......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter’s analysis of a New York Times op-ed article reveals how moral reasoning was undertaken in relation to three identities: the identity of Trump as an incumbent of the role of President, the identity of the writer, and, third, the identity of the collective group of Senior Officials. The moral accountability of Trump was articulated through a set of category predicates normatively associated with Presidents and category predicates normatively associated with Republicans. To have an identity is to be cast into a ‘typification’ or social type with an associated set of expectations about one’s role, relationships, and responsibilities within a culture or social structure. The chapter argues that the ethnomethodological approach underpinning membership categorization analysis (MCA) asks ‘How is identity done, managed, achieved and negotiated in situ?’ Indeed, MCA asks how people draw on and use social identities, in talk or text, in getting their everyday business done. This way of approaching the study of identity is different to other approaches that start with theories of self, or discourse, or power. To conclude, MCA enables us to analyse how, when a social category is used, the person being described is also being judged according to the set of normative expectations associated with that category.
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.................................................................................................................................. T is much work on identities in organizations but insufficient attention has been paid to how they may be studied. Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) offers one
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fruitful way forward that has not received the attention it deserves from identity scholars (e.g. Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ; Caza, et al., ). MCA involves the analysis of the social categories that people use in everyday talk and text to describe themselves and others. Social categories are the basis through which we make sense of our own identities and the identities of others not only as unique individuals but importantly as members of social groups. As Antaki and Widdicombe (: ) point out, ‘any individual can, of course, sensibly be described under a multitude of categories’: as a woman, a manager, a mother, a professional, a salesperson and so on. When people categorize themselves as a member of a social category, that categorization can be accepted, questioned, rejected, or ignored by others. The same is true when people find themselves described by others using a particular social category. Importantly, this categorization activity is part and parcel of the day-to-day work that takes place in organizations and between organizations. MCA has been described by Stokoe (: ) as the ‘milk float’ running behind the ‘juggernaut’ of Conversation Analysis (CA), capturing the different pace at which CA and MCA have taken off in the social sciences. Our aim in this chapter is to demonstrate the analytic value that can be gained from studying the categories that are used in management and organizational settings to accomplish the ‘doing’ of organizational life. MCA involves analysing three interrelated features of categories-in-use: (a) identifying which identity categories people use in talk and texts, by whom and at which moment in their interactions; (b) analysing what kinds of reasoning and inference these categories enable the speaker or writer to accomplish; and (c) what kinds of practical actions the categories are deployed within (and part of achieving)—for example acts of complaining, praising, inviting, rejecting, blaming, excusing, justifying, admonishing, and so on. In MCA, the analyst focuses on the knowledge and use of categories employed by the members of the social group themselves, not those attributed to the members by the analyst (Watson, : ). MCA invites study of the ‘routine ordinary common-sense knowledge’ people use to make sense of (and with) categories and the forms of ‘practical theorizing’ they accomplish in doing so (Housley and Fitzgerald, : ). In building upon Austin’s speech act theory, Edwards () points out that when people use categories they do so in the course of performing particular discursive actions. Categories are therefore part of doing something, not just describing something. They attend to some kind of ‘discursive business’ (Edwards, : ). Understanding this discursive business requires the analyst to investigate not only which categories get used by whom and when, but also asking ‘what is this categorization doing?’ (Watson, : ). MCA, therefore, starts with identifying which categories are used by particular people at particular moments during acts of speaking and writing, but crucially goes further to analyse what forms of practical reasoning these categories enable and what social actions they are used to accomplish. Categories are understood as ‘inference rich’ because categorization is a ‘normative practice through which inferences and implications are generated and managed’ (Benwell and Stokoe, : ). In Jayyusi’s (: ) words, categories have a ‘normative and moral infrastructure’. Describing someone as a member of a social category matters because it is consequential for the way that person’s identity is made sense of. It matters not only for how they are described but also how they are normatively evaluated (Jayyusi, ). In this chapter, we will show how categories have been used to perform moral evaluations of the US President Donald Trump.
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We will first provide an overview of the origins of MCA as it developed in ethnomethodology and later in CA. Next, we provide an overview of the types of work undertaken within organization studies that have drawn on MCA as a theory of social categories in use. We then illustrate MCA through an analysis of a New York Times editorial written by a purported anonymous member of the Trump administration in which the leadership of President Trump is described and evaluated. We conclude by outlining the analytic value of MCA and how it relates to other approaches to the study of identities in organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. MCA originates from Harvey Sacks’ influential book Lectures on Conversation and together with Conversation Analysis (CA) forms one of two main forms of ethnomethodological approaches to studying interactional practices. MCA involves the analysis of identity categories employed when people are speaking within a conversation or a written text. While CA focuses on the sequential organization of talk in interaction, MCA focuses on the ways in which actual references to categories used in talk or text enable members of a social group to accomplish whatever it is they are doing: holding a business meeting, calling a helpline, teaching a class, or putting forward an argument in a letter or speech. The question for an MCA analysis then becomes: How are social categories used to engage in forms of practical reasoning about the social world? This includes examining how membership of a category is ‘ascribed (and rejected), avowed (and disavowed), displayed (and ignored)’ (Antaki and Widdicombe, : ) in particular settings and times in the course of accomplishing some practical task. CA and MCA are ethnomethodological approaches grounded in the work of sociologist Harold Garfinkel from which the work of Harvey Sacks emerged. Some use the term EM/ CA to reference this close link (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, ). Ethnomethodological study involves focus on the way members of a society, regarded as ‘folk’ sociologists (Wieder, ) or ‘practical’ sociologists (Benson and Hughes, ) use their commonsense knowledge of the social world to accomplish social organization. People, from this perspective, are not viewed as ‘cultural and judgemental dopes’ (Watson, : ), being pushed and pulled into compliance by norms and values, but as active constructors of social worlds. Social facts are seen as accomplishments, not pre-existing ‘things’, leading Garfinkel (: ) to refer to this approach as the study of ‘fact production in flight’. While MCA scholars retain their interest in categories used in spoken interaction, it is not confined to studying talk but has also been used to study written texts. Eglin and Hester () use MCA to analyse the newspaper coverage of the Montreal Massacre, where a lone gunman killed fourteen female engineering students. They show how the newspaper descriptions employed categories and associated predicates to make sense of the underlying motive behind the attack. Eglin and Hester () analyse the suicide letter written by the gunman himself to make the attack rationally accountable, in his eyes at least. Stetson () also used MCA to analyse a Japanese newspaper story about a woman pushing a man onto train tracks and showed how alternative categorizations of the actors—either as a ‘woman’ or an ‘exotic dancer’, as a ‘teacher’ or a ‘drunk’—created ascribed identities for
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both parties, which were consequential for how blame was allocated: ‘woman versus drunk’ creates a different moral story from ‘exotic dancer versus teacher’. The concept of category predicates is an important one in MCA and is especially relevant for the study of identities in organizations. What was first described by Sacks as ‘category bound activities’ to refer to the activities typically associated with a particular category of person (‘crying’ for a baby, ‘comforting’ by a mother) has since been expanded to the concept of ‘category predicates’. Category predicates refer to the whole array of social characteristics conventionally associated with a category (Hester, : ). These characteristics could include ‘motives, rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, attributes and competencies’ that can be imputed or ascribed as ‘going with’ a category (Psathas, : ). For example, Watson () analysed the categories used in a complaint by a caller to a suicide prevention hotline. The caller invoked a number of categories in the course of her complaint about the ‘disgusting’ (Watson, : ) way she was being treated by her church, including categories of religion (Protestants, Catholics, Jewish people) and racial categories (black people and white people) and the obligations and expectations of categories of people within the church (vicar). The concept of membership categorization device (MCD) is important here. MCDs are devices for collecting together a group of categories that are typically understood as ‘going together’ (Sacks, ). Protestant, Catholic, and Jew are all members of the device ‘religion’, for example. Black and white are heard as ‘going together’ in the device ‘race’. Returning to Watson (), when the call-taker asks the caller if she has spoken to anyone at the church and whether they know she needs help, the caller resists the inference in the question, i.e. that the church have not failed in their moral duty if they do not know she needs assistance, by categorizing herself as not being the ‘type’ to ‘come screaming’ for help because that would make her a ‘beggar’ (Watson, : ). In this example, we see how two social actions—a complaint (against her church for breaking its moral obligation to offer aid) and a justification (for failing to undertake her responsibility to ask if she needs help)—are accomplished through the use of category predicates. The organization is criticized for failing in its duties through the inferences being made about rights, responsibilities, and obligations. Crucially, though, these inferences drew on common-sense understandings of categories that were not shared: the call-taker drew on a different set of inferences about the responsibility of the client (in this case the church member) to let the organization know if they needed help. Later, we will analyse the construction of ‘moral profiles’ used to present ‘specific distributions of blame, guilt or responsibility’ (Watson, : ) ascribed to President Trump as a leader.
M C O
.................................................................................................................................. As part of organizational life, categories are routinely used to describe the people who work in them and interact with them. Organizations have people who are categorized as managers and employees, leaders and followers, as senior managers and middle managers,
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as people who work for various functional departments (the ‘purchasing department’, the ‘sales team’) and business units (the ‘Brazilian headquarters’, the ‘Chinese subsidiary’). People working in organizations also categorize those they interact with during the course of doing their business. Other organizations are categorized as either competitors or allies; customers are categorized as satisfied customers or complainers, and so on. Interacting with other people inside and outside the organization would be hard to imagine without some way of categorizing those people in order to make sense of who they are and what they might be expected to be or do. The study of membership categorization activity is central to the ethnomethodological model of organizations. Hester and Eglin () term this approach to studying human societies ‘culture-in-action’, while Boden () calls it ‘organization-in-action’. Psathas (: ) explains how categories help us to understand the work of organizations: The notion here is that, if the “identities” of the parties . . . are relevant for the parties in the interaction, then these will be manifest in the various ways that the parties invoke, formulate and orient to contingently relevant membership categories. Further, by understanding how “categorization work” is ongoing, we can also understand how organizational context is invoked and made relevant by the parties since organizational identities are involved. And, since, in their talk-in-interaction they are engaged in “work”, such studies may reveal how the work of the organization is ongoingly produced in and through their interaction.
Only a handful of studies of organizations or in organizations have used MCA. SamraFredericks () showed how a senior manager led a strategic change initiative by deploying categories in interaction, painting a picture of the organization’s weaknesses and the danger that posed for its strategic plan of growth through acquisition. Llewellyn () analysed how categories play a role in the accountability of gift giving exchanges. Fairhurst’s (: ) analysis of leadership demonstrates that categories are ‘flexible linguistic resources’ that not only enable leaders to describe a situation, but also to make judgements, inferences, and decisions about what to do that lead others to hold consonant understandings. Larsson and Lundholm () used MCA to study leadership interactions in an international bank. Using audio recordings of two managers negotiating a decision about an overdrawn customer account, the authors show how ‘the negotiation about the nature of the issue is intimately associated with the interactional identities of the participants’ (Larsson and Lundholm, : ). Whittle et al. () examined audio recordings of strategy meetings to identify the role played by membership categories in the formulation and implementation of a strategic change initiative. One final example is that of Iszatt-White et al. () who also address issues of leadership in an analysis using MCA of the media representations of Jeremy Corbyn during the leadership election contest for the UK Labour Party.
A I E: T N Y T O-E P
.................................................................................................................................. On September , the New York Times ran an anonymous op-ed¹ article entitled ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration’.² The article stated that it
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was written by a ‘senior official’ within the Trump administration. We have chosen to analyse the categories used in this text for three main reasons. First, it illuminates an important phenomenon relevant to the study of organizations: namely, the relationship between leaders and followers. Second, and more specifically, it discusses a highly relevant topic of leadership ethics. Third, and finally, it was a consequential text in the sense that it was discussed in the media around the world and subsequently shaped the way in which people discussed and evaluated Trump. Both his supporters and his critics had much to say about the op-ed piece and it was a key text that informed the ongoing discourse about his presidency. In this chapter, we will focus only on the categories used in the op-ed piece itself, while noting that the analysis could also be extended to the texts and conversations that followed its publication (such as commentaries, talk shows, and stand-up comedy routines). Our analysis will address the following question: How is description and evaluation of a leader identity accomplished through the use of categories? The social actions being performed by this op-ed article include the acts of complaining, criticizing, admonishing, resisting, warning, encouraging, and inviting. Our analysis will focus on how the categories deployed in the text accomplished these social actions. First, we break down the op-ed article to show the categories used as it progresses, and second, we highlight particular category-based reasoning procedures that the author uses to present his or her account and accomplish the social actions listed above (see Table .). We will break our analysis into two sections, namely under second-tier titles ‘Author identity’ and ‘President Trump’s identity’.
Author Identity The first set of categories we focus on concerns the way in which the author positions himself or herself as part of an ‘epistemic community’. The author describes him-/herself as a member of a group of insiders who have access to privileged forms of knowledge due to their senior positions: described by the author as ‘senior officials’ and ‘top officials’. This categorization performs an important discursive function, namely positioning the author as part of a collective group who shares the views being expressed. This ‘category entitlement’—the idea that particular categories of people are treated as or claim to be knowledgeable as a result of their membership of a social category (Potter, : )—also performs the epistemic function of bolstering and corroborating the validity of the opinions being expressed (Benoit, ). It implies, ‘it’s not only me who thinks this, all members of the category senior official think this’. The author reinforces his/her identity as part of the group of senior officials. The President’s identity is then invoked through a description of his amoral behaviour as a ‘daily’ occurrence, invoking a sense of a permanent personality trait rather than idiosyncratic instances. A ‘type’ or ‘typification’ is thereby constructed. While associating with this in-group of senior officials, the author also differentiates him-/herself from this wider collective by positioning the others as sharing these views only ‘privately’, whereas the author is willing to go public, albeit under the veil of anonymity. In terms of footing (Goffman, ; see also Potter, : Figure .), the author positions him-/herself as not only the author and principal of these opinions but also the animator of a viewpoint shared by a collective (Goffman, ). At this point, the reference to a
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Table 20.1 Membership categorization analysis Membership categorizations in New York Times op-ed The author categorizes himself or herself as a member of a group of senior officials who share his or her concerns about the President (‘I am one of them’). The author disavows membership of the categories ‘the left’ and those who ‘want the administration to fail’. The author lays claim to membership of the category ‘Trump appointees’, who are said to share the characteristics of ‘having a duty to the country’ and ‘wanting to preserve the nation’s democratic institutions’, characteristics said not to be shared by Trump. The author claims to be a member of a category of people who know the same thing (‘anyone who works with him knows . . . ’)—an epistemic community—which leads them to reach the same conclusions. The author claims that members of the category ‘Republican’ share a set of conservative ideals that the President does not share, making him a non-member. The author attributes policy successes to the category ‘the administration’ rather than the President. The President is categorized as having a leadership style (‘impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective’) that impedes, rather than facilitates, policy successes. The author is positioned as a member of a category of senior officials who (privately) share the same opinions because they have similar experiences of interacting with the President. Members of this category are described as having no faith in the President and seek to avoid his decisions affecting the functioning of their departments. The author uses the category ‘unsung hero’ to describe those who disobey or ignore Trump’s orders. Insubordination is transformed into heroic behaviour through the earlier creation of a category of senior officials who share the characteristics of ‘having a duty to the country’ and ‘wanting to preserve the nation’s democratic institutions’. The author dismisses as false the category ‘villain’ used in the media to describe some of Trump’s aides. A distinction is made between appearances to outsiders (‘villains’) and reality known only to insiders (‘unsung heroes’). The author claims membership of two categories: people who are ‘adults’ and people who ‘try to do what’s right’. The author invokes categories of nations which the USA should not engage with (‘autocrats and dictators’) and those who should be regarded as allies (‘like-minded nations’). Trump is presented as aligning himself with the wrong categories. A contrast of categories of state administration is created by the author: ‘deep state’ (which is critiqued as a category) and ‘steady state’. The author lays claim to knowledge of category ‘the cabinet’, including their decisions and the justifications for those decisions. The author shifts categorization away from Trump as an individual towards the characteristics of those who put Trump into power and those who follow his lead. The category ‘we as a nation’ is ascribed responsibility for the situation. The category ‘Americans’ is invoked along with a description of what they should hold as their values, aims, and beliefs. An implicit contrast is made between Trump and the category of politicians with ‘honor’, which Senator McCain is positioned as a member of.
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The category ‘administration’ is further differentiated into two categories: those within who seek to ‘put the country first’ (including the author) and those, by implicit contrast, who do not. The category ‘everyday citizen’ is attributed the characteristics of being able to make a ‘real difference’ if they recognize they are able to ‘shed labels’ in favour of their shared identity as ‘Americans’. Note: The full article is available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-houseanonymous-resistance.html.
collective social group is also widened beyond just ‘senior officials’ to include ‘anyone who works with him’ and ‘astute observers’. This categorization practice creates a sense of a wider collective who corroborate these views. Overall, then, these membership categories perform an epistemic function, namely transforming the opinion from a subjective viewpoint (which would carry with it inferences about personal bias) into an objective statement of fact: something that ‘anyone in our shoes would see’ (Potter, : Figure .). Categories are also used to handle actual or potential attributions of motive. An op-ed piece as critical as this could easily be discredited on a number of grounds related to material or ideal interests (Lizardo and Stoltz, ) including, but not limited to, personal political ambition in seeking to displace the President to secure power for themselves or their allies, a vendetta motivated by personal conflict, or an ideological battle motivated by competing political agendas. The author focuses on the latter in particular and uses stake inoculation (Potter, : ) to discount the notion that a partisan ideological agenda is the motivation for the article by discounting the notion that the article is motivated by ‘the left’. By dis-identifying with a social group (‘the left’), the objectivity of the opinion is bolstered. Further, the author explicitly identifies as a Republican and discounts the notion that the motive for the piece arises from a pre-existing political stake, say, as someone from the rival political party most expected to be ‘resistant’ to Trump’s policies. Thus, the reader can no longer dismiss the text as ideologically motivated from an alternative political standpoint. What is contested here, therefore, is not the ‘real’ motive, which no one can ever truly access or know, but rather the ascribed motive, i.e. the ‘vocabulary of motive’ (Mills, ). The author also invokes categories in his or her description of motives. These motives ascribed to the collective include having a ‘duty to this country’ and wanting to ‘preserve democratic institutions’. These motives are used to construct the principal (Goffman, ) behind the text by invoking the persons or ideals on whose behalf the text is being written. This transforms the text from one motivated by self-interest to one claiming to be motivated by duty to the country. Importantly, the plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ are used to attribute these motives to the whole collective of ‘senior officials’ the author claims to be a member of. Other potential ascriptions of motives are also discounted when the author anticipates the potential nefarious motives that could be ascribed to those who are anti-Trump. The notion that this collective group of ‘resistors’ are acting antidemocratically is eschewed by rejecting the notion that a ‘deep state’ is in operation. Thus, the writer contests an accusation made by Trump in his tweets and by Trump supporters in books and articles (Corsi, ).
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The author also orients towards matters of moral accountability tied to categories. The fact that the moral accountability of disobeying orders by a superior is attended to shows that ‘following orders’ is a category-bound predicate of ‘senior official’ (Watson, : ). The category-bound expectation that a subordinate would follow the orders of a superior is oriented to as requiring an account: a breach in the moral order has occurred and needs to be justified in some way. This justification is accomplished through an appeal to their commitment to a higher set of ideals connected to the protection of ‘national interest’ and their ‘duty’ to the country. Breaking one set of role-bound expectations is justified through an appeal to another set of obligations that supersede these. Further justification work is also conducted to account for why the normal routes for challenging Trump’s decisions or unseating him were not followed. Writing an anonymous op-ed article criticizing the President is not a normal category-bound activity for a senior official and therefore the act of writing the article itself is an accountable action. Options such as the th Amendment,³ for example, are dismissed as risking a constitutional crisis and here again motives relating to duty to the nation are invoked to justify their rejection. A membership categorization device is used to bring together a group of people who share certain attributes: wanting the administration to succeed (thereby ruling Democrats out of the category), agreeing with the policies of the administration (thereby ruling out those who disagree on policy), having a first duty to the country (thereby ruling out nonpatriots), and holding an overriding allegiance to preserving democratic institutions (thereby ruling out those with other motives). The author, then, is positioned as merely the animator of this social group. Interestingly, notions of higher duty are conflated with the category Republican: only ‘true’ Republicans can act in the national interest.
President Trump’s Identity Within the category ‘Republican’, two social groups are in fact constructed: those who adhere to the ‘true’ or ‘proper’ ideals of conservatism (‘free minds, free markets and free people’) and those who do not. In other words, there are ‘true Republicans’ and ‘fake Republicans’. Trump is positioned in the second category, as someone who appears to represent these conservative ideals, but in fact does not belong to the category. A distinction is made between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ (Buttny, : ) and two discrediting methods are used to achieve this distinction: the terms ‘scripted’ and ‘mass-marketing’ are both used to discredit a text as not reflecting the ‘real’ view or opinion of someone. The author leads the reader to infer that they have been ‘duped’: what they think (appearance) Trump stands for is in fact the opposite (reality). What Trump espouses (appearance) is not what he really thinks or does (reality). For example, Trump is described as espousing the benefits of free trade and democracy (appearance), but his ‘impulses’ are described as ‘antitrade and anti-democratic’ (reality). This categorization discourse plays on Goffmanian notions of self-presentation, front-stage and impression management (Goffman, ), by implying that ‘what you see is not what you get’. The author proceeds to present him-/herself as fair and balanced by acknowledging the ‘bright spots’ of Trump’s administration, but these are also ‘ironicized’ (Pollner, )—that is, they should not be treated as reflecting the ‘true’ reality—in two ways. First, newspaper coverage (appearance) is ironicized as not reflecting the ‘true’ progress (reality) that has been
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made by the administration (what ‘the near ceaseless negative coverage . . . fails to capture’). Second, the ‘bright spots’ are also ironicized by claiming that the positive progress of the administration (‘effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military’) is also not what it appears to be. What would normally be attributed to the President as the leader of the administration is portrayed as achievements made despite his actions. The good things achieved by the administration (appearance) are distinguished from the behind-the-scenes activity needed to make these good things happen (reality). This appearance/reality discursive device (Buttny, : ), therefore, performs an important identity function by positioning Trump as not a ‘true Republican’ because he fails to enact the ideals (predicate) that the author associates with the category Republican. A form of category policing is being performed by the author: deciding who qualifies and should be admitted into the social category Republican. An identity category that Trump claims is here being rejected for him. The final categorization used by the writer is the category of leader. Trump is evaluated through a variety of descriptions of his personality and behaviour as a leader: impetuous, petty, adversarial. While there is certainly no universal shared common sense about what makes a good leader, these descriptions of behaviour and personality do invoke a sense of the predicates unlikely to be attributed to a competent and effective leader. Moreover, a moral landscape is laid out in which there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters. Trump is presented as amoral and, therefore, a bad character. Trump is also categorized as associating with the ‘wrong’ people, such as autocrats and dictators. The term ‘adult’ is particularly relevant here because it plays on a ‘stage of life device’ (Antaki and Widdicombe, : ) in which persons in category X who display behaviour Y warrant praise or complaint. By categorizing the senior officials the writer identifies with as ‘adults in the room’, Trump is implicitly categorized as ‘child-like’. The good characters include the author and his or her collection of senior officials, who are described as the ‘unsung heroes’ who temper Trump’s worst behaviours and unravel his bad decisions.
D
.................................................................................................................................. Our analysis of the op-ed article has revealed how moral reasoning was undertaken in relation to three identities: the identity of Trump as an incumbent of the role of President, the identity of the writer, and, third, the identity of the collective group of senior officials. The moral accountability of Trump was articulated through a set of category predicates normatively associated with Presidents (such as putting the national interest first) and category predicates normatively associated with Republicans (such as a commitment to free markets, free trade, and free people). The social action being performed—in this case criticism—was performed not through reasoning about Trump as an individual, but through the reasoning about the duties, responsibilities, and obligations normatively associated with Trump-as-a-President and Trump-as-a-Republican. The writer invoked a set of moral expectations the reader was assumed to share about what a ‘good’ President should do and what a ‘proper’ Republican should do. The author also oriented to a different set of moral accountabilities associated with the act of criticizing. Criticism of a person who is not only above you in the hierarchical chain
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of command, but also a democratically elected leader of the nation, is morally accountable in many ways, because it breaches normative expectations, such as the expectation that a subordinate should show loyalty and follow orders. We know this normative expectation is oriented to precisely because the writer spends so much time accounting for why he/she is writing the op-ed article (for example through appeals to duty and higher ideals) and why ready-to-hand inferences about his/her motive should not be made—such as partisan bias. This discursive work positions the writer as motivated by moral duty to the country and its citizens, and not as an illegitimate, party political, disloyal attack. The categorization work concerning ‘who I am’ and ‘who I am not’ was also tied up with the epistemic work of presenting the critique of Trump as neutral, fair, objective, and unbiased. Towards the end of the article, the writer sought to construct a set of identities for the reader, categorized as ‘everyday citizens’. A set of moral obligations were constructed for the reader. These included references to political party allegiances referenced through terms such as ‘labels’ and ‘reaching across the aisle’ and the moral duty of the reader to supersede any in-group identifications and out-group dis-identifications generated by their party political grouping (Republicans versus Democrats).⁴ Building on previous work undertaken using MCA to analyse the discourse of political leaders (Iszatt-White et al., ), we also contribute to the body of knowledge in leadership studies by showing how the category of ‘leader’ is made sense of and reasoned about. What differentiates our findings from the wider body of work in MCA is the focus on more or less shared common stocks of knowledge and reasoning. This is a crucial point that is worth unpacking in more detail. The focus in MCA analysis is typically on the shared knowledge and reasoning used to make sense of identities within interaction. The category ‘leader’ is, however, a different story altogether. Normative expectations about the category ‘leader’ are both historically contingent (as evidenced by the different ideas of what a good leader should be throughout history) and situationally contingent (one culture might be different from another, leaders of political parties might be different to corporate leaders and different to a charity) (Grint, ). While the category ‘leader’ can at times have a shared set of understandings and expectations about the type of person that makes a good leader, the category can also at times be highly contested. For instance, a leader can be praised for their leadership credentials by some at the same time as being criticized for their leadership failings by others, as the analysis of the media discourse on UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has shown (Iszatt-White et al., ). In these situations, it is clear that there are different forms of knowledge and reasoning about what characteristics are needed to be a ‘good leader’. Here, knowledge about the category leader is not shared-in-common. Indeed, ascribing an identity category is always subject to potential contestation.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Identity is one of the central pillars of any theory of culture. As Housley and Fitzgerald () argue, identity is an analytic construct used to capture the all-important relationship between an individual and the social groups and society they interact with. To have an
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identity is to be cast into a ‘typification’ or social type with an associated set of expectations about one’s role, relationships, and responsibilities within a culture or social structure (Housley and Fitzgerald, ). The study of how people are placed into ‘types’, and the kinds of practical reasoning accomplished through this social ‘typing’ of persons, operationalizes an important element of Schutz’s () phenomenological approach to understanding how society is constituted through typifications. Indeed, Watson () describes MCA as providing a ‘linguistic turn’ to Schutz’s work on typifications. The ethnomethodological approach underpinning MCA asks ‘how is identity done, managed, achieved and negotiated in situ?’ Indeed, MCA asks how people draw on and use social identities, in talk or text, in getting their everyday business done. It addresses this question by studying social identity as ‘something people in society do, achieve, negotiate, attribute things to and act upon as part of their daily lives’ (Housley and Fitzgerald, : ). This way of approaching the study of identity is different to other approaches that start with theories of self, or discourse, or power. Rather than seeking to explain how people come to hold a sense of self and how power operates through the discourses that construct subject positions, MCA seeks to investigate ‘how people display identity, in terms of ascribed membership of social categories, and the consequences of ascription or display for the interactional work being accomplished’ (Benwell and Stokoe, : ). MCA represents a distinct approach to studying identities that sits alongside the dominant approaches in organization theory. MCA shares common intellectual roots with many of these and also shares their anti-essentialist perspective on identity as something that people construct through their social interactions as opposed to something that is a stable and fixed inner ‘core’ or ‘essence’. However, it also provides a distinct way of approaching the question of how we construct our sense of self. Consider, for example, how other approaches would deal with the text we have analysed in this chapter. Social Identity Theory, for instance, would seek to identify the cognitive processes that lay behind the creation of identification with the in-group (those critical of the President) and disidentification with the out-group (those supporting the President). It would also be interested in mapping the psychological process through which well-established in-group identifications and out-group dis-identifications are being challenged (for instance, references to ‘shed the labels’ and ‘reaching across the aisle’). MCA, on the other hand, approaches this question of identity as a discursive practice (for instance the creation of a discursive category of an in-group and out-group) used as part of the accomplishment of particular social actions (for instance, the social action of criticizing). Identities, from an MCA perspective, are not only something we have but also something we discursively invoke and negotiate as part of our interactions with others. To conclude, MCA enables us to analyse how, when a social category is used, the person being described is also being judged according to the set of normative expectations associated with that category. For every category, there is a list of ‘actions, beliefs, feelings and obligations normatively associated with it’ (Benwell and Stokoe, : , emphasis added). However, we propose that these ‘norms’ can be more or less shared and more or less contested. They can also change over time as societies and social groups develop their cultural beliefs and expectations about these social categories. As such, membership categories are part of the stock of knowledge and reasoning procedures that constitute the culture of a society or social group. Studying the categories people use in
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talk and text enables us to see the norms and values that people draw on as interpretive resources for making sense of themselves and others. These are not just interpretations that take place in people’s heads as part of cognitive processes of categorizing streams of experience: they take place in publicly visible and accountable interactions with others. We invite others working in the field of identities in organizations to see where this study of membership categories in and about organizations can take us in the study of categories ‘in situ, in vivo’ (Watson, : ).
N . An ‘op-ed’ is an opinion editorial which expresses the opinion of the author rather than the usual factual reporting present in newspapers. . https://www.nytimes.com////opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html. . The th Amendment clarifies the succession of the Vice-President to the office of the President. One of the reasons for the succession would be a President’s ‘disability’ or ‘incapacity’. . Due to space constraints we have not developed this point in any detail.
R Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds.) (). Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Ashforth, B. E. and Schinoff, B. S. (). ‘Identity under Construction: How Individuals Come to Define Themselves in Organizations’. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, , –. Benoit, W. L. (). Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: Image Repair Theory and Research. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Benson, D. and Hughes, J. A. (). The Perspective of Ethnomethodology. Harlow: Longman. Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E. (). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boden, D. (). The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Buttny, R. (). Talking Problems: Studies of Discursive Construction. Albany: SUNY Press. Caza, B. B., Vough, H., and Puranik, H. (). ‘Identity Work in Organizations and Occupations: Definitions, Theories, and Pathways Forward’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Corsi, J. R. (). Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump. West Palm Beach, FL: Humanix Books. Edwards, D. (). ‘The Relevant Thing about Her: Social Identity Categories in Use’. In C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in Talk. London: Sage, pp. –. Eglin, P. and Hester, S. (). ‘ “You’re All a Bunch of Feminists”: Categorization and the Politics of Terror in the Montreal Massacre’. Human Studies, (–), –. Eglin, P. and Hester, S. (). The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Fairhurst, G. T. (). Discursive Leadership. London: Sage. Garfinkel, H. (). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, E. (). Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Goffman, E. (). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday (original work published ). Grint, K. (). Leadership: Limits and Possibilities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Hester, S. (). ‘Recognizing References to Deviance in Referral Talk’. In G. Watson and R. M. Seiler (eds.), Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. –. Hester, S. and Eglin, P. (eds.) (). Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Housley, W. and Fitzgerald, R. (). ‘Introduction to Membership Categorisation Analysis’. In R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (eds.), Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis. London: Sage, pp. –. Iszatt-White, M., Whittle, A., Gadelshina, G., and Mueller, F. (). ‘The “Corbyn Phenomenon”: Media Representations of Authentic Leadership and the Discourse of Ethics versus Effectiveness’. Journal of Business Ethics, –. doi: ./s---x. Jayyusi, L. (). Categorization and the Moral Order. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Larsson, M. and Lundholm, S. E. (). ‘Talking Work in a Bank: A Study of Organizing Properties of Leadership in Work Interactions’. Human Relations, (), –. Lizardo, O. and Stoltz, D. S. (). ‘Max Weber’s Ideal versus Material Interest Distinction Revisited’. European Journal of Social Theory, (), –. Llewellyn, N. (). ‘The Gift in Interaction: A Study of “Picking-Up the Bill” ’. British Journal of Sociology, (), –. Llewellyn, N. and Hindmarsh, J. (). ‘The Order Problem: Inference and Interaction in Interactive Service Work’. Human Relations, (), –. Mills, C. W. (). ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’. American Sociological Review, (), –. Pollner, M. (). Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, J. (). Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage. Psathas, G. (). ‘Studying the Organization in Action: Membership Categorization and Interaction Analysis’. Human Studies, (–), –. Sacks, H. (). Lectures on Conversation, vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Samra-Fredericks, D. (). ‘Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists’ Everyday Efforts to Shape Strategic Direction’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Schutz A (). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (original work published ). Stetson, J. (). ‘Victim, Offender and Witness in the Employment of News Stories’. In P. L. Jalbert (ed.), Media Studies: Ethnomethodological Approaches. New York: University Press of America, pp. –. Stokoe, E. (). ‘Moving Forward with Membership Categorization Analysis: Methods for Systematic Analysis’. Discourse Studies, (), –. Watson, D. R. (). ‘Categorizations, Authorization and Blame: Negotiation in Conversation’. Sociology, (), –. Watson, R. (). ‘De-Reifying Categories’. In R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (eds.), Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis. London: Sage, pp. –. Whittle, A., Housley, W., Gilchrist, A., Mueller, F., and Lenney, P. (). ‘Category Predication Work, Discursive Leadership and Strategic Sensemaking’. Human Relations, (), –. Wieder, D. L. (). Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (original work published ).
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Exploring Liminal Spaces of Identity Formation Through Video Diaries .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract This chapter explores the liminal spaces of the identity work of individuals in organizations. Following the processual outline of rites of passages by anthropologist van Gennep, the authors draw on sociologist Georg Simmel’s elaboration of the ‘bridge and the door’ as modes of transition to analyse the liminal processes of a manager of a newly formed firm. Based on video diary entries collected over a four-month period the authors illustrate how rites of transition are enacted and how these change relational patterns—bridging, opening or closing-off present, past, and future possibilities. Video diaries are helpful in indicating in particular the emotive aspects of such transitions and, therefore, the often hard to study personal processes that represent liminal spaces where there is neither a new beginning nor a completed process.
I: T A A N T C
.................................................................................................................................. . . . the “I” [is] so to speak always chasing after itself, without ever being able to overtake itself. The difficulty disappears, however, as soon as “reaching beyond itself” is recognized as the primary phenomenon of life . . . (Simmel, : )
O scholars have long been interested in aspects of identity construction. In this chapter, we explore the potential of video diaries to study liminal aspects of an
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identity formation process. Specifically we look at a video diary method drawing on selfdirected diary entries through mobile phones, tablets, and other computing devices over a period of time, intended to capture identity work in the moment. Drawing on Simmel’s () notion of ‘bridge and door’, we analyse empirical examples elicited from several months of video diary entries from an entrepreneur attempting to develop a new business. We suggest that Simmel’s processual understanding of liminality affords identity scholars a vocabulary to study the often complex, recurring, and distributed patterns involved when transiting between past, present, and future identities. We further suggest that video diaries can help researchers gain glimpses into the struggles involved in identity formation and change processes and the emotively charged struggles of individuals. The experience of organizational actors entering new roles, new organizations, or both, is imbued with a sense of being confronted with expectations and others’ prejudices coupled with one’s internal negotiation of a suitable way of projecting oneself through actions, symbols, and stories. Liminality is, inter alia, invoked to conceptualize such transitions, where organizational agents reconstruct their selves, renegotiating the limits of differing identities in a process often orchestrated in ritualistic form and accompanied by periods of unsettledness, disturbance, and insecurity. Two anthropological sources are frequently enlisted: van Gennep () and Turner (), and while the latter’s notion of ‘betwixt and between’ has become the ubiquitous moniker for states of liminality in organization studies, the former’s outline of a series of indirect rites, moving from separation to transition (the liminal) to incorporation, promises to provide a means for understanding the processes involved in identity formation and reform, and more broadly ‘identity work’ (Brown, ); it is these processes, Beech (: ) suggests, which remain less understood in the context of organizations. We locate our work within a processual organizational approach suggesting that organizations, and indeed individuals, are always in a state of becoming (Tsoukas and Chia, ) and for this van Gennep’s (: , ) work is particularly intriguing as he sees life itself as continuously moving through thresholds. Wavering between worlds, people perpetually find themselves physically and spiritually ‘in a special location’; namely on the boundary between two locations for varying amounts of time, in a series of continuous transitions recurring throughout life, unfolding in linear succession or coexisting; with more complex liminal processes incurring series of sub-transitions. Each transition is unique, marked by specific meanings, symbols, and rituals that only make sense in their specific context (van Gennep, : –). Such periods are often riven with anxiety, danger, and darkness but they also indicate the ecstatic capacity of individuals to make changes to their lives and to move on (Thomassen, ). The transmission through such liminal processes is frequently aided by rites. Rites facilitate the movement from a hypothetical (or systemic) ‘death’ back to life; a passage from the comfort of the past opening up to new possible directions and physical or psychological potentials (van Gennep, : ). Van Gennep’s rites are, therefore, less of an exacting framework and more of an acknowledgement of the fluidity of life, of patterns that connect, thus reversing the view that unsettled, disturbing, and insecure liminality is merely a temporary phase that needs to be overcome to return to a resting and stable universe. In this chapter, we take leave from van Gennep’s work to try and develop a processual understanding of liminal identity formation processes in organizations. Our aims are
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twofold. First, we seek to elaborate van Gennep’s largely empirical account of liminal transitions through the theoretical writings of Georg Simmel, read through the lens of Bob Cooper, as they provide a processual and relational vocabulary allowing us to understand identities in organizations in a way that heeds their restless, potential character (Cooper, : ). We draw specifically on the short essay ‘Bridge and Door’ in which Simmel () deconstructs the relational capacity of these two modes of transition. We offer illustrations of this approach in the form of excerpts from a video diary study with a director of a new entrepreneurial firm, demonstrating the possible value of this method to identity researchers. Facilitated by the widespread availability of video recording equipment, video diaries not only provide researchers with efficient means of generating data, they also promise to prompt reflective processes in participants and allow for the conveyance of emotive expressions. As video diary entries can be made in various locations, they also allow researchers glimpses into the hard to study aspects of work conducted in home offices, living rooms, or while travelling, thus also providing information about those environments and how individuals dress or conduct themselves outside of formal office or work settings (Radcliffe, ; Zundel et al., ). Our second aim for the chapter is, therefore, to assess the suitability of video diaries for processual analysis of liminal identity processes.
P I T
.................................................................................................................................. Identity-forming and re-forming processes in organizations have attracted a significant amount of scholarly attention. Social life, and especially organizations, are replete with roles, positions (Alvesson and Robertson, ), and hierarchical statuses that carry expectations for conduct, appearance, and emotive expressions (Ashforth et al., ). There is growing interest in the multiplicity of identities that ‘plural careerists’ can sustain both within and across roles, especially where individuals are engaged in a portfolio of work settings, such as in the gig economy (Caza et al., ). Straddling work contexts in this way is becoming more commonplace, but increasing job mobility, frequent organizational restructuring, and growing rates of self-employment bring changes in roles and positions to many in more traditional employment situations whenever they start or move to new organizations, subsidiaries, or groups and therefore from a reasonably well-defined setting to another, less known context. In reviewing the identity literature, Brown (: ) bids scholars to focus on the multiple means by which people are invited, cajoled, and sometimes even deceived into identifying with organizations. Identities have long been thought of as key to the socialization of citizens and organizational agents alike (Ibarra, ). They allow social groups to cohere as they provide legitimacy and cultural succession to routines (Brown and Lewis, ) and roles that allow for social order, for example through control and sanctioning afforded by the often merely taken-for-granted power imbued in legal institutions (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Collinson, ). Focusing on a particular subset of identity work in their study of personal identification, Ashforth et al. () elaborate the dynamics of linking
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past and present to a desired future, indicating that these processes are influenced by social feedback that validate or imperil these developments. Our own interest equally lies in the complex and varied ways in which individuals come to occupy the space between seemingly coexisting identities from former, current, or potential future organizational settings when social norms and hierarchies are in constant transition and the edges are often blurry, permeable, and stretchable (Essers and Benschop, ). This often leads to a wide array of permissible or expected behaviours and taken-for-granted dispositions that influence identity work in the moment. Actors can inhabit multiple identities; and as they are not mere puppets animated by social or organizational strings, they may also resist the impositions of social expectations, feign appearances, perhaps even alter discursive and material contexts; becoming gradually (Kreiner et al., ) or more fluidly (Thomas and Davies, ) involved in continuous processes of identity construction. Studying these complex, parallelly unfolding, and continually changing processes presents a challenge for researchers. While some focus on talk as a key mechanism of identity (re-)construction (Snow and Anderson, ), Hoyer and Steyaert () draw on narrative theory to pay heed to the non-conscious processes in play when people deal with ambiguities relating to identity changes in organizations. Adopting a psychodynamic perspective, Petriglieri and Stein () probe unconscious processes of projective identification, where unappealing aspects of self-identity are projected onto others in organizational settings, as a way of handling the unwanted self. More recently, Petriglieri et al. () elaborate psychodynamic versions of ‘portable selves’ as ways in which workers overcome challenges presented by contemporary careers and fluid workplaces. Temporary identity workplaces may therefore create ‘trusted venues in which to consolidate or change professional and personal selves’ (Petriglieri et al., : ), including past and potential future venues in what Driver (: ) calls the ‘imaginary character’ of identity work. Moreover, a number of studies operationalize and expand the anthropological work of Turner (). Ibarra and Obodaru (), for instance, turn Turner’s work into a framework for organizational behaviour. Johnsen and Sorensen () develop Turner’s study in tandem with postmodern ideas to elaborate the condition of permanent liminality in organizations. Beech () invokes Turner’s () notion of the ‘betwixt and between’ to identify a position in which organizational agents can occupy the disruptive and paradoxical identities that are in between established social roles as well as ‘trigger events’ that jolt individuals in and out of such spaces. A smaller number of studies draw on van Gennep’s () work. Tansley and Tietze () study talent management progression, focusing on the advancement gained by individuals if they manage to pass through a series of rites of passage. Invoking van Gennep and drawing on autobiographical narratives, Daskalaki et al. () elaborate liminal identities as embodied betweenspace and between-time, relating these relationships to translocal patterns of work. With a similar phenomenological drift, Küpers () elaborates the implications of an embodied, temporal, and spatial concern for liminality for organization studies writ large. Following these latter approaches we turn to the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel to extend the largely empirical work of van Gennep into a more processtheoretically oriented argument.
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.................................................................................................................................. Simmel () invites us to see social life as continuous movement and to investigate how human life unfolds as transcendence: as the continuous transition between thresholds of the immediate and the faraway; presence and absence; appearance and disappearance; past and future; and life and death. In what Cooper (: ) calls di-stance, life is not confined by fixed outlines and clear forms but is the continuous process of relating and reaching out. It is, as Simmel (: ) notes, like ‘life chasing itself ’; reaching beyond itself from what it knows into the unknown, latent and inchoate. Life is not an assemblage of clear and persistent outlines that mark objectively rational intelligibility. ‘Life is more than life’ (Simmel, : ) in that it is the constantly unfolding relating of form into the more (Simmel, : ), into the totality and unity from which any form is first delineated. All form, Cooper (: ) notes, is therefore merely provisional and we would be mistaken to commodify the human world ‘as a scene of . . . stable identities’. Cooper speaks of humans as ‘transmission stations’ (Cooper, : ), distending from the here and now into the abyss. How, in such perpetual flux, can anything amounting to an ‘identity’ be conceived? Simmel’s () answer is through relations. Life unfolds within and beyond boundaries so that every content of life, ‘every feeling, experience, deed or thought—possesses a specific intensity; a specific hue, a specific quantity, and a specific position in some order of things’, it is in us where these axes collide. Venturing beyond these thresholds means altering our identity; mixing the taken-for-granted with the new and the unexpected (Kemple, ). This double-play of boundaries, giving us values and a position in the world whilst being malleable, changeable and—at least in principle—alterable, marks the simultaneous partiality and unity of life: ‘We are bounded in each direction, and we are bounded in no direction’ (Simmel, : ).
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.................................................................................................................................. How can we conceive such transcendence of thresholds? Simmel returns to the paradox of unity and difference: only what is separated can be joined and only what is joined can be separated. It is this paradox that corresponds with human achievement. Separating and joining means relating, like a bridge that joins two sides of a river. The conception of the bridge means that the two river banks are not merely apart but they are seen as ‘disjoined’, therefore already bearing the possibility of a reconciliatory connection (Müller-Funk, : ). The door serves a similar function: a transition between two places. But where the bridge connects two sides that are structurally similar, the door separates as a structural difference between the inside and the outside. A bridge stabilizes the synthesis of the separated river banks and the expansion of human reach. It does so visibly, taking on aesthetic value, a picturesque image integrated into a landscape, emphasizing unity over separation. The door, on the other hand, emphasizes separation and joining equally. Acting as a joint in the human domain it indicates directedness:
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going inside the habituated dwelling that is separated from the world through the door, or stepping out of the door into the outside where ‘life flows forth out of the door from the limitations of isolated separate existence into the limitlessness of all possible directions’ (Simmel, : ). There are many such modes of transmission. The aesthetic agency of the door is, for instance, also mirrored in the window, but as it merely allows the eye to transit, and as it emphasizes looking out over looking in, it offers a much more restricted exchange than the door. We take the bridge and door as modes of transition, symbolizing connectivity and making us aware of the distance they help us overcome. Focusing on modes of transition places us in opposition to a logic of entities and frameworks that have the function of ‘closing all possible bridges and doors through which the “external world” could burst into the picture’ (Cantó-Milà, : ). The door indicates openness and difference, the fluidity of a shared identity in the possibility of approaching the other but also, in closing the door, we feel the security of sameness and prediction. On the bridge, however, there is a dawning realization that upon stepping upon it, life itself has unfolded beyond it. Once one is used to crossing it, the bridge no longer offers the uniqueness it once did. Instead it offers a commonality, an acceptance that through our cognition we cannot know all the forms of the world. This way, the bridge and the door help elaborate van Gennep’s rites: crossing bridges, closing, opening, and stepping through doors means relating to distance; bringing the faraway close or closing it off as a continuous movement through thresholds.
G I T D T V D
.................................................................................................................................. We exemplify these modes of transition through data gathered via video diaries. Diaries are a class of method for recording events and experiences as they occur in everyday life. Allowing for substantial variation, diaries can be personal or public, unsolicited or solicited, hand-written, typed, or audio recorded, personally maintained or managed by another (Bartlett and Milligan, ). As a research device, diary methods enable ‘people [to] provide frequent reports on the events and experiences of their daily lives . . . capturing life as it is lived’ (Bolger et al., : ). Video diaries add audio-visual data, capable of capturing events and reflections over time in a quick and efficient manner, producing rich data sets that allow for analysis of content, gestures, body language and expressions, tone of voice and surroundings (LeBaron and Jones, ). In recent years, increasingly widespread availability of video recording, storage, and sharing technology through personal devices (such as mobile phones) has widened the options presented by video diaries as a method for organizational research. Video diary methods can produce more as well as richer data than traditional written formats of solicited diaries, in a way that is ‘minimally intrusive and maximally reflective of individuals’ ongoing feelings, thoughts, goals, behaviors, and circumstances’ (Bolger et al., : ). Video diaries may hold particular promise for the study of identities in organizations as they allow for the study of individuals’ development over time, allowing
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participants to reflect on multiple roles and identities, and capturing data that may help understand the emotive processes in play. However, the method also presents a series of challenges as the sheer volume of information captured has the potential to overwhelm researchers; there is often little control over recordings, and the often personal nature of the disclosures made in video diaries can raise various ethical issues (Radcliffe, ; Zundel et al., ).
P, P, F I: A E E
.................................................................................................................................. We re-examine a video diary study we conducted with the management team of a marine engineering firm ‘Beta’ (Zundel et al., ), focusing on entries by Max,1 the firm’s managing director. In his career to this point, Max had accumulated significant marine experience in the UK’s Royal and Merchant Navy and as a contractor in vessel and marine management. Marine management was the core business of Beta, including work covering a range of tasks such as boat inspections, asset management, and the planning and overview of offshore projects (e.g. offshore wind farm installation). Beta was set up by Max with a number of ex-colleagues after Max had taken a year out to complete an MBA. At the time of our research, Beta had been in existence for eighteen months, employing twelve core staff. Over a period of four months, and as part of a series of interviews and observations, we asked the members of the management team to record entries into a video diary hosted on a private YouTube channel using any device available. We gave minimal instructions to comment on any developments arising in the organization they felt were of significance and while there were no specific prompts to elaborate on ‘identity’, the nascent nature of the firm and the changing profile of the fellow directors who had previously worked in the shipping industry, meant that many entries concerned their sense of self. This was particularly the case for Max, for whom the period of data collection was marked by significant turbulence, change, and anxiety. Beta had opened offices in Scotland, England, and Belgium, following rapid turnover growth but was wrestling with several strategic choices relating to growth (as it began to bid for and win work from major multinational firms) and its business model (attempting to move from consulting and maintenance jobs to software development and more encompassing service offerings). Some aspects of Beta’s activities involved the firm’s own staff and/or subcontractors working on the sites of their customers, imposing significant managerial coordination efforts. A troubling issue related to a new line of activity centred on the introduction of software developed by Beta to manage data on client equipment. The software was not yet earning revenue and consumed significant funds during typical software developmental stages, putting more pressure on the sales team and on Max for acquisition of new contracts for the established business. There were also substantial frictions between the friends cum directors and with a number of new hires to the firm. Max completed video diaries reflecting on the progress of his new organization, and his role as MD of the embryonic business. We received minutes of commentary from Max, captured through fourteen diary entries over four months.
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Encountering Bridges and Doors Max was an experienced and professionally trained sailor. Transiting into the role of MD for a fledgling firm not only brought a significant change in his work pattern, substituting ships and the open sea with offices and meeting rooms, but also a radically different kind of work, and he now had to deal with business plans, investors, clients, and myriad managerial tasks. Max was a hard worker, as exemplified by our receipt of diary entries at all times of day and night, and through holidays. His expectation of others to work equally as much was the source of continued friction in Beta. The toll of this workload on Max and his family was also the subject of a number of diary entries, in which he described growing fatigue, looking increasingly tired as the weeks progressed. Max’s approach to being a managing director (MD) did not follow a clearly demarcated path towards a fixed image of how an MD ‘should be’. Instead, we observed him drawing together fragments of ideas from varying sources of inspiration in order to deal with the expectations and demands of his role. One continuing resource was the conceptual vocabulary and methods he had developed through his MBA studies (see Figure .). Reference 1J_b Max Transcript 2 10th June 2013.
Text [1:20] well, I’ve just written a business plan (ehm) which I’m going to send out to these investors either today or tomorrow.
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Comment Talking about the business plan and engagement with investors, Max looks away from the camera, rubs his face and mouth.
[1:30] I think the challenge for me initially was I came out the MBA and I started writing the business plan right away and I was unable to make the difference between (ehm) doing kinda an academic thesis (ehm) for my project... [I] literally finished the MBA one day (ehm) handed it in and actually started with Beta on the following day.
For the duration of talking about the MBA, Max stops moving around, addresses the camera and moves his hands into a pensive gesture.
[2:10] So it’s kinda been a ... quite a hectic year I guess one way or the other.
After finishing talking about the MBA (completed just), and reflecting on the company work, he looks away from the camera, drops his hands, and mumbles.
. Analysis of Max []
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The MBA-style business plan which Max developed in his thesis was connected yet different to the plan he wrote for Beta. Max’s MBA experience spanned a link between the academic and the practical job of managing Beta and, just like a frequently walked path, that connection appeared natural, requiring little questioning. Only the practical task of writing for investors separated the two as Max struggled to find the right tone. Adopting the academic vocabulary of the recent past allowed Max to expand his skill-set and repertoire of tools to manage in the present; seamlessly moving back and forth between his business concerns and his MBA readings. Where bridging his academic past to the business present following a safe and determined path, Max also related his academic past to an intensely imagined possible future, liberated from the ties of being an entrepreneurial MD (see Figure .). Unlike the connection of his academic learning to the immediacy of business planning needs, Max’s deployment of agency theory to the implications of issues in the financial sector (in the wake of a well-publicized base-rate manipulation scandal) was not a safe and contained path, but a dangerous and open-ended glimpse at the boundary of his current
Reference 1J_d Max Transcript 2 20th June 2013.
Text
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Comment
[8:08] I was reading in the Financial Times yesterday about the bankers and they talked about them going to prison (ehm) and the short term-ism and it just sounded like a massive amount of, you know, the agency theory coming into that where people are effectively just trying to sort themselves out with, you know, no concern or interest for anybody else.
Talks to camera when bringing in agency theory to explain an everyday event.
[8:46] I don’t know if I’ve told you this but my plan B, if it all falls on its arse we’ll take some equity out of the house that we have and we are going to fuck off travelling for a year. So it doesn’t sound like a horrendous thing.
Seems to be inspired... looks to the ceiling when talking about ‘not’ being in the business.
. Analysis of Max []
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life; that of family breadwinner, manager of a new firm, and as a hard worker shaped by the drill of Navy hierarchies. Here Max stepped beyond the safe path of merely relating two sides, instead opening up the door and glimpsing beyond the threshold to a potentially radical change to a future of travelling, exploring, and leaving everything behind. An entry made almost three months later revealed Max’s recurring struggle to remain as an MD. Following a series of issues with funding, staffing, and project management he found himself in a position of needing to engage in consultancy work abroad—a resourceintensive, personally demanding activity—to generate cash to keep the business afloat (see Figure .). This is not merely a back and forth between two domains but a ‘permanent interchange’ (Wechseltausch). Following a series of setbacks and a punishing workload over several months, Max seemed more ready here to push open the door and leave. We can sense Max’s struggle with the limitation of isolated separate existence, hemmed in by the boundaries of the firm and the financial pressures; being stuck in work patterns that no longer fit; a demure, tired-looking, and reflective Max, seemingly yearning for the crossing of these limits and a bursting out into the ‘limitlessness of all possible directions’ (Simmel, ). But even with less existentially impactful concerns, Max’s identity as an MD remained liminal and in flux. In the sequence shown in Figure ., he discussed his absence from a major trade show.
Reference 3J_d Max Transcript 4 – 15th October 2013.
Text I’m off to Namibia for five days now. This has come just at the wrong or right moment (ehm) it is kind of getting to the point where I don’t know if I can really do this anymore, in terms of being out on the game. I mean it’s better because it is over a weekend. But I said yes, of course I can go and do that, and I committed to it but then this [project name] thing came up. Fucking who knows?
Image (#1)
(#2)
(#3)
. Analysis of Max []
Comment Having talked about some specific team activities in the previous 5 minutes, talking in a natural way looking back and forth to the camera, Max delivers this reflective piece without looking at the canera. He looks up throughout 40 seconds of reflections on a way of possibly leaving his current situation, and then looks down when remembering the reason he was looking to leave in the first place.
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Reference
Text 1J_a Max [3:04] … for some Transcript- 10th reason … everyone is June 2013. going to disappear off to a renewables UK show.
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Comment Swinging back and forth in the chair, head tilted back, light tone of voice.
[3:10] (eh) I’m not. I’m going to lock myself in a room and try to do some work and (eh) catch up with all the shite that I’m trying to do (eh) including, (eh) the strategy, and actually have a play around with [names software].
Swinging noticeably narrows, leans forward, seems to sneer when talking – with emphasis on ‘shite’, tone of voice lowers.
[3:25] As you can tell I have been out in the garden (ehm) [names city] tan, I managed to burn myself which was wonderful.
Returns to swinging back and forth in the chair, head titled back, tone of voice lightens again.
. Analysis of Max []
Locked in a room, Max had separated himself from the majority of his fellow directors as well as from other MDs in his industry by not attending the event. The diary entry is accentuated by Max’s emphasis on a swearword and his reference to the outside, sun and freedom. Calling his managerial work ‘shite’ not only diminished its importance, it imported a playfully vulgar idiom which Max elsewhere linked to the coarse tone and colourful vocabulary of his old life as a ‘hairy-arsed sailor in the Navy’. The door featured both rhetorically and processually as a boundary that emphasizes the separateness and isolation of his position. ‘The door speaks’ (Simmel, : ) and in closing it Max drew a boundary that allowed for the safety of privacy from the inchoate outside, without, however, losing its capacity for future exchanges. He could also have removed the boundary again by opening the door and placing himself outside of it, outside of isolation. In the entry shown in Figure ., this directionality was reversed. Rather than locking himself in, Max outlined a series of initiatives to professionalize Beta, only to wind up with a quip about the management team’s less than serious character. Max’s ideas—expressed in vocabulary from his MBA—about the professionalization of the team, the increased control and re-arrangement of the various components of work, and better coping with the flux and changes brought by a growing operation, described a plan of personal and group renewal towards an aspirational managerial identity. Max’s statement that he ‘comes from a place’ where he could ‘bump along’ suggests he has crossed the threshold from sailor to manager, but both the sneer and the final reference to their
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: Reference 3J_f Max Transcript 17th September 2013.
Text (talking about the need to professionalise as a team of owner founders)[3:56] And redefinition of roles, and what we want to do, and how we want to do it (#1) and making sure that, that coming from a place we could bullshit each other and just kind of bump along but now that we have got people working for us (#2) we have to kind of show this coherence and responsible perspective, which well {laughs} (#3) is sometimes at odds with our puerile and immature characters. (ehm).
Image (#1)
Comment When talking about having employees, a pained expression – almost a sneer – crosses Max’s face – wedged in between talking about the owner-directors being a group of friends bumping along with quite genial emotions.
(#2)
(#3)
. Analysis of Max []
character showed that this transition remained incomplete. This excerpt was typical of many of Max’s musings in which the orderly, sanitized, and contained rubbed against the puerile and unruly. Max’s continuing efforts to act as an MD, replete with expectations of responsibility and coherence, retained the possibility of opening up again; the possibility of childlike disorder and profanity.
E T L D V D D
.................................................................................................................................. The bridge and door are images of boundaries that both separate and connect. Bridges and doors are not frames that contain elements and separate them from their surroundings. Instead, they signal pathways and relational dynamics. Conceiving identity from the view of the door takes into account not only how identity comes together but also how identity is continually shaped. It places the emphasis not on the metaphor of the door but on the ability of the individual to include and exclude; to open links to a world beyond themselves,
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, , ,
and how to sever these again. The brief glimpses of his life as lived revealed by Max’s video diary entries indicated the individual nature of each such transition, akin to van Gennep’s () suggestion that rites of passage are situationally specific, distributed, potentially recurring and simultaneous. Max’s continued wavering between framing his new managerial identity whilst continually drawing and extending boundaries to his old life as a sailor, to his academic interests, and to his family indicated that Max’s identity was not fixed just as the boundaries that mark the specific positions and the axes that make up our identities are merely provisional, malleable, and bleeding (Cooper, : ; Simmel, ). Speaking of bridges and doors is a way of speaking of the crossing of these thresholds; about patterns of relating. As a ‘transmission station’ (Cooper, : ), Max related to the world in different and changing ways, finding and drawing boundaries and crossing bridges or opening doors to insides and outsides. This is, however, not merely an intellectual task, but one that affectively moved him. Elaborating on his state of mind in the diary entry shown in Figure ., his voice and gestures changed markedly as he switched from discussing business duties in the present to reflecting on a personal holiday experience, and a possible future away from the business. Reference 3J_d Max Transcript 4 16th August 2013.
Text (5:10) Right, I turned a corner, not on holiday ironically. My holiday in [place] which was meant to be really, really relaxing, was not much. It took me five days to unwind (#1) and then I got woundup again halfway through because of a variety of things. [Names a project] were fucking being a pain in the arse. But then, obviously I came back and I had very little motivation. I got offered a job up in [city], (#2) which was basically a succesion planning thing, which in the end basically I didn’t have the... I actually put my CV in because basically I’d come to the point where I’d just had enough, I was just fucking so sick of it (#3).
Image (#1)
(#2)
(#3)
. Analysis of Max []
Comment Having covered some specific team activities in the previous 5 minutes, talking in a natural way looking back and forth to the camera, Max delivers this reflective piece without looking at the camera. He looks up throughout 40 seconds of reflections on a way of possibly leaving his current situation, and then looks down when remembering the reason he was looking to leave in the first place.
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:
Cooper (: ) suggests that the transmission station that is the human body ‘sustains itself only through its work of disembodiment’. However, we saw in our data that this reaching beyond life can be a disturbing and deeply unsettling experience and thus very much an affair of the body. Watching Max’s facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and spoken words in the video entries revealed a depth of emotional strain experienced by Max through the continued exposure to the fragile, liminal dynamics of his myriad past, present, and possible future identities. Throughout the four months of data collection, Max’s reflections on his new role were characterized by intense effort, stress, and negative emotional expressions, indicating that he was nearing the end of his tether. The strain is clearly visible on his face, the emotive expression of the initiation of the rites of passage; of a liminal space, incorporated at the moment of realization of a perspective to carry on. Similar to Daskalaki et al.’s (: ) study of diaries of liminal experiences, we also saw life at the margin to be an intensely embodied affair where ‘sensory experience, affect, and cognition merge constantly’. He was in a period of recurring self-doubt, a point mort full of darkness and anxiety, leaving Max barely able to continue the struggle. Opening the door beyond his current life was a rite of passage that breathed élan back into his existence (Hochner, : –). It is in this sense that Cooper (: ) discourages us to think of a notion of static bodies that house the mind or spirit, and instead see the body as a form that ‘comes alive through disembodying and abandoning itself ’. Life, Simmel (: ) argues, ‘holds the boundary fast, stands on this side of it – and in the same act stands on the other side of it and views it simultaneously from within and from without’. We can understand the current moment only by transcending it; reaching out beyond ourselves into our past that instilled our values and into our future; our time left and our direction of travel. It is this paradox, our bounded non-boundedness, which allows us to grasp life. We can judge our own position by transcending it and looking back, like stepping off a train to see it speed off and realizing just how fast we must have gone. Max’s realization of his positions was an intense embodied process of transcending limits.
V D
.................................................................................................................................. We found that the audio-visual elements of the video diaries further added to our understanding of identity work. Weick (: ) suggests that the richness of organizational phenomena may be appreciated through approaches that work towards a more ‘bountiful supply of socially interpreted everyday life’ not just through more data points but also in ways that enrich research qualitatively. We were able to see Max happy, tired, and angry, and to glimpse his surroundings, be it his office or home-office, hotel rooms, and his living room. We designed our video diaries as self-directed and uncontrolled instruments, which meant that our data collection was limited to Max’s (and other directors’) choice of time and place of recordings and by the parameters of the recording devices and procedures over which we had no control. Our video diaries, therefore, yielded little data on actual organizational exchanges; and we found that not all participants were as diligent and open when recording diary entries (see Zundel et al., ). However, we did find that some participants were encouraged to offer a combination of highly personal and intimate issues about work, colleagues, family affairs, and their past
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lives. These issues were brought close to us through the performances, confessions and reflections in front of the camera. Holliday (: ) observed that self-directed video research can stimulate light-hearted performances in front of the camera, including jokes, ironic statements, dances, singing, mimicking, and so on. Holliday stresses that this loss of inhibitions occurred despite the subjects’ knowledge of the academic use of the videos, and despite their control over the filming process and the ability to delete or edit materials (: ). This was similar to our own experience with Max, who gleefully noted in his first diary entry: I’m curious just to see how this is going to work because what I can see is, I can see this turning into me having a right fucking moan and you having to listen to it which is (ehm) rather a shame because obviously you’re just going to have to suck it up in case there are some nice juicy research titbits in there (laughs).
Holliday also suggests diarists use video diaries for confessions which may even have autotherapeutic effects when the production of diaries moves from being a performance to being performative (: ), helping research subjects to question, elaborate, or secure their discursive and social positions in conversation with an invisible other. The video diary format is particularly suited for the study of liminal identity processes which often go hand in hand with darkness, anxiety, and danger (Hochner, ), but also raises substantial questions of ethics and care for the well-being of participants and researchers who witness, in close-up format, the emotional struggles of those they study. We also felt that the visual element allowed us to get closer to Max, beginning with our growing familiarity with his idiosyncrasies, for example looking up in moments of contemplation, moving back and forth in his chair and frowning. We came to empathize with Max’s liminal experiences, moments of contemplation, of waiting and stepping out towards new thresholds (van Gennep, ). But watching the video diaries week after week also changed our relationship with the data. Cunliffe (: ) notes that when participants implicate the researcher in the data, claims of moral neutrality and of the privileging of theory and researcher expertise become unsettled. We felt that, in watching these diaries, we got ‘carried away’ (Gadamer, : ) by witnessing the struggles of Max wrestling not just with the challenges of his business, but with his shifting identity. In this sense, our own boundaries became stretched when we saw his increasing frustrations and fatigue. As we were exposed over time to diary entries, bearing emotional messages of struggle and pain as an integral part of the record, our collective experience made it difficult to pretend that we could be objective and distant onlookers and we became increasingly sensitive to the question of how caring, affective, and, at times, emotionally involved we could allow ourselves to become (see also Gilmore and Kenny, ) when watching these events through the window of a computer screen: connected but also separated from Max’s struggle; secure but also helpless.
C R
.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we analysed identity work in organizations in a way that heeds its restless, potential character (Cooper, : ). Linking van Gennep to Simmel makes a connection
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:
that nudges us towards a processual view of identity work which may offer intriguing insights as well as conceptual ideas. In exploring the bridge and door in particular we acknowledge that the use of such imagery may be regarded as merely quaint, esoteric, or mechanistically metaphorical. Yet, we found the intellectual challenge of using these images helpfully provocative, inviting us to engage more with Simmel’s wider work and how this relates to processual organizational research on identity and beyond. Understanding identity processually creates implications for the empirical study of identity formation and change (‘work’) as the various rites of transition often occur in multiple, repetitive, or concurring patterns, each unique, marked by specific meanings, symbols, and rituals that only make sense in their specific context (van Gennep, : –). We found that video diaries can help elicit such difficult to study moments and convey a range of impressions from the margins between positions. We were surprised in particular by Max’s frankness and, as we progressed, his growing interest in adding to the diaries. And while they pose limits as research instruments, video diaries may offer valuable insights especially when combined with other methods.
N . We have used a pseudonym.
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Tansley, C. and Tietze, S. (). ‘Rites of Passage through Talent Management Progression Stages: An Identity Work Perspective’. International Journal of Human Resource Management, (), –. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (). ‘Theorizing the Micropolitics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services’. Organization Studies, , –. Thomassen, B. (). Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-between. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (). ‘On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change’. Organization Science, (), –. Turner, V. (). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, A. (). The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weick, K. (). ‘The Generative Properties of Richness’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Zundel, M., MacIntosh, R., and Mackay, D. (). ‘The Utility of Video Diaries for Organizational Research’. Organizational Research Methods, (), –.
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Abstract The historic turn in organization studies has given rise to increasing interest in historical methods. In parallel, the cultural turn in business history is associated with concerns beyond narratives of corporate success or failure. But as yet there has been limited historical research on identities in organizations. This chapter sets out historical methods appropriate for examining identities, focusing on exemplars of ethnographic historical research. Whereas corporate history prizes historical sources such as company board minutes, and organizational identity can be researched from corporate communications such as company magazines, it is more difficult to compile a checklist of historical sources for examining identities in organizations. Historical research on clerks and entrepreneurs illustrates the range of sources that could be considered. However, the focus on such literate groups in society also highlights the problem of survivor bias in sources, which historians describe as the silence of the archives.
I: T H T O S
.................................................................................................................................. T is great opportunity for further historical research on identities and identity work in organizations in relation to the historic turn in organization studies (Clark and Rowlinson, ; Weatherbee et al., ), and the cultural turn in business history (Rowlinson and Delahaye, ; Rowlinson and Hassard, ). A cultural turn suggests less of a preoccupation with business history as a branch of economic history, and more
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concern for cultural history, including questions of identity. Cultural history is preoccupied with ‘the trinity of identity categories’—gender, race, and class (Gunn, : )—which are dealt with specifically by other chapters in this handbook. Business history, or management and organizational history, potentially offers a perspective on the mediation of the trinity of gender, race, and class identities through organizations, as well as professional and organizational identities. In order to facilitate a historical contribution to studying identities in organization studies, and an organizational perspective on identity in cultural history, in this chapter we will consider some exemplars for historical research. This allows for a discussion of how to interrogate sources (Decker, ), and present research appropriately for the genres of business history and organization studies (Rowlinson, ; Yates, ). The historic turn is associated with growing interest in history from management and organization studies, with a series of special issues of leading journals focused on historical approaches (Godfrey et al., ; O’Sullivan and Graham, ; van Baalen and Bogenrieder, ). There are two aspects to the historic turn that could be termed structural and cultural. For the structural historic turn, which is predominant in strategy, the past constitutes an objective constraint on organizations and individuals in the present. History is said to matter (Ghemawat, : ) through path dependence (Greve and Seidel, ), and the related concepts of organizational inertia (Boeker, ; Kelly and Amburgey, ), and competence lock-ins (Malerba, Nelson, Orsenigo, and Winter, ). There is more scope for considering identities in organizations in relation to the cultural historic turn, in which the past constitutes a resource that can be used strategically by actors and organizations (Suddaby et al., ). The cultural historic turn is aligned with a research agenda on the ‘uses of the past’ in organizations (Wadhwani et al., ). Here again, however, the main interest has been with identity work by organizations (Basque and Langley, ; Oertel and Thommes, ), rather than identities in organizations. The neglect of historical research on identities in organizations can partly be explained by methodological concerns. For contemporary research, data can be generated from interviews (e.g. Petriglieri and Obodaru, ) and ethnographic observations (e.g. Alvesson et al., ; Humphreys and Brown, ). For historical research on organizational identity long runs of official publications such as company magazines can be used (Anteby and Molnar, ; Basque and Langley, ). Narratives of identity change in the relatively recent past can be reconstructed from interviews, as with Rao et al.’s () interviews with French chefs and gastronomic critics, supplemented with secondary sources for previous changes. But for researching identities in organizations over a longer period, or going further back in time, data cannot be generated and appropriate sources are less readily identifiable from a pre-prepared checklist. Some engagement with historical methods and source criticism therefore becomes necessary.
H M O S
.................................................................................................................................. Historical methods have not been widely used to research identities in organizations. An indication of this is that in comprehensive reviews of the literature on identities in
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organizations (Alvesson et al., ; Brown, , ), history is hardly mentioned apart from a brief historical account of the concept of identity. Likewise in Kipping and Üsdiken’s () survey of historical research in leading management and organization journals, of the eighty-two articles selected for review Rao et al. () is the only one that is explicitly concerned with identities in organizations. Rao et al.’s () highly cited study of the changing role identity of French chefs since the s is not cited in reviews of identity scholarship (Alvesson et al., ; Brown, , ), possibly because it is primarily located in the literature on institutional logics rather than identities. Still more surprisingly, in Kipping and Üsdiken’s () review of historical research there is only limited consideration of history in the study of organizational identity. However, as with historical research in general, there is probably more historical research on identities in organizations than initially meets the eye (Kipping and Üsdiken, ). There are two reasons for this lack of visibility: first, historical research does not always announce itself as such in organization studies; and second, identity does not appear to have been taken up explicitly as a research agenda in business history, as is evident from numerous reviews of the field (cf. Jones and Zeitlin, ; Maclean et al., ; Wilson et al., ). Nor is identity prevalent in the emerging field of management and organizational history (cf. Booth and Rowlinson, ; McLaren et al., ). To the extent that there is interest in identity, it is mainly focused on how an organization’s identity is partly constituted by narratives of its past (Foster et al., ; Mordhorst and Schwarzkopf, ; Zundel et al., ). One challenge, therefore, is to identify historical research that touches upon questions of identity even if they are not explicitly stated. As with case studies and ethnography, there is an emerging discussion about a typology of history in organization studies. Historical research on organizations can be characterized as either corporate history, analytically structured history, serial history, or ethnographic history (Rowlinson et al., ). Corporate history, defined as ‘a holistic objectivist narrative of a named corporate entity’ (Rowlinson et al., : ), is probably the type of history that a non-historian would most readily expect to read about an organization. Many large organizations commission historians to write their history, and these commissioned histories are highly variable in their quality. Scholarly works have been written by leading business historians with a corporate commission (e.g. Jones, b), but as business historians are all too aware many other commissioned histories fulfil their commemorative purpose without any academic pretensions (Jones and Sluyterman, ). Researching identities in organizations is unlikely to require the production of anything like a corporate history, and corporate histories may be of limited value themselves insofar as identity is unlikely to be their main concern. Alfred Chandler’s classic Strategy and Structure (Chandler, ) remains the best starting point for considering how history can be written in which corporate entity is subordinate to the exploration of concepts. Even so, this form of conceptual or ‘analytically structured history’ (Rowlinson et al., : ) is still largely concerned with the construction of a narrative and is rarely focused on identities. Serial history represents the standard alternative to narrative history, as the application of familiar techniques, such as event history analysis, to a chronological series of ‘repeatable facts’ found in archival sources (Rowlinson et al., : ). There is a constant tension between the tendency for serial history to eclipse narrative in order to satisfy the requirements for methodological legitimacy, especially from quantitative researchers in organization studies, and the
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expectation that history should produce some sort of narrative. This tension has probably obscured the possibility for producing historical research informed by questions of identity that is neither narrative nor serial history.
E H
.................................................................................................................................. The form of history that is most conducive to exploring identities can be described as ‘ethnographic history’, which is ‘derived from reading historical sources “against the grain” in order to recover practices and meanings from organizations’, though this tradition ‘is under-represented in organization studies’ (Rowlinson et al., : ). Ethnographic history combines an ethnographic sensibility for what life was actually like, with an immersion in primary historical sources. We will consider two exemplars to illustrate ethnographic history as a research strategy (Rowlinson et al., ) that although not explicitly concerned with identity, nevertheless deal with related issues and highlight methodological concerns for historical research on identities in organizations. In the first exemplar, Childs () studied the operations of a gold mine in Brazil during the nineteenth century, owned by the British St. John d’el Rey Mining Company. Although the company had been the focus of a detailed study before (Eakin, ), and features as an example of a successful British multinational enterprise (Jones, a: ), Childs focuses on the life of the slaves who worked in the mine. In particular he discusses a ritual that demonstrates how oppressed people can ‘construct identity to counter their subordination’ (Childs, : ). In a ritualized display of power, as described from , ‘on Sundays nearly , slaves from the mine, separated by sex, lined up in columns in front of the Casa Grande (big house) for a ceremony called the Revista (review)’ (Childs, : ). Childs highlights how the slaves expressed their pride and shame through the ritual, and took any opportunity they could took to ridicule their masters. In the second exemplar of ethnographic history McKinlay () explores the careers of Scottish bank clerks in the twenty years before . The clerks often worked under close scrutiny from each other in branches with a small number of employees. This ‘scrutiny intensified the self-policing of identity through daily self-presentation’ (McKinlay, : ). Neither Childs () nor McKinlay () are explicitly interested in questions of identity in organizations, but both take what could be called self-consciously ‘angular’ theoretical perspectives (Megill, : –). Childs’ analysis is informed by Bakhtin (), whereas McKinlay () takes his cue from Foucault’s () forays into the archives, as he explains in a later methodological reflection (McKinlay, b). What this means is that both Childs and, more pointedly, McKinlay, distance themselves from ‘conventional’ or default corporate history that is preoccupied with explaining the success, or occasionally the failure, of a particular organization from the sources found in its archives (Rowlinson et al., : ). As exemplars of ethnographic history both Childs and McKinlay touch on methodological issues that are particularly salient for historical research on identities in organizations. First, they are both predicated upon what historians recognize as the ‘serendipity’ of finding particular sources that have survived in the archives (Jordanova, : ). Second, they both rely on reading sources ‘against the grain’, as historians put it (Rowlinson et al., :
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), when they use sources to reveal meanings that were not intended. Source criticism can involve a close reading of what the sources do not say as well as what they do say, in order to construct an ‘argument from silence’ (Howell and Prevenier, : ). A distinction can be made between different types of historical sources. The term ‘sources’ emphasizes that historians are reliant on finding archival records since they cannot construct data in the present (Rowlinson et al., : ). Narrative or literary sources are presented in a narrative form (Alvesson and Sköldberg, ), such as articles in company magazines. Remnants are the left-over remains from some process in the past. Strictly speaking a ‘remnant’ is said to be, ‘any source which cannot have been exposed to subjective distortion’ (Alvesson and Sköldberg, : ). But in practice ‘a source can be both a remnant and a narrating source’, for example ‘minutes constitute a remnant of a meeting’, as evidence that it took place and who was in attendance, ‘but also a narrating source about the same meeting’, summarizing a discussion about a decision that was made (Alvesson and Sköldberg, : ). Remnants, such as the records of decisions taken in board minutes, might be best for tracing the actual course of events, and the statistical records of production, sales, and revenue are invaluable for assessing the performance of an organization, as would be expected for a narrative corporate history. Legal documents, such as wills, mortgages, share certificates, or transfers of ownership are the closest equivalent in business to the diplomatic sources prized by professional political historians, ‘which document an existing legal situation or create a new one’ (Howell and Prevenier, : ). These sources may be useful in the sense of establishing the basis for identity in organizations. Feminist researchers, for example, have used women’s wills and share registers to establish that women made up a significant proportion of UK investors during the nineteenth century (Rutterford and Maltby, ). But researchers turn to women’s correspondence and novels to figure out what share ownership might have meant for women (Maltby and Rutterford, ; Rutterford and Maltby, ). Likewise, remnants are unlikely to provide sufficient evidence to infer identities in organizations from the past, as opposed to narrative sources. Almost all organizations produce narrative sources, such as company magazines or published histories that express their own identities (Delahaye et al., ), and these can be analysed using concepts from history such as invented tradition (Rowlinson and Hassard, ), or imagined community (Heller and Rowlinson, ), as well as the familiar concept of organizational identity (Hatch and Schultz, ). Narrative sources, especially company magazines, often give information about individuals, allowing further research into their identities. However, as both Childs () and McKinlay () illustrate, the narrative sources that might be more appropriate for looking at identities in organizations may be more idiosyncratic, with little prospect of being able to make a checklist of what to look for before going into an archive. Childs’ account of slaves at the gold mine in Brazil relies heavily on inferences from a fifty-page Circular to the Proprietors of the St. John d’el Rey Mining Company that was sent out to stockholders in , assuring them of the ‘humane and generous . . . measures already adopted . . . to render them [the slaves] as contented and happy as men can be expected to be, whose lot is to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow’ (quoted in Childs, : ). Childs cites the Circular over twenty times, and it is clearly an intriguing narrative source. But the Circular is the
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outcome of a particular process that arose in the St. John d’el Rey Mining Company, so it would be difficult to say researchers should look out for similar sources in other archives. Childs’ () reliance on the Circular along with the company’s annual reports and minutes of board meetings illustrates several aspects of what historians call ‘the silence of the archives’ (Decker, ). Firstly, these sources are written about the slaves, and the voice of the slaves themselves is not recorded. Their thoughts and feelings can only be inferred from what the slaveholders wrote about them, which is difficult to read without irony. Beyond the interpretation of surviving sources, there is the serendipity of their survival. The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company Archive is held by the University of Texas at Austin, and as such was available for Childs’ () research. There is no particular reason to think that the slaves at the mine would have been very different to slaves at other mines, but the distinctive British character of the company explains the nature of the sources and why they were kept. The lives of other slaves went unrecorded, or at least are unrecorded in such accessible sources.
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.................................................................................................................................. McKinlay’s () account of bank clerks does include the actual voice of at least one clerk from the archives, in the form of a ledger filled with cartoons drawn by one of the clerks who worked for the bank from to . The cartoons made fun of the clerk’s colleagues and the bank manager, who was portrayed as Napoleon. McKinlay (b) advises researchers to compensate for the silence of the archives on the subaltern, the neglected subordinates in organizations, by looking out for instances where the subaltern disrupts accepted knowledge, as in the cartoons drawn by the bank clerk. From visiting bank archives ourselves, it appears to be common knowledge that bored bank clerks whiled away their time writing or drawing in the margins of the bank ledgers, but archival marginalia are rarely considered significant in conventional corporate history. McKinlay has extended his research on bank clerks with a detailed account of Mr Notman, a bank clerk who was overlooked for promotion and was refused permission to marry by the Commercial Bank of Scotland several times between and (McKinlay, a). Notman eventually won a legal challenge against the bank’s refusal to let him marry, which was a watershed in changing the degree of control banks exercised over their clerks’ lives and careers. McKinlay’s research demonstrates how telling the story of a particular event can draw upon a range of sources, such as newspaper reports and court records, as well as the internal staff records of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, and the minutes of meetings at the National Union of Bank Employees where his case was discussed. But this was a rare if significant instance where the lives of bank clerks featured in national newspapers. McKinlay’s research on bank clerks contributes to a rich seam of historical research that touches on the identities of clerks in the UK, albeit that the literature on identities in organizations is hardly referred to by historians. The effort of managers to prove their masculinity in post-war Britain was brilliantly researched through long in-depth interviews by Roper (), who highlights the richness of the life history method for looking at
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subjectivities in the past. But the life history method is necessarily restricted to the relatively recent past, with Roper’s research starting from , almost forty years before his book was published. For an earlier period Heller’s (, , forthcoming) research on British male clerical workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrates the variety of sources and how they could be read in relation to identities, even though identity is not his explicit focus. Heller notices that narrative corporate sources such as company magazines change in form over time (Heller and Rowlinson, , ). In the late nineteenth century some of the earliest company magazines, such as the London County Council Staff Gazette, were actually written by clerks themselves, albeit with approval from their employers. In these magazines the clerks, who were still predominantly men, expressed pride in their work and a sense of public service. The satisfaction of the clerks writing in their staff magazines can be contrasted with the general dissatisfaction expressed by novelists and journalists who recounted their experiences of working as clerks during the same period. George Bernard Shaw, for example, worked as a clerk in Dublin for four years (Heller, : ). Heller (: ) demonstrates how oral history interviews collected in the s, which are held in the British Library, can be revisited to give an insight into an earlier period. These sources are a valuable counterweight to the didactic tone of more traditional primary sources such as government and company reports, company magazines, and their counterpart trade union magazines. Another source Heller (: ) uses extensively as a counterweight to more conventional sources are five diaries written by London clerks. Only one of these was published, with the rest held by various local government archive collections in and around London. Again, it is difficult to say how such sources can be found, other than the serendipity of looking through the catalogues of local archives with the skills of a historian who knows what to look for. Novels are a rich source for considering the identities of clerks. Heller’s (forthcoming) discussion of the rites and rituals of clerical life begins with an illustration from the classic comic novel The Diary of a Nobody, by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith ( []), of how the family and suburban life of the clerk was seen as theatre. Theatre and performance lay at the heart of the Grossmiths’ farcical account of the mishaps and minor adventures of Charles Pooter, senior clerk at the City firm Perkupps and proud tenant of ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, North London. Novels also illustrate the dilemmas of masculinity for clerks. For manual working-class men physical strength was seen as a defining feature of their work. Middle-class men felt that their work lacked the requirement for physical strength, but aspired to be free from dependence and servility. They were also better paid, which enabled individuals to exert power and status. The clerical worker was trapped between these two ideals of masculinity. He was servile and told what to do by other men, he purportedly produced nothing of value, being seen as pushing paper rather than producing goods, and he was depicted as being weak in body and stature (Heller, : ). Clerks are said to have suffered a crisis of masculinity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was compounded by social ridicule. This crisis was played out in the early twentieth-century British novel, Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk, by Shan Bullock (), a former clerk and civil servant. When Thorne was told by his wife that that he was capable of being a man
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as well as a clerk, his answer bore testament to the crisis of masculinity that male clerks supposedly felt: Ah, but can we Nell? That’s just the point. Don’t we lose our manhood? What do we see of real life? What do we know of the world? What do we know of anything? . . . We’re a small breed. We aren’t real men. We don’t do men’s work. Pen drivers – miserable little pen drivers – fellows in black coats with inky fingers and shiny seats on their trousers – that’s what we are. Oh you may laugh, Nell, but it’s true all the same. Think of crossing t’s and dotting i’s all day long. No wonder bricklayers and omnibus drivers have contempt for us. We haven’t even health. That fellow turning an organ outside is more of a man. (Bullock, : –)
There are overlaps between Heller’s () historical research on clerks and Wild’s () account of how clerks were portrayed in English literature, focused on London between and . Wild argues that novels about clerks, mainly set in London, constitute a genre of English literature that has been overlooked in literary history. In the genre of the clerical novel the clerk, almost exclusively male, was the protagonist and his home and office were centre-stage. Wild looks at a range of novelists such as Arnold Bennett, Walter Besant, the Grossmiths, Jerome K. Jerome, William Pett Ridge, Shan Bullock, Frank Swinnerton, and E. M. Forster whose fiction focused on London clerks, and was widely read when it first appeared. While some writers such as Gissing and Forster created narratives of emasculation, in which clerks were mocked for their intellectual and cultural pretensions, there were other more affectionate portrayals of clerks from former clerical workers such as Pett Ridge and Swinnerton. Wild also points to the emergence of a new type of clerk in the Edwardian clerical novel, who was portrayed as physically strong, capable, singular in his ambition, and successful in his career. All of this highlights the potential value of novels as historical sources for considering identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. The idea of the silence of the archives derives from post-colonial studies, and the question of whether the subaltern can speak (Spivak, ). This rather dense argument on the nature of the archives kept by British colonial bureaucracies translates to corporate archives, where the construction and survival of sources reflects the priorities of directors rather than employees. Archives cannot simply be reported, especially as research moves away from conventional corporate history towards an ethnographic approach dealing with questions of identity. As Decker explains, it is as if the archive itself has a voice, and the first archive that spoke to her, from a British multinational operating in West Africa during the s, ‘was unmistakably racist, sexist, elitist, Anglo-Saxon and of a bygone era where one referred to one’s peers and employees as “chaps” and said things like “cheerio” without any irony’ (Decker, : ; ). The silences of corporate archives are echoed in all the sources discussed so far. The prevalence of research on the identity of male clerks, for example, reflects the greater surveillance of these workers, but also their propensity to produce narrative accounts of
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their own lives. There appear to be less abundant sources for women in clerical jobs, or for manual workers. There are silences in the classic accounts of the life and work of manual workers, such as the portrayal of decorators in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The book was the product of a lean, sober, and bookish strain in workingclass socialism (Shipley, : ). This ‘atheist-puritan tradition’ was always ‘ill at ease with popular pastimes like boxing, beer drinking, dancing and football’ (Shipley, : ), which suggests that identities which conflicted with this tradition were unlikely to be portrayed favourably. Harker’s () detailed study of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists considers whether it fulfilled the author’s stated intention ‘to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life – more especially of those engaged in the Building trades’ (quoted in Harker, : ). Harker identifies the fictional town of Mugsborough in the novel as Hastings and checks with contemporary sources such as newspapers to date the setting of events. Overall, Harker confirms details in the novel such as hours of work and general standard of living. But, more interestingly from the point of view considering identities, he accepts the implication of the novel that ‘the ideology of the nuclear family’ would have been hegemonic in Mugsborough (Harker, : ). The inner life of less literate professions than clerks is elusive, and subject to the vagaries of historians. Rose’s () highly cited book on The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class appears to be at pains to establish that a small number of voracious British autodidacts from the early twentieth century read more than the average undergraduate in the early twenty-first century. This is a book that romanticizes the atheist-puritan tradition in working-class life. However, Rose (: ) also notes that there was some truth in Lord Salisbury’s widely quoted sneer that the new journalism of the early twentieth century was ‘Written by office boys for office boys’, as opportunities increased for clerks to find outlets for their writing. Thus, even in a book about the working class in general, clerks appear as the most prevalent non-elite readers as well as writers. Subaltern identities are subordinated in almost all sources, from archival remnants such as board minutes, through to narrative sources such as novels.
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.................................................................................................................................. Historical research on identity in organizations brings history and organization studies together and exposes the distinctive character of both. The craft nature of historical research means that historians are not expected to articulate their methods in the same way as social scientists, at least not for qualitative narrative history. However, the historic turn in organization studies has led historical researchers to express their methods in a style that is more appropriate for social science journals, with a separate and readily identifiable methods section, and author–date references instead of endnotes giving details of sources (Rowlinson et al., ). There is appropriate attention to historical methods in at least one of the leading textbooks on research methods for business and management (Bryman et al., ), as well as reflexive accounts of historical research (Adorisio and Mutch, ; Alvesson and Sköldberg, ; Decker, ; Rowlinson, ), and guides from historians
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(Kipping et al., ; Lipartito, ; Yates, ). This leads to an expectation that in the context of organization studies qualitative historical research should be presented with an explication of methods that situates the research strategy in relation to alternatives, along similar lines as the presentation of ethnographic and case study research. Increasingly, it is expected that historical research in organization studies should meet the criteria for ‘dual integrity’ (Maclean et al., ), in other words that it should fulfil the requirements for research in both history and social science. This means that details of all sources need to be given in order to fulfil the ‘verification logic’ of history, as well as the details of how the sources were found and turned into data in order to fulfil the ‘replication logic’ of management and organization studies (Rowlinson et al., : ). In practice, the journals in each field have their own expectations expressed through style guides and the norms of reviewing, and more particularly through genres of writing (Yates, ). The research by historians discussed in this chapter, which has mostly been published in history journals, could meet the expectations for research in management and organization studies journals if it was more explicitly engaged with questions of identity. The difficulty is that the rich narrative sources that have been found for looking at the identity of clerks, such as diaries and novels, might not be suitable for examining other professions or in different time periods. The location of sources, such as the clerks’ diaries in archives, provides for verification logic, but there is less replication logic in terms of explaining how such sources can be found in the first place or how they can be read against the grain. The research on clerks in London and Scotland that we have highlighted lends itself to considerations of identity and is indicative of how research on other occupational groups could proceed. Recent research on entrepreneurship, for example, highlights the value of alternative sources. Reveley () analyses an ‘entrepreneur’s narrative identity’ through reading his autobiography. Reveley highlights the potential for using narrative sources when he notes that although, ‘the autobiography does not meet the business historian’s need for objective data . . . it is precisely the access an autobiography affords to its author’s subjectivity that makes it an invaluable source’. This allows Reveley to examine the ‘personal self-identity’ of an entrepreneur. Amatori () also touches on questions of identity in his discussion of the short memoir written by Leopoldo Pirelli, who was CEO of the eponymous rubber company from to . Popp and Holt () consider the ‘narrative identity’ of entrepreneurship through the letters written to each other by John and Elizabeth Shaw, a husband and wife who were involved in setting up a business trading hardware in the North of England in the nineteenth century. They offer two readings of these sources, one which confirms the conventional view of entrepreneurship, and the other which ruptures such a neat interpretation. Organization theorists have sometimes been seduced by the idea of systematically analysing long-running periodicals, such as company magazines, to explore organizational identity. However, the vagaries of rooting around in archives, the serendipity required to find idiosyncratic sources, and the silence of the archives, may have dissuaded organization theorists from looking at identities in organizations from the past. Having highlighted the potential richness of historical sources, we hope that organizational researchers will be more likely to consider such sources to explore identities.
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Weatherbee, T. G., McLaren, P. G., and Mills, A. J. (). ‘Introduction: The Historic Turn in Management and Organizational Studies: A Companion Reading’. In P. G. McLaren, A. J. Mills, and T. G. Weatherbee (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History. New York: Routledge, pp. –. Wild, J. (). The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, –. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, J. F., Toms, S., de Jong, A., and Buchnea, E. (eds.) (). The Routledge Companion to Business History. Abingdon: Routledge. Yates, J. (). ‘Understanding Historical Methods in Organization Studies’. In M. Bucheli and D. Wadhwani (eds.), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Zundel, M., Holt, R., and Popp, A. (). ‘Using History in the Creation of Organizational Identity’. Management & Organizational History, (), –.
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ISSUES IN AND PROCESSES OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ...............................................................................................................
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The Role of Temporal Fluidity .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract Current theories of identity in organizations assume and valorize stability of identity over time. In this chapter the authors challenge this assumption by introducing contemporary understandings of the fluidity of time in the construction of autobiographical memory. They argue that, both in individual and organizational memory, narrative constructions of the self fluidly incorporate episodes from the past, present, and future in an ongoing effort to create a coherent autobiography. They elaborate the construct of autobiographical memory as constituted by autonoetic consciousness, life narrative, and collective memory and discuss the implications for identities in organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. O of the defining features of magical realism in literature is the fluidity of time. In Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, for example, we observe a ‘bewildering mix of different times: images, stories and sensations from the past blend together with present moments and even future experiences’ (Outka, : ). Similarly, in Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Kill Bill, the main character, Beatrix Kiddo, represents the ‘assumption and rejection of alternate identities (lover, killer, mother) through the various names assigned to character (Kiddo, Black Mamba and Arlene Machiavelli, among others)’ that make sense only through the disorder of time which allows her to become ‘more comprehensible and coherent as she—and the film, through flashback—recovers and
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incorporates her past selves’ (Bealer, : ). Both Roy and Tarantino exhibit an emerging understanding that a ‘coherent’ identity is one that can be readily positioned in a pre-existing social category, and is a temporally fluid form of autobiographical construction—an ongoing and complex negotiation between past, present, and future in an effort to construct a coherent sense of self. More critically, these authors implicitly reject the notion that identity construction at the individual level of analysis is somehow separate from identity construction at the group, organizational, or societal level of analysis. Rather our sense of self is an amalgam—a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ (James, : )—that occurs at the intersection of role expectations, societal norms, and individual subjectivity. The idea that identity work occurs at the intersection of individual, group/organizational, and societal levels of analysis contradicts most theories of identities in organizations which have carefully separated individual and collective levels of identity construction (Caza et al., ). Reciprocally, much of the theorization of organizational identity has been equally vigilant in parsing organizational identity work from processes that construct identity at the individual level (Albert and Whetten, ). When viewed through the lens of temporality and memory, however, as we do in this chapter, we see that the clinical rigour of separating levels of analysis may misguidedly mask the interstitial fluidity of identity work which not only transcends the boundaries of past, present, and future, but also moves effortlessly between levels of analysis. Research on organizational identity has only started to embrace the notion that identities are often much more contingent than the essentialist assumptions embedded in early theories of organizational identity. There is an emerging but distinct shift away from theorizing organizational identity as a property (Albert and Whetten, ) and towards theorizing identity as an ongoing process (Pratt et al., ; Schultz et al., ; Schultz and Hernes, ). The processual turn is supported by empirical research that characterizes organizational identity as a process of social construction in an ongoing present (HowardGrenville et al., ; Schultz and Hernes, ), an unremitting linguistic performance (Hardy et al., ) or a constant negotiation of competing narratives (Brown et al., ) of multiple identities (Caza et al., ). Collectively, this research begins to articulate a conceptualization of fluidity in the construct of organizational identity in which, at any given moment, some elements of identity are maintained while others are actively being reconstructed. Understandings of organizational identity, however, have not yet embraced contemporary notions of the fluidity of time. This is somewhat surprising because temporality is a core element of the original articulation of organizational identity. As Whetten (: ) observes, much of organizational identity is enacted in a temporal conceptualization of ‘acting in-character, commonly expressed as “honoring the past” ’ in which a proposed future action is legitimate because it is ‘consistent with our organization’s history of strategic choices’. The implicit understanding of time in this conception of organizational identity, however, is linear, sequential, and largely deterministic, a form of path dependence that ignores the subjective experience of time as a chaotic and disordered process of ongoing reconstruction of the past, present, and future. It is the temporal fluidity of identity construction that we address in this chapter. Our core argument is that autobiographical memory—both individual and collective—is the primary mechanism through which the temporal aspects of identity construction occur. Autobiographical memory is ‘a uniquely human system that moves beyond recall of
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experienced events to integrate perspective, interpretation and evaluation across self, other and time to create a personal history’ (Fivush, : ). Autobiographical memory integrates memories of past experiences into an overarching narrative of personal identity (Nelson, ). Although the construct was originally generated to account for processes of memory construction of individual identity, we believe the construct is equally useful in accounting for processes by which collective memories can be integrated into ongoing narratives of identities in organizations. Our chapter proceeds in three stages. First, we reverse the typical approach of theorizing individual identification from the organization and, instead, elaborate how organizational identity parallels the construction of individual identity through the continuous construction of autobiographical memory. Our core argument is that, in contrast to the dominant assumptions in the literature, the temporal construction of identity is not a linear, sequential accretion of experience over time, but rather is a process by which past experiences are constantly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in an ongoing present. Second, we introduce the concept of autobiographical memory and its critical role in organizational identity. We demonstrate how organizational identity is constituted in practice by an ongoing and overarching internal narrative in which the past is reconstructed in the context of the future. Third, we describe how the construction of organizational identities through autobiographical memory spans levels of analysis. Organizational identity, we suggest, coheres only to the extent to which individual and collective autobiographical memories reinforce each other.
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.................................................................................................................................. Scholars have long understood that organizational identity is constructed over time. The original articulation of the concept of organizational identity acknowledged that identity emerges and endures as a result of the accumulated history of the organization (Albert and Whetten, ). Organizational identity usefully determines the appropriateness of action in the present by comparing each choice to the history of past choices (Whetten, ). History and memory are critical elements of organizational identity because organizational environments tend to reward consistent and coherent organizational practices (Czarniawska, ). The existential need for continuity is perhaps best captured by the growing research on nostalgia in organizations which explicitly connects memory and identity as an emotional antidote to disruptive change (Strangleman, ). Nostalgia, Gabriel () observes, is ‘an anchor to the past, one that stops identities from drifting or being overwhelmed or weakened by a changing world’.
Memory and Temporality The challenge in using the past to inform present and future choices, however, is that the past is subject to interpretation and, as a result, may not necessarily provide an enduring and coherent identity narrative that satisfies organizational preferences for stability and predictability of behaviour. Organizational scholars have theorized the interpretive ambiguity of the past with the term ‘rhetorical history’ which acknowledges the capacity of
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organizations to strategically use ‘the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stakeholders of the firm’ (e.g. Suddaby et al., : ; ). While a single overarching narrative may provide the coherence that will satisfy all stakeholders, there remains a high probability of competing understandings of the past that can be marshalled to support conflicting strategic choices for the future (Kaplan and Orlikowski, ). An emerging stream of empirical research has begun to explore the various ways in which organizations use the past to construct identity. Some studies demonstrate the deliberate use of rhetorical history to present a positive identity for the organization (Brunninge, ; Foster et al., ; Oertel and Thommes, ). Others show how reclaiming past memories is a way to reassert identity and inform strategic choices for the future of the organization (Hatch and Schultz, ; Howard-Grenville et al., ; Schultz and Hernes, ). Still others focus on how the products generated by corporations provide a form of ‘material memory’ through which present and future organizational members can actively and continually reconstruct the historical thread of firm continuity. This does not occur by rhetorical claims of identity, but rather by examining the enduring and coherent history of products upon which the company has built its success (Ravasi et al., ; see also Schultz and Hernes, ) or by ‘imprinting’ past artefacts into the present (Kroezen and Heugens, ). Also, scholars have pointed at how deliberate neglect and/or forgetting of memories is a way to underpin desired future identities (Casey and Olivera, ). This growing body of research suggests that identity is a form of collective temporal sensemaking in which elements of the past are selectively used to construct meaning in the present directed at the future. While this research impressively demonstrates what material is used to construct a narrative of the self, it fails to provide a comprehensive account of the processes of collective cognition by which organizations construct a coherent biographical account of their identity. More critically, current explanations of how memory is used to construct identity fail to specify a theoretical construct through which individuals and organizations use memory to syncretically fuse past, present, and future into a coherent internal narrative of identity. The magical realist literature that we used to introduce this chapter offers important clues as to how memory is an active and important agent in ongoing processes of sifting through the past, imagining the future and actively and continually constructing an ongoing internal narrative of the self. Identity emerges from an internal conversation that draws from embodied memory, and internal experience of the individual. But it also borrows from, and internalizes, broader socio-cultural accounts of the self—the roles (e.g. mother) that one occupies, extant relationships with other selves (e.g. lover), and one’s idealized future self (e.g. killer). These accounts reveal both the complexity and agency of memory in practice at the individual level. They also expose the inadequate theorization of organizational memory and the critical but unexamined role that it plays in creating, maintaining, and changing collective identities. To address this issue, we turn to the cognitive sciences and the emerging construct of autobiographical memory.
Autobiographical Memory Autobiographical memory is a construct developed in social psychology that describes the process by which individuals integrate ‘memories of past experiences into an overarching
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life narrative’ (Fivush, : ; Fivush et al., ). Early studies of human memory focused on the ability to remember specific experiences in the past, termed ‘episodic’ memory. Autobiographical memory extends episodic memory in three important ways. First, it incorporates an awareness of the self as the focal subject of the act of remembering into the memory, a uniquely human form of reflexive memory that Tulving () has termed autonoetic consciousness. Second, in contrast to episodic memory which recalls events as relatively disconnected experiences, autobiographical memory positions the individual as an active author of her memory by stitching past experiences together into a continuously constructed personal history. In order to create an autobiographical memory, individuals draw selectively from actual episodes from their past and imagined episodes from their aspirational future (Habermas and Bluck, ). Finally, and most critically, autobiographical memory is not solely a product of individual recollection, but rather draws equally from the social and cultural context within which the individual engages in symbolic interaction and through which their sense of self or identity is constructed (Fivush, ; Fivush et al., ). We elaborate and illustrate each of these characteristics of autobiographical memory. Autonoetic consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness refers to the reflexive awareness of ourselves in acts of remembering. It is the uniquely human ability to mentally position ourselves in our memories in constructing a narrative of ourselves as continuous entities in time. In its original conceptualization, Tulving (: ) observed an amnesiac patient who, as the result of a closed head injury in a traffic accident, retained much of his memory both short and long term, but was unable to position himself in his memories: N.N.’s amnesia for personal events is profound. . . . N.N. has no difficulty with the concept of chronological time. He knows the units of time and their relations perfectly well, and he can accurately represent chronological time graphically. But in stark contrast to his abstract knowledge of time, his awareness of subjective time seems to be severely impaired. When asked what he did before coming to where he is now, or what he did the day before, he says that he does not know. When asked what he will be doing when he leaves “here,” or what he will be doing “tomorrow,” he says he does not know.
Autonoetic consciousness, thus, gives individuals the capacity to maintain a sense of continuity of identity by virtue of the ability to represent oneself in multiple episodic memories in the past, present, and future. This awareness is the foundational element of identity because it provides the ability to conceive of oneself as being coherently continuous in time. Life narrative. Sensory recall of past events is necessary but insufficient for autonoetic consciousness. The act of retrieving and reconstructing memories about oneself requires significant skill in temporal reorganizing. Young children gain an initial sense of self by learning how to organize memories of their participation in past events in temporal sequences which bring past experiences to bear on present and future goals (Zaman, ). Identity, thus, is constructed, in large part, through the narration of one’s participation in the past, present, and imagined future in the form of a life narrative. Life narrative is defined as ‘an overarching narrative that integrates specific autobiographical memories along a personal timeline from past through present and into the future (Fivush, : ). The ability to weave a life narrative out of episodic memory and
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recurrent events is not innate (Fivish et al., : ). It is an acquired organizational skill requiring both linear and non-linear representations of time. While young children and inexperienced narrators tend to struggle to impose linear order on the chaos of time, even skilful narrators will intersperse a primary linear story line with anachronies such as prolepses (flash-forwards) and analepses (flashbacks) (Genette, ). Narrating one’s life story often requires an ability to project oneself as thinking retrospectively in an imagined future in what has been termed ‘future perfect thinking’ (Weick, ). Collective memory. Because autobiographical memory is premised on a reflexive awareness of the self as the focal subject of memory, the process of constructing one’s life history is not simply a reconstruction of individual experiences, but must necessarily incorporate the memories, accounts, and life histories of other members of the community in which the individual resides. Much of our individual memory is derived from the collective memory of the group, culture, or society in which we live (Halbwachs, ; Olick, ). Personal memory is profoundly influenced by ‘what we come to remember as social beings’ (Zerubavel, : ). An individual’s affiliation with and participation in a group, therefore, profoundly influences what she remembers. The notion of collective memory is an integral element of autobiographical memory. The development of autonoetic consciousness, or the ‘sense of a subjective self as an experiencer of events, depends on participating in socially and culturally organized reminiscing in which one’s own memories of a past event can be compared to another’s’ (Fivush, : ). In acts of collective remembering, we tend to rely on culturally defined modes of expressing our memory and adopt linguistic terms, vocabularies of motive (Mills, ), and culturally accepted cognitive schema for organizing and expressing our memories. Acquiring ‘a group’s memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity’ (Zerubavel, : ). Over time, we tend to incorporate and conflate the collective act of group reminiscence with the original individual experience. Autobiographical memory, thus, is largely informed by the self interacting with others (Conway et al., ).
Fluidity of Memory Autobiographical memory requires an individual to construct a coherent sense of self in two dimensions—temporal and social. Temporally, identity is constructed by selectively and creatively drawing from past experiences to construct a sense of continuity in the present and future. According to the implicit theory approach in psychology, individuals tend to prefer internal narratives of a stable self by projecting attributes and feelings of the present into both the past and future in an effort to create a sense of continuity. Ross () observed that, because our feelings in the present are more accessible than those in the past or the future, and because we prefer self-narratives of identity that are based on stability and coherence, we start our ongoing autobiographical narratives with self-appraisals based in the present—i.e. how do I feel about my job today?—and project that feeling into the past by selecting memories of episodes that reaffirm our attitude in the present. Individuals tend to construct narratives of their past and their future with attitudes, beliefs, and images of the self based largely in the present (Wilson and Ross, ).
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In constructing one’s internal narrative of self, individuals cognitively represent or draw from individual experiences over time in an effort to ‘connect the past self to the current self as a continuous being in time’ (Fivush, : ). Our need for continuity of the self requires an active and somewhat fluid process of autobiographical memory. Considerable research in psychology supports the notion that individuals tend to recall pasts that are consistent with their self-image in the present. Conway and Ross (), for example, created an experiment in which subjects were exposed to a fake study skills training program and concluded that the subjects retrospectively revised their initial selfassessment down in order to present a coherent narrative of self-improvement. Memories of the past, thus, are revised based on projecting the demands of the present into an idealized future. Identity is similarly premised on a degree of social fluidity in which the construction of one’s internal narrative of self requires the ongoing integration of competing narratives of self that occur across the different sources of our collective and/or cultural memory. That is, in constructing our autobiographical memory, we also draw from different institutional communities within which one’s experience occurs—e.g. family, tribe, society—to connect the various collective memories of self into a continuous being in space. Drawing from the expansive literature on collective, cultural, and social memory described above, we can see that memory is often a socially selective act. Memory is also culturally fluid. Considerable research has been devoted to understanding how autobiographical memory is constructed when the primary communal structure is the family (Nelson and Fivush, ) or the tribe (Zerubavel, ). In creating our autobiographies, the personal and the cultural are connected in the flow of time. Memories, shared in a collective context, not only influence the tribe, they also reciprocally reform, amend, and edit individual memories. Similar research in sociology suggests that individual memories are profoundly influenced by the social context within which we live. For example, individuals in Asian cultures have fewer and later memories than individuals in Western cultures and report having fewer autobiographical memories (Wang et al., ). Little or no research effort has been devoted to understanding how the construct of autobiographical memory operates at the organizational level of analysis. Next, we explore the question of how autobiographical memory might inform our understanding of identities in organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. Like individuals, organizations actively construct autobiographical memory. Organizational autobiographical memory shares the three defining characteristics of individual autobiographical memory—autonoetic consciousness, life-history narrative, and collective memory. We define organizational autobiographical memory as the process of enacting a distinct identity of the organization as a coherent actor in time by selectively integrating episodes from the past, in the present and for the future into an overarching life narrative of the firm. We elaborate this definition and the characteristics of organizational
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autobiographical memory in the balance of this section. Before doing so, however, we briefly review the construct of organizational memory. Organizational memory achieved prominence in Walsh and Ungson’s (: ) definition of the process by which organizations acquire, store, and retrieve ‘stored information from an organization’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions’. While the concept of organizational memory has been widely accepted, it has also drawn a broad range of critiques, most of which focus on the limitations of its implicit reliance on a computer metaphor in which organizational memory is understood as a storage bin and the process of remembering as mechanical and static. A number of alternative models of organizational memory have been proposed that introduce a range of more dynamic and interpretive elements of memory—including how organizations use memory to learn and improvise (Moorman and Miner, ) and to strategically forget (de Holan and Phillips, ). Perhaps the most powerful critique of how organizational memory has been theorized in the management literature, however, is that it theorizes memory as a property or asset of the firm and overlooks the distinctly interpretive and subjective process of remembering that is so evident at the individual level of analysis. Not only does the construct ignore the growing literature on collective memory, it ignores the critical function that collective memory, life history, and autonoetic consciousness play in the creation, maintenance, and erosion of organizational identity. How do corporations use autobiographical memory to create organizational identity? And, in turn, what are the relations between the multiple stories told amongst internal constituencies (Brown, ) and the overarching life narrative of the organization? A rapidly accumulating body of research has begun to document both the sites and practices of corporate memory. The primary focus of the sites of memory are corporate museums (Nissley and Casey, ), corporate archives (Decker, ), and corporate artefacts (Ravasi et al., ). Collectively, this research has begun to explore the process by which collective memory is accumulated and managed to create a coherent sense of self. Artefacts, archives, and museums, however, do not construct memory in the absence of distinct practices of selection, organization, and interpretation of memory. With respect to the practices of memory, current research has focused on acts of commemoration, such as the micro-processes of historicizing as collectives rediscover and renew past memories for the future (Hatch and Schultz, ) and the use of historical narratives in organizational transformation. Dalpiaz and Di Stefano (), for example, analyse the transformation of a generic manufacturer of kitchen appliances to a high-design producer of artisanal crafts. The dramatic change was engineered by the strategic use of historical narratives that redefined the collective memory of change with three rhetorical strategies; memorializing (which masked change as continuity), revisioning (which masked continuity as change), and sacralizing (which motivated change by characterizing it as a noble endeavour). Collectively this research has started to delineate the way in which the core narrative material that forms the life history component of autobiographical memory is assembled and manipulated to create an internal conversation about the self to the self. We extend this growing body of scholarship through a deeper understanding of the processes through which organizations reorganize episodic memories from past, present, and future to create a conscious sense of a coherent ‘self ’ in time. Drawing on the concept of autobiographical memory we propose three implications for the study of identities in organizations.
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The Corporate Historian as the Architect of Autonoetic Consciousness In contrast to episodic memory, which offers an eidetic version of the past, autonoetic memory requires considerable organization. Memories are selected and sequenced in order to give meaning and structure to an entity’s life history. Autonoetic consciousness, thus, is a form of reflective memory through which an entity constructs a coherent sense of self across time, a form of temporal sensemaking that blends episodic memories of the past with an idealized self-image projected in the future. This is a process that Weick () defined as future perfect thinking and is a critical mechanism for creating identity. Increasingly, corporate historians are the agentic actor through which autonoetic consciousness is maintained in organizations. The corporate historian is a relatively recent invention, emerging in the USA in the early s but gaining formal professionalization only by the s (Suddaby et al., ). Fuelled by a growing awareness that history of the enterprise can instil a sense of identity and purpose in large organizations, the role of the corporate historian is largely built around an emerging understanding that history is a ‘manageable asset’ of the firm (Wadhwani et al., ). So, for example, Seaman and Smith () describe the critical role played by the corporate historian in overcoming the resistance among top managers in British confectioner Cadbury Corporation to integrating with US based Kraft Foods. To smooth the merger, company archivists created an intranet site aptly titled ‘Coming Together’ that reinforced selective points of historical commonality between the firms, focusing particularly on the founders, both of whom were deeply religious individuals whose values formed, not just a common bond between the two firms, but a shared, albeit invented, past. As a result of such demonstrated skill in using history to manage processes of change and identity, the corporate historian is now a well-established role in large corporations (Suddaby, ). Corporate historians understand the importance of an autonoetic consciousness in organizations and the strategic power of reinterpreting history. Following Weick () they understand that action often precedes thought and, as a result, history can be a useful tool for imposing meaning and order on the flow of experience. Critically, the relative malleability of the past, in processes of autobiographical memory, is also an excellent means of legitimating action in the present and the future. ‘Equivocality’, Weick (: ) observes, ‘is removed when an enactment is supplied with a history could have generated it’. In contrast to traditional, academic, historians who are primarily concerned with understanding the past in the present, corporate historians are more concerned with understanding the past in the future. The future perfect orientation of the corporate historian is perhaps best articulated by Bruce Weindruch, founder and CEO of the corporate history consulting firm The History Factory, in his aptly titled book Start with the Future and Work Back: A Heritage Management Manifesto (). The title describes his strategy for constructing organizational identity through strategic storytelling (see also Barry and Elmes, ). The starting point is always the aspired future goal of the organization and the challenge, he argues, is identifying a plausible historical path that, in Weick’s words, could have generated it. The corporate historian, thus, is emerging as a key agent for nurturing autonoetic memory in organizations. By creating an awareness of the relative fluidity and fungibility
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of past, present, and future, corporate historians are simply making explicit the previously implicit temporal embedding of the dominant life narrative of the organization. This, in turn, becomes part of the cultural and collective memory feeding into the localized narratives of the various social units in the organization.
The Temporal Fluidity of Autobiographical Memory In order to construct a coherent sense of identity, both at the individual and the collective level, an entity must develop the ability to creatively develop a sense of coherence by selectively and fluidly imagining the entity as a continuous structure in time. Tulving () referred to this ability to maintain awareness of the self as existing, simultaneously in the past, present, and future, as the conscious awareness of subjective time. Diachronic identity, or the ability to maintain a subjective awareness of identity across time, Luckmann () observes, is premised on an understanding of time, not as a linear progression, but as a narrative perception of time that allows the subject to ‘travel’ in time while creating an ongoing narrative of self (see also Cunliffe et al., ). The concept of time and its relationship to identity is elaborated by Freeman’s () three categories of time; historical, mythic, and narrative. Historical time is linear, rational, and amenable to scientific measurement and standardization. It is consistent with the objective use of the past as described in traditional notions of organizational memory. Mythical time, by contrast, is cyclical where the past is repeated in the present and the future as myths that give meaning and structure to individuals. Mythic time, however, like historical time tends to follow a chronological flow from past to present to future. Meaning, in mythical time, is constructed by the intrusion of the past on the present and in the future. Narrative time, however, defies our presuppositions of chronology. Narrative time is distinctly non-linear. Narrative time is premised on assumptions of autonoetic fluidity in which the narrator must travel backward and forward in time in an effort to create a coherent sense of self. Narrative time is characterized by deviations from the temporal order, through prolepses (flash forwards) and analepses (flashbacks), temporal leaps, and related anachronies, all of which sacrifice temporal and historical accuracy in the interests of creating continuity of the entity through time. Critically, in narrative time, meaning and identity are not created by the original event (i.e. episodic memory) but, rather, by the sensemaking created by retelling the original event in the present with implicit reference to the future. Like the magical realist literature introduced at the beginning of this chapter, narrative time is disjointed and fluid. We see the fluidity of time in processes of the autonoetic reconstruction of organizational identity in Dobusch and Schoeneborn’s () analysis of the hacker organization Anonymous. Because it is comprised of a network of individual members who conceal their personal identity from each other and interact exclusively through technology, Anonymous is a ‘fluid’ organization. Organizational boundaries are permeable and hackers can act on behalf of the organization without formal membership. By analysing both the chronological pattern of events and the communicative identity claims made in two identity challenging episodes, the researchers conclude that the coherence of identity of the organization was established, not by the pattern of decisions and actions of the hackers,
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but rather by the narrative identity claims or speech acts of the organization. While temporality was not the primary focus of the study, the reader can clearly discern that the temporal structure of the speech acts is less chronologically linear than the acts that they describe. The sense of Anonymous as a coherent entity ‘was accomplished through carefully crafted and staged speech acts that were claimed to have taken place on behalf of Anonymous as an organizational endeavor’ (Dobush and Schoenborn, : ). The understanding that narrative temporality is different from and often disconnected from the temporality of lived experience is reinforced by O’Connor’s () study of the narrative history of a Silicon Valley technology firm engaged in a strategic planning exercise. In comparing different stories told by individuals at a variety of planning events, O’Connor concludes that the stories are temporally fluid, embedded in the past, present, and future. The narrators, she notes, are willing to sacrifice chronological accuracy in favour of offering a better articulation of the identity claim about the company that the storyteller is trying to create.
Co-Production of Individual and Organizational Memories Collective memory exists both in material form and in communicative practices of remembering by a mnemonic community. Halbwachs (), in his early articulation of the concept of collective memory, reminds us that even our personal memories are, in large part, borrowed from the primary social groups within which we reside—the family, the school, the nation state. Because of this, Luckmann (: ) observes, identity, both individual and collective, is ‘built on the stuff of time’. A logical extension of this argument, thus, is that the identity of the group and the individual is an act of co-production. The communicative practices by which individuals narrate stories of themselves, as part of their autobiographical memory, necessarily include references to the social context within which those experiences occurred. That is, the stories that we tell about our self to our self must necessarily incorporate stories of our group to our group. Reciprocally, the narratives of the life history of the organization not only reproduce the identity of the organization in the present, they also reproduce the identity of the narrator. In highly institutionalized social structures, such as corporations, the social context will weigh heavily in the process of the co-production of identity. This was the observation of Merton () who observed that over the course of a career, bureaucrats tend to adopt the conservative, rule-bound identity of the organizations within which they work. Bureaucratic personalities, Merton argues, emerge from the synthesis of individual career ambitions and organizational expectations over time. In a provocative essay titled ‘Disturbing Memories’, Richard Sennett offers a glimpse of the process by which corporate and individual memories co-construct identity. Sennett () provides an account of an extreme case in which individual and corporate identities are cleaved as the result of layoffs and the act of autonoesis—which Sennett terms ‘remembering together’—is disrupted. Sennett studied computer programmers who had been made redundant at IBM, because of a growing preference for desktop and corporate outsourcing of programming work to India. The layoffs were shocking to the largely middle-aged employees who, when they began their professional lives, were promised
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‘lifetime employment, generous benefits extending even to a corporate golf course, and a clearly outlined map of possible future promotions’ (Sennett, : ). So profound was their dislocation that the now unemployed programmers would meet regularly for coffee at a hotel restaurant near their former workplace, where, still dressed in their corporate uniform of white shirt and ties, the men would nurse coffees and engage in a process of collective sensemaking of what had happened to them and to their company. Sennett identifies three distinct stages of remembering together. First, they would ‘dredge up corporate events or behaviours in the past that seemed to portend the changes which subsequently came to pass’. This stage was devoted largely to identifying the moment in time in which the process of co-production of identities began to disintegrate. In this stage the organizational identity was often portrayed as more calculatingly evil in memory than it likely was in fact. In the second stage of ‘rewriting their collective history’ the programmers engaged in demonizing the Indian programmers who displaced them. At this stage, the co-production of collective identity slipped, for a time, away from the corporation and to the nation state. The programmers worked hard to reconstruct their identity as Americans and to engage in demonizing the ethnic identity of ‘others’, including the new president of IBM who, it was noted, was Jewish. In the final stage, however, the unemployed programmers began to reconnect their sense of self with the corporation and in their acts of collective remembering began to describe a shared strategic blindness, both at the individual and the corporate level, in their collective failure to foresee the tell-tale signs of the rise of the desktop computer and their mutual stubborn commitment to the failing mainframes. In Sennett’s poignant account we can observe hints of the process by which the co-production of identity through autobiographical remembering occurs.
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.................................................................................................................................. Our intent has been to redirect studies of identities in organizations. First, we problematize current conceptions of identity which have seen identity as a static property of, rather than a fluid and ongoing process within, organizations. We elaborate the processual character of identity, and focus attention on the temporal foundations of identity as an act of continuous reconstruction of past and future in the present. Organizational identity is a process of becoming. Second, we advance how the fluidity of time is a determinative but understudied characteristic of identity by conceiving identity as a reflective process of narrating an autobiography. But autobiographical memory work is not the mere recollection of a linear past. Rather, it requires the author to become a time-traveller, moving effortlessly between past, present, and future to construct a narrative of the self as a coherent and enduring entity through time and space. Identity is ongoing memory work. Finally, we introduce the notion of identity as a co-production of individual and collective memory. Prior definitions of organizational identity have struggled to analytically separate individual and organizational conceptions of identity. We suggest that this effort is
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misguided and causes us to lose focus on the degree to which collective and individual acts of re-membering cohere and reinforce each other. Individual and collective memories are mutually constitutive of identity, both of the person and the group. Sennett () reminds us that modern capitalism encourages the fallacy that memories are private property as part of a larger project of isolating individuals and eliminating collective action. We have all had the experience of meeting a new person or joining a new organization, and then looking back on our life in a very different way. Organizational identity occurs at the intersection of individual and collective memory. We began this chapter by referring to how artists working in the magical realist tradition understand that identity and memory are intimately connected, inherently fluid and in a constant state of becoming. Their impressionistic understanding of memory is validated by scientific descriptions of autobiographical memory and its relationship to individual identity in psychology. We adapt these insights to the organizational level of analysis and identify some fruitful prospects for future research. Our hope is that, by offering a more dynamic and nuanced view of memory and identity in organizations we can begin to understand organizations as trans-temporal phenomena, with varying levels of coherence and continuity in an ever expanding present, carved out of the mnemonic debris of the past and the future. Similarly, we challenge the somewhat artificial separation of levels of analysis in identity research which has carefully segregated work on identities of individuals in organizations from organizational identity. While we understand the potential risk in mis-specifying individual level data for processes that occur at the organizational level, and the related risk in reductive theorization, there is an equal risk of ignoring the important processes of identity work that occur at their intersection. By viewing processes of identification and identity work through a temporal lens we see that the collective and the individual converge in the construction of autobiographical memory. The construct of autobiographical memory serves as a useful nexus, not only for individual and collective concepts of self, but also for the different categories of identity work—cognitive, discursive, artefactual, and practice. Our chapter offers a sketch of the construct and encourages future research on the fluidity of memory and identity.
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Abstract ‘Why, even with the proliferation of poststructuralist theoretical understandings of identity, do people routinely talk in terms of “real” and “fake” selves?’ (Tracy and Trethewey, : ). This chapter examines the deeply rooted assumption and sedimented way of talking about selves as essentialized, authentic, and real. Such viewpoints, along with the tendency to pit ‘real selves’ against ‘fake selves’ are often promulgated even in social constructionist, poststructuralist, and critical work, leading to a number of unintended and problematic consequences. The authors review research related to real and fake selves, and expand upon how Tracy and Trethewey’s () metaphor of the ‘crystallized self ’ has extended and opened up additional research that explores: () the discursive struggles of resistance and self-disciplining in relation to the preferred self; () the difficulty of viewing multiple facets of identity as valuable rather than contradictory; () the gendered work involved in boundary-spanning; () critical intersectionality; and () qualitative research. The authors close the chapter by discussing how the new materialism in organizational studies might extend and inspire future research in terms of crystallized identities and organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. W, even with nuanced, poststructural, and relational theoretical understandings of identity do people still talk in terms of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves? In this chapter, we explain how the real-self$fake-self dichotomy serves as an ideological discourse that functions in several ways, producing specific outcomes for organizations and their members. This case was made originally by Tracy and Trethewey () who empirically demonstrated how the real-self$fake-self dichotomy is created and maintained through contemporary literature, scholarly theories of identity, discourses of power, and everyday organizational talk
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and practices. In turn, they provided an alternative metaphor for conceptualizing and talking about identity—something they called the ‘crystallized self ’—which highlights the ways identities are multifaceted and constructed in and through relationships and larger discourses even though they may feel solid and immutable. In this chapter, we review Tracy and Trethewey’s () primary arguments and examine the ways that the ‘crystallized self ’ has been taken up, extended, and problematized in research. For example, the metaphor has been used to explore gendered boundary work (Denker, ; Gill, ), challenge psychological theories of leadership (Fairhurst, ), invite intersectionality (Eger, ; Zingsheim, a, b), unpack discursive struggles (Bardon et al., ; Baumeler, ; McEwan and Flood, ; McEwan and Mease, ), navigate contradictions (Dykstra-DeVette and Canary, ), and imagine qualitative research (Ellingson, ). Tracy and Trethewey () chose to focus on how identity is fluid and always in process. However, in the final section of this chapter, we take up the question of what happens to the ‘crystallized self ’ when we take seriously the idea that identities are not just communicatively constructed but simultaneously ‘an assemblage of flesh, bones, nerves, organs, and skins’ (Cooren, : ). In response to this question, we develop several areas for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. In this section, we review the key components of Tracy and Trethewey’s () argument about the real-self$fake-self dichotomy, its problematic outcomes, and an alternative. We begin by demonstrating how the real-self$fake-self dichotomy reveals and replicates itself. Considering Foucauldian notions of how power produces reality, identity, and ‘rituals of truth’ (Foucault, : ), the real–fake dualism is important not because there are necessarily ‘true’ differences between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves, but because people talk and act as if there are. The power of this discourse, as such, is not in its capacity to reveal truth with a capital T, but from its ability to claim truth or knowledge. As American television personality Stephen Colbert might say, the power of the real–fake bifurcation comes from its truthiness (Narvaez, )—the duality seems true at a gut or intuitive level regardless of evidence to support it, and therefore, people behave and act in ways that support the separation and difference between a real/stable and fake/fluid self. Second, we explain how the dichotomy results in strategized subordination (Brown and Lewis, ; Deetz, ), perpetually deferred identities (Hochschild, ), a process termed ‘auto-dressage’, compartmentalization of identity, and the production of organizationally preferred ‘good little copers’—who dutifully observe organizational norms and expectations (Newton, : ). One of the issues that contributes to the real-self$fake-self dichotomy is that the English language is ill-equipped for talking about identity in ways that might disrupt the real-self$fake-self dichotomy. The ‘crystallized self ’ metaphor provides a positively valenced term that might allow us to talk about, conceptualize, and perform identity in new ways.
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.................................................................................................................................. Many identity theorists have suggested that the self is socially and discursively constructed. These include researchers associated with symbolic interactionism (Mead, ), dramaturgy (Goffman, ), relational ontology (Cooren, ), organizational identification (Kreiner and Ashforth, ), and critical and poststructuralist research (Alvesson et al., ). However, ideas about the self as fluid, malleable, fabricated, and multiple have not taken strong hold in the popular imagination, and common discourses continue to frame identities in fairly simplistic (realist) terms as either empirically ‘real’ or instead as ‘fake’ and inauthentic performances (Gill, ). Myriad contemporary discourses reinforce the notion that ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ selves can be discovered through spiritual and self-help practices. A range of books and television shows (e.g. Dr. Phil) make up multimillion dollar industries helping people to find their, socalled, authentic selves. A search on Amazon.com in using the phrase ‘finding your true self ’ pulled up books for sale, and another , connected to the keyword ‘authenticity’. Many such works are marketed primarily as audiobooks, which allow users to listen repeatedly to the ways they can differentiate their ‘essential’ or ‘core’ self from the ‘social’ self that is concocted to please others (Beck, ). We also see remnants of the real-self$fake-self dichotomy in identity theories, such as those associated with emotional labour. Emotional labour is ‘the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ to be ‘sold for a wage’ (Hochschild, : ). The emotional labour concept, which continues to be discussed widely (e.g. Malvini Redden, ; Scarduzio, ), is based on the premise that emotion is something individual and real that is fabricated through performances. Performing emotional labour, from this standpoint, is psychologically difficult because it creates a clash between supposed authentic, inner, personal emotion, on the one hand, and the supposed outer, contrived, expressed emotion on the other. Of course, we might expect the preservation of this realself$fake-self dichotomy in essentialist feminist research. However, even self-ascribed postmodern and poststructuralist theorists occasionally reify the idea of dichotomous real and fake selves. Mumby and Putnam (), for example, in their research related to bounded emotionality, have been critiqued for conceptualizing self-identity in integrated terms, ‘assuming that a person has a single self that, transcending context, can be known’ (Martin et al., : ). The bifurcation is entrenched in our language and strengthened through pervasive discourses of power such as entrepreneurialism (du Gay, ) and managerialism (Deetz, ) that colonize the private sphere and encourage excessive careerism (Wieland et al., ). When employees submit themselves to overwork and corporate values, they place organizational rewards above alternative options such as leisure, family, community, and the pursuit of meaningful work. Meanwhile, they actively engage in remaking and recreating their selves to match corporate and entrepreneurial ideals. This may come in the form of purchasing products that make us appear professional, or engaging in self-branding techniques (Lair et al., )—such as ensuring we have a large number of endorsements on networking websites such as LinkedIn, or an impressive following on Twitter (Page, ).
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Although self-branding practices have historically been associated with employees in mediated or creative industries, even academics are increasingly pulled into self-promotion and self-monitoring of their publishing metrics, and in doing so, support neoliberal academic discourses that increasingly mimic a corporate model (Duffy and Pooley, ). Together, such practices result in a variety of problematic outcomes, the form of which depends on employee status: employees who have high status jobs are encouraged to ‘real-ize’ a managerialist, colonized, and entrepreneurial self—a self that is ‘more real’ and valued than their non-organizational selves. However, when organizational selves are stigmatized, low status, or spoiled, employees may work instead to separate their ‘authentic and real’ selves from their ‘just a job’ and therefore ‘fake’ selves.
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.................................................................................................................................. Employees who work towards adopting and real-izing organizationally prescribed identities may engage in self-subordination (Deetz, ) without necessarily being compelled to do so by a rule, policy, peer, or supervisor. For instance, many academic employees (without prompting from their university or supervisor) have enrolled themselves on websites such as Academia.edu, Google Scholar, and Publons. Academia.edu is ostensibly a place to share scholarship. However, it is a for-profit company (despite its .edu website address). The website provides analytics on citation and article downloads, sends emails to users about how they rate compared to their peers, and encourages subscribers to pay for enhanced access. Google Scholar gathers scholars’ research in one place and provides metrics on citation levels and impact (‘H-index’) scores. Publons is designed to showcase peer review and editorial contributions, but also disciplines those scholars who do not review their colleagues’ work (labour that is typically unpaid). When employees immerse themselves in such systems they are more likely to begin reporting (on their vitas, employee evaluations, and on social media) where they rate. Like knowledge workers who bring in cots to sleep on when their jobs require they stay at work all night (Deetz, ), reliance on and self-reporting based on these systems results in self-subordination. Second, when employees are focused on creating their best possible self in the service of their work, non-work relations and activities can be marginalized. For example, employees in the USA are spending increasing numbers of hours working, and fewer hours vacationing. According to the International Labour Association (Miller, ), Americans work more hours per year than Japanese workers, more hours per year than British workers, and more hours per year than French workers; furthermore, nearly per cent of American males and . per cent of females work more than hours a week. Meanwhile, Americans on average take fewer than vacation days per year, compared with paid holidays/vacation days per year in France and Finland (Miller, ). Clearly, American workers are spending their time at work, rather than engaging with other activities which can result in ‘perpetually deferred’ and potential selves. These imagined, but never realized, selves do odd things like fill their bookshelves with books that are never read and buy camping equipment that sits in the garage unused and gathering dust (Hochschild, ). In this model, friends, family,
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and communities are also left with deferred lives, as care for family is outsourced (Hochschild, ), and civic engagement declines (Sander and Putnam, ). A third process associated with real-izing the preferred self is a practice Tracy and Trethewey () coin ‘auto-dressage’. Typically, dressage refers to a specific type of training that makes horses ‘calm, supple, attentive and keen’ as well as ‘obedient’ and willing to ‘enthusiastically respond to refined, invisible signals’ (Savoie, : ). When applied to the world of work, ‘labour in its dressage sense . . . is non-productive, nonutilitarian and unnatural behavior for the satisfactions of the controller and as a public display of compliance, obedience to discipline’ (Jackson and Carter, : ). Tracy and Trethewey () take the dressage concept a step further by arguing that when employees, themselves, choose to identify primarily with work and engage in self-subordination, they practise dressage not only to show the master that they are under control, but to essentially perform their training and complicity for themselves. This may come in the form of refusing vacation or parental leave time even when taking the vacation might create more opportunities for all parties involved. Another example of auto-dressage are employees who choose to dress professionally when going to the office, even on the weekend when it is unobserved. In short: This type of activity . . . is not just about surveilling the self on behalf of management (or strategized subordination). Neither is it solely performing unnatural activity for another’s sake (dressage). Rather, it is activity that fails to produce any tangible good or service; its primary product is a preferred managerialist identity. (Tracy and Trethewey, : )
Whereas professional employees tend to align their ‘real’ self with organizationally preferred identities, people who work in low status jobs are often encouraged by supervisors and organizational norms to distance their identities from their organizational positions. Research exploring jobs in which employees engage in subservient, dirty, or distasteful activities (e.g. custodians, supermarket clerks, home health aides, correctional officers), suggests employees are encouraged to think of their work as ‘just a job’ rather than a ‘real job’ (Clair, ; O’Connor and Raile, ). Thus, employees aim to compartmentalize their work identities in the guise of protecting an ‘authentic’ self. For example, in low status (largely female-dominated) work such as waiting tables, prostitution, serving as flight attendants, or being bank clerks, employees are disciplined to think of their work as a performance with front and back stages (Miller et al., ). In frontstage venues, organizational norms often require that employees look happy by smiling, act interested by nodding, and sound professional by asking questions. They are not told to really feel or be happy, attentive, or professional, but to simply act this way (Tracy and Tracy, ). Other stigmatized employees—especially those who work in contexts of high security and danger—are often asked to compartmentalize their work selves to keep their contaminated work selves from seeping into and affecting their private lives. For example, prison guards, considered by other law enforcement officers to be ‘the scum of law enforcement’, may be asked to ‘leave home at home and work at work’ (Tracy, : ). Public service employees such as firefighters tend to view their work and life as in competition with one another, with home being a more fulfilling and peaceful space. Bochantin (), for example, reports one firefighter as describing leaving work as akin to escaping Alcatraz Island. Finally, workers whose personal identity markers do not mesh
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with those traditionally associated with a profession may try to suppress ‘real’ aspects of themselves at work to appear organizationally appropriate. Women mask their pregnancies (Gatrell, ), transgender employees hide their gender identity (Jones, Under Submission), and older employees hide their age (Trethewey )—sometimes, quite literally, to survive in their organizational setting. Certainly, activities to fabricate, compartmentalize, or pass may feel akin to resistance for the employee involved. However, cynicism and pretending can provide a ‘specious sense of freedom’ (Fleming and Spicer, : ) as employees continue to act within organizational norms and rules. What’s more, compartmentalization distracts employees from the fact that their work actually does shape their behaviour and ways of being outside of the workplace. Prison guards, for example, experience trouble turning off their hardened persona at home (Tracy, ) and sex workers can experience intimacy challenges and sexual alienation in their private life (Sanders, ). Employees should be more sceptical when organizations ask them to merely ‘perform’ a certain organizational persona and keep their ‘private’ and ‘real’ selves compartmentalized and presumably (but erroneously) unscathed. Activity at work shapes employees’ identities even when they clock-out and go home.
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.................................................................................................................................. Tracy and Trethewey () argue that fresh linguistic alternatives have the potential to facture the real-self$fake-self dichotomy and help people focus on the political, constructed, relational, and fractured aspects of identity. They propose the metaphor of the ‘crystallized self ’, building upon Richardson’s () notion of crystallization in conducting creative analytic practices in qualitative research. The imagery of the crystal: . . . combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colors, patterns, and arrays, casting off in different directions. What we see depends upon our angle of repose. (Richardson, : )
This metaphor of identity as a multifaceted crystal contrasts with the idea that identity is a two-sided ‘real’/‘fake’ coin. Furthermore, it resists the notion that identity is suffocated, flattened, and colonized by corporate, managerial, and entrepreneurial interests (Deetz, ; du Gay, ). Rather, the metaphor highlights multidimensionality, complexity, and fluidity. What is seen depends on the angle of repose, and despite the fact that crystals may feel or appear hard and solid, their shape and form depend on the fluctuating conditions of their natural construction. Although the notion of a ‘crystallized self ’ highlights the power of discourses, ideologies, and organizational norms for constructing identity, Tracy and Trethewey () suggest several ways that people might exert agency to craft a multifaceted self. First, they encourage people to experiment with routinized scripts and language—and disrupt scripts that assume an essentialized or colonized notion of self. For example, people could
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altogether abandon banal questions like, ‘What do you do?’ and instead ask critically inspired questions (e.g. Flyvbjerg, ) such as ‘Where are you going in life, and to whom is this development most desirable?’ Second, people can deliberately place themselves in unfamiliar territories and within discourses that challenge or at least provide texture to their typical ways of being. For example, Hochschild () went so far as to leave her liberal home of Berkeley, California and travel to Louisiana for an extended time to understand and write empathically about the viewpoints of teaparty conservatives. In short, Tracy and Trethewey (: ) encourage people to traverse and hold in tension multiple conflictual discourses, contexts, and ways of being—to live ‘a life wrapped in a quilt of many colors rather than one suffocated by a monochromatic blanket’.
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.................................................................................................................................. According to a Google Drive search, Tracy and Trethewey’s () essay has been cited times, and according to statistics kept by the journal Communication Theory, as of August , it is the journal’s st most highly referenced article in its history and its th most referenced article published since . In this section, we analyse how this work has been used as a lens to explore: () the discursive struggles of resistance and self-disciplining in relation to the preferred self; () the difficulty of viewing multiple facets of identity as valuable rather than contradictory; () the gendered work involved in boundary-spanning; () critical intersectionality; and () qualitative research.
Discursive Struggles of Self-Disciplining and Resistance in Relation to a Preferred Self The ‘crystallized self ’ has served as a powerful lens for researchers who are interested in analysing the discursive struggles of self-disciplining and resistance. More specifically, the ‘crystallized self ’ has been used to make sense of the way(s) people both resist and enact ideal identities imposed upon them by their organizations. For example, an examination of identity at Disneyland asks, ‘how do corporations attempt to regulate [or seek to discipline] the ways middle managers draw on discourses centered on “effectiveness” and “ethics” in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond?’ (Bardon et al., : ). The authors analysed how managers responded to a corporate-sponsored programme aimed at creating productivity and morality— attributes that were privileged by their employer. Bardon et al. () found that managers were not simply the receivers of the programme’s messaging; they actively engaged in taking up the corporate ideal of the ‘practically wise’ manager in which ethics and efficacy were jointly emphasized.
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Another work that explores the tension between preferred organizational and marginalized individual identities deals with the disciplining of self as the ‘enterprising subject’ in relation to the powerful discourse of entrepreneurialism (Baumeler, : ): The organizational discourse of entrepreneurialism has created an idealized productive subject who reflects the interest of the organization. The current idea is that enterprises should release the individual’s autonomy and creativity and direct them towards organizational excellence and success. Thus, employees are supposed to be transformed into entrepreneurial selves who are personally responsible for innovation, economic growth and the safeguarding of their own employability. (Baumeler, : )
The notion of an ideal entrepreneurial self invokes ‘auto-dressage’ as one means by which self-disciplining is performed. The crystallized metaphor is also used to represent the way self-interpretations are influenced by identity regulation goals of various groups in society—including the organizational identities imposed by management. Fairhurst (: ) posits the ‘crystallized self ’ against psychological conceptualizations of identity to explain the way discourse and power shape identity and suggests that while selves are often conceptualized as ‘real’ or ‘fake’ in the authentic leadership literature, the ‘crystallized self ’ ‘elucidates a self continuously under construction through language use and in social interaction’. This constructed self pushes back not only against a psychology of self, but also against a pathologizing of self. In McEwan and Mease’s () study of online identity construction and maintenance, the ‘crystallized self ’ is extended towards a new metaphor, ‘compressed crystallization’, in which the discursive struggle for identity unfolds online. The authors examine how social networking sites like Facebook—where individuals virtually present and represent their at-home selves—have become entangled with organizational selves insofar as potential employers are surveilling future hires’ online selves and ostensibly making hiring/firing decisions on the basis of the person’s mediated personal life. The authors propose ‘compressed crystallization’ as a new way to conceptualize the mediated self: In the computer programming world, data compression is a process used to encode information using few bits. Data is compressed by systematically reducing redundancy, but compression also makes data less reliable. We use the metaphor of compression to consider how crystallized identities might be performed, produced, and read online. (McEwan and Mease, : )
Due to the lack of nuance and expression available in the online communication of self, people self-discipline by portraying socially ideal selves to a ‘mass personal audience’, aligning that portrayal towards the values of the audience they perceive as ‘primary’ (e.g. their organization, church, etc.). Extending this research on ‘compressed crystallization’, McEwan and Flood () analysed , responses to a Yahoo! news article that reported upon the threat of organizations requiring potential new hires to provide their Facebook login information, including private passwords. McEwan and Flood (: ) draw on ‘compressed crystallization’ to explain how people ‘essentially flatten or compress various facets of self to perform an identity that is perceived as appropriate across multiple audiences’. They found that while some readers voiced resistance, others believed that workers should
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adapt to their future workplaces’ rules and expectations. The analysis substantiated ‘a discourse of compression’ in which some employees shape themselves in light of overarching ideologies from educational institutions, professional/workplace organizations, and the church. However: . . . when produced through consent to organizational standards, rather than negotiation, the self is often viewed as never quite good enough. The standard of “professional” in one’s personal life is a slippery discourse [as] perceptions of inappropriate behavior may be unevenly distributed among segments of the population. (McEwan and Flood, : )
Compression of online identities problematizes the ‘crystallized self ’ by highlighting the ways that online performances serve to strip nuance, complexity, and context from identity.
Multiplicity of Identity as Valuable Rather than Contradictory The ‘crystallized self ’ metaphor has also been used to frame that facets of identity interact with each other, and with the socially expected organizational self—sometimes paradoxically so. In a study of women entrepreneurs, people ‘who ostensibly have more freedom and flexibility to make choices as to how to shape their material work-life’, the ‘crystallized self ’ elucidates the way women navigate their entrepreneurial identity in relation to their athome selves (Gill, ). Gill () argues that female entrepreneurs hold particularly complicated roles due to the societal expectation that women work full time and carry the burden of household labour. Here, multiple facets of identity impose on each other, creating a multiplex web of identification that sometimes enables and sometimes constrains. Indeed, self-employment may complicate and compound work-life identity negotiation, and result in identity dis/integration. While the ‘crystallized self ’ may provide a generative vocabulary by which entrepreneurs can make sense of their multiple identities, Gill () makes the case that this vocabulary has not been taken up by the people it describes. Much like the study of women entrepreneurs, Svihla et al. () demonstrate, in a study of engineering students, that celebrating conflicting facets of identity can influence students’ success. Namely, when traditionally underappreciated facets of identity were labelled as productive to the creative process, students were more capable of moving through setbacks. Organizations can usefully encourage their members to perceive of their crystallized selves as not only permissible, but as an asset. The ‘crystallized self ’ has also been extended to ‘crystallized organizational identity’ to account for the recognition of complex and contradictory factors in the organizing process (Eger, ). In an ethnographic study of a transgender outreach centre, Eger () found that the organization supported all ‘facets’ of transgender experience, encouraging members to communicate in a way that highlighted their ‘multiple, overlapping, and even conflicting facets requiring complex responses that exceed narrow, single-issue organizing’ (: ). Participants often faced multiple identity influences including homelessness, indigenous heritage, and transgender identity. Although some organizations might treat each facet of a person’s identity separately (e.g. homelessness addressed in isolation from
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indigenous heritage or transgender identity), a crystallized organization recognizes all facets simultaneously.
Crystallization and the Gendered Work Involved in Boundary Spanning Other ways the ‘crystallized self ’ has been taken up and applied is in discussions of gendered identity (Fairhurst, ) and boundary work (Gill, ; Denker, ). For example, Gill’s () study of women entrepreneurs examined the discursive conceptualizations of work-life boundaries, including how women framed the intersection of their ‘work’ or ‘home’ selves. People often feel they must perform a preferred employee identity, and turn this performance on and off, transitioning between boundaries in order to portray the appropriate persona. Gill () points to the ‘crystallized self ’ as a more empowering perspective. In a similar vein, Fairhurst (: ) argues that notions of ‘authentic leadership’ have become entrenched in discourses of gender inasmuch as gender ‘has emerged as a deeply rooted organizing principle, playing a particularly strong role in matters of control, resistance, and organizational identity’. Here, ‘femininity’ can valuably be discussed alongside the identity construct of the ‘alpha male’ since they are intrinsically intertwined. In an organizational autoethnography (Denker, ), the ‘crystallized self ’ is taken up to explain how the author’s experience as a bartender was implicated with emotional labour and aesthetic sexual performance. Denker struggled with her identity as both a scholar and someone who needed to make ends meet. Reflecting on her experience, she wrote: As “Kathy the bartender,” I mixed a jigger of masked emotions, organizationally prescribed aesthetics, and commodified sexuality in the cocktail of enacted identity as I got drunk off the easy money and woke with a hangover of shame, guilt, and questions about representation. Within this text, I, “Kathy the scholar,” examine my own “choices” with emotional labor, sexuality, and negotiated power. (Denker, : )
Although people who work ‘dirty jobs’ are encouraged to present an organizationally preferred self—and therefore compartmentalize their authentic personas—the ‘crystallized self ’ provides a way to make sense of discourse and power such that ‘through our emotional labor we are both marginalized and powerful, and as we recognize both organizational power and the worker’s claims to resistance, we see a more nuanced view’ (Denker, : ).
Crystallization and Critical Intersectionality Several scholars have extended the ‘crystallized self ’ metaphor, to account for intersectionality (e.g. Eger, ) including movement towards a theory of ‘mutational identity’ (Zingsheim, b). Zingsheim (b) examines how discourse (re)creates identities that reflect and can be analysed in relation to the ‘contemporary mutants’ of pop culture icons in the X-Men and Heroes series. Although Tracy and Trethewey (: ) made the case that various facets of identity may reflect and refract both external and internal influences, a
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turn towards ‘mutational identity’ illuminates how the original metaphor did little in terms of ‘how subjectivities also alter, grow, and shift through their interplay and through the discursive practices of identity negotiation’, as well as in terms of ‘accounting for how that process reflexively alters and (re)constitutes the discourses by which crystals are formed’ (Zingsheim, a: ). In this case, Puar’s () consideration of Deleuzian assemblage is especially useful for highlighting the inherent instability of identity due to its morphing nature and the mobility of space and time. The devised new concept, ‘mutational identity’, acts as a conceptual frame through which to view identity ‘as characterized by evolution, multiplicity, embodiment, and agency’ (Puar, : ). Furthermore, mutational identity analysis (Zingsheim, b) demonstrates that the X-Men pop culture phenomenon—which others had viewed as indicating social progress—actually represents identities in ways that reify dominant discourses of whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.
Crystallization and Qualitative Research Finally, the crystallized metaphor has continued to hold sway in the world of qualitative research methods. Tracy and Trethewey () were originally inspired by the imagery of the crystal as proposed by qualitative researcher and sociologist Laurel Richardson (). Subsequently, Ellingson () drew both from Tracy and Trethewey as well as Richardson, using the metaphor as a framing device for a range of qualitative research activities. As a methodological philosophy, crystallization provides an alternative to positivist notions of triangulation to reach consistent and reliable truth. In contrast, crystallization focuses on multiple realities and forms for their own sake: Crystallization combines multiple forms of analysis and multiple genres of representation into a coherent text or series of related texts, building a rich and openly partial account of a phenomenon that problematizes its own construction, highlights researchers’ vulnerabilities and positionality, makes claims about socially constructed meanings, and reveals the indeterminacy of knowledge claims even as it makes them. (Ellingson, : )
New language and frameworks make a difference. The notion of crystallization as an alternative to triangulation has now reached beyond Richardson’s field of sociology to the larger community of qualitative research (e.g. Chang et al., ; Denzin, ; Tracy, ).
C F I R
.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we have provided an overview of the powerful discourse of the realself$fake-self dichotomy, its problematic outcomes for employees, and an alternative way of conceptualizing identity through the ‘crystallized self ’. Furthermore, we have synthesized the ways that other researchers have taken up, extended, and problematized aspects of crystallized identities. In this third section, we discuss how consideration of another key area
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of literature—namely, organizational materiality—holds promise for future research, not only related to crystallized identity, but also for crystallized organizations. Much recent theorizing argues that organizing processes and outcomes are constructed through a complex combination of discursive construction and materiality. On the one hand, a major contribution to the study of identity by organizational communication scholars is a focus on the communicative and discursive construction of organizing (CCO) (McPhee and Zaug, ). This approach suggests that organizations are not ‘containers’ where communication happens, but are instead constructed, contested, and dismantled through communication (Fairhurst and Putnam, ). CCO is valuable in many ways, including that it situates organizational identity as always fluid and in the process of becoming. However, research in the last ten years has argued that communication scholars’ focus on discourse and CCO has glossed and marginalized the ways that organizations and employees are also material (Cooren, ). A focus on materiality suggests that in addition to examining the ways communicative interactions and relationships construct and sustain identities, it is simultaneously valuable to focus on the ways that identities are fabricated by and manifest in material things like objects, contextual spaces, bound timeframes, and bodies (Ashcraft et al., ). Tracy and Trethewey (), like many of their contemporaries, chose to highlight the communicative construction side of the discursive–material dialectic. This leaves the other side of the dialectic prime for future research. Specifically, we believe that researchers may find fertile ground in attending to the following question: What happens to the notion of the ‘crystallized self ’ when we take seriously the idea that identities are not just communicatively constructed but simultaneously ‘an assemblage of flesh, bones, nerves, organs, and skins’ (Cooren, : )? Among other things, this question asks us to consider the idea that, ‘as any assemblage, we have a certain identity or singularity (we are also universes)’. In other words, our bodies have a way of looking, sounding, and smelling that is enduring despite diets, vocalic lessons, and perfumes. A focus on materiality asks researchers to consider not only what aspects of identities are material, but how materiality influences identity construction. As an example, consider a person’s regional accent. Certainly, someone could make the case that one’s accent is a facet of a ‘crystallized self ’ created through years of language and relationality. However, one might also argue that accent is as much or more a result of the material geographic region in which someone is born, learns to talk, and is socialized. In this second viewpoint, a material space constructs identity. In the United States, Wisconsinites like the first author end up with a nasal tone, whereas Southerners end up with a charming drawl. Physical spaces (whether they are regions, shapes of offices, or the amount of light in a room) shape the ‘crystallized self ’, and new areas for research emerge by considering these issues. Not only do materials (along with discourses) crystallize identities, but people, through their talk and behaviour, also serve to construct and recreate facets of non-human materials. In these ways, we believe that crystallization and the sociality–materiality dialectic are quite compatible. Take for example, the cigarette. Advertisements and young people’s behaviours made cigarettes a status symbol for American college-aged co-eds in the s, whereas today, cigarettes are largely eschewed by American college-age students (Dennis, ). What used to be a ‘ciggy’ is now a ‘cancer stick’—even though the material make-up of the object has stayed relatively consistent. As another example, clowns used to
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be light-hearted entertainers for children but today are frequently characters in horror films (Kennedy, ). What these examples illustrate is that the way we interact and talk serves to crystallize, reframe, and provide new facets for a range of material things. These things include objects (e.g. are fur coats symbols of status, cruelty, or second-hand shopping?), spaces (e.g. is Las Vegas luxurious, tacky, or mundane?), time periods (e.g. is Memorial Day meant for remembrance, barbecue, or buying discount appliances?), animals (e.g. is a pit bull a security device or a beloved pet?), and human bodies (e.g. are Rubenesque figures a sign of affluence, sex appeal, or gluttony?). In short, the crystallized metaphor is not only useful for highlighting the multifaceted aspects of identity but can also be used to explore the multifaceted aspects of material things in the world. Finally, a key part of research regarding materiality is that people never speak only for themselves, but also speak on behalf of policies, places, objects, documents, and other people. They serve as ventriloquists, making material objects speak (Cooren, ). Being a ventriloquist has ethical implications that overlap with one of Tracy and Trethewey’s () concerns—that human beings have some agency to choose the discourses that construct and crystallize their being. In terms of materiality and ventriloquism, Cooren (: ) argues that when we have the luxury of choosing the entities for which we act as mouthpieces, ‘we should also be prepared to respond for them. This is the condition of our responsibility, as it is also the condition of our ethical conduct.’ So, what is the ethical implication? Considering both Tracy and Trethewey’s () and Cooren’s () discussion of agency suggests that when people choose to voice a viewpoint, they also take on some mindful accountability for the discourses and materials from which that viewpoint emerges. For example, if people espouse viewpoints that are authored by a specific church, then they should be prepared to take on some ethical responsibility if the church is marked with scandal. If they choose to ventriloquize a colleague’s idea, they have some responsibility to stand by the colleague when she/he drops in popularity. If someone chooses to talk about ideas authored by white supremacists, then she/he is also an agent of whitesupremacist violence. In short, what the materiality literature suggests when considered in relationship to the ‘crystallized self ’ is that even when identity is multifaceted, human beings ethically should not and cannot abandon the discourses and things that construct them. That is, when people choose to re-inscribe and polish a facet of a crystallized material entity through their ventriloquism, then they should understand that they are essentially locking forces with the other crystals that also share that facet, and together, they are creating force and power in the world. Crystallization serves to bolster Cooren’s () notion that with such choices come power, responsibility, and accountability.
C
.................................................................................................................................. In conclusion, this chapter lays out the ways that identity is neither real nor fake, even though people continue to talk and act as if it were. Maintaining the dichotomy has several
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problematic outcomes, including that people continue to kid each other and themselves. As high status employees attempt to real-ize their preferred identity, they delude themselves that the best way to deal with ideologies of corporate colonization and entrepreneurialism is simply to defer their lives, become good little copers, and to prance their way through self-subordination via auto-dressage. Meanwhile, employees in lower status positions are told to simply (and mythically) compartmentalize their identities, and not let the stigmatized things they must do at work influence their ‘true’ identity. An alternative conceptualization of identity as crystallized has informed a range of research in the last thirteen years. The synthesis provided here suggests the ‘crystallized self ’ has been used as a lens to explore: () the discursive struggles of resistance and self-disciplining in relation to the preferred self; () the difficulty of viewing multiple facets of identity as valuable rather than contradictory; () the gendered work involved in boundary-spanning; () critical intersectionality; and () qualitative research. What is more, the metaphor of the ‘crystallized self ’ plays well with materialism and relationality in organizational studies, and considering these literatures together suggests several areas for future research. That said, we believe the ‘crystallized self ’ will not reach its potential until such time that focused work is done to popularize the metaphor. Scholarship that aims to impact everyday people must move towards novel and generative understandings of self. People live their lives through the stories they tell and the language they use (Lawler, ), and ‘the words we have are not always the words we need’ (Ashcraft, : ). In this case, the words scholars have used for understanding a poststructuralist identity (words like ‘constructed’, ‘multiple’, ‘fractured’, and ‘fragmented’) have not been sufficient for penetrating the popular imagination and disrupting long-engrained divisions between essentialized ideas of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves. We hope that future researcher-practitioners will work towards public scholarship that will launch the ‘crystallized self ’ into the public imagination, and thus create ways of being and doing scholarship that transform work, practice, and self.
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Hochschild, A. R. (). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Jackson, N. and Carter, P. (). ‘Labour as Dressage’. In A. McKinley and K. Starkey (eds.), Foucault, Management and Organizational Theory. London: Sage, pp. –. Jones, S. (Under Submission). ‘Negotiating Trans* Identity in the Workplace’. Management Communication Quarterly. Kennedy, M. (). ‘No Laughing Matter: When Exactly Did Clowns Become Scary?’ AP News, March. Retrieved August from https://apnews.com/caccfdfda. Kreiner, G. E. and Ashforth, B. E. (). ‘Evidence Toward an Expanded Model of Organizational Identification’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Lair, D. J., Sullivan, K., and Cheney, G. (). ‘Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Personal Branding’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Lawler, S. (). ‘Narrative in Social Research’. In T. May (ed.), Qualitative Research in Action. London: Sage, pp. –. McEwan, B. and Flood, M. (). ‘Passwords for Jobs: Compression of Identity in Reaction to Perceived Organizational Control via Social Media Surveillance’. New Media & Society, (), –. McEwan, B. and Mease, J. (). ‘Compressed Crystals: A Metaphor for Mediated Identity Expression’. In C. Cunningham (ed.), Social Networking and Impression Management: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. –. McPhee, R. D. and Zaug, P. (). ‘The Communicative Constitution of Organizations: A Framework for Explanation’. The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, . Malvini Redden, S. (). ‘How Lines Organize Compulsory Interaction, Emotion Management, and “Emotional Taxes”: The Implications of Passenger Emotion and Expression in Airport Security Lines’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Martin, J., Knopoff, K., and Beckman, C. (). ‘An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality: Managing Bounded Emotionality at the Body Shop’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Mead, G. H. (). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller, G. E. (). ‘The U.S. is the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World’. -Something Finance, January. Retrieved March from https://somethingfinance.com/americanhours-worked-productivity-vacation/. Miller, K. I., Considine, J., and Garner, J. (). ‘ “Let Me Tell You About My Job”: Exploring the Terrain of Emotion in the Workplace’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Mumby, D. K. and Putnam, L. L. (). ‘The Politics of Emotion: A Feminist Reading of Bounded Emotionality’. Academy of Management Review, , –. Narvaez, D. (). ‘Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning’. Perspectives on Psychological Science, (), –. Newton, T. (). ‘Managing’ Stress: Emotion and Power at Work. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. O’Connor, A. and Raile, A. N. (). ‘Millennials’ “Get a ‘Real Job’ ”: Exploring Generational Shifts in the Colloquialism’s Characteristics and Meanings’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Page, R. (). ‘The Linguistics of Self-Branding and Micro-Celebrity in Twitter: The Role of Hashtags’. Discourse & Communication, (), –. Puar, J. K. (). ‘Queer Times, Queer Assemblages’. Social Text, (–, –), –. Richardson, L. (). ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –.
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Richardson, L. (). ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’. In Y. S. Lincoln and N. K. Denzin (eds.), Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, pp. –. Sander, T. H. and Putnam, R. D. (). ‘Still Bowling Alone? The Post-/ Split’. Journal of Democracy, (), –. Sanders, T. (). ‘ “It’s Just Acting”: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Savoie, J. (). Dressage . North Pomfret, VT: Trafalgar Square Books. Scarduzio, J. A. (). ‘Maintaining Order Through Deviance? The Emotional Deviance, Power, and Professional Work of Municipal Court Judges’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Svihla, V., Datye, A., and Gomez, J. (). ‘Mapping Assets of Diverse Groups for Chemical Engineering Design Problem Framing Ability’. Paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. Tracy, S. J. (). ‘Emotion Labor and Correctional Officers: A Study of Emotion Norms, Performances and Unintended Consequences in a Total Institution’. Dissertation. Dissertation Abstracts International, A, (University Microfilms No. AAI-). Tracy, S. J. (). ‘The Construction of Correctional Officers: Layers of Emotionality Behind Bars’. Qualitative Inquiry, (), –. Tracy, S. J. (). ‘Qualitative Quality: Eight “Big-Tent” Criteria for Excellent Qualitative Research’. Qualitative Inquiry, (), –. Tracy, S. J. and Tracy, K. (). ‘Emotion Labor at : A Case Study and Theoretical Critique’. Journal of Applied Communication Research, (), –. Tracy, S. J. and Trethewey, A. (). ‘Fracturing the Real-Self$Fake-Self Dichotomy: Moving Toward Crystallized Organizational Identities’. Communication Theory, (), –. Trethewey, A. (). ‘Reproducing and Resisting the Master Narrative of Decline: Midlife Professional Women’s Experiences of Aging’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Wieland, S. M., Bauer, J. C., and Deetz, S. (). ‘Excessive Careerism and Destructive Life Stresses: The Role of Entrepreneurialism in Colonizing Identities’. In P. Lutgen-Sandvik and B. Davenport Sypher (eds.), Destructive Organizational Communication. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. –. Zingsheim, J. (a). ‘Developing Mutational Identity Theory: Evolution, Multiplicity, Embodiment, and Agency’. Cultural Studies$Critical Methodologies, (), –. Zingsheim, J. (b). ‘X-Men Evolution: Mutational Identity and Shifting Subjectivities’. Howard Journal of Communications, (), –.
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Abstract This chapter highlights how organizational images and efforts to manage those images through branding influence the identities of individuals within organizations. The authors discuss the ways in which individuals’ identity projects are regulated, challenged, or supported by images and brands. They argue that identity is a particularly important concept for understanding organizing in today’s ‘brand society’, with individuals’ identities intertwined with corporate efforts of branding. Managing distinct and attractive images at both the collective and individual levels means that less prestigious, even stigmatized images may be important identity threats that impact individuals’ processes of identity work. The authors examine how previous literature has theorized the interplay between individual identity, image, and branding, arguing that the implications of branding for individuals’ construction of identity in organizations must be assessed critically.
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.................................................................................................................................. T concept of identity is coupled to the questions ‘who am I?’ and, in an organizational setting, ‘who are we?’ (Alvesson et al., ). The answer to the question ‘who am I?’ may be linked to our social identities and self-categorizations: whether as a Swede or a Dane, a student or a professor, a woman or a man, or any intersections between dominant categories (Tajfel and Turner, ). The answer may also depend on who is asking the question and the social situations in which individuals find themselves (Goffman, ). It may also depend on a person’s preferred self-narrative, weaving together past experiences, provisional ideas of self, and future ideal identities (Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ). In organizational life, the answer may be located in managerial discourses regarding the ‘appropriate’ employee, or it may result from contestation over the meaning of shared values and ways of being (Alvesson and Willmott, ). As this handbook, among other
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work, demonstrates, answers to the questions ‘who am I?’ and ‘who are we?’ are seldom straightforward; they are always socially, contextually, historically, and discursively situated in complex ways (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Brown, ; Caza et al., ). In reading the vast literature on individual identity within studies of organization and management—including this handbook—it may appear as if organizational members approach their work each day as self-reflexive, existentially insecure individuals whose identities are continually open to question. In other words, it may appear that everyday organizational work is heavily intertwined with individuals’ own work on their identities. Identity has been linked to sensemaking, power dynamics, culture, strategy, and branding, among other aspects, and many scholars place identity at the very heart of organizing (Albert et al., ; Alvesson and Willmott, ; Alvesson et al., ). However, we argue that many organizational ‘mysteries’ (Alvesson and Kärreman, a) may be understood without considering individual identity issues. Life may pass for individual managers and employees without them (us) being constantly occupied by identity. That said, we also argue that there are instances in which identity does have the utmost importance. From our point of view, identity becomes most highly relevant in light of the increasing dominance of brands and images in and around contemporary organizations, what Kornberger () labelled the ‘brand society’. In the ‘brand society’, image management and branding are important for shaping external perceptions as a means of emphasizing one’s own identity endeavours and a positive sense of self. Identity thus becomes most visible when used strategically to emphasize certain images or brands or when individuals and organizations are prevented from doing so in the face of identity threats, uncertainty, or suspicion. At the organizational level, time and energy are channelled into harmonizing organizational images, identity, and culture in the name of branding (Hatch and Schultz, ). For individuals, too, potential incoherence between others’ images and one’s own perceptions of identity may be problematic (Dutton and Dukerich, ; Dutton et al., ). While organizations and individuals alike strive for the ideals of harmony, alignment and coherence, these are precarious affairs, as identities, images, and brands are far from stable or enduring (Gioia et al., ). Their mutual inter-dynamics are located in social relationships. They may often be contested and constantly negotiated, manipulated, and ‘managed’, and they may spin out of control and take on lives of their own (Bertilsson and Rennstam, ; Frandsen, ). Our main interest is to consider images and brands as ‘activation points’ for identity work. In the following, we examine the ways in which images and brands influence meaning-making and behaviours of individuals in organizations—and thereby significantly impact contemporary organizing.
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.................................................................................................................................. In many service-oriented industries, from airlines to banks, corporations have engaged in competitive fights over the positioning of their brands, often centred on the supposed levels of customer service offered by employees. While research on emotional labour has
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pointed out how such brands have become powerful in ‘managing the hearts’ of employees (Hochschild, ), organizational studies has only recently begun to deepen our understanding of the implications of brands and branding for individuals and their identities in organizations (Brannan et al., ; Endrissat et al., ; Frandsen, ; Frandsen et al., ; Hatch and Schultz, , ; Kärreman and Rylander, ; Kornberger, ; Müller, ; Mumby, ; Ravasi and Schultz, ). In our contemporary brand society (Kornberger, ), no longer only the marketing department but everyone engages in communicative labour (Mumby, ) preoccupied with branding and being branded by organizations. There is continuous emphasis on the conscious (and perhaps tiring) articulations of answers to questions such as ‘who am I?’, ‘how do I look?’, and ‘how am I perceived?’ among individuals, often in relation to ‘who are we?’, ‘how do we look?’, and ‘how are we perceived?’ as an organization. Brands belong to the same domain of organizational phenomena previously studied using concepts such as organizational identity (Albert and Whetten, ; Ashforth and Mael, ; Dutton and Dukerich, ; Ravasi and Schultz, ; Scott and Lane, ) and organizational image (Alvesson, ; Dutton and Dukerich, ; Dutton et al., ; Gioia et al., ). Each of these concepts signifies a certain viewpoint of the organization. Organizational identity refers to the mental associations about an organization held by its organizational members. Organizational identity is often influenced by ‘organizational image’, which refers to how others view the organization, and by the organization’s strategically communicated brand. As such, organizational identity is typically defined as ‘the set of beliefs shared by top managers and stakeholders about the central, enduring, and distinctive characteristics of an organization’ (Scott and Lane, : ). One common premise in this literature is that members relate to organizational identity with varying degrees of (dis)identification. In elaborated form, members develop and express their self-concepts in light of organizational identities, which are in turn developed and expressed through members’ self-concepts. Organizational identity is, therefore, more than an answer to the question ‘who are we as an organization?’ (Gioia and Thomas, ). It also presents, at least potentially, a partial answer to the question ‘who am I as an individual?’ While the relationship between individual and organizational identities is well studied in the literature on identity (Brown, ), and although the influential role of organizational image in this relationship has been noted (Dutton et al., ), the role played by brand remains rather under-theorized. Brand is typically seen merely as an organizational signifier, yet recent developments in the literature have bridged organization studies and branding to suggest that brands and branding are interesting in their own right (Brannan et al., ; Endrissat et al., ; Frandsen, ; Frandsen et al., ; Hatch and Schultz, , ; Kärreman and Rylander, ; Kornberger, ; Müller, ; Mumby, ; Ravasi and Schultz, ). In understanding individual identity work within organizations related to organizational-level identity and image, especially in the context of our argument that individual identity work is often ‘activated’ given tensions among organizational identity, image, and brand, we highlight two important concepts: identity regulation and identification. We first elaborate on these concepts before proceeding to more elaborate definitions of branding and image.
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.................................................................................................................................. The term ‘identity’ is used in many different ways and to refer to diverse entities. Consider, for example, ‘corporate identity’ (Cornelissen et al., ; Van Riel and Balmer, ), ‘organizational identity’ (Albert et al., ; Gioia et al., ; Scott and Lane, ), ‘occupational’ and ‘professional identity’ (Ashcraft ; Ashforth et al., ; Ibarra, ), or ‘social’ and ‘personal’ identity (Ashforth and Mael, ; Hogg and Terry, ). Identity may refer to enduring, coherent, or distinctive characteristics—that is, some kind of essence—of certain entities (Albert and Whetten, ) or to temporarily coherent, context-dependent, fluctuating, fragile, or even conflicted formations of ‘who one is’ (Alvesson et al., ; Gioia et al., ; Tracy and Trethewey, ). Identity tends to become most visible when it appears or feels problematic, such as when individuals face uncertainty, threat, or suspicion (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, ; Elsbach and Kramer, ; Petriglieri, ; Ravasi and Schultz, ). In organizational life, uncertainty, threat, or suspicion may arise from outsiders’ perception of the organization, organizational image, or from managerially enforced and strategically communicated brand discourse supposedly signifying ‘who we are’. We may not explicitly reflect upon identity as we go about our daily work. It may instead be activated when individual organizational members try and make sense (Weick, ) of the events linked to organizational images (Dutton and Dukerich, ) or branding (Brannan et al., , Frandsen, ; Kärreman and Rylander, ; Müller, ). Here we focus on identity as constituted through discourses and practices (Alvesson et al., ; Collinson, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). This suggests that identities are continually negotiated and potentially contested (Thomas and Davies, ). Identity work thus occurs in interaction with available discourses and accepted practices. Management can regulate employee identities (Alvesson and Willmott, ) in various ways. To encourage a particular employee identity, it may attempt to engineer a certain organizational culture (Kunda, ). Management may also attempt to co-opt identity material relating to consumer culture (Land and Taylor, ), ethical orientations (Costas and Kärreman, ), lifestyles (Fleming and Sturdy, ), or broad societal discourses (Ybema et al., ) to establish ties between employee identity and the organization. Such ties may be encouraged through the exercise of aspirational control (Alvesson and Kärreman, b; Costas and Kärreman, ; Roberts, ; Thornborrow and Brown, ), that is, by providing aspirational and attractive identity material to the employee self, such as high status, generous compensation, and an elite sense of selfhood (Alvesson and Robertson, ). As we will see, this kind of identity regulation may also incorporate brands and branding. Managerial identity regulation (Alvesson and Willmott, ) may lead to different results, including identification, dis-identification, ambivalence, alienation, and organizational exit (Collinson, ; Costas and Fleming, ; Costas and Kärreman, ; Kärreman and Alvesson, ; Kunda, ; Pratt, ). Identification processes are tightly connected to individuals’ identity work, that is, to ongoing activity to construct a ‘self ’ that is coherent, distinct, and positively valued (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Kuhn, ). Scott et al. (: ) argued that ‘the story we tell of ourselves in interaction (or posit with
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respect to interaction) is the essence of identification’. Similarly, Kuhn and Nelson (: ) defined identification as ‘communicative acts illustrative of one’s attachment to one or more identity structures’. Identification thus results when employees organize their senses of self by deploying identity material provided by the organization in positive ways (e.g., Elsbach, ; Grey, ; Kuhn, ). Dis-identification, on the other hand, happens when employees experience identity material provided by the organization as fake, inauthentic, or morally compromised, thus establishing their identities through alternative discourses that run counter to the dominant managerial discourse (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, ; Holmer-Nadesan, ). Other research has focused on different types of variation in between identification and dis-identification, such as neutral identification (Elsbach, ), schizo-identification (Elsbach, ; Humphreys and Brown, ), ambivalent identification (Kreiner and Ashforth, ; Lemmergaard and Muhr, ; Pratt, ), and various pathological forms of under- and over-identification (Dukerich et al., ; Galvin et al., ). Contemporary processes of identity regulation increasingly take new forms in which employees’ identities are regulated to fit companies’ overall brand messages and values (Brannan et al., ; Frandsen, ; Müller, ). Such brand-centred control evokes the external audience—in the form of customers—as a powerful source of normative control, coercing employees to think and act as brand ambassadors not only at work but also outside of it (Müller, ). Frandsen () highlighted the potential dilemmas of brandcentred control, particular among call-centre employees, who are expected both to act ‘on brand’ and to deliver extraordinary service, while at the same time being efficient with their time in short customer interactions. This leads to schizoid forms of identification. Brannan et al. (), on the other hand, suggested that in such mundane work environments as call centres, brands may become a source of meaning for employees’ identity work. As such, brands and branding are seen to foster both positive identification (Brannan et al., ; Kärreman and Rylander, ) and more problematic forms of identification and resistance (Frandsen, ; Müller, ), often with simultaneous, shifting positions between identification and dis-identification (Frandsen et al., ). To understand these relationships and responses, we explore brands and branding, as well as organizational image, in more detail below.
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.................................................................................................................................. As concepts, brand and branding have primarily emerged from the marketing literature. Here, the short definition of a brand is a marker that identifies a product or service, whether a name, a symbol, or something else (cf. Keller, ). Contemporary marketing literature suggests the brand is also a valuable asset, both strategically and financially. Not surprisingly, a key challenge for scholars has followed: to identify the critical components of successful brands and to develop models and theories concerning brand management. In this context, brand equity, or a brand’s overall value (Dillon et al., ; Kapferer, ; Keller, ), has emerged as a key concept. Indeed, many studies of brand management
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seek to identify critical components and to understand their operation in order to maximize brand equity. Scholars have also drawn distinctions between brands used to market certain products and brands used to symbolize an organization, or a ‘corporate brand’. The latter is seen as a general strategic resource, a core competency manifesting as attraction for customers, product support, investor confidence, and brand longevity (Balmer, ). Hatch and Schultz () see the corporate brand as deeply rooted in organizational culture, a vehicle for expressing unique organizational values. The corporate brand is also used as a symbolic device to distil and visualize various attributes of an organization, clarifying the meaning of the organizational identity for employees (Kärreman and Rylander, ). The perspective of corporate branding acknowledges the importance of internal organizational processes (Karmark, ; Hatch and Schultz, , ; Schultz et al., ). This suggests that, in today’s fast-moving, global society, marketing and communications efforts make more sense directed at the corporate rather than the product level. There is a shift from a narrow focus on customers as audiences to a broader focus on all stakeholder groups, especially internal audiences (De Chernatony, ; Gotsi and Wilson, ; Harris and De Chertanoy, ; Ind, ; Karmark, ). This shift is reflected in popular catchphrases like ‘brand culture’ (Schröder and Salzer-Mörling, ), ‘living the brand’ (Ind, ), and ‘brand religion’ (Kunde, ). Mobilization of employees, it is argued, is key for an organization to deliver its brand promise and align employees’ behaviour with the values expressed by the brand (Olins, ). For example, Olins (: ) noted: Marketing service brands demands an additional skill, getting your own staff to love the brand and to live it and to breathe it, so that they can become the personal manifestation of the brand when they deal with customers.
As such, branding practices that target organizational members’ values, hope, aspirations, and identities have emerged in the forms of ‘internal marketing’ (Ahmed et al., ; Kelemen and Papasolomou, ; Lings, ), ‘internal branding’ (Bergstrom et al., ; Foster et al., ; Müller, ), and ‘employee branding’ (Brannan et al., ; Edwards, ; Harquail, ). These internally directed brand practices attempt to regulate the behaviour of employees, particular front-line employees, to ensure strong identification with the brand: ‘on-brand’ behaviour. Recently, the rhetoric around brands has intensified, encompassing still more social and cultural aspects (Kornberger, ; Müller, ; Mumby, ; Willmott, ). Brands, it is claimed, are ubiquitous elements of contemporary culture (Endrissat et al., ). Their logic supposedly defines key aspects of social life, such as political and religious practices and our senses of self (e.g. Arvidsson, ; Banet-Weiser, ; Klein, ; Kornberger, ; Lury, ). Although as means of marketing brands are well understood in the marketing literature, organizational scholars have noted that branding can also be seen as means of organizing by communicating or imposing certain meanings upon employees (Kärreman and Rylander, ). Research on branding has started to explore the consequences of branding considering managerial efforts to regulate employees’ perceptions, interpretations, and identities (e.g. Kärreman and Rylander, ; Kornberger, ; Pettinger, ), summarized through concepts such as brand ambassadors or brand citizens (Backhaus and Tikoo, ; Burmann and Zeplin, ).
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The relationship between branding and being branded is complex. Scholars have observed that organizations may draw on employees’ identities and lifestyle preferences rather than persuading employees to adapt to identities provided from the top (Endrissat et al., ; Land and Taylor, ). Critical scholars of management studies have suggested that this kind of branding is based on immaterial labour, with employees adding to the brand’s value without additional compensation (e.g. Arvidsson, ). On the other hand, organizational members may be willing to participate in the production of a brand if it provides identity material for their own personal branding projects, defining to some extent who they are or will become. This suggests a dynamic relationship between doing branding and being branded (Vásquez et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Images ‘exist’ somewhere between a communicator and an audience, and they are often understood as a result of reciprocal or bi-directional projections. That is, images of corporations, products, occupations, and people take shape in the presence of efforts to both produce and interpret impressions (Frandsen, ). The production of images is often marked by branding efforts such as slogans. For example, Copenhagen Business School until recently used the motto, ‘Where university means business’, which conveys an image of university and business existing in harmony. Of course, the impact of this image will vary among people, who often draw information from other sources, such as interactions with the university as organization, observed behaviour by university staff, academic research, or the media. Many industries, firms, occupations, and professions are sensitive to image, especially in those sectors captured by concepts such as ‘the knowledge economy’, ‘the knowledge organization’ or ‘knowledge work’. This domain is largely characterized by creativity, problem-solving, and task complexity (Alvesson, ; Lowendahl, ; Newell et al., ). At its core, knowledge work can be understood as the application of ‘esoteric expertise’ (Starbuck, ): specific, scarce, and abstruse knowledge deployed in work practices (Kärreman, ; Starbuck, ). The ambiguities of knowledge, knowledgeintensive firms, and knowledge work (Alvesson ) make ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’, and ‘solving problems’ matters of belief, impression, and negotiated meaning (Alvesson, ; Kärreman, ). Higher education illustrates this dynamic well. Universities and professors nurture an image of being among the best, as evident, for example, in the fuss and scramble over published institutional rankings (Alvesson, ; Huzzard et al., ). Put bluntly, image becomes crucial in the absence of tangible material evidence available for inspection, leading individuals in knowledge-intensive firms to construct notionally ‘elite’ identities through affiliation with organizations holding prestigious brands (Alvesson and Robertson, ; Brown and Coupland, ; Gill, ). An organization’s image may also pose threats to the identities of members of stigmatized organizations (Devers et al., ; Helms, and Patterson, ; Hudson, ; Hudson and Okhuysen, ; Paetzold et al., ) or occupations (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Kreiner et al., ; Lemmergaard and Muhr, ; McMurray, ; Meara, ;
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Meisenbach, ; Tracy and Scott, ; Wolfe and Blithe, ). Dutton and Dukerich’s () seminal study of the New York Port Authority illustrated that the organization’s image significantly influenced how organizational members interpreted and acted upon key issues. Their follow-up research highlighted that a negative image often led employees to feel embarrassed and to challenge their organizational identification, while a positive image led employees to ‘bask in the reflected glory’ of their organization and to experience strong identification (Dutton et al., ). Studies of dirty workers (members of stigmatized professions) have also shown how a tainted organizational image motivates employees to engage in taint-management strategies (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Meisenbach, ), including dual strategies of both hiding and advertising their affiliation (Wolfe and Blithe, ) and various forms of identity-boosting behaviours (Tracy and Scott, ), in order to secure a positive identity despite their stigmatized affiliation.
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.................................................................................................................................. Thus far, we have focused on the conceptual side of identity, image, and branding. In this section, we look more closely at some recent empirical studies of the dynamics of identity, image, and branding. We focus on six studies: (a) Kärreman and Rylander (); (b) Frandsen (); (c) Brannan et al. (); (d) Endrissat et al. (); (e) Frandsen et al. (); and (f) Müller (). Taking an interpretivist approach, Kärreman and Rylander () showed how the branding practices of a global management consultancy firm strengthen employees’ organizational identification. They found that the content of organizational identity—responses to the question, ‘who are we?’—are not directly influenced by branding activities but instead are framed and shaped through social interactions in the workplace. However, the brand was important in that it shored up the attractiveness of belonging to the firm, fuelling processes of organizational identification. The brand reminded employees, outlining and enhancing associations and emotions that derived from previous experiences of social interactions at the firm. Indeed, the primary audience for branding was not clients or prospective clients but rather employees and prospective employees. The authors thus highlighted the potential of branding for managing meaning internal to the organization. Frandsen () studied the ways in which internally directed branding activities seek to produce ‘on brand’ identities by contrast with the more technocratic forms of control that govern ‘the assembly line’ type of work of call centre employees. As such, employees found themselves torn between, on the one hand, ‘living the brand’ and, on the other, following procedures, being effective and being ‘on time’. In instances where they took responsibility for customers (as prescribed by the brand values), they could also be reprimanded for acting slowly or inefficiently. The study highlighted that employees, initially drawn to the brand and identifying with it before entering the organization, over time became cynical and distanced themselves from the brand as a coping mechanism that permitted simultaneous embrace and distance from their work roles.
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Brannan et al. () focused on interactions around organizational brand involving meaning-making, identity work, and the regulation of frontline service workers, again in a call centre. They showed that the brand helps to mobilize employees and capture their commitment. The elements of prestige, professionalism, and success the brand communicated were important in boosting employees’ sense of organizational identification and self-esteem. Brand meanings operated in two distinctive ways, both as material for identity work (making employees feel better about their future selves) and as disciplinary tools. Brand meanings distract from the mundane realities of day-to-day call centre work, making it possible to reframe the work as ‘future’ skilled service work. The brand helped employees frame their work as offering ‘customer service’ rather than ‘taking calls’. Employees used these meanings to support their identities as notionally ‘skilled professionals’, which helped them commit to a future with the firm and sugar-coated the mundane reality of call centre life. Further, managers did their best to push symbolic brand meanings of the firm as ‘prestigious’, underscoring processes of identity regulation and acting as ‘a palliative for a plaintive existence of life on the line’ (Brannan et al., : ). Endrissat et al. () suggested that, in contemporary capitalism, branding and identity projects are important not only for professional service firms but also for the relatively lowskilled retail service sector. They investigated how branding, employee identity, and organizational identity form mutually constitutive relationships. The advent of job titles such as ‘store artist’, ‘sandwich artist’, or ‘barista’ are trends, in their view, towards building brands by association with art and craftmanship. Tapping into desired identities is a business model for retail service organizations that incentivizes employees with positively valued identity opportunities. The firm offers a space for employees to act out desired identities, and employees provide life stories and lifestyles that support the company brand. Endrissat et al.’s () concept of identity-incentive branding adds to our understanding of how brands exert neo-normative control to alter the focus from existing identities, such as gender and ethnicity, to desired identities that are unstable and require social recognition and validation. Frandsen et al. () highlighted the increased focus on branding in non-profit and public sectors—such as municipalities, hospitals, cities, and higher education—where corporate notions of brands as a competitive resource for organizations have taken hold. Their study of four different business schools found that Deans and marketing professionals seek to engage faculty in their branding efforts but that faculty respond in diverse, often unintended ways. Some engaged in brand endorsement. Others remained more ambivalent in relation to the brand, describing it as devoid of meaning. Still others positioned themselves as cynical towards their business school brand, construing it as a ‘façade’, ‘hype’, ‘spin’, or ‘superficial fluff ’. The micro-level, discursive methodology in this case illustrated how faculty members’ sensemaking was in constant flux, with individuals’ discursive positioning constantly shifting within each interview. This highlights the ambiguous character of brands and the always dynamic, often ambivalent identity work of organizational members who respond to them. Müller () examined what happens when a brand deeply engages external stakeholders, introducing the concept of brand-centred control as a new twist on normative control. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a consumer products company with a strong corporate culture and brand, and with a particular focus on internal branding as an extension of culture management, Müller () showed that brand-centred control,
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besides internally managing meaning, mobilizes external audiences (customers and the wider public) as an additional source of normative control. In these circumstances, employees are coerced to engage with the brand image held by external audiences, becoming brand representatives both at work and in their free time. By implication, brand-centred control transcends the boundaries between work and employees’ private lives, making work and organizational control ever-present. Employees may resist brand-centred control in various ways, but their internalization of customers’ idealized image means that even in the absence of face-to-face interactions with customers they come to judge their behaviours and sense-of-self in light of normative brand values.
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.................................................................................................................................. We conclude this chapter by highlighting three directions for future research. Extant research suggests that we have only scratched the surface of understanding the interplay among brand, image, and identity in contemporary organizations. While the literature on marketing has explored how employees’ values, culture, behaviours, and identities are mobilized in support of brands, the implications of brands and branding for individuallevel identity work remains to be fully explored. First, both Endrissat et al. () and Frandsen et al. () highlighted that people’s engagement with brands is often intimately tied to their ideas concerning their own personal brands. The marketization of self and the focus on building personal brands are increasingly prominent discourses in corporate life (Lair et al., ), yet the implications and enactment of this discourse remain unstudied in relation to individuals’ identity work within organizations. Future research could therefore explore the relationships among corporate branding, personal branding, and identity work. Second, Bertilsson and Rennstam () highlighted that brands may both create and destroy value for organizations. Building upon their ideas around branding, future research may seek to understand how branding can simultaneously enhance and restrict individual identity work within organizations. Bertilsson and Rennstam’s () proposed alternative perspective on branding as a platform emphasizes the co-constructive and intertwined nature of brands and the roles of diverse groups of stakeholders both internal and external to the organization. Understanding how such brand co-construction may tap into the individual identity projects of employees and managers in organizations could offer a new avenue for future research. Finally, our argument is that tensions, insecurities, and dilemmas related to the interplay among brands, images, and organizational identities create opportunities for individuals to engage in identity work. Yet empirical studies also highlight that responses to instances of perceived misalignment are rarely fixed and straightforward but rather fluctuate frequently, as do the brands and images to which they react. As such, more interpretivist and critical studies are required to understand the complex nature of the interplay among these key concepts and discourses—including their implications for individual identity work in contemporary organizations.
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‘ , ’ ’ Paradoxes of Trumpian Identity Work Knotting in a Post-Truth Context .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract How are identities constituted in a post-truth context? To answer this question, the authors of this chapter take a paradox approach to identity, which can address the contradictions of a post-truth era. They show how the paradoxical tensions that actors experience serve as discursive resources for individual and collective identities. The authors assert that the greater the interrelatedness of paradoxical tensions evidenced in discourse, the more likely are they to knot in a dynamic interplay that may result in self-referential action of a contradictory or paradoxical nature. Drawing from the logic of extreme context research, the chapter examines the discourse of the post-truth presidency of Donald J. Trump to illustrate how identity knotting subverts managerial agency in identity construction. ‘I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed’. Donald J. Trump1 Yet, tells advisers that the , Haitians sent here in ‘all have AIDS’, and that Nigerians who saw America would never ‘go back to their huts’. Donald J. Trump2 Mockingly imitates the accent of the Indian prime minister. Donald J. Trump3 Uses a White House event to honour American Navajo veterans to mock a senator with a racially charged (‘Pocahontas’) slur. Donald J. Trump4
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Tells Americans that a march of torch-carrying white supremacists and neoNazis includes ‘some very fine people’—and when one of those marchers murders a peaceful counter-protester, condemns violence on ‘both sides’. Donald J. Trump5 ‘I think that I would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . a very stable genius’. Donald J. Trump6 ‘The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons’. Ralph Waldo Emerson (: ) ‘Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t’. Margaret Thatcher7
I
.................................................................................................................................. W one thinks of the th President of the United States as an avowed dealmaker who said he would bring management skills and a business sense to the presidency, as the above quotes demonstrate, he has certainly been a study in contradictions. Paradoxically, many would say deception, while others would claim authenticity. President Trump’s statements have invoked the spectre of ‘post-truth’, characterized by alternative versions of reality in which subjective preferences, contradictory sentiments, and gut feelings substitute for objective standards of sensemaking (D’Ancona, ; Wang, ). While the norm-breaking presidency of Donald Trump may seem far removed from identity research, the value of extreme context research is being recognized for its ability to shed light on difficult-to-access phenomena, the best and worst in human behaviour, and accelerated processes over the ordinary (e.g. circumstances that pose elevated risk, crisis or emergency modes of relating, or disruptive episodes in organizational systems seen as highly consequential to multiple stakeholders) (Hällgren et al., ). We seek to explore how identities are being constituted in a post-truth context, and the role that a paradox approach can play in informing us about both identity and agency. Specifically, as organizational actors experience the world, they construct paradoxical tensions (i.e. the push-pull among multiple oppositional tendencies) that also serve as discursive resources for individual and collective identities (Clarke et al., ; Dameron and Torset, ). We assert that the greater the interrelatedness of paradoxical tensions evidenced in discourse, the more likely are they to knot in a dynamic interplay that may result in selfreferential action of a contradictory or paradoxical nature. Drawing from the logic of extreme context research, we examine the discourse of the post-truth presidency of Donald J. Trump to illustrate how identity knotting subverts managerial agency in identity construction.
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.................................................................................................................................. The study of identity, in recent years, has shifted to ‘identity work’, i.e. the processes by which individuals and collectives construct, alter, and adapt their identities (Brown, ; Snow and Anderson, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). However, in the performance of identity work, individuals are constrained by in situ demands, the structures that
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organizations impose, and the often-imperceptible reach of culture. From within these constraints, they reflexively and strategically construct identities in self-narratives at the nexus of temporal, personal, relational, cultural, and professional identifications (Ashforth et al., ). Although identity may be perceived as a set of stable characteristics, it is always a work in progress, subject to the interplay of sensemaking, discursive interaction, and negotiation (Baumeister, ; Weick et al., ). Following Sheep et al. (b), individual identity is also fraught with paradox, just as much of the identity work literature is actually theorized in terms of duality, tension, or paradox. Although this is often implicit (e.g. agentic resistance to identity regulation), Sheep et al. (b) made a paradox framework explicit by naming four major tensions in this literature and the identity paradoxes they form (see also Brown, ). These are: () a paradox of entity, i.e. is identity a characteristic (focusing on durability or stability of identity categories) or process (focusing on dynamism and the fluidity of identity change) (Alvesson, ; Breakwell, ; Gioia and Patvardhan, )?; () a paradox of conformity, i.e. how can one assimilate to the group(s) yet remain distinctive (Brewer, ; Hoyer and Steyaert, ; Kreiner et al., )?; () a paradox of temporality, i.e. how does one transition from a current (or former) self into future possible selves (Brown, ; Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, )?; and () a paradox of elasticity, i.e. how do identities stretch to include new facets of identity yet simultaneously constrict to hold identity together (Kreiner et al., )? Other identity tensions likely exist. Since paradoxical tensions are persistent and thus non-resolvable (Schad et al., ), ongoing identity work is necessary to manage them. Note that these are often simultaneous, interdependent tensions worked out in the moment. Either prospectively or retrospectively, individuals decide to emphasize or de-emphasize which aspects of their identity should be expanded or contracted in some way. Also, paradoxes of conformity and temporality fuel the elasticity calculation to expand or constrict, while paradoxes of entity manifest themselves in constricting or expanding identity work and the object relations they form. Paradoxes of entity, conformity, temporality, and elasticity are thus deeply intertwined.
P, I W, K
.................................................................................................................................. Since the above arguments converge on a more processual, paradoxical, contingent, and discursive view of identity and identity work, Sheep et al. (b) turned to poststructuralism as a theoretical framework most likely to record paradox. A poststructuralist lens rejects the humanist psychology view of the self as an integrated whole (e.g. Erikson, ; cf. Hoyer and Steyaert, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ), favouring instead its location in language, communication, and discourse. This is reflected in the view of language as constitutive, not merely reflective of social reality. Discourses source paradoxical tensions as they compete and thus serve as resources through which individuals construct their individual and collective identities in and through communication processes, identifying the conditions of possibility for various subject positions (Dameron and Torset, ; Ford, ; Laine and Vaara, ).
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A poststructuralist lens positions the self at the intersection of multiple and competing discourses through which actors experience and act upon the world (Baxter, ; Clarke et al., ; Holstein and Gubrium, ). Since organizations are microcosms of society, multiple discourses circulate as actors struggle to fix meaning in the moment. Of course, any such ‘fix’ is always temporary, as other meaning potentials often emerge in the struggle against closure over which meanings should prevail (Laclau and Mouffe, ). Similarly, identity work signals a contingent identification with a subject position in a competitive discursive field. By this is meant that the identity work could always be otherwise, signalling a key constructionist touchstone. A key advantage of a poststructuralist view, then, is the ability to understand the combined experience of the aforementioned identity paradoxes. Based on work by Sheep et al. (a) and relational dialectics (Baxter, ), Sheep et al. (b) make the argument that actors are likely to experience multiple paradoxes of identity work as knotted, i.e. a dynamic interplay of twists, kinks, and curls that explain self-referential action of a contradictory or paradoxical nature. They explain: [W]hat happens when organizational actors—as they account for their context-bound actions—name one pole of a paradox (e.g., change over stability), interweave it with the pole of another paradox (e.g., different over same) that, in turn, impacts still other paradoxes (e.g., future over past and present) (cf. Sheep, Fairhurst, and Khazanchi, )? Further, what circumstances precipitate such an interweaving (e.g., a post-traumatic growth opportunity), and what do we learn from considering their collective inter-workings through actors’ sensemaking accounts? (Sheep et al., b: )
Inconsistencies in behaviour can surface any time that the knotting shifts, e.g. stress on one tensional pole that exacerbates its impact on other tensions by generating a new tension thereby tightening the knot or, alternatively, stress on another tensional pole that attenuates the impact on the others, thus loosening it. Knotting directly manifests itself in actors’ problem setting in the way that they name or imply multiple tensions, and how they may intertwine and be generative of new tensions (Fairhurst and Sheep, ). Moreover, the work of Schön () tells us to look for the ways in which problem setting prefigures action, i.e. problems are set in such a way as to justify one course of action over others. This is what Sheep et al. (a) found in their study of innovation in the print industry under conditions of resource deprivation. Actors engaged in knotting multiple tensions by naming them, explaining how they interrelated, and justifying innovative action or inaction based on their ability to find room to manoeuvre. Such a finding, we believe, has great purchase for the study of identity paradoxes because we can investigate how one paradox of identity work might amplify or dampen the effects of other identity paradoxes. To summarize, we have made the case for studying identities and identity work with a paradox lens, as a number of paradoxical tensions remain implicit in the identity work literature. These identity paradoxes include entity, conformity, temporality, and elasticity, although this list is certainly not complete. We have also suggested that organizational actors experience the interrelatedness of these paradoxical tensions, and the affordances of a poststructuralist lens make such interrelations easier to research. Studying interrelated identity paradoxes is not an attempt to re-centre the self-identity, but to underscore the complexity of identity work in and through language, communication, and discourse. More specifically, organizational actors are likely to engage in a
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particular form of problem setting in their work environments that we call ‘knotting’, i.e. the naming of multiple, intertwined tensions to prefigure or justify a course of action—or to participate in a particular form of identity work. Knotting can also be approached from an analytic point of view when actors’ sensemaking accounts are fragmented, lacking, or incomplete (e.g. Fairhurst and Sheep, ; Norton and Sadler, ). We follow such an approach in the example below. We also draw from the logic of extreme context research to demonstrate how identity paradoxes can impact one another in the post-truth presidency of Donald Trump, the knotting this produces, and the contradictory leadership outcomes that follow.
P-T L K I T
.................................................................................................................................. At the heart of leadership is trust, and trust is lost when leaders lie, go back on their word, or act counter to what they have said. Such is the conventional wisdom, backed by research, on effective leadership in a Western context (Doughherty, ; Shockley-Zalabak et al., ). However, there is a post-truth dynamic afoot when—according to numerous journalistic, scholarly, and historical sources—a president of the United States routinely deceives, remains indifferent to such behaviour, and manages to win not just attributions of leadership, but accolades of authentic leadership (Kakutani, ). If trust is essential to effective leadership and deceit destroys trust, can ‘leadership’ and ‘post-truth’ ever be mentioned in the same sentence, let alone be paired? The answer to such a question leads us to the presidency of Donald J. Trump and to ask how, precisely, he wins attributions of authenticity when there have been so many public documentations of his mendacity? The answer to this question, we believe, lies in Trumpian identity work, which we present as an example of extreme context research whose goal, as mentioned, showcases difficult-to-reach phenomena and accelerated processes. Hällgren et al. () usefully type extreme contexts as circumstances posing elevated risk, crisis/emergency modes of relating, and/or disruptive episodes in organizational systems with consequences to multiple stakeholders. We see the latter of these as most relevant to the example at hand, i.e. disruptive contexts that are ‘frequently portrayed as unique, unprecedented, or even uncategorizable’ (Christianson et al., : ; cited in Hällgren et al., : ), owing to the fact that they are a sweeping departure from what has been the norm. As such, disruptive contexts ‘do not usually allow for preparation (Lanzara, : ) and catch organizations and/or communities off-guard’ (Hällgren et al., : ). We believe that Trumpian identity work meets these criteria for several reasons. First, while the US presidency may be analogous to a CEO of a large, multinational corporation, the democratic operations of government make it unique. Only forty-five individuals have served this office in the history of the United States, and the all-encompassing media coverage of the President’s activities, from the mundane to crises by a designated White House press corps, far exceeds that of most CEOs. Second, President Trump is unique. In a recent survey of political scientists and historians, President Trump ranked as the
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worst president in US history, and was still fifth worst when considering the responses from conservative respondents only (Shugerman, ). This may, in part, be due to often contradicting himself and, uniquely, showing such an indifference to this as to blur any true–false binary (Scherer, ). The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column and database records that in the first days of his presidency, President Trump made , false or misleading (public) statements (Fact Checker, ). This averages to . false claims a day, which supports the alternative reality making of post-truth discourse (D’Ancona, ; DePaulo, ; Kakutani, ). Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian specializing in authoritarianism, asserted, ‘ . . . if you want to rip the heart out of a democracy directly, if you want to go right at it and kill it, what you do is you go after facts. And that is what modern authoritarians do (see Strachan, )’. The presidency of Donald J. Trump is triggering these and other similar arguments, especially with his attacks on the mainstream media (Snyder, ; Strachan, ). Finally, according to New York Times writer Charles Homans (), a veteran of numerous Trump campaign and post-election rallies, Trump portrays a quintessentially postmodern view of the self:8 I have never interviewed Trump, but people I know who have often remark on an uncanny element of the experience: the absence of any indication of an off-limits private self distinct from his public image. The phenomenon feels radically postmodern: a complete communion of the thing with its representation, officiated by an audience of millions over the course of nearly four decades.
In short, whether by dint of office, behaviour, or persona, President Trump’s identity work is sui generis and on full display, representing an opportunity to understand the knotting of identity paradoxes, especially when we first consider authenticity and the site of identity work.
Real-Self/Fake-Self: ‘If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t’ (Authenticity Paradox) Two quotes from President Trump at the start of this chapter suggest a use of discourse to establish identities that are, paradoxically, ‘fake’ and ‘public’. Specifically, the more that President Trump says that he should be categorized as something (e.g. non-racist or a stable genius), the more he raises questions about whether he should be a legitimate category incumbent (Jayyusi, ). Earlier quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Thatcher make this logic explicit, as does Trump’s contradictory behaviour vis-à-vis issues of race. In these utterances, Trump draws from a powerful real-self/fake-self discourse operating in society, where discourse reflects a system of knowledge that creates ‘truth effects’ (Foucault, ). Tracy and Trethewey () suggest that one has only to look in selfhelp books, the business and popular press, everyday talk, and some scholarly theories (e.g.
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emotional labour) to find that the self is, for the most part, dichotomized as either real and authentic or fake and false. Further, ‘Truth effects created by the real-self/fake-self dichotomy are important not because there are necessary true differences between real and fake selves, but because people talk and act as if they are’ (Tracy and Trethewey, : ). In other words, their power derives from the ability of people, such as President Trump, to claim truth (Newton, ).
Public/Private: Onstage/Backstage (Site Paradox) At the same time, Trump’s remarks are made for public consumption, which suggests a public–private tension at the site of identity work (Schmidt and Lee, ). Society, culture, and social roles are typically designated ‘public’, while the personal, backstage, and individualistic traditionally inhabit the ‘private’ realm. The fact that public–private is, paradoxically, a false dichotomy, due to the ways in which the private realm is also a product of society and culture, matters little (Baxter, ). As Trump’s heavy use of Twitter suggests, he routinely draws from a public–private discourse by placing a high premium on his public image, e.g. communicating directly with ‘the people’, often bypassing his own communications staff. A poststructuralist view of identity resists the dichotomizing of identity into real or fake selves and public or private ones (Baxter, ; Tracy and Trethewey, ). It favours the ways in which discourses of power (e.g. managerialism, entrepreneurialism, etc.) create various subject positions. However, from the position of the identity work of the actors, these are dilemmatic tensions—i.e. they require management, especially given the scrutiny the selection of presidential preferred selves receives from the public, the media, and other branches of government. Real self/fake self and public/private discourses appear to provide the linguistic tools that support Trump’s identity work and contribute to particular kinds of identity knotting, which we next explore.
Popular/Elite: Right versus Left (Affiliation Paradox) Knotting occurs when identity work reveals multiple tensions whose prismatic effects amplify or dampen the effects on one another and, at times, generate new tensions (Fairhurst and Sheep, ; Sheep et al., a, b). For example, as Figure . demonstrates, Trump’s identity work reveals that the greater the tension in public/private paradox, the greater the tension in real-self/fake-self paradox. That is, attempts to create a public persona (e.g. via use of Twitter, Fox News, etc.) demand, paradoxically, that he establish simultaneous and opposite identities, i.e. a far right-leaning Republican and neither Republican, nor far-right leaning. Trump must appeal to his base and yet still be palatable to a more general public. Thus, we see a key influence on his ‘If you have to say you are, you aren’t’ identity work, with its confounding categorical incumbency: ‘I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed’, at the same time he tells Americans that a Charlottesville march of white supremacists and neo-Nazis includes ‘some very fine people’ and condemns violence on ‘both sides’ when a peaceful counter-protester is murdered. His identity work conforms to the norms of political correctness regarding race in the first
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Affect Paradox: “Irrational” vs. Rational Response
Right vs. Left
Automaticity Paradox
Authenticity Paradox
Affiliation Paradox
Unmonitored vs. Monitored Communication
“If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Site Paradox Onstage vs. Backstage
. The Trumpian identity knot
quote, while he carefully avoids offending avowed racists (who partially make up his base) in the second. The exacerbating effects of the public/private paradox on the real-self/fake-self paradox also manifests itself as Trump responds to the increased public scrutiny of his campaign and presidency by routinely labelling the mainstream media as ‘Fake News’. By setting up the news sources delivering favourable coverage of him as ‘truthful’ (e.g. Fox News) and other news sources delivering less favourable coverage as ‘fake’ (e.g. CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post), Trump delegitimizes the mainstream media and their identity regulation efforts. By implication, he frames himself as truthful and victimized. He publicly repeats this argument so often that the truncated term ‘Fake News’ is all that is necessary to invoke a narrative understanding of the mainstream news media as the disingenuous villain out to get him (Deye and Fairhurst, ; Vaara et al., ). As shown in Figure ., the knotting continues when we factor in a third paradoxical tension, that of popular versus elite, a tension derived from populism, which is a ‘set of ideas that radicalizes the notion of people against a usurper, oppressor and intrinsically bad oligarchy’ (Poblete, : ). However, while ‘popular’ is typically associated with ordinary people and ‘elite’ with those in charge of society’s institutions, Trump reframes elite from ‘up versus down’ to ‘left versus right’ (Gage, ). Although he is not the first to do this, Trump is the most prominent world leader to consistently shift the meaning of ‘elite’ away from class towards culture—i.e. liberal ideas (e.g. globalism), coastal addresses, and highbrow tastes (Gage, ). This involves an artful bit of identity work from a man who came from a privileged background, with an Ivy-league education, and whose name is synonymous with wealth and power. For example, during the campaign, Trump tweeted, ‘Hillary says things can’t change. I say they have to change. It’s a choice between Americanism and her corrupt globalism. #Imwithyou’.9 The hash tag is an economical and powerful bit of identity work, as was his description of the strong ratings of the (cancelled) Roseanne television show
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about a white, working-class family: ‘It was about us . . . the Fake News hasn’t quite figured it out yet’.10 Indeed, ‘I’m with you’ and ‘It was about us’ are deceptively simple. They gloss key differences within his base (e.g. certainly not everyone is an avowed racist), yet members feel as though he is speaking to them despite those differences. Moreover, Trump often portrays the media as an elite that bypasses the needs of the people: ‘The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging [and] demeaning my use of social media because they don’t want America to hear the real story’.11 In depicting the media as a mendacious, powerful group restricting Americans’ access to the ‘real story’, Trump once again, by implication, defines himself as the defender of truth (Deye and Fairhurst, ). With the addition of popular/elite to public/private and real-self/fake-self, however, the knotting becomes Gordian by sourcing deep-seated cultural differences, known colloquially as the ‘culture wars’. Trump has sewn such suspicion into traditional media institutions (e.g. Schwartz, ) that support within his Republican base has only grown—so much so that a pattern of deception (witness Fact Checker data) can produce ever more grandiose identity work (e.g. ‘I would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . a very stable genius’) without challenge.12 A Gordian identity knot thus forms as the mainstream media pulls in one direction with increasing disdain for both Trump’s public fake-self (e.g. denials he is racist) and real-self (e.g. observed demonstrations of racisms). Trump’s base responds by pulling in the opposite direction by dis-identifying with such media, in favour of an identification and endorsement of him that grants him ever more licence (Ogden, ).
Automatic/Planned: Unmonitored versus Monitored Communications (Automaticity Paradox) There is a fourth tension in Trumpian identity work to explore in Figure .: rather than always strategic, conscious, and planned, President Trump’s frequent tweeting, especially at odd hours, suggests communications that are more spontaneous and impulsive. To understand this dynamic, consider a sub-tension of the public/private paradox that linguists term monitored versus unmonitored language, where monitored language ‘aims outward, referring to addressing the wider world’ (i.e. the public realm), contra the more personal and self-oriented nature of unmonitored speech (i.e. private realm) (McWhorter, ). Communication scholars similarly use the terms ‘expressive’ to refer to someone who lacks an edit function and context sensitivity versus a ‘rhetorical’ who strategically shapes the context to meet one’s goals (O’Keefe, , ). Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman () likewise distinguish ‘System ’ thinkers who are fast, instinctive, and emotional in thought and ‘System ’ thinkers who engage in slower, more deliberate and logical thinking. Resonances in the social sciences notwithstanding, we use the monitored versus unmonitored distinction because of its identity implications, and as it is more clearly derivative of the public/private paradox. Paralleling previous arguments, the greater the tension in monitored versus unmonitored messaging, the greater the tension in real-self/fake-self paradox. How tension manifests itself
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in monitored versus unmonitored messaging is most visible in President Trump’s ‘walkbacks’, which are (monitored) corrections to previously (unmonitored) statements. For example, the week of July was extraordinary for the number of times he walked back his views on Russian interference with US elections from off-the-cuff remarks, e.g. unscripted responses to questions at news conferences (Parker et al., ; Scott, ). Historically, the bias in previous presidential communications has been towards monitored messaging, for a variety of reasons including a separate communications office and the need to produce authoritative texts that coordinate with other government branches. However, President Trump’s communication style, as demonstrated most visibly in his penchant for tweeting during the campaign and while president,13 creates an opposite pull towards unmonitored messaging that, time and again, surprises even his closest advisers who (presumably) help to craft his walk-backs (Parker et al., ). Like the public–private paradox, monitored versus unmonitored messaging interpenetrate, in this case, because of their intertextuality. In short, unmonitored messages often respond to and are shaped by previous monitored communications, while monitored messages respond to and may be shaped by previous unmonitored communications. The knot pulls tighter and more Gordian with the addition of monitored/unmonitored messaging because Trump’s management of this tension is winning him attributions of authentic leadership, which is extremely rare in the usual doublespeak of Washington politicians. How does he do this? He often says and tweets things that are politically incorrect and when he exceeds the bounds of political correctness, he walks back his original strategy with what The Washington Post (and others) have noted is a grudging apology and a ‘wink and a nod’ to the original insult (Fisher, ). He uses strategically ambiguous messaging to reinforce the original ‘I’m with you’ identity work with an implied ‘I’m still with you. They (the media, my staff, liberals, and so on) are making me do this’. Trump’s base discerns this coded message (as they did with the earlier non-offensive message to white supremacists) by responding with affirmative identity work on his behalf. They attribute authenticity to him while excusing or ignoring racist, misogynist, or otherwise morally dubious behaviour that would bring down most other politicians (Baldoni, ; Talbot-Zorn and Marz, ). To this we must add the ways in which the opinion journalism of conservative media outlets (e.g. Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, conservative talk radio, and others) reinforce and echo this identity work with favourable portrayals of President Trump and dismissive views of the mainstream media. DeRue and Ashford (: ) observed that identity work is not just done by leaders as they project an image, but those ‘mirroring back and reinforcing (or not) that image as a legitimate identity’. Thus, we get a richer sense of identity knotting and its Gordian qualities by considering: () how his messaging can be read as simultaneously unmonitored and monitored, public and private, real and fake, and popular and elite at the same time that his base and conservative media outlets legitimate unmonitored/monitored, public/ private, real-self/fake-self, and popular/elite identity knotting to produce attributions of authentic leadership, contra () the mainstream media’s (and others’) rejection of Trumpian identity work by unmasking the strategically ambiguous messaging and attributing mendacity to his leadership. Trump’s identity work thus continues to play with confounding categorical incumbency. His identity work, simultaneously and paradoxically,
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shows him to be a ‘politician’ and ‘not a politician’, the latter to his staunch Republican base who find this authentic.
Emotion/Reason: ‘Irrational’ versus Rational Responses (Affect Paradox) How does identity knotting generate new tensions that can generate more twists and turns and pull a knot ever tighter? We can observe identity knotting’s generative effects in a fifth tension in Figure ., emotion-reason. This is observable in Trump’s own emotions, as well as emotional reactions to Trump’s messaging. For example, the anger that Trump feels towards the media, his own Justice Department’s investigations of his campaign, the intelligence community, trade with China, among other topics, is frequently palpable (Graham, ; Ogden, )—witness his Twitter tirades, their aggressive tone, and the apparent scuttling of any reasoned argument that presidents must be held accountable to the law. Trump supporters and critics also appear qualitatively different vis-à-vis their emotions, and the weighting of them, than the winners and losers of past presidential elections (Vick, ). Consider, for example, the neologism ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. Even while conservative media use the term to discredit the (putatively irrational) criticisms of Trump’s behaviour in office, this phrase reflects strong emotional reactions from various anti-Trump quarters to unmonitored/monitored, public/private, real-self/fake-self, and popular/elite identity knotting. Ideologies are rooted in emotions as much as they are rooted in logics and assumptions. So it should not come as a surprise that when ‘If you have to say you are, you aren’t’ identity work is directed towards ideological issues of racism, misogyny, class, etc., they stir deep emotional chords—not just by those who are offended but by those sympathetic to Trump’s fear mongering on these and other issues (e.g. immigration). Of course, we have known for a long while that emotions and reason inform one another (Kahneman, ), and thus represent another false dichotomy that actors, nonetheless, often treat differently in their identity work. Although the final chapter of Trump’s presidency has yet to be written, one legacy of his presidency has been to further the divisions in the United States in an unprecedented fashion (Gage, ). We argue that his identity knotting, fuelled by the emotions it generates, contributes to just such an outcome.
I I W
.................................................................................................................................. President Trump reinforces the current literature on identity work. For example: () professional role or job transitions, difficult situations, and potential identity threats often occasion identity work (Collinson, ; Ibarra, ), all of which fit President Trump’s relatively short time in office, at this time; () the operations of power often infuse identity work with subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity (Brown, ), reference Trump’s ‘wink and a
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nod’ strategy; () the positioning of contradictory identities is not uncommon in organizational interactions (Ford, ; Humphreys and Brown, ; Potter and Wetherell, ), reference Trump’s confounding categorical incumbencies; () a number of studies have already established the tensional, even paradoxical, nature of identities and identity work where discourse figures prominently (Brown et al., ; Clarke et al., ; Dameron and Torset, ; Ford, ; Lutgen-Sandvik, ); and () authenticity is a paradoxical tension to be managed in and through identity work (Brown, ; Ibarra, ), much as President Trump is doing. The extreme context research of Trumpian identity work uniquely informs the study of identity and identity work in two ways. First, it is one thing to look at how multiple and competing discourses combine to produce fragmented identity positionings (e.g. Clarke et al., ; Dameron and Torset, ; Ford, ), quite another to examine the exacerbating or attenuating effects of these discourses vis-à-vis the tensions they generate. Knotting poses the question as to the effects of paradoxical tensions upon one another, as well as their potential generative effects vis-à-vis new tensions. Knotting evidences itself in actors’ problem setting discourse in which they name multiple and intertwined tensions, much as Sheep et al. (a) observed. However, it can also be a tool for analysts to build upon the scalability of a tensional framework (Fairhurst and Putnam, ), to name and identify intertwined tensions while using actors’ discourse and other data to piece together the knot(s) (see Figure . and Fairhurst and Sheep, ). Paradoxically, in a post-truth context, an overlay of power dynamics both undermines (intentionally) and exacerbates (unintentionally) the tensions of identity work. A disruptive view of leadership emerges (at least from what has been normative in contemporary leadership theories in democratic societies), in which it is not so much about a nuanced attempt to address multiple audiences or to arrive at an evidence-based understanding of ‘truth’, but about the power of the leader to define ‘what is truth’. That is, a ‘post-truth’ context both depends on and facilitates the power to gain more power by promoting oneself as the source of ‘the truth’ and aggressively delegitimizing and silencing any evidence, perspective, individual, or institution that is seen to challenge that power position. To wit, ‘Believe only me. Reality is what I say it is. Anyone who claims otherwise is an Enemy of the People’.14 Thus, if there was any ‘tensional’ framework detected, the pole of the tension in opposition to the pole representing the view of the leader’s power position would quickly be denied, denounced, and discounted. What is remarkable here is that, even in a ‘posttruth’ context where power to control ‘what is truth’ attempts to squelch the very possibility of a tensional view, we nonetheless observe a plethora (a ‘knot’, if you will) of interrelated tensions (detailed above and summarized in Figure .) in documented quotes over time illustrating the identity work of Donald Trump. We should note that there are no ‘set’ discourses for identity knotting. Our earlier work included a paradox of entity, i.e. characteristic versus process; conformity, i.e. assimilating versus distinct; temporality, i.e. current (or former) self versus future possible selves; and elasticity, i.e. stretch versus constrict (Sheep et al., b). The Trumpian identity work described in this chapter showcases authenticity, i.e. real-self versus fake-self; the site of identity work, i.e. public versus private; affiliation, i.e. popular versus elite; automaticity, i.e. monitored versus unmonitored; and affect, i.e. emotion versus reason. All manner and variety of competing discourses can be
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the subject of identity knotting, which the context and actors involved will make known in and through language and communication. A second contribution of our analysis of Trumpian identity work is to extend our understanding of authenticity and identities. Although the poststructuralist literature questions authenticity altogether as a pragmatic concern (for a review, see Brown, ) and much of the managerial literature concerns itself with feelings of interiority and how best to manage exterior projections (e.g. Ashforth et al., ; Ibarra, ; Kreiner et al., ), Trump’s identity work illustrates strategic ambiguity in a post-truth context. His unmonitored communications demonstrate a lack of concern for addressing multiple audiences simultaneously, by which we mean a lack of awareness that his words construct a certain version of reality that does not just ‘disappear’ with his subsequent identity work that attempts to roll it back. Under these circumstances, the contradictions accumulate and easily knot.15 However, his monitored attempts to appeal to multiple audiences evidenced by his ‘wink and a nod’ walk-backs (e.g. ‘least racist person’16 or ‘stable genius’ or ‘never been a president as tough on Russia as I have been’17) largely fail as a broad strategy (as instances of ‘If you have to say you are, you aren’t’), but very much succeed as a narrow one with a staunch segment of the Republican base who finds this authentic. Correspondingly, Trump’s base and like-minded media outlets undertake identity work on his behalf that, in turn, licenses more unmonitored communications, and so on. To be sure, winning an authenticity attribution in modern-day politics through one’s identity work and actions by some per cent of the US electorate is not an insignificant achievement when distrust of politicians is so very high (D’Ancona, ). But from a broader leadership perspective, what is the price of unmonitored/monitored, public/private, real-self/fake-self, popular/elite, and emotion/reason identity knotting when it brings into bold relief the country’s divisions? Perhaps an even more basic question is how much does identity work by this President even matter? Trump’s media surrogates have urged supporters not to pay attention to what he says, only what his presidency does (Stephens, ), thus challenging the long-held view that leadership is fundamentally about the management of meaning. Moreover, research by Jacquart and Antonakis () suggests that charismatic effects in leaders will matter most under ambiguous economic conditions. Trump thus far has benefited from a strong economy, so we should expect that to carry the day vis-à-vis evaluations of his leadership, according to their research. Arguably, however, this research doesn’t concern itself with the complexities of post-truth leadership. We assert that communication goals multiply as the number of audiences expands. The greater the number of communication goals, the increased likelihood of strategically ambiguous identity work (e.g. use of the ‘wink and a nod’ in service to a real-self versus fake-self). Such ambiguity fosters short-term gains in the form of widespread interpretability (e.g. Trump as authentic versus mendacious), but also deniability, which opens the door to a greater diffusion of moral responsibility (e.g. Trump’s absence of apologies, repeated blaming of previous administrations, and aides urging citizens not to take him literally) (Kakutani, ). Institutionalized echo chambers, comprised of people who perform and reinforce a leader’s identity work, may dictate how ‘short’ the short-term gains are. However, the use of identity work to diffuse moral responsibility erodes institutions when people cannot be held accountable for their actions (Snyder, ). For these reasons, and although the benefits of strategic ambiguity have been extolled (Eisenberg, ; Pascale and Athos,
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) and politicians usually try to be all things to all people, the use of strategically ambiguous identity work in a post-truth context is not a promising development for effective leadership. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher had the right idea in principle. If you repeatedly have to remind people that you are a great leader, then perhaps you aren’t.
N . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive////opinion/editorials/Donald-Trumps-Guide-ToPresidential-Etiquette.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module =opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region. . https://www.brainyquote.com/lists/authors/top__margaret_thatcher_quotes. . This further reinforces the link between postmodernism and post-truth. The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial owing to one’s perspective becomes the foundation for the more egalitarian discourse of post-truth, which gives voice not just to the marginalized, but to ‘offensive and debunked theories . . . or to equate things that cannot be equated’ (Kakutani, : ). . Trump, D. J. [realDonaldTrump] (n). Donald J. Trump Twitter feed. Retrieved from https:// twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-. . Trump, D. J. [realDonaldTrump] (n). Donald J. Trump Twitter feed. Retrieved from https:// twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. . At this writing, % of Republicans approve of the job he is doing. https://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/why-people-like-trump////-ea-e-bcddcc_story.html?utm_term=.ebbed. . Over the – July weekend, for example, he tweeted no less than times. . https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-trump-is-so-frantic-right now////cf -adebdafffaa_story.html?utm_term=.cecd. . For a recent example, consider the Trump Tower Russia meeting during the campaign that supposedly was about adoption but later became about opposition research on Hillary Clinton, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp////trump-just-made--problematicadmissions-about-the-trump-tower-meeting/. . https://www.theguardian.com/us-news//jan//i-am-not-a-racist-trump-says-after-backlashover-shithole-nations-remark. . https://www.washingtontimes.com/news//jul//trump-says-hes-tougher-russia-any-otherpresident/.
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Abstract Processes of identity work and identification are neither purely cognitive nor just behavioural matters but intersected by emotions. In providing an overview of current developments, this chapter seeks to highlight the variety of approaches available to identity researchers interested in emotions in organizations. It describes the various conceptual perspectives that identity scholars adopt in order to fruitfully incorporate emotions into their study of identity in organizations by, for example, highlighting the affective aspects of social identification, understanding emotions as discursive resources, and addressing emotional labour as a form of identity work. Discussing areas for future research the chapter investigates how emotions connect the individual and the social, the role of emotions in organizational members’ responses to social influences on their identities, and the emotional aspects of identity work.
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.................................................................................................................................. E are inextricably linked to identity and identification processes (e.g. Beech, ; Brown, ; Cascón-Pereira and Hallier, ; Harquail, ; Müller, ; Stryker and Burke, ; Sturdy et al., ). As I argue in this chapter, addressing emotions in the study of identification processes and identity work enables us to gain richer knowledge of identities in organizations (Fineman, ; Gabriel, ; Sturdy et al., ). This chapter focuses on the ways emotions are involved in individuals’ quests for identification in organizational contexts. It introduces the various theoretical domains that organization and management scholars draw on to understand how emotions are engaged when individuals negotiate their identities as participants in organizations. In so doing, I provide an overview of the field and highlight additional opportunities for theoretical, conceptual, and empirical development in the further study of how emotions feature in identity processes. Identity scholars refer to emotions in various ways. Some emphasize how a person’s subjective feelings are often entangled with individual cognitive dispositions (e.g. Ashforth et al., ; Harquail, ). Others understand emotions as socially produced phenomena
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(e.g. Beech, ; Fineman, ; Tracy, ) attending to the impact of social interactions and/or culture (Boiger and Mesquita, ; McCarthy, ). Many authors accentuate the discursive nature of emotions (Sturdy, ; Zembylas, a). Addressing this diversity, the chapter continues with providing an overview of how identity research has studied the connection between emotions and processes of identification in organizations. Describing the various approaches also serves to illustrate the multiple perspectives available to scholars who seek to better understand the emotional aspects of identities in organizations. In considering future directions for research, I first propose that the study of emotions can help us understand how individuals are connected to and separated from the social context. Secondly, I suggest deepening our insights into the role of emotions when organizational members respond to social influences on their identities. Finally, I discuss how the study of the emotional aspects of identity work supports our understanding of identities in organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. In the following paragraphs I first consider Social Identity Theory/Self Categorization Theory (SIT/SCT) and the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural aspects of identification in organizations. I then discuss how Role Identity Theory links emotions to processes of identity verification and non-verification in organizations. Next, I examine research that regards emotions as constituting discursive resources in processes of identification before highlighting how scholars study emotional labour and identification in organizations. I finally address research on emotions and humour in relation to the negotiation of identities.
Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioural Elements of Identification How do emotions indicate the value and the valence an organizational identity has for an individual? How do processes of identification in organizations differ when either cognition, emotion, or behaviour drive identification processes? These are two of the numerous questions posed by Harquail () in her influential article addressing the manifold and dynamic intersections of cognition, emotion, and behaviour in social identification processes. Following Harquail (), numerous SIT/SCT scholars have investigated the role of cognition, emotion, and behaviour in processes of identification in organizations (e.g. Ashforth, ; Ibarra and Petriglieri, ; Müller, ). Ashforth and Schinoff () argue that scholars primarily investigate (a) how emotions influence the process of social identification in organizations, and (b) how identities are associated with emotion profiles; i.e. information regarding how to feel and how emotionally to express an identity. In identification processes, emotions constitute a signalling device to inform others of an individual’s commitments (Harquail, ). Emotions indicate the value an identity has for
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an individual. They inform others how an individual feels about their identity in relation to their membership of an organizational unit, an organization, or a professional community. Cascón-Pereira and Hallier’s () study of the competing identities of doctor-managers showed doctors felt emotions such as anxiety and insecurity, and also excitement and pleasure. These emotions indicated to the doctors how valuable it was to adopt or to reject manager and doctor identities. Cascón-Pereira and Hallier () argue that when individuals are confronted with competing identities, emotions provide guidance to people concerning where their attention is needed. Croft et al. () also exemplify how emotional attachment to desired professional identities influences identification. In their study, nurses were required to adopt a functionally demanded leader identity, which conflicted with their emotionally important nurse identity. The nurses dealt with this conflict by either rejecting the managerial elements of the leader identity or by reframing the leader identity using ‘emotive language’ (Croft et al., : ) from the nurse identity, thus accommodating competing identity demands. Complementary to the investigation of the role of emotions within processes of social identification in organizations, several scholars have studied how social identities, associated with organizational roles or membership of teams, departments, organizations, etc., provide individuals with ‘what-to-feel’ information. In addition to providing a certain mind-set and a particular set of behaviours, a social identity also provides information about the emotions to be demonstrated while enacting this identity (Ashforth and Schinoff, ). In this sense, the identities people develop within organizational contexts are associated with ‘emotion profiles’ (Coleman and Williams, : ), which inform individuals regarding what to feel while enacting their identity. For example, a person identifying with the identity of a nurse is expected to show emotions such as empathy and care for patients (Ashforth and Schinoff, ). In turn, experiencing the emotions associated with a social identity assures an individual ‘that one fits with the identity’ (Ashforth and Schinoff, : ). For example, feeling empathy and care for patients indicates identification with the nurse identity. Feeling and expressing the emotions a social identity specifies encourages individuals to further internalize this identity and the associated set of thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
Emotions and Identity Verification/Non-Verification Stets and Trettevik (: ) use Role Identity Theory to suggest that ‘emotions appear based on identity performances and the extent to which individuals think that others see them as meeting the expectations tied to a particular identity in a situation’. When people occupy an organizational role, or are a member of a work group, or differentiate themselves from other people, they refer to socially prescribed meanings in order to define and enact their identity in a particular organizational situation (Stets and Burke, ; Stryker and Burke, ). For example, academics may activate a set of meanings, hence, a particular identity (e.g. university teacher) in a specific situation (e.g. teaching in a university classroom) and enact this identity through lecturing. Depending on whether or not individuals perceive others support their identity claims, they develop either positive or negative emotional responses (Stets and Trettevik, ). Identity verification is associated with positive emotions (Stets, ; Stet, ). For example, entrepreneurs who receive positive performance feedback from their customers can experience emotions which strengthen their entrepreneurial identity
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(Markowska et al., ). Identity verification makes it more likely people will continue enacting their context-specific identities (Stets and Trettevik, ). Identity nonverification, in turn, is related to negative emotions, as people fail to receive support for their identity claims (Stets, , ). For instance, in researching human resource professionals, Haines and Saba () found when employers do not provide professional employees with the opportunity to engage in the responsibilities associated with their role, workers are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion. The professionals in this study perceived themselves to be unable to perform in accordance with their understanding of the professional identity due to the insufficient provision of resources by the organization. The perception that the organization denied their identity claim caused emotional depletion (Haines and Saba, ). Non-verified identity claims lead to negative emotions, which prompt organization members to employ specific coping strategies. These include seeking support from other persons to cope with anger, using selective perception so as to focus only on feedback that supports an identity claim, blaming others for not verifying their identity claim, and withdrawing from the interaction that caused non-verification (McCall and Simmons, ; Stets and Trettevik, ; Stets and Tsushima, ). These and other coping mechanisms mitigate the non-verification of an identity claim and associated negative emotions, such as anger, shame, guilt, and anxiety.
Emotions as Discursive Resources in Processes of Identification Understanding identity as constituted through discursive practices, a large community has studied discursive identification processes. From this perspective, discourse enables and constrains the enactment, e.g. the feeling, meaning, and performance, of emotions. Emotions constitute discursive resources people draw upon in processes of identification (Coupland et al., ; Essers and Benschop, ; Gill, ; Sela-Sheffy and Leshem, ). In Coupland et al.’s () study the administrative staff and teachers drew on discourses of professionalism and appropriate role-related behaviour to construct their work-related identities. The administrators denied being emotional at work because this would interfere with their understanding of professionalism. In contrast, teachers emphasized the role of emotions in their work. For them, being emotional formed an important element of their work-related identity. Similarly, Zembylas (b) showed how emotions constituted a discursive resource for the construction of teachers’ selves in the process of responding to calls of normality. Clarke et al.’s () study shows how managers attempted to resolve antagonistic discourses of emotional engagement and emotional detachment. Although their position required being emotionally neutral, the managers struggled balancing this demand and their emotional commitment to the organization and its employees. To reconcile the resulting identity conflicts, they drew upon antagonistic discourses of being emotionally detached and engaged when constituting their managerial identity. They constructed different versions of themselves as emotional beings, as professionals, and as moral managers (Clarke et al., ). Marsh and Musson () investigated the discourses men in home-based telework drew upon when narrating their experiences of conflicts between career and family. The men juggled the discourses of work and family to cope with the competing emotional demands of work/career and home/family. They attempted to
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reconcile the fundamental conflict between the father identity (i.e. being emotional) and the career identity (i.e. being rational) (Marsh and Musson, ). In Ezzell’s () study of female rugby players, the players drew upon the masculine discourse of what constitutes the typical rugby player in order to construe their identity. Engaging in rugby—a ‘collegiate, maledefined sport’—was at odds with the notion of being female and the associated ‘conventional notions of passive femininity’ (Ezzell, : ). In working on their identities, the female rugby players used emotions as discursive resources to naturalize emotions associated with aggression and competition. To solve the dilemma of being females who engage in a maledefined sport, the women maintained a coherent identity by drawing upon the discourse of a rugby player, who naturally is an aggressive and tough person. Finally, MacArthur and Shields () showed how professional baseball players negotiated the emotional expression of showing tears in relation to social discourses of normative masculinity. This stream of research illustrates how emotions are part of the stock of social knowledge people refer to when construing notions of who they and others are (and should be), and who they might become in the future (Winkler, ). Emotions are implicated in socially available discourses and associated social identities (Watson, ). Drawing on emotions is productive for people’s identities in organizations, and they use emotion discourses in their performances to establish, maintain, defend, and alter the meanings they attach to their selves.
Emotional Labour and Organizational Identification Hochschild () was amongst the first to emphasize that organizations prescribe emotion norms to their members to regulate behaviour and emotions. This, in turn, implies members of an organization are required to work on their emotions, and to reconcile any differences between inwardly felt and outwardly displayed emotional expressions (Hochschild, ). The prescription of emotion norms by organizations not only targets members’ feelings but aims to regulate their understandings as organization members (Thomas, ). To respond to organizationally imposed emotion norms means to react to particular identity templates implicated by these norms. Therefore, emotional labour implies how people respond to appropriate feeling norms and to norms of appropriate identification (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Hochschild, ; Marsh and Musson, ). Reacting to ‘systems of emotion control’ (Tracy, : ), individuals simultaneously constitute themselves and are constituted as emotional beings through consenting and resisting behaviour and discursive meaning making. Lemmergaard and Muhr () described the identification process of prison guards as an attempt to develop professional indifference and emotional detachment to cope with emotional strains. Other responses to emotion control entail subordinating the self to emotion labour norms (Tracy, ) or maintaining a split identity, thus negotiating between authentic and displayed identities (Tracy, ). Tracy (, ) studied the emotional labour and emotional personal identities of correctional officers at two women’s prisons. She describes various situations during which the officers were required to uphold emotional displays prescribed by organizational emotion norms: The stories retold to me and the behaviors and incidents I observed at Women’s Minimum Prison and Nouveau Jail illustrate how employees’ emotional experiences and understandings are constructed through mundane practices designed to meet organizational norms such as “don’t get sucked in” and “don’t take things personally”. In meeting these and other
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norms, officers strive to appear respectful when they feel disgust or anger, maintain wariness/ suspicion even when they feel comfortable, and act calm when they are in tragic- or fearinducing situations. (Tracy, : )
Studying the micro-practices of constituting and reconstituting a precarious emotional identity through emotional labour, Tracy (), adopting a Foucauldian view, argues that both the ‘real’ and the fake emotions are part of a person’s identity. The correctional officers were required to constantly balance what they felt and what they were supposed to feel and display, thus maintaining a split identity. This led to paranoia, withdrawal, literalism, toughness/coldness, an us-versus-them mentality, and embarrassment (Tracy, , ). In a similar vein, Lemmergaard and Muhr () illustrate that Danish correctional officers face an emotional dilemma. On the one hand they are required to establish personal relationships with inmates to support rehabilitation, and on the other hand they dis-identify with inmates to retain a professional distance. Both examples emphasize organization members’ continuous emotional struggle to reconcile tensions between their ‘authentic’ and organizationally prescribed identities through emotional labour.
Humour, Emotions, and Identification Martin () suggests emotions form one of the essential elements of the humour process. Amusement, like other feelings of emotional well-being, constitute emotional responses elicited by cognitive processes through which people appraise a stimulus ‘as nonserious or unimportant, putting us into a playful frame of mind at least momentarily’ (Martin, : ). Humour in this sense is not only tied to the intellectual effort to perceive a stimulus as being amusing, but also to the emotional experience involved in enjoying it (Martin, ). Pouthier () refers to the interpersonal function of humour in organizations related to the establishment of group cohesion and group identity. In her study of cross-boundary team meetings, she addresses the socio-emotional behaviours of griping and joking. She suggests these mundane communicative activities serve as identification rituals: Through the performance of griping and joking rituals, team members can make both a common identity and distinct occupational identities salient in team interactions. (Pouthier, : )
Westwood and Johnston () show how organizational members use humour to defend their group identity against attempts by the organization to regulate the identity of its employees. They made participant observations during workshops that had been introduced to facilitate a workplace justice programme. During the workshops, the firm attempted to exercise control through determining how employees should think and act in the workplace. Employees rejected this attempt by adopting ironic and cynical stances towards the workshops and the management’s efforts to define what was appropriate. In this study, humour constituted an emotional response through which group identity work was accomplished. As Martin (: ) explains: By making fun of the stupidity, incompetence, laziness, or other failings of the people who frustrate, irritate, and annoy them and thwart their progress toward their goals, individuals are able to minimize the feelings of distress that these others might cause, and derive some pleasure at their expense.
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Humour in this instance was used as a defence mechanism to express disagreement with organizational identity templates. In other organizations, members may engage in identity work that constitutes compliant versions of their humorous selves (e.g. Huber and Brown, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The study of emotions is gaining momentum in research on identities in organizations. As this chapter highlights, numerous authors have sought to understand the role of emotions in processes of identity work and identification. In extant literature on identities in organizations, emotions are addressed in the following ways: emotions serve as indicators that gauge the value and significance different social identities have for organization members; emotions signal to members of the organization how strongly they identify with a social identity; emotions are outcomes of identification processes; emotions indicate the existence of identity conflicts; emotions provide information about how to enact an identity; emotions constitute discursive resources organization members draw on in processes of identity construction. However, despite the growing interest in how emotions and identities are entangled, there are, as yet, few papers that take a systematic approach to the study of emotions and identification processes in organizations. Both Social Identity Theory/Self Categorization Theory (SIT/SCT) and Role Identity Theory have come furthest in incorporating emotions into their theoretical frameworks, and yet the proponents of these theories continue to struggle to adequately account for emotions (Müller, ; Stryker and Burke, ). Indeed, emotions are often selectively rather than systematically addressed in the study of identities in organizations, and as a consequence, numerous issues remain unaddressed. In the following, I outline three broad areas future research on identities and emotion might explore to further understand the intersection of emotions and the development, negotiation, defence, and change of the various meanings members of an organization ascribe to their selves. First is the question of how emotions connect the individual to social collectives. There is consensus that the study of individual (or personal) identity ‘is not meaningful in isolation from the social world of other people’ (Jenkins, : ). According to Margolis () emotions help people to establish and maintain boundaries around their selves, and in this sense, connect the person and the social context (Edensor, ). Kreiner et al. () explain that boundaries serve to separate and connect the domains of individual and organizational identity, and to define aspects within these domains. They describe both complementary and conflictual dynamics at the interface of these identities, and how emotions are involved in these boundary dynamics. For example, when members of an organization perceive an insufficient overlap between their individual and the organization’s identity, they may feel an unwanted separation and ‘a craving for a deeper meaning, a desire for a stronger bond, a yearning for a closer connection’ (Kreiner et al., : ).
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According to Margolis (: –), emotions ‘keep us attuned to what we are, what we are becoming, what groups we are joining, which ones we are leaving, and whether all these changes are good or bad for us’. Zembylas (a) suggests emotions link people not just to groups but to institutionalized, i.e. social and cultural, patterns of being and knowing. Individuals in organizations constitute their identities emotionally, responding to social knowledge regimes, associated emotion discourses, and as Watson () has suggested, the social identities that are made available by these discourses. Emotions are productive of people’s sense of self, and help to establish, maintain, defend, and alter identities. According to Margolis (: ), ‘(e)motions let us know when we are engaged in an interaction that is not changing the boundaries around our many selves and when we are engaged in an interaction that does involve shifting boundaries’. In this sense, emotions may be a useful focus for studying how permeable the boundaries between individuals and organizations are, and thereby, the extent to which members of the organization incorporate aspects of organizations into their personal identities (Kreiner et al. ). Future research might seek to understand how emotions are implicated in processes of establishing and changing boundaries around the self while individuals negotiate their identities in organizational contexts. How do people emotionally establish, maintain, revise, and change the boundaries between themselves and the collective; e.g. the work team, the department, or the organization? To answer such questions, future studies might adopt a process perspective to investigate the (micro-)processes associated with the emotional constitution of identities in organizations. Beech () suggests emotional attachment and detachment influence these micro-processes. Being emotionally attached to or detached from others influences whether a person accepts or rejects input from others during social interaction. Hence, emotions may strengthen, refine, or reject people’s identity constructions in organizations (Beech, ). A second area for future research is the role of emotions in organizational members’ responses to social influences on their identities. Previous research highlights that the regulation of emotions forms part of the processes that establish, sustain, or change identities in organizations. The requirement to manage emotions stems from expectations that are connected to organizational positions and the associated organizational feeling rules, or from the existence of broader cultural norms governing emotions (Ashforth and Humphrey, ; Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Fineman, ). Emotion management, i.e. the various strategies that people use to accommodate their emotions to existing emotion norms (Lively and Weed, ), intersects with identity negotiation; this offers opportunities for future investigation. For example, what is the role of others in the process of managing emotions and identity? The role of organizational elites, e.g. managers and supervisors, has received widespread attention in the study of emotional labour, i.e. the commercial exploitation of emotion management (e.g. Hochschild, ; Lemmergaard and Muhr, ; Tracy, , ). Much less is known about how colleagues, fellows, peers, and subordinates establish, enforce, or alter feeling norms and emotional identities. Furthermore, individuals simultaneously constitute their identity and are constituted as emotional beings through consenting and resisting behaviour and discursive meaningmaking (Tracy, ). Members of organizations are not simply ‘passive consumers of managerially designed and designated identities’ (Alvesson and Willmott, : ). Thus, future research could pay more systematic attention to organizational members’ various
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forms of resistance to organizational and managerial attempts to regulate their identities through emotional displays and talk about emotions. Surface acting, the display of organizationally prescribed emotions without actual feeling (Hochschild, ), is one form of resistance, dis-identification is another (e.g. Collinson, ; Costas and Fleming, ). A further response that has not received much attention is instrumental compliance (Willmott, ). Other strategies for research include exaggerated performance of emotions to expose a faked identity, and the avoidance of situations where compliance with emotional behaviour scripts could make it difficult to maintain an individual’s ‘authentic’ sense of self. However, even though people are capable of distancing themselves from organizationally imposed feeling norms, total dis-identification is rare. Put differently, identification and dis-identification coexist in complex, fluid, and mutually constitutive ways (Dutton et al., ; Humphreys and Brown, ). Individuals might partly surrender to some of the emotional expectations associated with an organizational position, and resist other feeling norms related to it. Furthermore, members of an organization may blend different emotion management strategies, and by implication, identity negotiation strategies, during their emotional labour (Bolton, ). A third area for future research addresses the emotional aspects of identity work (Brown, , ). Emotions and identity work are inextricably related ‘particularly in periods of life transitions where emotion-identity may be experienced more acutely as well as conditions of paradox or contradiction between self-identities’ (Sturdy et al., : ). Processes of identity work are not ‘emotionally neutral’ (Beech, : ) as ‘often people construe their identities with an explicit emotional component’ (Coupland et al., : ). Addressing the salient and less-salient emotions that are felt and enacted when identity becomes an issue for members of an organization would avoid an overly cognitive approach when studying identity work. However, identity work scholars have only just begun to focus squarely on the intersection of emotions and identity work (Winkler, ). Much of the identity-work literature portrays individuals as vulnerable subjects, who struggle to establish, maintain, or alter their identities in organizations. Often, identity work is regarded as organization members’ continuous efforts to construe what is deemed to be a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). An emphasis on emotions, I argue, could contribute to our understanding of the processes of construing threatened and precarious identities. Zembylas () suggests the words people use to describe their emotions associated with identity threats constitute a purposeful performance to construct threatened identities. Cascón-Pereira and Hallier () and Stets and Trettevik () demonstrate that identity threats are associated with negative emotions. Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly () show negative emotions accompany the disassociation from the former self; whereas people cultivate positive emotions when they construct new identities. Identity-work scholars could more systematically explore how emotions are involved in the struggle to (re-)establish a preferred identity, the role of emotions within processes of identity negotiation, and emotional identity repair work (Winkler, ). How do organization members emotionally perform remedial identity work? How, for example, do individuals in organizations emotionally address identity conflicts, and what does it mean for their emotions when they solve (or fail to solve) such conflicts?
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Constituting people as vulnerable subjects implies a particular way of understanding emotions and their role in identity work. Many studies, in fact, suggest there is much anxiety, worry, angst, and insecurity in organizations. Identity construction processes, however, also take the form of active play. Thornborrow and Brown () refer to feelings of earnest desire. Sinclair () writes not only about feelings of vulnerability and insecurity, but also euphoria. Raghuram () points to feelings of being recognized, accepted, and proud. These are a few examples to suggest that constituting people as individuals, who actively play with their identities, enables a different understanding of emotions in the processes of identity work. As Ibarra and Petriglieri () emphasize, individuals’ engagement in the active trial of possible future identities may involve emotions such as excitement and joy. Finally, it is unclear how various identity-work tactics are informed by emotions, or whether there are emotional identity-work tactics people may employ while working on their selves (e.g. Beech, ; McInnes and Corlett, ; Zhang et al., ). Empson () proposes various identity-work tactics as a reaction to positive, ambivalent, and negative experiences of identity conflict. This suggests that emotional experiences of identity challenges inform the identity-work tactics that people employ to address them. In turn, the various ways members of an organization work on their identity—whether they accept or contest an identity (Beech ), or whether their identity work is of a controlling, reconciling, and confirming nature (McInnes and Corlett, )—may not be solely informed by emotions, but also be performed through the feeling and enactment of emotions. Emotions, in this sense, accompany performances of identity (Zembylas, a), and indeed identity work itself may arguably constitute an emotional effort (Winkler, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Many scholars have come to acknowledge that how we think, feel, and (en)act the meanings we attach to ourselves while joining, participating in, shaping, and leaving organizational contexts has an emotional dimension. Therefore, they have become increasingly interested in understanding what Edensor (: ) refers to as ‘the “unthought known”, “the precognitive and extra-cognitive knowledge” which is partly affect, the feel of things, embodied sensual experience, and which when it enters into consciousness, often “comes as a surprise” . . . but is nevertheless part of a fundamental emotional subjectivity which grounds identity in shared, unreflexive feelings’. I hope this chapter not just provides a brief overview of, but will further stimulate research on emotions and identities in organizations, and that this will enable identity scholars to better grasp the human experience of identity work and identification processes.
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Abstract This chapter explores fictional portrayals of managers in popular culture and considers the different ways that they shape our understanding of the identities of managers. Focusing on films and novels, the chapter begins by exploring the fundamental nature of the claim that well-known fiction has a capacity to shape and influence the world, albeit indirectly, and in unobtrusive, relatively unnoticed ways. The chapter builds upon established traditions of literary-orientated work in organization studies to show how fiction can transmit ideals, identity models, and patterns for sensemaking about organizations. However, the chapter also represents a fresh direction for research, focusing on the tensions and continuities across a wide range of contrasting fictional portrayals of manager-like figures. The chapter explores ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘tragic’ portrayals of managers in fictional works to consider how they might help shape who we think of when we consider a ‘manager’ in contemporary society. In doing so, the authors encourage a wider consideration of the cultural content and context of managerial identity work and the ways that it can be imagined and understood.
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.................................................................................................................................. O the last years, managers and similar figures within work organizations have been portrayed in fiction in a variety of ways, often with hyperbole and caricature. At one end of the spectrum they can be lionized as entrepreneurs or inspirational leaders or as new kinds of aristocrats—business aristocrats; at the other, condemned—if not as mere bureaucrats, trumped up tradespeople and office juniors—then as profligate and corrupt fat cats, perhaps with sexually predatory or psychopathic tendencies (Watts, ).
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This chapter looks at the implications of such portrayals for managers’ identity work. First we trace some of the differing ways in which manager-like figures have been portrayed in successful literature, films, and TV shows (hereafter referred to as ‘fiction’), from the time that the modern industrial manager emerged around the mid-nineteenth century, up until the present day. Second, we speculate upon the cultural work these portrayals have accomplished—particularly the impact that such portrayals may have had on certain identity practices and processes for managers within work organizations. As a stock of lore about managers, fiction is important, we argue, not only in framing the public image(s) of ‘the manager’ over time, but also in subtly shaping the range of possibilities available to people for constructing their work identities. ‘Work identities’ are the set of meanings that people associate reflexively with their selves in employment contexts (Alvesson et al., ; Clarke et al., ). They are formed through processes of identity work, i.e. those active processes of formation, maintenance, and repair by which identities are constructed and sustained (Brown, ; Learmonth and Humphreys, ; Thornborrow and Brown, ; Watson, ). We also take the position that there is no such thing as a passive reading of a text or of looking at a film: the ‘gaze’ is actively engaged both in interpreting the text (and thus the reader becomes part of the text) and in the production of subjectivity. Thus reader and text are caught up in one another—the text confers subjectivity (Ford et al., ). The ideas in this chapter are, therefore, in the tradition of much work in the arts and humanities: we hope the chapter offers new, surprising, and even disturbing ways in which managers are seen. It is offered with the intent of enriching organization studies as a discipline, which rarely explores the wider cultural influences on managers’ identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. New beliefs about issues of political or social significance often find prominence by being presented in well-known fiction. Richard Rorty (: xvi) argues that ‘the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change’. Well-known fiction thus has a capacity to shape and influence the world; though as many cultural histories show, it typically does so indirectly, and in unobtrusive, relatively unnoticed ways. For instance, Edward Said (: xii) suggests that by the nineteenth century, novels had become ‘immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences’ towards colonized lands and peoples. From Defoe’s () novel Robinson Crusoe on, he suggests that those European novels (and later films) that touched on colonial experiences were central to the legitimation of colonial ambitions. This was because they typically represented Europeans at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon outlying regions, while making the peoples they encountered appear to have little culture or history, other than a degenerate one. Fiction, therefore, loomed large in the European imagination, Said argued, important in making the need for Western assimilation seem obviously desirable.
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Lynn Hunt () argues a similar point: that the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, especially its ability to make readers empathize strongly with characters, led the elite groups who read novels at that time to start to see ordinary people differently. Through the voices of the maidservants and similar protagonists, readers came to appreciate that everyone shared complex inner lives; something previously assumed to be the unique preserve of the educated. This change was important, Hunt argues, because the idea of universal Human Rights ‘could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion. They learned this equality, at least in part, by experiencing identification with ordinary characters who seemed dramatically present and familiar [in novels], even if ultimately fictional’ (Hunt, : ). Unsurprisingly, there is a substantial literature in organization and management studies which explores literary productions and popular culture (Clark, ). We are especially interested in analyses of the ways that movies and novels, in particular, have been used or can be interpreted not only as providing critical insights on modern life but also as a major influence on modern life in themselves. Indeed, organizational theorists are contributing to a steadily growing academic literature that explores the two-way interaction between literary and popular culture on the one hand, and work and organization on the other (see for example, Parker, ; Rhodes and Parker, ; Rhodes and Westwood, ). This literature typically focuses on the ways that novels (Czarniawska, ; Grey, ; Land and Sliwa, ; Michaelson, , ; Morrell et al., ; Styhre, ) and television or films (Bell, ; Buzzanell and D’Enbeau, ; Höpfl, ) represent and influence understandings of organizations. In other words, this chapter has resonances and continuities with established traditions of literary-orientated work in organization studies (e.g. De Cock and Land, ; Griffin et al., , ; Rhodes and Brown, ). Hassard and Holliday’s () edited book was the first to debate, in a systematic manner, the relationships between fiction and organizing. Czarniawska and Rhodes () build on this genre, by showing how fiction can transmit ideals, identity models, and patterns for sensemaking about organizations. There have also been journal special issues, articles, and edited collections on fiction, showing how these kinds of processes occur in the case of particular works; Gosling and Villiers (), Rhodes and Lilley (), and Sievers () being some of the most recent. However, our chapter also represents a fresh direction for research, because it focuses on the tensions and continuities across a wide range of contrasting fictional portrayals of manager-like figures. It also avoids the typology-approach: classifying fictional managers as heroic etc., as has occasionally been attempted (Gosling and Villiers, ). Our approach to this issue assumes that how we see managers (in common with any social phenomenon) is inevitably selective, such that our view of the manager is, at least in part, necessarily constructed from the mêlée of cultural ideas we have already imbibed about them. Indeed, Giddens () argues that there is a double hermeneutic between academic and common-sense ideas. He suggests that in developing technical questions and definitions to guide the conduct of their empirical work, social scientists necessarily draw upon common-sense ideas; at the same time, however, scientific accounts also influence non-experts who typically make elements of academic work integral features of their own (common sense) beliefs. Giddens’ double hermeneutic, allied to the exemplary cultural
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histories cited above, has led us to explore the work performed by fiction in the context of management—to wonder how fictional representations of managers have influenced the identity work associated with managers. We have spent a significant amount of time over the last few years discussing these ideas with a wide range of people, fellow academics, as well as practising managers on MBA courses, etc. We have been encouraged to develop them, paradoxically enough, by two of the more sceptical comments encountered in discussing the possible relationships between managers in fiction and managers in so-called ‘real life’. One such comment, from an academic colleague, went something like this: ‘but aren’t managers just too hard-nosed to know or care about their cultural portrayal?’ This comment is encouraging, if only because the question itself is a good illustration of the unnoticed ways in which fiction can be woven into the background of taken for granted assumptions about the nature of managers. As early as , in John Keats’ narrative poem ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’, there are merchants hardnosed enough that ‘many a weary hand did swelt / In torchèd mines and noisy factories’ for them, and uncultured enough to think that ‘red-lined accounts / Were richer than the songs of Grecian years’. Today, this sort of view of the manager is so culturally prominent that it might usefully be thought of as myth in the sense used by Roland Barthes (). That is, as a familiar mini-narrative which idealizes, simplifies, or exaggerates an aspect of reality, adding up to a widely taken for granted illusion of truth and coherence. The other encouragingly sceptical comment came from a manager studying for an MBA: ‘I’m nothing like Gordon Gekko [Michael Douglas’ corporate raider in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street], I’m just an ordinary bloke’. So, here is a manager who does know and care about (at least some of) the ways in which managers are portrayed in culture. His comment also suggests that fiction has changed him. In the sense that it has caused him to reflect upon who he is (and is not), Gekko has influenced the speaker’s sense of self and the ways he presents himself to others. Indeed, the comment illustrates some of literary anthropologist, Wolfgang Iser’s () arguments. Iser suggests that fiction has the potential to disrupt and transfigure received ways of seeing, bringing us into a deeper sense of self-consciousness. In reading a novel or watching film, one of the things we are doing is ‘reading’ our own self. Fiction thus enables us to objectify and, if we wish, to have a chance to modify our identity; something which, it seems, happened to this manager in the process of watching Wall Street.
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.................................................................................................................................. The next part of this chapter analyses a number of fictional works in which manager-like figures feature (though not necessarily in obvious ways) from the mid-nineteenth century up to today. We include as ‘manager-like figures’ people who are conventionally classified separately: entrepreneurs, finance brokers, chairs of multinational companies, as well as more junior managers employed in corporate bureaucracies. In the public imagination they are all likely to be seen similarly. Clearly we make no attempt to be exhaustive; a more or less impossible task given how commonly such figures are represented. Therefore, we consider only a small number of
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works that are, or were, highly successful and well known—consistent with an interest in the cultural impact of such work. This criterion usefully limits the scope of the study—as well as ensuring that the titles have attracted a wide literature; though on the downside, it will also tend to exclude more avant-garde material. To further limit the number of potential sources, we only consider works written in English, aware of course that this introduces a tendency to consider exclusively Western sources. As a heuristic, for the purposes of analysis, we have divided the portrayals of managers into what we see primarily as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ depictions. However, we recognize that many of the fictional portraits are complex and multifaceted and so typically contain elements of both positive and negative—or indeed ambivalent elements that resist an easy either/or classification— hence the scare quotes we have placed around both terms.
‘Negative’ Portrayals of the Manager Analysing the popular fiction on American business people in the first half of the twentieth century, Chamberlain (: ) went so far as to suggest that there is ‘a distilled malevolence, a cold and frightening spite, [in] . . . the painting of practically every fictional businessman . . . encountered’. While we think that the picture is counterbalanced to some extent at least by a number of apparently more positive accounts, still, his analysis is not far wrong and can be generalized beyond American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the earliest major novel in British fiction to feature a manager prominently (Elfenbeim, ) is Charles Dickens’ novel Dombey and Son. It was published in weekly editions between and and was a huge success with its first audiences. We suggest that Dickens’ manager prefigures many of the elements of subsequent ‘negative’ portrayals of the manager. James Carker, the manager of the company called Dombey and Son, is concerned, as one might expect, with things like bureaucracy, company efficiency, worker control, and the acquisition of wealth and power on behalf of its owner, Paul Dombey. However, the novel dramatizes the corrosive personal consequences of Carker’s work. While very well-paid and ostensibly highly cultured and sophisticated in his tastes, he is also feared by his subordinates, sycophantic towards Mr Dombey, and he ends up deliberately bankrupting the company, absconding to France, scandalously accompanied by Dombey’s wife. On this latter point—a point to which we return in a later section of the chapter—one of the most interesting of his characteristics, as Humpherys argues, is how Carker has ‘the ability to evoke powerfully conflicted responses from women’ (: ). Let us meet James Carker, manager of the firm of Dombey and Son, in the words Dickens himself uses to introduce him: With hair and whiskers deficient in colour at all times, but feebler than common in the rich sunshine, and more like the coat of a sandy tortoise-shell cat; with long nails nicely pared and sharpened; with a natural antipathy to any speck of dirt, which made him pause sometimes and watch the falling motes of dust, and rub them off his smooth white hand or glossy linen: Mr Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole. (Dickens, : )
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From passages like these, it is easy to assume that Dickens intended Carker to be a melodramatic, stagey villain—whose every appearance should be greeted (metaphorically) with a hiss. Indeed he is far from unique in Victorian fiction in the nature of his death—he ends up being killed by a railway train—like all the best villains of the time should. But taking the novel as a whole, Dickens represented Carker with a degree of subtlety, complexity, and ambivalence. Such subtlety means that Carker can be read, in part at least, as a victim of the corporate world that had emerged by Dickens’ time. This was a world which, Dickens thought, had already come to institutionalize and reward petty hypocrisies. There are examples of corporate double-speak, cruel humiliations, and pointless bureaucratic procedures within the novel. But for Dickens, while the reward for complicity in the corporate world’s hypocrisies was the promise of money and a certain kind of power, its price was the inevitable corrosion of character—the sort of cruelty ‘of heart’ that he ascribes to Carker in the excerpt above. Indeed, both Carker and Dombey, his boss, are portrayed as seemingly unable to relate to people as people; others for them were mere instruments, whom they valued only in as much as these others could further their business interests or their wider pursuit of power. It is clear, in other words, that Dickens meant us to see Carker’s primary motivation as the selfish quest for power. Hinted at in Dombey and Son are various nefarious links between the manager and wider society, which are made more explicit in two famous novels from around the turn of the twentieth century: Joseph Conrad’s () Heart of Darkness and Robert Tressell’s () The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Conrad draws attention to the ineluctable links between the manager and a particularly savage and barbaric form of European imperialism (Dombey and Son was a shipping company with strong colonial interests); Tressell portrays his manager, Mr Hunter, not merely as the instrument of capitalist exploitation, but worse, as a class traitor. It is also possible to see echoes of Carker in more recent fiction. His bureaucratic predilections resonate with a recurring literary trope that is commonly encountered say, in popular detective stories: where the hero’s ‘real’ detective work is frustrated by a manager insisting (inevitably counterproductively) on proper procedure. Furthermore, in representing the manager as not just as a bureaucrat but as someone with a selfish, almost psychopathic use of power to feed ruthless profit-obsessions, personal status, greed, and sexual allure, Dickens seems to have established a (minor) literary convention. This convention has been followed in the past by authors as diverse as P. G. Wodehouse (Psmith in the City, ) and Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, ), as well as by successful more contemporary novelists, including, for example, Joseph Heller (Something Happened, ), David Lodge (Nice Work, ), Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities, ), Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, ), and Sebastian Faulks (A Week in December, ). These novels take the manager from mere bureaucratic functionary in Something Happened, for example, all the way to out-and-out delusional psychopath in American Psycho. A particularly interesting contemporary parallel with Dombey and Son (both novels are set in the London of their day, and have a strikingly similar cast of characters) can be seen in John Lanchester’s novel Capital. Let us meet Roger Yount, sat at his desk in the City of London: . . . doing sums. He was trying to work out if his bonus that year would come to a million pounds. At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six
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foot three, just short enough to feel no need to conceal his height by stooping – so that even his tallness appeared as a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than on more ordinary people. The resulting complacency seemed so welldeserved, and came with so little need to emphasise his own good fortune relative to anyone else, that it appeared like a form of charm. . . . He would have fitted seamlessly in the old City of London . . . but he fit in very well in the new City too, where everything was supposedly meritocratic, where the ideology was to work hard, play hard, and take no prisoners; to be in the office from seven to seven, minimum, and where nobody cared what your accent was or where you came from as long as you showed you were up for it and made money for your employer. (Lanchester, : –)
We can see in Yount many elements of the wider Carker caricature—the superficial charm underpinned by an obsession for making money. Of course, such characteristics can also be turned into satirical or straightforwardly comical ridicule. Characters like Mr Burns in the cartoon series The Simpsons, Lord Business in The LEGO Movie, David Brent in the British mockumentary The Office, and the villains in Bond films come to mind.
‘Positive’ Portrayals While most authorities agree that a negative portrayal of manager-like figures is dominant in fiction (e.g. Chamberlain, ; Pollard, ) there are also plenty of more positive ones; or at least ‘positive’ in the sense that a sympathetic reading seems to have been intended by the author. A novel more or less contemporaneous with Dombey and Son and featuring (something approaching) a manager-hero, is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley (). Robert Moore is a Yorkshire mill-owner, but rather than being corrupted by his job as Carker was, Moore is portrayed as having been ennobled by it; particularly by his success in conflicts with the mill hands in introducing new machinery. Although flawed by his love of money—he makes a deeply unromantic proposal to Shirley who is rich and her money would enable him to repay his creditors—he is forgiven by Caroline, whom he eventually marries. His mistake was, after all, attached to a ‘worthy’ mercantile objective. Here is how Brontë introduces him: At the time this history commences, Robert Moore had lived but two years in the district, during which period he had at least proved himself possessed of the quality of activity. The dingy cottage was converted into a neat, tasteful residence. Of part of the rough land he had made garden-ground, which he cultivated with singular, even with Flemish, exactness and care. As to the mill, which was an old structure, and fitted up with old machinery, now become inefficient and out of date, he had from the first evinced the strongest contempt for all its arrangements and appointments: his aim had been to effect a radical reform, which he had executed as fast as his very limited capital would allow; . . . Moore ever wanted to push on. ‘Forward’ was the device stamped upon his soul. (Bronte, : )
Moore was not particularly rich or cultured (today we might call him ‘just an ordinary bloke’), and he most directly prefigures fictional business people like Mike Baldwin, the factory owner formerly in British TV soap Coronation Street. Indeed, it is interesting to note that in both Dombey and Son and Capital, while the managers in the bigger
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organizations are treated unsympathetically, small organizations are also featured prominently—in corner shops as it happens in both these novels. Their owners (though never described as managers) are treated much more supportively. Indeed, arguably the characters in these smaller organizations are romanticized by Dickens and Lanchester as much as they are by Brontë. However, in those fictional characters who might be described as business aristocrats, the idea dramatized in Moore—that running a business can be ennobling—gets fused with something akin to James Carker’s show of good taste and sophistication. Characters like Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant’s advertising executive in the Hitchcock film North by Northwest); Edward Lewis (Richard Gere’s businessman in Marshall’s film Pretty Woman); or, most recently, Christian Grey (the entrepreneur-hero of E. L. James’ novel Fifty Shades of Grey) are businessmen, partly in order for them plausibly to be rich, and therefore—at least in some readings—sexually attractive. Indeed, all three figures engage in high-profile sexual relationships as an integral part of the plot. Furthermore, by being somewhat distanced from their quotidian jobs, they are represented in ways more suggestive of Brontë’s earlier hero: Mr Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre—rather than as managers as such. Thornhill, Lewis, and Grey are all suave sophisticated and cultured—somewhat akin to Rochester. Also like Rochester perhaps, these businessmen can be read as attractive characters because of the elision, or romanticization, of the personal costs involved in securing their wealth (we are never told exactly how Mr Rochester obtained his wealth either). So here is the first description of Christian Grey given to us by the narrator Anastasia Kavanagh (his future lover) who has just stumbled on to her hands and knees as she tries to enter his office for the first time: I have to steel myself to glance up. Holy cow—he’s so young. ‘Miss Kavanagh.’ He extends a long-fingered hand to me once I’m upright. ‘I’m Christian Grey. Are you all right? Would you like to sit?’ So young—and attractive, very attractive. He’s tall, dressed in a fine gray suit, white shirt, and black tie with unruly dark copper-colored hair and intense, bright gray eyes that regard me shrewdly. (James, : ) Of course all these figures have their dark sides, and are clearly open to much less positive readings. In Grey’s case, for example, his penchant for extreme sadomasochism complicates—to say the least—his subsequent relationship with Kavanagh (just as Mr Rochester’s attempted bigamy complicates his relationship with Jane Eyre).
‘Tragic’ or ‘Nihilistic’ Portrayals Given the ambivalence attached to both the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ portrayals we have examined so far, a third way of considering the portrayal of managers within fiction is by making all its complexity more explicit; that is, as tragic. In the novel Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro provides such a characterization through the first-person narrative of Stevens, a butler at Darlington Hall in Britain during the interwar period. Stevens, in his management of the household, sets himself extremely high standards and reflects
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throughout the novel on his success as a head butler but also unintentionally reveals his failure on a personal level. The first of these is in his incapacity to speak up against his own boss, Lord Darlington, who as we discover is a traitor to Britain and the war effort. As Stevens suggests: A butler’s duty is to provide good service. It is not to meddle in the great affairs of the nation. The fact is, such great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and me, and those of us who wish to make our mark must realize that we best do so by concentrating on what is within our realm . . . that is to say by devoting our attention to providing the best possible service to those great gentleman in whose hands the destiny of civilization truly lies. (Ishiguro, : )
Stevens’ defence of his inaction—his failure to speak out against his own boss—reflects the perspective of the highly competent and technocratic middle manager, who excels at what he does but believes any questions about its greater purpose or contribution are not his responsibility; see also the portrayal of Albert Speer as The Good Nazi (Van der Vat, ). The most tragic aspect of Stevens’ life, however, can be found through the implications of his extreme devotion to his position—primarily his inability to look beyond his work to the happiness and love he might find with housekeeper Miss Kenton. The tragedy of his life as a manager devoted to his work therefore is a life unlived—as Stevens says towards the end of the book ‘the rest of my life now stretches out as emptiness before me’. Professionally he has been successful but at great cost to his personal life and moral integrity. Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral also provides a fascinating depiction of the tragic manager through the protagonist Seymour ‘the Swede’, Levov. The first part of the book sets up the Swede as a childhood hero of the narrator—a high school sports star, who marries the beauty queen and goes on to become manager and president of Newark Maid, the glove manufacturing plant built by his immigrant family. The twist in the plot comes as this successful business man—who in many respects embodies the American dream— witnesses his daughter reject this very dream as exploitative of workers, leading her to violently rebel through a series of grotesque murders and extreme self-abuse. Gentry () suggests that whilst most reviewers consider American Pastoral as a novel about a good man punished for his virtues, she considers it as an acceptance by Roth of the flaws of this complex character. He suggests that ‘Swede [Levov’s] major faults are that he accepts the injustices of capitalism, that he never genuinely loves women and that he never thinks for himself. In creating ambiguity toward Swede, Roth may be admitting he has built a house of fiction that causes women to be bombmakers’ (Gentry, : ). This complexity—the light and dark of management figures—is reflected in popular culture through the rise of the manager as anti-hero (Vaage, ). The portrayal of figures such as mob boss Tony Soprano in the TV show The Sopranos (–) and advertising executive Don Draper in Mad Men (–) are two rich examples of deeply flawed individuals who (at times) do terrible, amoral things but who have enough goodness and kindness in them to persuade an audience that they can be redeemed. Ultimately, however, it is in their working lives in which they most obviously have a sense of status and importance that they prove to be so unfulfilled and miserable and ultimately which proves to be their undoing. In one scene, Don Draper advises one of his workers ‘you’re happy because you’re successful – for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need
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more happiness. I won’t settle for percent of anything. I want percent.’ The tragedy of Draper as a manager and as a person is watching him pursue the impossible (the percent), of something he can never achieve, and destroying everything and everyone he has in the process. The ultimate irony of the show is in the very last scene. We are led to believe that Draper (suffering from a creative block) might have finally found spiritual peace, meditating with hippies on a hilltop colony far away from his management desk. However, the show ends with a wry smile from our meditating protagonist and jumps to the now-iconic Coca-Cola ad ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ complete with dancing hippies on a hilltop colony, suggesting that he has used this experience to create one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time. Draper as a manager will never find peace; he will always be searching for the percent. The danger of this morally murkier vision of the manager in fiction, however, is that it slips into nihilism. Characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper are now counter culture heroic figures who might in any sensible world act as warnings about male unhappiness but instead are regularly celebrated on websites glorifying their best quotes without any apparent sense of irony (‘ Don Draper Quotes to Live By (Seriously)’, Lee, ). This kind of celebration can be problematic for authors themselves, leading them to question how they portray managers and worry that they are perhaps excusing amoral behaviour amongst CEOs and those in powerful positions. One such example of this phenomenon came in from Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of critically lauded animated TV show Bojack Horseman () about the life of a hedonistic Hollywood actor. Bob-Waksberg was informed by a colleague that disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein1 was raving about his animated show at a dinner party he attended: When I heard that story, the idea that Harvey Weinstein watched my show really gave me chills, and I thought, what is he getting out of it? Does he watch it and go, ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way to be. Us Hollywood guys, we’re trouble. What are you going to do with us?’ (Cited in Strachan, )
This reaction caused nothing short of an existential crisis for the author in which he worried that his own morally ambivalent and deeply complex lead character (whose actions were affected by his own childhood traumas) had made it easier for an executive to justify his own ‘shitty behaviour’. This ultimately led to a whole season of the show being devoted to this inherently complex question about how fictitious representations of things, like managers and those in power, could shape the actions of people in ‘real life’. It is to this question we now turn.
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.................................................................................................................................. The influence of the complex cultural legacy this ambiguous stock of lore may have on the identity work of ‘real’ managers—and to some extent on those managed by them—is the subject of the next section. Clearly, we are not talking about anything like a set of straightforward, cause-and-effect mechanisms. If these kinds of cultural portrayals do
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have an influence they are necessarily of an indirect and long-term nature. Also, we do not want to give the impression that the negative caricature contained in Dombey and Son and other more recent fiction—or the more positive ones in novels like Fifty Shades of Grey— are, in any way, a reflection of what individual managers are ‘really’ like. Rather, we investigate the doubtless subtle, multifaceted, and contestable connections primarily by exploring the ‘cross-over narratives, cognate forms of thought, and interrelationships of discourses’ (O’Gorman, : ) that may occur between successful fiction and what happens in managerial identity work. As it is likely that these interrelationships will span a very wide range of possibilities, we limit ourselves here to two illustrative examples of the potential for fiction to provide fresh directions for research into the identity work of managers. These illustrative examples are: leadership—here understood as an indirect, unexamined response to the negative portrayals; and sexual identity and authority—understood as a response, again inchoately and indirectly, to some of the more ostensibly sympathetic portraits of managers.
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.................................................................................................................................. It is very likely that many managers are aware of the dominance of their negative portrayal in cultural media, and that this negativity is likely a source of anxiety for them. Following Iser () therefore, fictional portrayals of manager-like figures can be expected to have disrupted received ways of seeing managers and enabling people to ‘read’ their own selves differently. Indeed, Learmonth (: ) has argued that the dominance and persistence of their negative image within the wider culture may be one reason (among others) for managers often having to fight uphill battles in establishing the legitimacy of their views and their actions: often, the archetypal anonymous manager is assumed to be a money-obsessed, emotionally illiterate bureaucrat.
One plausible possibility, it seems to us, is that the rise in the popularity of the discourses of ‘leadership’ in recent years (Learmonth and Morrell, ) may have been welcomed (if not engineered) by those managers concerned about their poor image in the wider culture. As Alvesson and Spicer (: ) argue: In many instances, embracing the idea of leadership does not involve any significant change to practice but merely indicates an interest in relabelling managerial work as ‘leadership’ to make it sound more fashionable and impressive. The term leadership is seductive, has a strong rhetorical appeal, and is therefore heavily overused.
Once represented explicitly as leaders, the archetype figures, instead of being exemplified by discreditable individuals like James Carker, can plausibly become people like Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte—figures who are much more conventionally glamorous and positive than anyone ever associated with ‘mere’ management. Furthermore, the discourses of leadership introduce more ambiguity into the identity of the manager/leader. The kinds of connotations and associations that the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ have still to allow people called ‘leaders’ to occupy positions of authority, maybe even of supremacy. On the
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other hand, the associations that go with the term ‘leader’ also suggest that leaders are (for want of a better word) ‘nice’ people; people who are basically on our side (because leaders need followers). This niceness is something that the term ‘manager’ allows much less readily. As Pfeffer () has pointed out: Over the last several decades, the [leadership] industry has produced a recipe for how to be a successful corporate leader: Be trustworthy and authentic, serve others (particularly those who work for and with you), be modest, and exhibit empathetic understanding and emotional intelligence.
In other words, in terms of managerial identity work, one of the important consequences of the rise in the language of leadership is that the people who used to think of themselves as mere ‘managers’ can now imagine themselves using a term that makes them seem much grander and considerably more important—while at the same time also sounding ‘nicer’. They can imagine themselves as ‘leaders’. Hendry () captures well the ways in which many people probably think of what it must be like to be (called) a manager: For most managers, management is basically a job . . . Few people become managers . . . out of a sense of vocation. It is not something they do out of a burning desire to express themselves, to contribute to society or humanity, or to take a stand on issues that matter to them. A successful manager . . . might well be proud of her achievements, but being a manager . . . is rarely in itself a source of great pride. . . . It is a job, and a good and respectable job, and for many people an interesting and/or remunerative one, but at the end of the day it’s just a job. (Hendry, : –)
In contrast, Petriglieri and Petriglieri (: ) show us how today’s dominant cultural image of the leader is rather different: [T]he image of leadership that predominates is of an individual ascending to, or occupying, a position of hierarchical power, competently adapting to his or her environment, and wielding his or her influence to achieve financial (or otherwise measurable) results and, in so doing, rising further up the ladder. . . . [thus, this image] portray[s] leaders as ‘crafters of their own fortunes’ . . . in a world where success – usually defined as promotions and profits – hinges on making the right decisions in high-stake situations . . . a worldview in which individualism and heroism prevail.
When we call one person a leader and another person a manager, we are not just naming them differently. While (mere) ‘managers’ are generally imagined as bureaucrats, if not complete bastards, ‘leaders’ can be imagined to be enacting identities that are admired by their followers, shareholders, and market analysts alike; imagined too, as being able to transform organizations and those who work for them as they pursue their visionary strategies (Wilson, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. One striking aspect of the apparently more positive fictional images of the manager we examined above is not merely that ‘he’ almost always gets portrayed as a man (even though
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sometimes gendered expectations are pointedly refused—as in Demi Moore’s operations executive, Meredith Johnson, in Levinson’s film, Disclosure; or Judi Dench’s ‘M’ in recent Bond movies); but also that his being a man is sexually and erotically (not merely socially) significant. Furthermore, the ostensibly positive images of the manager in popular fiction often also play to cultural caricatures involving weak women being swept off their feet by powerful men. This sort of storyline is so taken for granted that it arguably legitimates and normalizes such activities. The fact that many of the (conventionally speaking) ‘positive’ images of the manager in the wider culture have a sexual dimension represents a huge contrast to standard literature on management identity or indeed the broader management practice literature. This is a literature which almost without exception ignores sexuality and eroticism altogether (Burrell, ; Harding et al., ) ensuring that the issue remains more or less unaddressed in terms of identity work. Especially in the light of recent developments—in particular the attempts to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace by the ‘#MeToo’ movement (Guardian, )—such supposedly positive portrayals may well take on a new poignancy and significance. Some men in powerful managerial positions enact identities which encourage them to engage in predatory or other forms of exploitative sexual activities as a legitimate part of who a top manager should be. We saw earlier in the chapter how the first novels encouraged Europeans to think of outlying countries as places where they were at liberty to enact their fantasies. Analogously, arguably, sexual assault by powerful men in the workplace is being normalized, to an extent, by ostensibly positive portrayals of managers doing just this in popular culture. Not least because the women at the receiving end of such assaults may often be portrayed in fiction as actually welcoming them. Furthermore, the discourses of leadership far from rule out such activities. As Grint et al. (: ) argue, the term leadership can, in itself, be ‘throbbing and overflowing with (eroticized) meaning’.
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.................................................................................................................................. We should acknowledge explicitly that the implications of the portrayal of managers in popular culture set out in this chapter are largely speculative. At this stage, we are basing our work on ad hoc conversations, along with what we feel is plausible based upon our own experiences. However, we believe that the approach opens many promising avenues for identity research. In particular, it suggests new ways in which to reveal some of the historical and cultural contingencies on which today’s diverse images and ideals of bosses—and the identity work they enact—depend. It also provokes us to think more about how fictional characterizations of management might shape our assumptions about what good or fair management is in the workplace and how this might in turn feedback into cultural portrayals. This chapter therefore suggests further research questions. Designing empirical work that looks at the impact of fictional accounts on actual managerial practice is a challenging but nevertheless fruitful next step for us. We are also intrigued by the historical dimension
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of the work—whether there have been substantive changes of managers in fiction over time—and also the cultural dimensions—whether managers are portrayed differently in fictional accounts across differing national cultures. We would also like to examine gender in more detail—how, if at all, do accounts of male and female managers/leaders differ and with what implications? We hope, however, that this chapter succeeds in complicating the identity literature in organization studies that rarely considers the wider question of sources of materials for identity work. We hope also to have contributed work that provides an adrenaline shot to the reading and watching audience of cultural portrayals of the manager. Many seem simply innocuous or even innocent, but we would encourage critical reflection on the content. In doing so, we encourage a wider consideration of the content and context of managerial identity work and the ways that it can be imagined and understood in the cultural influences that surround us.
N . Harvey Weinstein is a Hollywood producer, founder of Miramax entertainment company, which produced films such as Pulp Fiction () and Shakespeare in Love (). In Weinstein was publicly accused of sexual abuse and rape allegations and subsequently charged with these offences, resulting in his dismissal from Miramax. At the time of writing Weinstein was on bail and awaiting trial for the allegations, which given the sheer volume and similarity of the claims are widely believed to be true.
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Identity Play and the Creative Potential of Liminal Experiences .......................................................................................................................
Abstract Liminality is the individual or group experience of being betwixt and between states, roles, and/or identities. For both individuals and organizations, liminal experience is pervasive, often permanent, intrinsically problematic and a crucible for innovation and growth. Yet advances in our understanding of liminality in organizational life have remained fragmented, uninformed by empirical research in adjacent fields of scholarly inquiry or theorizing at different levels of analysis. This chapter aims to bring together disparate research and theorizing on liminality’s contemporary manifestations to conceptualize liminality as a creative process that affects the renewal and adaptability functions that are so vital to personal and organizational thriving.
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.................................................................................................................................. I the contemporary workplace we often find ourselves betwixt and between: in between jobs, in between careers, and in between old and new technologies, organizational directives and ways of working, and, as a result, in between identities. It is fundamentally human to grow, adapt, evolve, and as such, make transitions from one thing to another; it is also fundamentally human to find comfort in routine, consistency, and continuity. It is not surprising, therefore, that the concept of liminality, defined historically as the state of being in between statuses or social categories (Turner, ; van Gennep, ), has gained currency (Ibarra and Obodaru, ). Clearly, for both individuals and organizations, liminal experience is pervasive, often enduring, intrinsically problematic, and, as we will argue in this chapter, a crucible for innovation, creativity, and growth.
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In organizational research, liminality has been the focus of empirical and conceptual work in three typically unrelated areas: work role transitions, organizational change, and the nature and experience of ‘non-traditional’ work and workers. Viewed by Turner (: ) as a ‘realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’, all three of these bodies of work suggest an inextricable link between liminal states and creativity at the individual level and innovation at the organizational level. Yet, mechanisms and processes are not always explicit or linked across levels of analysis and critical questions remain unanswered. In the careers literature, researchers have long noted that all manner of work role transitions, from entering into and adapting to a new role, to receiving a promotion, changing careers, being made redundant, or moving into retirement, are accompanied by sentiments of being ‘in between’ as people start to shed an old role and identity without yet having clarity about the new (e.g. Ashforth, ; Ebaugh, ; Ibarra, , ; Newman, ; Shepherd, ). As shifting job markets and social mores increase the likelihood and frequency of career transitions across the life span (Gratton and Scott, ), and increase the degree to which those transitions will be under-institutionalized (i.e. lacking in guiderails such as a clear-cut duration and/or end-point, e.g. a formal apprenticeship, or prescribed steps and peer reference available in a lockstep process, e.g. making partner in a professional firm (Ibarra and Obodaru, )), liminality can become both more difficult to traverse and more fertile ground for self-authoring and individuation (Petriglieri et al., ). Researchers concerned with change processes at the organizational level have likewise noted that change involves transitional periods, spaces, and times in which the old and the new collide (Clark et al., ; Corley and Gioia, ; Gioia et al., ; Howard-Grenville et al., ) and in which the old rules of the game are loosened or unfrozen sufficiently to allow experimentation with new ways of doing things (e.g. Brown and Starkey, ; March, ; Schouten, ). Often organizational change is ‘incubated’ in bracketed spaces that separate the ‘liminars’ from the real world of historic practices, ideologies, and constraints (Howard-Grenville et al., ). The importance of conceptualizing the nature and outcomes of such ‘in between’ time and space can only increase in relevance as organizational scholars investigate change processes catalysed by new workplace technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics (e.g. Barley et al., ). As business reports clearly indicate, major technological discoveries in artificial intelligence and machine learning have been made yet few organizations have moved beyond limited experiments with using them (Ransbotham et al., ). The primary impediment, these reports argue, is the existing gap betwixt and between new technological potential and old organizational processes and cultures. Yet, as authors such as Howard-Grenville et al. () argue, it is precisely at these interstices that innovative practices with the potential to catalyse organizational change emerge. Finally, as traditional employment relationships have deteriorated in much of the world, the nature of careers has been changing. Workers today have to navigate an external labour market and construct their careers out of a series of jobs or gigs that might span not just organizational but also occupational boundaries. Scholars who investigate the changing nature of work, including non-traditional work arrangements such as temporary (e.g. Garsten, ; George and Chattopadhyay, ) and contract work or ‘portfolio’
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careers that combine diverse work arrangements and activities (e.g. Ashford et al., ; Bidwell and Briscoe, ; Cappelli and Keller, ; Fenwick, , ; Gold and Fraser, ; Petriglieri et al., ; Tempest and Starkey, ), report a common experience of feeling suspended between codified roles, social categories, and reference groups as well as projects or ‘gigs’ that differ in type and duration (e.g. Ashford et al., ; Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly, ; Daskalaki, ; Ellis and Ybema, ; Küpers, ; Ladge et al., ). Accordingly, this chapter aims to bring together disparate research and theorizing on liminality’s contemporary manifestations in order to propose a conception of liminal experience as creative process. We further suggest that liminal periods differ in the extent to which they provide a holding environment in which the rules that govern old identities are suspended, allowing people and groups to play safely with alternative, even fanciful, possibilities. When people and groups are buffered from well-established roles, relationships, and the goal-directed logic of efficient search (March, ), we argue, creative responses are more likely to emerge. The chapter consists of four sections. We start by outlining both classic and new ideas about liminal states to show that, while these conceptualizations differ in their intellectual origins, levels of analysis, and even key assumptions, they all share an understanding of liminality as holding significant creative potential. Specifically, we focus on individual identity growth and collective innovation as creative outcomes of liminality. In the second section, we propose that play is a key mechanism for realizing liminality’s creative potential and fostering growth or innovation, both at an individual level and at an organizational level. In the third and final section we then turn our attention to key moderating factors of the relationship between play and liminality’s creative potential and advance ideas about how time, space, and relationships can encourage playful responses to liminality as well as influence the effectiveness of these responses. We conclude by exhorting future research on how people and organizations can best navigate life-cycles filled with liminal experiences.
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.................................................................................................................................. The idea of transition is common to many theories of change, from Kurt Lewin’s () influential ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ theory to William Bridges’ () ‘endings-neutralzone-beginnings’ model of the individual transition process. To be in transit is to be in the process of leaving one thing, without having fully left it, and at the same time, of entering something else, without being fully a part of it (Levinson, ). From theories of adult development (Levinson, ), organizational socialization (Strauss, ; Van Maanen and Schein, ), and career transitions (Ebaugh, ; Ibarra, ) to theories of change at the organizational level (Schrage, ; Trice and Beyer, ), change is increasingly viewed in terms of dynamic adaptation and transition processes. The in-between period is the crucible in which people and organizations forge new possibilities. Yet, being ‘in between’ or on the threshold, a key feature of transition, has received little conceptual attention and few links have been established across levels of analysis.
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Liminal Experience The notion of ‘liminal’, derived from ‘limen’—the Latin word for threshold—was introduced in the social sciences by the French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep. Nineteenth-century anthropologists noted that all cultures have rituals marking individual or collective transitions from one position in the social structure to another (such as that from ‘boy’ to ‘man’) and that such transitions follow a universal sequential structure characterized by three phases: separation, transition, and reincorporation (or pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal—before, at, and past the threshold) (McNamara et al., ). This paradigm has been a rich source of conceptual material for theories of socialization and organization culture (Trice and Beyer, ; Van Maanen and Schein, ), and more recently, research on organizational identity (Clark et al., ). In his work Les rites de passage () Van Gennep identified and systematically described the socio-cultural features of such transitions. The initial, pre-liminal stage is the period immediately before the transition. This stage contains separation rites that serve to detach the person from his or her previous position in the social structure. The liminal stage is the transition proper, a state in which the person does not belong to either the previous or the future social position, but is a ‘liminar’, suspended between the two. Liminality is the actual passing through the threshold that marks the boundary between past and future social positions, a passing marked by ambiguity, solitude, and alienation from the social structure. After crossing the threshold, the person is reincorporated into society in his or her new role. Victor Turner (, , , ) extended Van Gennep’s notion, defining liminality as a state of being ‘ “betwixt and between” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification’ (Turner, : ). Turner discovered that many cultures shared liminal rites and experiences, in which the ‘normal’ rules of everyday life are suspended for a concentrated period in which ‘anything goes’, and curiosity, exploration, frivolity, and joie de vivre govern behaviour. Mardi Gras, and most carnival rituals, are archetypical liminal experiences; more mundane experiences, such as going away to college for the first time, also share attributes of liminality. While Van Genep’s notion of liminality pertained exclusively to primitive rites, Turner extended the concept to include all situations when ‘persons elude or slip through the network of classification that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’ (: ), ‘an interstructural situation’ (: ) in which people are suspended in social space. In organizations, for example, laboratories, scenarios, simulations, off-sites, role-plays, and parallel organizations encourage departure from established norms and operating procedures, allowing people to experiment with new possibilities and configurations, and, as such, produce more creative outcomes (Brown and Starkey, ; Schrage, ). Building on this anthropological perspective, Bridges () proposed a theory of personal and professional transition as following a sequence of endings, neutral zones, and beginnings. The ‘neutral zone’ is the time in between endings and new beginnings, defined by Bridges as a ‘neither here nor there’ psychological in-between space when identities are in flux and people feel they have ‘lost the ground beneath their feet’. For Bridges, the neutral zone is not a literal time and space, between one job and the next, for instance, but a psychological and emotional state in which the individual is truly in
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between identities, with one foot still firmly planted in the ‘old world’ and the other making tentative steps towards a ‘new world’. Bridges (: ) was also one of the first to note that the unpleasant and seemingly unproductive middle period played a critically productive function and should not be short-circuited: We need not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out at turning points in our lives for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of our everyday existence. In the apparently aimless activity of our time alone, we are doing important inner business.
Empirical descriptions of liminal experience suggest that liminality is indeed a time rife with anticipation, confusion, fear, and all sorts of mixed feelings. For instance, people in the process of ‘becoming an ex’ (e.g. Ebaugh, ) describe themselves as ‘living in a vacuum’, ‘in midair’, ‘ungrounded’, ‘neither here nor there’, ‘at loose ends’, or ‘nowhere’, anxiously oscillating between ‘holding on’ and ‘letting go’; between a desire to rigidly clutch at the past and the impulse to rush exuberantly into the future (Osherton, ). At the collective level, Brown and Starkey (: ) suggest that change in organizational identity ‘causes its members psychic pain, discomfort, anxiety, conflicts, and overall loss of self-esteem’.
Liminality as Crucible for Transformative Change Despite the well-documented discomfort of liminality, there is a consensus in the broad and loosely coupled literature that creativity, innovation, and personal growth can result from liminality’s ‘adaptive instability’ (Gioia et al., ). Struggles with contradiction, made manifest as old and new identities and resources are juxtaposed (Conroy and O’LearyKelly, ; Janusz and Walkiewicz, ), in an environment that relaxes or even inverts normal role and status structures encourages playful exploration of new possibilities (Turner, ). As we suggest below, these attributes of liminal experience can promote individual identity growth and organizational innovation (Howard-Grenville et al., ; Sonenshein et al., ) or, as Gioia et al. () conclude, ‘instability fosters adaptability’. Individual identity growth. Adult development theorists have long viewed the ‘fertile emptiness’ (Bridges, : ) of liminality as a crucible for creative expression and identity growth (Erikson, ; Levinson, ; Marcia, ). By grappling with liminality’s chaos, loss, or doubt, they suggest, people improve their capacity to harness the resources at their disposal to become ‘one’s own person’. Erikson (, ) described identity growth as a process of individuation, i.e. the process of shifting from a sense of self based on parental expectations towards developing one’s own values, norms, and commitments. In his theory, development consists of movement from ‘role confusion’, defined as the absence of a stable and clear sense of self, to ‘identity synthesis’, the development of a stable and clear identity that incorporates one’s life experiences and the lessons learned from them. Marcia () elaborated Erikson’s theory by proposing two dynamic processes that he saw as crucial for achieving identity synthesis: exploration and commitment. Whereas exploration refers to the process of questioning one’s identity ‘givens’ and actively exploring alternative identities, commitment refers to the process of making choices among options
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considered and engaging in activities to implement these choices. According to Marcia, people vary in their capacity and willingness to explore and commit to identities. The four possible combinations that form the core of his theory are: identity diffusion (no identity exploration or commitment, the state most akin to pure liminality), identity moratorium (exploration without commitment), identity foreclosure (commitment without exploration), and identity achievement (commitment after a period of exploration). Kegan () similarly proposed that adult development entails a move away from unexamined conformity to social and organizational expectations towards greater self-authoring. Organizational scholars who study positive identity development built on these classic notions (e.g. Dutton et al., ; Kreiner and Sheep, ; Maitlis, ; Sonenshein et al., ). Kreiner and Sheep (: ), for instance, defined identity growth as ‘progressive increases in the competence, resilience, authenticity, transcendence, and holistic integration of one’s self-concept’. Maitlis (: ) similarly defined the identity growth that can follow a traumatic experience of identity loss in terms of ‘an increased appreciation for life, greater sense of personal strength and a radically changed sense of priorities’, when ‘new capacities are constructed that allow individuals to live in ways richer than before’. This sort of identity growth is manifest, for example, in people who emerge from career change processes with more individuated self-construal (e.g. Ibarra, ), who craft positive identities amidst the precariousness of inherently liminal professions (e.g. Petriglieri et al., ), or who live their lives permanently suspended between two cultural identities and are more creative and integratively complex as a result (Benet-Martinez et al., ; Tadmor et al., ). Organizational innovation. Ample evidence suggests that organizational identities and cultures are also transformed through liminal periods. Studies of organizational change (e.g. Clark et al., ; Corley and Gioia, ), for example, suggest that members of new organizations experience a problematic meanings void (‘we don’t know what it means to be who we think we would like to be’) which they eventually resolve by performing ‘liminal actions’, defined as tentative or provisional structuring activities and experiential learning. Likewise, Howard-Grenville et al. () found that organizational occurrences such as meetings, training programmes, and even everyday interactions were used by employees to seed and energize longer-term fundamental change. Notably, such efforts appeared to generate cultural change by infusing new meanings into existing symbolic forms and cultural resources. Workshops, off-sites, scenarios, simulations, and the like provided means of trying out alternative ways of being. As summarized by Howard-Grenville et al. (: ), liminality enables significant cultural change in organizations ‘because it temporarily suspends normal social dynamics and brackets everyday experience, such that interactions are no longer fully governed by the existing cultural repertoire’.
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.................................................................................................................................. Building on the discussion above, in this section we argue that being playful—with personal identities and organizational resources—is the core mechanism by which people and organizations are able to harness the creative potential of liminality in the service of
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learning, adaptation, and growth. Below we describe the hallmark features of identity play in liminality, and next describe conditions under which people and groups are more likely to engage in playful explorations of novel future possibilities. The notions of work and play denote different ways of approaching activities, rather than differences in the activities themselves (Glynn, ; Mainemelis and Ronson, ; Miller, ). As March () argued, ‘play’ is distinguished from ‘work’ by its contrasting logic: enjoyment and discovery rather than purpose are the primary drivers of behaviour. Once behaviour is no longer channelled towards a specific target the value of efficiency plummets, and is replaced by the pleasure of taking the circuitous route. When goals are no longer primary drivers, the ‘logic of efficiency’ also loses primacy, allowing intuition, emotion, and taking a leap of faith to guide decision-making; these deviations from normal rules of conduct facilitate expression and creativity (Isen, ). Once we are relieved from purpose, detour, and therefore, serendipity become possible. Applying this basic distinction to individual identity construction processes, Ibarra and Petriglieri () suggested that purpose and process distinguish identity work and play. ‘Identity work’ is defined as people’s engagement in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening, or revising their identities (Brown, ; Snow and Anderson, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Identity work consists of adaptation within the boundaries of an existing identity, striving to maintain authenticity in the face of identity integrity violations and adapting to new role requirements; in these cases a person ‘works’ towards a known target identity. ‘Identity play’, by contrast, is defined as people’s iterative engagement in provisional trials of possible future selves: ‘Identity play aims to explore possible selves rather than to claim and be granted, desired, optimal or ought selves. Work is conducted in the real world; play’s context is the threshold between current reality and future possibilities. Commitment, in play, is provisional; as such, play processes generate variety not consistency’ (Ibarra and Petriglieri, : ). A similar distinction underlies classic organizational notions of exploitation and exploration, most iconically described by March () as the ‘technology of rationality’ and the ‘technology of foolishness’. When organizations operate under the technology of foolishness, play is the dominant mode and innovation more likely. As argued by Meyerson and Martin (: ) the suspension of coherent, uniformly accepted norms allows individuals ‘greater freedom to act, to play, and to experiment’. For example, in HowardGrenville et al.’s () study of cultural change, experiential learning enabled people to suspend practical limitations that might constrain their use of new cultural resources, and to experiment with new approaches. As discussed throughout this chapter, research on work role transitions and organizational change provide many examples of how people and groups experiment or ‘play’ with possible futures in the time and space in between old and new roles, identities and cultures. The underlying mechanisms that appear to account for heightened creative potential are divergent exploration and delayed commitment.
Divergent Exploration If play processes generate variety instead of consistency, evidence of identity play may be found first and foremost in the range and diversity of options considered. In individual-
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level research, this more circuitous path of identity play can be witnessed in career changers’ experimentation with diverse possible selves before settling on a new direction (Ibarra, ; ). An investment manager, for example, toyed with a list of possible selves that included becoming a head-hunter for money-managers and leveraging her interest in art to move into art investment advising as well as going back to school to study history and launching a luxury business, while a mid-career literature professor used the year in which she audited MBA classes to explore a range of divergent options (Ibarra, ). The value of divergent exploration is just as evident in its absence. Newman (), for example, argued that clinging to higher-status past identities in ways that impeded their use of agency to build alternative social networks exacerbated the marginalization of displaced managers. The importance of variety in ideas, knowledge, and experiences has been a cornerstone of the creativity literature (e.g. Gino and Ariely, ; Mainemelis and Ronson, ; Sternberg, ). In fact, divergent thinking refers precisely to ‘the ability of individuals to develop original ideas and to envision multiple solutions to a given problem’ (Gino and Ariely, ; Guilford, , ). Divergent thinking involves thinking ‘without boundaries’ or ‘outside the box’ (Thompson, : ), and has been associated both with ideational fluency (i.e. generating numerous ideas) as well as ideational flexibility (i.e. generating heterogeneous ideas) (Sternberg and O’Hara, ; Torrance, ). The idea that divergence fosters growth, creativity, innovation, and learning has been widely applied in the organizational literature, from explaining the link between exploratory learning and innovative capacity (McGrath, ) to understanding intuition (Dane and Pratt, ) and organizational learning (Weigelt and Sarkar, ). Similarly, we propose that playful, divergent exploration with a wide variety of possible futures creates a rich platform for identity growth or the novel recombination of existing elements that defines innovation.
Delayed Commitment A defining feature of play is the idea of delaying the ending or taking the circuitous route, which is often elaborated via the deliberate introduction of obstacles, a process termed ‘galumphing’ (Miller ). The primary reason delayed commitment is associated with creative outcomes is that nascent identities take time to develop, especially when they have competition from better-established if increasingly outdated or inadequate identities (Ibarra, ). For example, Ashforth () argued that individuals concurrently hold desired possible selves at a distance, playing with their identification with those selves until such a point when they feel authentic. The distancing combined with the ‘just for fun’ element of play facilitates a feeling of safety that allows the individual to experiment freely with alternative, nascent identities; but, it also takes time. At the organizational level, experiential learning aimed at uncovering new ways of operating is necessary to ‘de-problematize the unfamiliar’, allowing the emotional or threatening aspects of change to be addressed (Howard-Grenville et al., ). Ambivalence also fosters delay. Theorists have argued that the process of identity redefinition proceeds through oscillating cycles of rigidly holding on to the past and letting go to embrace future possibilities; key to attaining a positive outcome is preventing
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‘premature closure’, tolerating painful discrepancies, and allowing time for self-exploration and self-testing that is necessary to obtain new information about one’s self (Marris, ). In a study of mid-life career change, for example, Osherton () observed that rather than being a sign of one’s lack of readiness, this moving back and forth is in fact the key to successful transitioning in that it staves off premature closure until alternative possibilities have been fully explored. In a more recent piece on liminality following work role loss, Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly (: ) advanced a similar view about the value of delay: ‘Individuals who advance quickly to identity stability (e.g., uncomplicated progression) do not experience the struggle associated with intense emotions and meaning making that can prompt identity growth’. Postponing choice and commitment, in sum, seem necessary for gathering new information, building new capacities and relationships, and processing complex feelings about changing (Mahoney, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Many transformation processes, in nature as in social life, share the experience of transition in a protected space—the cocoon, the chrysalis, the womb, the ‘make-pretend’ space, the apprenticeship or internship. In the same way, we argue that taking advantage of liminality’s fertile emptiness requires a holding environment (Winnicott, ) or psychologically safe space (Schein, ) in which to test unformed, even risky, identities in a relatively secure environment, one that mitigates disturbing affect and facilitates the kinds of non-routine sensemaking necessary in the pursuit of agency and choice (Petriglieri and Petriglieri, ). Entering a relationship, time, or space legitimately dedicated to transition and exploration, we argue, makes playful response more likely as well as enhances the likelihood that play will produce useful discovery. These ideas of boundary spaces and transitional figures come from British child psychologist Donald Winnicott, who studied the transitional periods between one developmental stage and the next. In these periods ‘in between’ more clearly defined stages of maturity, children imagine various possibilities for themselves in the future, and they play out these possibilities via games, imagination, and make-believe explorations. This play world demarcates a boundary region, between an objective external reality and the entirely subjective internal world of the child. The role of the mother is to provide a safety zone in which the child can give rein to his or her imagination. In that space, the child feels protected, safe from any danger. He or she can gradually define and test out a newly emerging self, with the mother’s blessing, rehearsing for the hard work of making the illusions real in the external world.
Transitional Relationships In childhood, the transitional figure is, of course, the mother; in adulthood, guiding figures and kindred spirits play much the same role allowing the person or group to create,
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experiment with, and begin to internalize nascent identities (Winnicott, ). The strong bond that develops between the person in transition and the guiding figure creates a safe zone within which the change idea starts becoming a real possibility. A necessary feature of this relationship is that it develops outside the web of routine professional interactions in which the person has been embedded (and is trying to break out of). In his work on life transitions Levinson (), for example, described the role of guiding figures who help people endure the ambiguity of the in-between period and create a safe space within which they can imagine and try out possibilities. Strauss (: ) similarly viewed the role of the guiding figure as helping a person make sense of what is happening to them: ‘because some very surprising things are happening to him that require explanation . . . and because one’s own responses become something out of the ordinary, someone must stand prepared to predict, indicate, and explain the signs’. A special camaraderie also develops among people going through a liminal experience together, forging bonds that typically transcend any status differences established by the normal structure. This ‘communitas’ might be structurally built-in, in the form of fellow participants in an educational or outplacement programme, a professional or occupational community, or a more informal reference group that provides social support as well as a point of comparison to shape the liminar’s self-understanding (Baumeister, ). For example, employment agencies organize social events and parties to encourage contingent workers to get to know each other (Garsten, ). In Howard-Grenville et al.’s (: ) study of culture change processes, a valuable communitas helped people in one instance cope with uncertainty: ‘we knew that we had a support system, so . . . you feel more confident about stretching yourself because you knew you had somebody who would help you’, and a nine-month action learning programme provided ‘a cross network of allies and contacts for moving things forward’. One study participant observed that ‘it wasn’t like we were caulked off like a bunch of free-thinking dreamers. We had allies and contacts for moving ideas forward’. When such communitas is not built-in, people create it for themselves. For example, the independent workers studied by Petriglieri et al. (: ) mindfully and deliberately cultivated connections with people who offered them emotional support and a ‘kindness infusion’. Similarly, a freelance feature writer interviewed by Storey et al. (: ), said: ‘I’ve carried on clinging on by my fingernails. Some of it, I have to say, with (a friend and fellow freelancer) mopping up my tears and putting me back on my feet and saying “There, there. Shift yourself ” ’.
Transitional Time and Space As noted by Emirbayer and Mische (: ), certain settings enable people to ‘distance themselves (at least in partial exploratory ways) from the schemas, habits, and traditions that constrain social identities and institutions’. Indeed, studies of liminal experience invariably refer to protected time or space (Ibarra and Obodaru, ) or ‘bracketed’ experience (Howard-Grenville et al., ) in which processes are ‘playful’ and ‘freed of practical constraints’ (Emirbayer and Mische, : ). For example, independent workers create their own holding environments through specific daily or weekly routines as well as
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specific physical spaces (Petriglieri et al., ). As one consultant explains, ‘when I walk through that door and cross that threshold I step into a space that embraces all of the different aspects of myself ’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Not having this kind of protected space, she says, ‘would limit my ability to dream’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Similar ideas about protected time and space also appear in studies of organizational change. For instance, Howard-Grenville et al. (: ) offer several examples of how offsites and strategy retreats were constructed as liminal in order to foster change: Actors gave careful thought to how they would facilitate and invite interaction, intentionally bringing to the fore moments, events, or occasions in which people could interact differently, suspend the usual organizational social dynamics, and allow role-based interactions to recede in importance.
Like children playing make-pretend, liminal time and space suspends ‘real world’ requirements for consistency and rationality, allowing liminars to play with still unformed possibilities. For example, people take sabbaticals or attend educational programmes in order to rethink their careers and identities, seeking a time and space they can legitimately devote to self-reflection and exploring divergent interests (Petriglieri et al., ); they also turn to labour market intermediaries like ‘coding bootcamps’ (Kaynak, ) or ‘rural archipelagos’ (Vesala and Tuomivaara, ) in which they not only learn new skills but forge relationships with a new peer group and create bridges between old and new career identities. Non-routine events taking place outside organizational boundaries, such as strategy workshops (Johnson et al., ), away-days (Concannon and Nordberg, ), and business consultancy dinners (Sturdy et al., ) have all been discussed through a liminal space and time lens. Because the suspension of the rules is temporary, people can safely toy with new ideas, knowing they will have to come back to reality again. Entering a time and space legitimately dedicated to exploration makes it much easier to take the crooked path.
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.................................................................................................................................. The need for people and organizations to be creative, adaptive, and engaged in continuous learning has only become more obvious as we traverse change, individually and collectively, more and more often (Gratton and Scott, ). Despite the obvious dynamism, people and organizations do not always thrive under conditions of threat, loss, and change (Petriglieri, ). Our conception of liminality offers a new understanding about how and through what mechanisms betwixt and between experiences foster a playful response, increasing the likelihood of creativity, innovation, and growth. Although liminality generates confusion and uncertainty we have seen how it can also provide opportunities for exercising agency in crafting one’s jobs, careers, identities, and organizational cultures. As researchers continue to document changes in organizational forms and practices, the rise of contingent careers, and, more generally, the increased likelihood and frequency of career change over the life-course, understanding liminality as creative process becomes increasingly important.
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Does It Still Matter in Organizations and Society? ......................................................................................................................
Abstract Identity is an important topic in organization and management scholarship. However, gender identity is often referred to only in passing, while in-depth theoretical engagement with the concept is rare. This is despite heated debates among feminists and polarizing discussions on gender and acceptable gender identities in many countries. Yet, given current conversations on the multiplicity and fuzziness of identities and identifications in work organizations, much can be gained from such engagement. This chapter considers these issues through a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminist lens inspired by the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger along with Rosi Braidotti and post-colonial feminists’ ideas, to develop relational concept of gender and gender identity. Their conceptualization of identity as fluid, malleable, and defined in relation to the other, it is argued, may enrich our understanding of identities in organizations. The notion of gender identity as a provisional and unstable construct that unfolds relationally also has broader ethical and political implications for re-envisioning new modes of cohabitation on an equivalent basis. Such an approach might contribute to forging both a new politics of identity, and practical programmes that address organizational injustice and social inequalities.
I
.................................................................................................................................. I is a major theme in management and organization studies (Brown, , ; Watson, ), and gender is an ever-present, if somewhat marginalized, topic (Fotaki and Harding, ). However, the phrase ‘gender identity’, which is the subject of heated debate among feminists, is not neutral. It differs from other ‘identities’ because ‘gender’, which is often used as a shorthand for gender identity, is at the forefront of political conversations, social movements, and policy changes (Bernstein, ; Krook and Childs, ).
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: ?
Important conversations are currently taking place on whether gender identity, as recognized in law, should include gender self-identification, effectively allowing people to change their legal sex simply by declaring their intention ‘to live in their preferred gender’ for the rest of their lives (The Economist, ). However, the shift towards multiple gender identities and trans people’s right to self-identification is not taking place uniformly, even in the West. For instance, the legitimate struggles of historically marginalized constituencies (e.g. women and LGBT) are still rejected as identity politics in online campaigns in the USA and Europe. Although these may be connected with white supremacy organizations targeting civil rights won by women and race-equality movements (Daniels, ), similar ideas are also an important part of normalized political discourse. Hostility to feminist theories and feminists extends to various forms of gender mainstreaming, such as sexual education in schools and the legalization of abortion (Dhaliwal and Yuval-Davis, ; Kuhar and Paternotte, ). Virulent opposition to gender empowerment also lies at the core of the ethno-nationalist movements informing governmental policies in Hungary and Poland (Korolczuk and Graff, ). This also coincides with illiberal, conservative, and nationalist groups mounting a backlash against gender politics, feminism, and feminists in many other European countries (Juhasz and Pap, ) and the USA (Klasing, ). Such assaults occur despite limited progress or even reversals in achieving gender equality. For instance, there are renewed attacks on women demanding equality, despite outcries following disclosures of widespread sexual harassment (Fotaki, a) and the continuing gender pay gap (AAUW, ; OECD, ). Graff (: ) concludes that ‘The rightwing offensive against “gender” is no longer viewed as a polemic against gender studies, or indeed as a misunderstanding, but a new strategy on the right that transcends many divisions and contributes to the rise of illiberal populism.’ Yet there has been little or no exploration of why, in various social settings, gender remains a problematic category that arouses strong emotions, which often manifest as denial of gender discrimination and hostility towards gender equality movements. Equally, management scholars have devoted limited attention to gender as a sub-category of scholarship on identities (Brown, ). Brown () analyses five approaches to identity work—discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic—that aid understanding of how organizational identification intertwines with individuals’ constructions of self. However, gender identity is absent from these considerations, even though such identification depends largely on how individuals perceive unity between themselves and a collective (Brown, ). For some time now, feminists and gender theorists have argued that this identity is socially constructed and reproduced (e.g. Acker, ; Harding, ; Smith, ). Later developments in poststructuralist gender theory dispense altogether with the idea of identity as fixed and stable; instead, they consider gender identity as always fragile and requiring work to sustain the illusion of stability: gender or sex do not exist as such. For instance, Judith Butler (, ) deploys the idea of performativity to expose the fragility of gender and sex categories as mere performances of normative practices that can be produced equally well by men and women: ‘the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin’ (Butler, : ). Taking the gender relationality perspective further, Bracha Ettinger introduces the notions of transsubjectivity and the matrixial borderspace (which is both symbolic and
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material) to stress the absence of separateness of the subject from the other. Such conceived subjectivity is always an emerging one, co-constituted by the ‘I and unknown non-I’, and characterized by the idea of an encounter rather than a lack or a split (Ettinger, a). Accepting the notion of gender as provisional and unstable has implications for theorizing identities and organizations. First, it may help deconstruct the processes of attributing gender binaries by highlighting their organizational outcomes and undesirable social phenomena of gender hostility. Second, it demonstrates how this approach might contribute to forging both a new politics of identity and practical programmes that address organizational injustice and social inequalities. Further, Rosi Braidotti (: ) links the decentring of identity and multiplicity with advanced neoliberal capitalism, which augments de-territorialized differences to create ‘new, hybrid and multiple or multicultural identities’. This, I will argue, might also explain how gender identity links with the illiberal populism discussed above. Other works by feminist theorists on intersectionality and transnationalism can offer important insights into the work of organizations as sites that not only reproduce social differences, but also constitute a form of difference by assigning hierarchies and value to different types of work (Fotaki and Harding, ). For instance, the low-status, ill-paid, precarious, placeless and displaced worker identity requires theorization within and through an intersectional lens. Various aspects of intersectionality theory that consider relationships between gender, race, sexuality, age, disability, and class, and particularly how these intersect with each other, may help theorize inequality and exploitation in the workplace. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Benschop and Doorewaard, ; Hancock, ; Holvino, ; Tatli and Özbilgin, ; Winker and Degele, ), these issues are rarely explored in the management literature, although this may be changing. Intersectionality can also be deployed to develop the idea of identity as an embodied practice that is both fluid and processual, since it is affectively and discursively co-produced (Fotaki et al., ). Moreover, transnational feminist scholarship (Fernandes, ; Mohanty, , ) introduces the discourse of excluded ‘others’ in relation to the organization of work, identity, and emancipation in different geographical locales, which is infrequently considered in management and organization research or education (Fotaki and Prasad, ). Such approaches allow understanding of the interconnectedness between apparently very local and specific conditions of living and global power relations (Fotaki and Harding, : ch. ). This chapter draws on the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist feminist ideas of authors such as Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger, along with intersectionality and the transnational perspectives of Rosi Braidotti, Chandra Mohanty, and others, to explain how gendering may lead to the production of abject identities, and specifically how these arise within and through organizations. The proposed approach of embodied relationality offers a novel understanding of identities in organizations: it offers a new relational theorization of human subjectivity to explain difference and otherness in organizations and society. It also focuses on how discourse and embodied affect intertwine in social and organizational contexts to argue that identities are malleable and fluid. The next section briefly reviews the main dilemmas underpinning identity debates in social sciences and organization studies, foregrounding the proposed feminist contributions to identity conversations. A feminist lens is then applied to analyse instances of
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organizational identification in work settings, and to explain the causes of continuing hostility towards gender. The concluding section discusses some theoretical and practical implications of such an approach.
I I R C U S P O W?
.................................................................................................................................. Identity is a topic of extensive theoretical and empirical research in various disciplines as well as popular culture but there is no unified definition of identities (Fearon, ). Fearon suggests that ‘identity’ is used in two linked senses, which may be termed ‘social’ and ‘personal’, referring simultaneously to a social categorization and to the sources of an individual’s self-respect or dignity. This double sense of ‘identity’ implies that such social and individual processes can be separated and defined. It thus justifies calls for a more robust definition ‘than just “social category” because of an implicit linkage with the idea of personal identity’ (Fearon, : ). That is, ‘identity’ is seen as an attribute or set of attributes that make the individual unique (such as an identity card, as well as personal tastes and preferences), while at the same time implying a group to which individuals belong, defined, for example, by one’s nationality, race, sexual orientation, or other characteristics. Yet at the heart of this duality lies a basic conceptual contradiction in how we think about identity, extending beyond academic conversations. The growing popularity and importance of ‘identity’ in contemporary politics, for instance, is documented in two recent publications (Appiah, ; Fukuyama, ) that reiterate the interplay between uniqueness and stability of identity versus ambiguity and inherent changeability. For Appiah, any stable and definitive identity other than one based on universal humanity is meaningless. He reveals confusion and contradictions underlying the collective identities we take for granted. These, he suggests, often result from exaggerating arbitrary or bogus characteristics (such as the contested concept of race) which separate us, rather than highlighting what we share in common (Appiah, ). Fukuyama (), on the other hand, explains our attachment to arbitrary identities as predicated on marginalized groups’ need for social recognition and desire for respect. His proposed solution to divisive identity politics is the development of a unifying national identity based on creed rather than race or ethnicity (Fukuyama, ). He suggests this as an antidote to the loss of a broader sense of purpose and identification that liberal democracy has provided for individuals following the rapid growth of social inequalities in recent decades. Organizational studies researchers are also increasingly turning their attention to the processes through which they are constructed (Brown, ). Yet, irrespective of scholars’ specific concerns ranging from improving organizational effectiveness to enhancing understanding of complex relationships and/or unpicking relations of power, control and resistance, ‘identity’ continues to prove a beguiling concept (Brown, : ). Can the answer be found in the multiplicity of identities, as some organizational scholars
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suggest (Brown, ; Kuhn and Nelson, ), linked with organizational identification (Ashforth, ); or in a clearer delineation of identity as a field of study (Pfeffer, ), as other influential scholars of organizations propose? Or rather, should the question ‘Gender, what is it?’, relating to feminists’ foundational concept of gender, be redefined in terms of a more basic question, ‘Gender, is it?’ (Dimen and Goldner, : xvii, cited in Flax, : )? The next sections endeavour to problematize these questions, focusing on gender identities in the context of identity scholarship more generally.
D R G I
.................................................................................................................................. The notion of gender as a constitutive aspect of social structures has been enormously influential, although the gendered-organization approach remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped (Britton, ). For instance, working from a feminist epistemological standpoint, Dorothy Smith () and Sandra Harding () considered the gendered implications of assuming a knowledge of social totality. They emphasize that knowledge is always rooted in a particular position, and that women are privileged epistemologically by being members of a marginalized and historically oppressed group. Accordingly, the authors conclude that each gender and social class is uniquely related to the work of production and reproduction, and has a different understanding of human needs and the nature of work. Drawing on their ideas, Joan Acker () argues for organizations to be reconsidered not as gender-neutral settings, but as institutions in which gender identities are presumed and reproduced. Thus, explanatory frames in the constructivist feminist tradition focus on gender(ing) as an outcome of organizing processes, co-producing norms by which members are judged, and defining their relationships with desirable outcomes. Relatedly, the meaning, significance, and consequences of gender identity are a function of power differences reflected in the sex composition across levels of an organizational hierarchy (Ely, ). French poststructuralist feminists, including Luce Irigaray () and Hélène Cixous (), have sought to understand how power differences lead to social inequalities and women’s oppression, drawing their inspiration from philosophy, linguistic deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. Their primary focus was on the importance of developing women’s own language and signification systems for representing themselves, and for escaping the symbolic laws of patriarchy. Julia Kristeva () also stressed the role of the preverbal maternal body in understanding alterity (Kristeva, ) and the production of abject identities (for a detailed discussion, see Fotaki, ). These ideas offer a fruitful avenue for unearthing the roots of contemporary hostility towards gender identity and the mainstreaming of gender. In the English-speaking world, Juliet Mitchell’s () landmark Psychoanalysis and Feminism inaugurated a politically-inspired transformation of psychoanalytical theories and concepts by feminist and gender theorists. Judith Butler’s work on the instability of gender norms by and her creative appropriation of psychoanalytic ideas for the purpose of re-theorizing gender relations was enthusiastically taken up by activists
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and academics, including organization scholars (e.g. Fotaki and Harding, ; Jenkins and Finneman, ; Nentwich and Kelan, ; Riach et al., ; Tyler and Cohen, ). Butler offers a radical idea of subjectivity that is performatively and affectively constituted by individuals subjecting themselves to dominant social discourses. Accordingly, we become subjects by performing the social norms conveyed by circulating discourses, since we do not exist outside these. Drawing inspiration from the notion of the performativity of language (Austin, ), Butler () has stressed the power of discourse to create the very realities it is meant to represent. This means that we are constituting, embedding, and reenacting ‘a truth’ of the discourse through performativity, which is ‘not an act, nor a performance, but constantly repeated “acts” that reiterate norms’ (Butler, : ). Moreover, individuals sustain these identities through affective attachments to the social norms on which they depend for their social existence. Butler uses the example of gender heteronormativity to explain how people become affectively attached to dominant discourses, as these provide them with a socially viable identity. While this often involves subjecting ourselves to a stark and often painful exercise of power (Kenny, , ), we do so because we crave social recognition. Following Lacan’s reading of Hegel, she argues that one becomes an individual subject only when recognizing, and being recognized by, another subject (Butler, a). We also seek recognition through discourse and affective attachment to socially-established norms, even if these misrepresent us because we do not exist outside these (as, for instance, when gay people adopt heteronormative identities); this affective attachment to such norms is what compels us to enact them. In other words, performativity describes a set of processes that produce ontological effects, working to bring certain kinds of realities into being, and leading to certain kinds of socially-binding consequences (Butler, : ). For Butler, each individual in society puts on a gender performance, and thus each person is in a drag costume fashioned, more or less, according to a binary view of what is socially, culturally, and widely considered to be ‘true’ gender. According to Butler, these performances are ‘performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’ (Butler, : ). For example, her analysis of the parodic gender practices of the drag act is an instance of resignification. Overall, Butler’s thinking on gender heteronormativity, as well as other ways of becoming social beings, represents a deep engagement with questions of how our relations with other people are caught up in our identifications with hegemonic social norms. This has important theoretical and practical implications. The first is that the process of becoming a subject involves submitting oneself to certain norms, rules, and discourses which are unstable, arbitrary, and therefore changeable; hence, there is no stable or prior identity as such, other than through performance of such norms as long as individuals continue to identify with these. It may, for instance, lead to adopting injurious identities in response to interpellative calls (see Butler, b, discussing Althusser’s interpellation when one responds to being called an offensive name). But social norms can be disrupted through creative appropriation and parodic intervention as the example of the drag act or adopting the term ‘queer’ in emancipatory politics suggest. The second and related point advanced by Butler concerns the issue of recognition by literal others early in an individual’s life as a precondition of our existence as subjects. This
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process is continuously reproduced throughout the subject’s life as she strives to recognize herself in the symbolic Other (for a discussion of organizational and societal implications see Fotaki, ), expressed in social norms, values, and relations, and in forms of kinship. Such an understanding allows us to theorize the centrality of the literal other (in addition to social norms representing the symbolic big ‘Other’ in Lacanian terminology—see Lacan, ), as a basis for developing relational conception of identity. The recognition of our links to others as requirement for our own literal and symbolic survival can provide a new foundation for organizational ethics (see also Fotaki and Harding, : ch. ). As Butler presciently puts it: If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who ‘I’ am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. (Butler, : )
In sum, Butler’s emphasis on the power of gendered discourses, which must be constantly performed by the subjects themselves to reiterate social norms that constitute them (Butler, ), has led to important theoretical developments in organization studies. For instance, researchers have traced how organizational and gendered discourses are inscribed upon women’s bodies in ways that constrain their professional identities (Trethewey, : , cited in Brown, ; see also Fotaki and Pullen, ). For example, discursively constituted identities of ageing and older workers through their representations in public policy debates, academic research, and the media, have an impact on ageing and older workers’ employment and their perception of self (Ainsworth and Hardy, ). Women may also unwittingly internalize discourses as part of their professional identity, for instance in speaking about themselves as less successful academics than their male colleagues (see Fotaki and Harding, : ch. ). In this way, cultural assumptions that stereotype women as less willing or able to perform in high-powered positions are then used to justify and normalize their discrimination (Fotaki and Pullen, ). Although feminist theorists’ work on identity has been taken up in organization studies, explicitly engaging with Butler’s ideas (e.g. Baker and Kelan, ; Riach et al., ), there remains a gap in theorizing identity as relationally constituted vis-à-vis the literal other, in addition to social norms. A few researchers have addressed this omission by drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s work on relationality to theorize identity (Kenny and Fotaki, a, b) and position it in the global social context (Fotaki and Harding, ). To address these gaps and identities as embodied relationality, this chapter will apply Ettinger’s ideas with Braidotti’s () work on nomadic and minoritarian subjectivities together with the scholarship on intersectionality and transnational feminism (Fernandes, ; Mohanty, ). Bringing these diverse works together allows a key argument to be advanced on the fluidity and ambiguity entailed in the notion of gender identity, while demonstrating the complementarity and continuity in varieties of feminist thinking and feminist struggles. Bracha Ettinger, an Israeli psychoanalyst, philosopher, and artist who works with various media, including painting, video, graphical works, diaries, and notebooks offers a unique conception of subjectivity. This is conceived as transsubjectivity emerging from the matrixial borderspace, and implying an absence of separateness of the subject from the other. Her original theoretical development—the matrixial borderspace (Ettinger, a)—is a symbolic concept that contains bodily material memory of our cohabitation
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with the m/other, representing interconnectedness and compassion (Ettinger, a). Hence matrixial transsubjectivity denotes that ‘I’ is always inextricably linked to the unknown ‘non-I’ or the Other/(m)other that co-emerges through the process of cohabitation in the womb (Ettinger, b). This innovative theory proposed by Ettinger extends Butler’s argument on relationality: that we all depend on the other under conditions that are inevitably precarious, our fears about survivability link us to others whom we do not know (Butler, ). Ettinger’s core contribution is to compel us to consider the materiality of the body and affect to re-envision coexistence with the unknown and unknowable other, since this, as she argues, is our inescapable psychic reality. The transsubjectivity also explains that we always exist as partial subjects: comprising the symbolic and material remnant of the mother, and of the baby that cohabited with her (see Kenny and Fotaki, a, b for more details). In terms of identities, the idea of transsubjectivity indicates that these are always emerging, through an encounter with the other rather than a lack or split: ‘In the matrixial feminine, however, this alternative does not arise from the absolute Other (as it does for Lévinas or Lacan) but from borderlinking with the Other’ (Ettinger, a: ). Ettinger’s new insights develop psychoanalytic feminist thinking further by proposing an ethics of ‘difference’, which is based on connectedness, coexistence, and compassion towards the other, grounded in our corporeal and embodied connections. She achieves this by rehabilitating the womb at the symbolic and imaginary level (by equating it with life giving rather than death—for a discussion of associating maternity with the abject and the ultimate otherness in psychoanalysis see Fotaki, and Kristeva, ). Her theory thus differs from the phallogocentric lack and masculine law in classic psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Overall, Ettinger reconceptualizes the idea of ethical responsibility for the other through the prism of the feminine body, moving away from the Lévinasian and Lacanian untheorizable other. She also rethinks feminist contributions to radical otherness by Kristeva, offering a different idea of alterity as constitutively productive. Equally, Ettinger is not concerned with sexual difference the way Irigaray () is, for whom the absence of women’s own symbols of representation and their equation with lack, void, and/or masquerade, reduces alterity to sameness. It has been argued that such patriarchal constructs might be then deployed for the purpose of male identity formation, and the definition of female identity as its corollary, leading to the imposition of the gender binary, and therefore to sexual/political domination over women and some men (Fotaki, ). Though she criticizes Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject, she is not concerned with his precursor to gendering and gender identity, in which one gender (the masculine) relies on the subordinated other (the feminine) to support its own, always tentative, constructions of its manhood (Fotaki and Harding, ), Ettinger’s intention is not to contradict Kristeva, Irigaray, Freud, or Lacan or counter their arguments. Rather, she seeks to introduce the matrixial as an encompassing parallel to the phallic universe, as a second consciousness determining structure (Fotaki and Harding, : ) that is symbiotic with this universe, because her fundamentally ethical proposition has cohabitation and coexistence at its centre. Ettinger’s subject co-emerges through an encounter with an unknown other as ‘becoming together’ (for a further discussion see Fotaki and Harding, : ch. ). Building on Kristeva’s offering of the body as a source of
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signification Ettinger radically reconsiders identity as cohabitation and compassion vis-à-vis and with the other. In sum, invoking the idea of cohabitation and the joint relational space, her ideas allow us to develop the concept of compassionate borderspaces (Kenny and Fotaki, a, b) as a new ethical proposition that acknowledges our shared predicament as humans; recognizing this can contribute to re-theorizing organizational identities with their ethical and social consequences as will be discussed in the concluding section. The chapter now moves on from the identity dissolution to discussing how the macropolitical and economic forces that shape everyday existence placing bodies and identities at the centre of global flows of power. It turns to Braidotti’s work showing that the historical era of globalization is the meeting ground on which sameness and otherness, or centre and periphery, confront each other and redefine their interrelations (Braidotti, : ). Braidotti () considers the context of globalization, which changes the roles of former ‘others’ of modernity (women along with ‘earthly’ natives), turning them into powerful sites of social and discursive transformation. This acknowledges important issues of concern to the world over the last decades, and especially to the non-Western world (Federici and Sitrin, ; Holvino, ). She builds on the work of post-colonial feminists showing how historically established forms of disadvantage distributed across race, class, and gender contribute to creating new abject and subaltern identities in late capitalism (Mohanty, , ; Spivak, ). The feminist theorists of intersectionality argue for including aspects of identity of the marginalized and subaltern subjects to consider the effects of the gendered, patriarchal, racialized, and (hetero)sexualized nexus of power. This also links with transnationalist feminists who argue that theoretical and empirical research must also account for the domination and differential power regimes within, between, and beyond nation states to capture the emerging ‘forms of identity, imagination and practice in a rapidly globalizing world’ (Fernandes, : ). Braidotti contributes to this call by developing an idea of a nomadic subjectivity—‘a mobile entity, in space and time, and also an enfleshed kind of memory’ (Braidotti, : )—to reassert the power of the embodied flesh that she describes as ‘wetware’. She takes inspiration from Deleuzian ideas of the subject as non-unitary and unfolding through the process of multiplying interconnectedness with others and the inanimate world. This allows her to reconsider the subject as ‘a spatial temporal compound, which frames the boundaries of the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, : ). Her notion of subjectivity that is imperceptible and to be found in multiple belongings suggests that identities are emergent and always in the process of becoming—especially when this process is prompted and facilitated by the mobility and movements of globalization. The creative fusion of the concept of hybrid nomadism in Braidotti’s work, along with Bracha Ettinger’s embodied matrixial borderspace and Judith Butler’s writings on discursive constitution of identity through subjects’ attachments to social norms suggest that the idea of a definable identity or gender identity as such cannot exist. This is because the subject is ‘a mobile entity in space and time, and also an enfleshed kind of memory, retaining its ability to last and remain extraordinarily faithful to itself through a set of discontinuous variations and permutations’ (Braidotti, : ). Hence, the attempt to pin it down might prove futile. Instead we should examine the bodily memories, affective attachments, co-emergence in space and time in relation to others. Taken together the feminist insights on relationality and ethical responsibility for the other including the
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non-human other considered above, imply a possibility of new organizational ethics of posthumanist inclusivity and affective compassionate care (see also Fotaki and Harding, : ch. ) as will be discussed next.
R I: T I
.................................................................................................................................. The relational reconsideration of subjectivity vis-à-vis the other outlined above, which brings together insights from diverse feminist psychoanalytic thinking, has powerful implications for rethinking both identities in organizations and the uses of identity in political discourses. First, Butler’s understanding of the human as a relational social being who craves recognition by others allows us to appreciate the role of social norms in the subject’s formation. Second, Ettinger’s idea of the matrixial borderspace contributes to developing embodied relationality. This provides a fruitful avenue for rethinking our subjectivities and identities, including gender identities, as emerging through encounters with others. Finally, framing our subjectivities and our own lives as inevitably precarious (Butler, ) and Braidotti’s () idea of nomadic subjectivities compels us to reconsider ourselves in relation to all lives, and as inextricably interwoven with the lives of unknown others; this also fundamentally questions the concept of identity. Taking a lead from Fotaki and Harding (: ch. ), who suggest that feminists and intersectionality theorists have critiqued the concept of woman as a homogeneous identity, this chapter questions the assumption that the term ‘identity’ may have a single, fixed, positive or negative meaning. As the authors argue, rather, just as ‘woman’ has numerous meanings, many with a history that influences the constitution of the woman in twentyfirst century organizations, so does identity. They also warn that fixation of woman identity as defined by white middle-class concerns regarding discrimination at work for instance, had necessitated feminist resistance in the first place led by post-colonial, intersectional, and transnational theorists. The term identity is polysemous, with numerous meanings, both positive and negative, that individuals can mobilize as they constitute their different identities. Theories of identities in organizations would be also strengthened if they were not essentialized in a similar way. This can be achieved, for instance, by including various aspects of identities along with subaltern voices rather than merely struggling for precision and definition (see also Ashforth, ). Thus, identity is never a neutral term as it often defines our social existence. The case of restrictive gender identities demonstrates this: in a world which dictates that there shall be two sexes, a person must be coherently gendered as either man or woman in order to have a livable life (Butler, ). Relationality, an idea derived from the work of the feminist writers discussed above, and particularly by Judith Butler (, , ) and Bracha Ettinger (a, b), emerges from our corporeality and embodied affective connections, as the foundation of human subjectivity. It gives meaning to our individual experiences and constitutes us as social beings. As such, it offers novel possibilities for (re)imagining the self and the other in the context of organizations and society.
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These new insights from psychoanalytic feminist thinking can be used to propose an ethics of ‘difference’ based on connectedness, coexistence, and compassion towards the other, grounded in relationality rather than gender and gendering frameworks. They could also prompt developments in the organization studies literature that relate care to compassion, as care is often seen as being stimulated by a compassionate response to others’ suffering (Frost, ; Kanov et al., ). Rethinking the notion of compassion, cohabitation, and care through this prism may help us consider new, inclusive forms of researching, teaching, and writing to oppose exclusion and ‘othering’. It may also have implications for research on gender and identity more generally: it must be analysed in relation not only to ‘sexual difference’, but also to race, forms of desire, kinship, and power, including colonialism (Flax, ; see also Fotaki and Harding, : ch. , for organizational examples). Lastly, such reframing of identities as relationally emergent opens up ways for rethinking different forms of otherness, along with strategies for converting abjection and exclusion into political agency. This resonates with Braidotti’s new nomadic subjectivities emerging through a transformative process that ‘requires alternative figurations to express the kind of internally contradictory multifaceted subjects we have become . . . i.e. alternative representations and social locations for the kind of hybrid, sexualized nomadic subjects we are becoming’ (Braidotti, : ). Influenced by Braidotti and Deleuze’s ideas, Linstead and Pullen () show how this might lead to rejecting the male/female binary in organizations. The authors argue for ‘a gender dynamics that is both subjective and corporeal and yet beyond binary opposition and dialectics’ (Linstead and Pullen, : ), and in which gender and identity are aggregates rather than cohesive concepts, thus offering a ‘simultaneous intensive multiplicity’.
P I
.................................................................................................................................. Having discussed theoretical implications of a relational approach for organizational scholarship on identities, the chapter concludes with outlining the practical relevance of this approach. Butler’s and Ettinger’s theorizing of subjectivity in relational terms has important implications for understanding the work of organizations under neoliberalism. Bradotti’s nomadism on the other hand, brings in the much needed transnational dimension that can be useful for disrupting the concept of fixed identities and for revealing their performative effects. Taken together these ideas might help achieving the required shifts towards the ‘problems’ of the dispossessed and migration, from an abstract global debate into something that resonates in people’s lives, thus challenging the perception of them as un-relatable ‘others’. The shared vulnerability obliges us to assign irreducible value to human lives, even the most distant ones, and to acknowledge the uncertainty we all face under the neoliberal regime. Butler () illustrates this with the case of civilian casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who were labelled as ‘collateral damage’, rather than as men, women, and children, in the so-called ‘war on terror’ waged by recent US administrations. They were turned into ‘monstrous others’ and were no longer seen as people with livable lives worth protecting. Even in the midst of affluent Western societies, we are witnessing a rapid increase in various categories of
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undeserving ‘others’, such as the new poor, refugees, and migrants, who are often rejected, stigmatized, and refused a duty of care. There is a long and intimate relationship between capitalism and the production of abject identities. Rendering women abject is necessary for the appropriation of their reproductive labour in capitalism (Federici, ) and ‘post-capitalism’ (Federici and Sitrin, ); social transformation in any form of organization is not possible without recognizing this. Such issues must be addressed in management education and research (Fotaki and Prasad, ), because the dispossession and inequality increasingly experienced by people in the developed and developing worlds is, arguably, at the root of many political and social problems. However, in the business and management context, the dominant market logic of profit maximization at any cost often disregards the lives of ‘others’ and turns them into saleable commodities. This enables conspicuous and compulsive consumerism to coexist with abject poverty, and allows entire groups of people in distant parts of the world to be treated instrumentally and disposed of. Taken together these ideas might help achieving the required shifts towards the ‘problems’ of the dispossessed and migration, from an abstract global debate into something that resonates in people’s lives, thus challenging the perception of them as un-relatable ‘others’. Arbitrary categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or class are often used to justify inequalities under neoliberalism. This explains the backlash against even modest redressing of injustice against various historically disadvantaged others. The rise of populist forces against ‘gender ideology’ across the West, and particularly in the USA and Eastern Europe (Juhasz and Pap, ; Graff, ), suggests it has become a kind of social glue and a metaphor for expressing the insecurity and unfairness produced by the current socioeconomic order (Grzebalska et al., ). Calls for abandoning identity politics and the growing hostility towards gender and gender mainstreaming recreates these new ‘old’ abject identities. Further, questions of sexual politics often converge with anti-immigration politics, even in progressive secular EU countries such as France and the Netherlands (Butler, ). Yet, these discourses of illiberal postmodernity go hand-in-hand with establishing neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm and the sole viable narrative, which is increasingly used to justify the growth of inequality and dispossession in developed countries as well (Daskalaki and Fotaki, ). We must therefore recognize how various means, including ideology and language, are deployed to constitute abject identities and how these dominant discourses might be inscribed in women’s and oppressed others’ psyches. This means recognizing that gender stereotypes are ideological and prescriptive, and that their influence is unlikely to diminish simply with the passage of time or by accumulating evidence of women’s capabilities (Benschop and Brouns, ; Charles, ; Fotaki and Pullen, ). Seen from a historical perspective, some societies have gone a long way towards addressing systemic barriers that prevent women from flourishing. Yet, in every country and every profession, women continue to be paid less than men for work of the same value, distributed across arbitrarily defined identities (AAUW, ; OECD, ). Equally, sexual harassment remains the most pervasive form of violence against women, often extending to other forms of aggression, such as harassment and violence towards women in public spaces, and attacks on and shaming of women and girls on the internet and social media (Fitzgerald, ). Such facts reveal that much more remains to be done. Deploying gender identities
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strategically in women’s common struggles for their legal and reproductive rights, as well as challenging patriarchal definitions of womanhood and gender (see Prasad, on the use of strategic essentialism in organizations), is often necessary. Bringing information about sexual harassment and abuse to the public domain, as women have done recently (Fotaki, a), is also an essential step for bringing about change. Pressing for institutional conditions to preclude discrimination is another very important step. Yet the fundamental struggle is for promoting social justice and for recognizing all individuals as equivalent rather than focusing on their ‘unique’ individual or collective identities. This can be achieved if we demand public policies that emerge from a recognition that all our lives are precarious, and that we all depend on society for survival (Fotaki, b) rather than allowing neoliberal neglect for the (precarious) other in almost every form of organized life.
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Abstract This chapter uses leadership development as a portal to understanding how identity work is collaboratively practised in organizations. At the same time it explores an organizationally sanctioned liminality that continuously produces identity work in the performative interweaving of travelling concepts. Advancing this link between leadership development and identity work, the authors engage a processual re-theorization that posits identity work as liminal practice—emergent, edgy, ephemeral, precarious, and fluid in nature—and leadership development as concerned with making visible the implicit identity work undertaken within this liminality. They illustrate their argument with insights from a leadership studio workshop, which sought to develop collaborative leadership within a recently formed public health and social care service where identity work continuously shapes, and is shaped by the development of a more inclusive and dynamic leadership practice.
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.................................................................................................................................. As is abundantly demonstrated by this handbook, identity continues to be an enormously productive construct in organization studies. The potential for identity to explore across levels of analysis, internal and external organizational boundaries, and ethnic and cultural differences has made it an indispensable tool in almost every aspect of organizational research (Alvesson et al., ). However, with contemporary trends towards postindustrial models of organization that involve flexible employment, temporary and fixedterm contracts, and complex dynamic networks rather than rigid bureaucratic structures,
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conventional thinking about stable and durable identities in organizations is being overtaken by the concept of continuously rebuilt, ephemeral, chameleon-like identities that can shift and morph with changing conditions (Ybema et al., ). Research interest is accordingly turning towards the work of making identities (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Brown, ), where this is widely understood as a dynamic social process characterized by precarity and emergent becoming, in which organizational actors work together to simultaneously reconstruct their selves and their worlds. This performative perspective on identity work evokes new metaphors of inquiry that are able to engage with the uncertainty and ambiguity of continuous change (Czarniawska and Mazza, ). For example, the notion of ‘liminality’ has already been linked to identity work in a variety of studies including the flexible nature of employment (Beech, ), the management of temporary projects (Paton and Hodgson, ), as an apparatus for culture change (Howard-Grenville et al., ) or a mechanism for training and development (Hawkins and Edwards, ), and as a description of consulting practice (Czarniawska and Mazza, ). In its original conception (Turner, ; Van Gennep, ), liminality refers to the transition between stable identity states during which the usual social structures and their associated obligations are suspended. The liminar undergoing transition effectively stands outside conventional definition and is, therefore, socially invisible (Beech, ). In its application to organization and management, Söderlund and Borg () demonstrate that this conception has been significantly extended beyond the sequential evolution between preliminal and post-liminal states, to make more visible the positions and roles of liminars in this process, and the liminal space within which the transition takes place. However, they also suggest there is still more that could be mined from this metaphor, especially in relation to the temporal dimensions of liminality and the dynamics of learning and development. It is this challenge that we take up here. In particular, we want to go beyond the mere sequentiality of a process that moves from one fixed and stable identity to another, by engaging a processual ontology that attends to the emergent movements and flows of actually doing identity work. We illustrate our argument using examples drawn from a leadership studio workshop (Simpson and Buchan, ) that was designed to develop collaborative public leadership, where leadership is explicitly conceived as a perpetually liminal practice that is both fluid and emergent. In this context, leadership development is accomplished in the work of actually doing leadership, and as such it is deeply entwined with, and inseparable from identity work. We begin in the next section by elaborating the mutuality of leadership development and identity work. Our argument then proceeds to develop the theoretical and methodological implications of liminality for identity work, which we then explore empirically in the context of developing collaborative leadership.
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.................................................................................................................................. Identity-based research has served to unsettle and disrupt traditional leadership scholarship, which tends to privilege the psychometric assessment of those traits, behaviours,
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and contingencies by means of which leaders are deemed to operate. Such approaches frame leadership in terms of performance, effectiveness, and activity, with leadership development responding to questions about what leaders should do and how those things should be done. Identity researchers on the other hand approach leadership critically, as a social construct that offers resources in terms of power, meaning significance, and relationship. Here, leadership development asks different questions about what leadership might facilitate, enable, and constrain between actors in their various moments and contexts (Mabey, ). Identity approaches to leadership development have shone a light on processes that shape, direct, and influence the emergence of leadership, such as the idealized and desired identities that are structured into programme purposes and designs, and which serve to regulate participant identity choices (Gagnon and Collinson, ), power and resistance dynamics between participants and educators (Carroll and Nicholson, ), and the facilitated processes of constructing and undoing identity (Nicholson and Carroll, ). This focus on identity has shown that claims relating leadership construction to a discrete self are nebulous, that actors inhabit leadership in myriad ways that require sustained reflexivity and sensemaking to understand, and that leadership connects with other organizational and societal discourses of control, legitimation, and expectation in profound and not always transparent ways. Nevertheless, identity research in leadership continues to be rather static as it focuses more on the drivers and results of identity work than the movements of the work itself. At first glance theories of identity work appear to embrace change, transition, and flux as core features. After all identity work is generally taken to be synonymous with struggle (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ) and it is frequently characterized as ‘being continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening, or revising’ identities (Alvesson and Willmott, : ). Identity work has always been viewed as a process that is discursively produced and materially mediated, and as such it is steeped in flux, fragmentation, and contradiction (Simpson and Carroll, ). However, research on identity work has most often assumed that the end goal is continuity and consistency ‘whereby people strive to shape a relatively coherent and distinctive notion of personal self-identity’ (Watson, : ). This speaks to a preference for ‘settled selves’ where subjects retrospectively impose a sense of narrative order and cohesion on their identity accounts, often as a response to perceived researcher expectations in interviews. Critiquing this tendency towards equilibrium, identity researchers have turned their attention to drivers such as impression management and political positioning in identity-oriented interviewing (Alvesson and Sveningsson, ). These concepts are equally important for leadership development programmes, especially given that participants often feel they must reaffirm their desirability and organizational value regardless of their own struggles with leadership and its demands. A second critique that concerns us here is the privileging of the individual and personal in identity research. This has been confronted head-on by scholars such as Watson () who sees a reluctance to grapple with the social, structural, and contextual forces that provide significant ‘extra-individual discourses’ as important resources for identity work (Alvesson et al., : ). Watson (: ) proposes ‘ “nested” levels’ that nestle personal identity in larger spheres of organizational and societal narratives. Again this concern is equally resonant in a leadership development context where any act of leading
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inevitably includes others, necessitating greater relational and situational sophistication in both theory and practice. In order to respond to these critiques of identity work, particularly in the context of leadership development, we argue here for a very different approach to theorization, one that more readily engages with the flows and movements of socially embedded leadership practice. In the next section, we develop ‘liminality’ as an alternative metaphor to inform new identity work theory, one that replaces any hankering after cohesion, order, and permanence with the edginess of understanding oneself ‘betwixt-and-between’, always on the cusp of multiple sites and locations, and always in motion. This explicitly processual approach requires an ontological shift that steps away from the stabilized certainties of representationalism in order to plunge directly into the performative flows of practice (James, ; Shotter, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The notion of ‘liminality’ can be traced back to van Gennep’s () studies of the ritualized rites of passage practised by different cultures. He observed three distinct phases in these rituals: separation, transition, and incorporation. For instance, in a ‘coming of age’ ritual, the child is first separated from the social group that identifies her status as ‘child’; then through a developmental process she transitions to a new state of adulthood; and finally she is incorporated into this new social status. Czarniawska and Mazza () point out that this ritual process is equally relevant in the world of contemporary organization where, for instance, when trainees are recruited they are separated from their previous lives as students, then they are developed through specialized training schemes, and ultimately they are welcomed as fully-fledged managers. This three-phase passage chimes with Lewin’s () familiar model of change management—unfreeze, change, refreeze—and may be equally criticized for over-simplifying a complex and ongoing process by assuming it is bookended by stable positions that define fixed start and end points. In other words, both models privilege states of stability and equilibrium, relegating the dynamics of change and transition to effects that are secondary and derivative. This same critique is what motivates our quest in this chapter to explore the dynamic movements of identity work. It was only after van Gennep’s work was translated into English in that Turner (, ) began to elaborate ‘liminality’ in the field of anthropology. Like van Gennep, he sees it as a vehicle for transition in the context of socio-cultural status change, but he is particularly interested in exploring the liminal phase, which he describes as ‘being-on-athreshold . . . a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states’ (Turner, : ). It is, in effect, a learning process that combines experimentation and reflection. Liminality is thus ‘full of potency and potentiality . . . experiment and play’ (Turner, : ), but although it may release creativity, it can also generate anxiety when people come to realize they have slipped their moorings to familiar realities. For Turner, liminality must be understood as simultaneously spatial and temporal, but ‘[s]ince liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a
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time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen’ (Turner, : , emphasis in original). In seeking an alternative to clock time, Turner () invokes Csikszentmihalyi’s () notion of ‘flow’ to describe the continuity of experience that transcends the common dualistic distinctions between self and social, and between past, present, and future. There is a remarkable resemblance between Turner’s understanding of liminality and the earlier writing of Mead () on the subject of sociality, which he defines as the movement ‘betwixt and between the old system and the new’ (Mead, : ) and ‘the capacity of being several things at once’ (Mead, : ). It is sociality that allows us to engage with our own and others’ multiple and shifting identities in the unfolding process of identity work. Indeed it is this capacity that, for Mead, is the defining quality of what it means to be social. We are social to the extent that we are able to walk in the shoes of others and take on attitudes other than our own. Sociality, then, is the social process of reconstructing meanings in changeful situations, and it is sociality that brings meaning to our socially engaged experience (Carroll and Simpson, ). Like Turner’s take on liminality, Mead’s sociality is both spatial and temporal as the ‘betwixt and between’ signifies not only a state of inbetween-ness, but also a process of movement within and between. Over the past decade or so, the idea of liminality has been taken up and enthusiastically elaborated in the field of organization studies (Söderlund and Borg, ). For instance, Beech () pursues Turner’s interest in what happens in the liminal phase of transition, suggesting that identity work is a liminal activity that arises in between self and social identities. As such, it is more of a ‘negotiation between’ than a ‘transition between’. He finds three work practices—experimentation, recognition, reflection—that emphasize the dynamics of imaginative inquiry in the co-constituting of liminal experience. This formulation nevertheless depends on more or less stable, dualistic states that bookend, and contain, liminal activities. Others have focused attention on the liminars, the occupants of liminal space, attending to the work-related experience of certain roles or positions in organizations, such as consultants (Czarniawska and Mazza, ), temporary workers (Garsten, ), project managers (Paton and Hodgson, ), and the participants in leadership development programmes (Hawkins and Edwards, ). Still others have explored the liminal space, its physicality and materiality, where liminal activities can develop outside the normal constraints of organization (e.g. Johnson et al., ; Sturdy et al., ). However both these streams of research, liminal position and liminal space, downplay the processual emergence of liminality in favour of the spatial entities that populate and contain its movements. As originally conceived by van Gennep and Turner, liminality is necessarily a temporary condition, but somewhat paradoxically, organizational scholars are increasingly describing it as a permanent in-between state. Johnsen and Sørensen () argue that modern organization is characterized by a permanent state of crisis, a perpetual urgency, suggesting that change rather than stability has become the norm. Whereas organizational change has traditionally been justified in terms of establishing a new stability, today temporariness and transition have become institutionalized as an enduring state of ambiguity and uncertainty. In the words of Czarniawska and Mazza (: ) ‘liminality is becoming the modern condition’. Whilst these are fruitful developments of ‘liminality’ as a concept, in our view they are still somewhat constrained by the idea that permanent liminality is conceived as a
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state located between other states. Bamber et al. () make a useful distinction by opposing the common conflation of liminality with a state of limbo. For them, limbo implies an irredeemable stuckness that is ‘always-this-and-never-that’, whereas liminality holds the potential of being ‘neither-this-nor-that, or both-this-and-that’ (Bamber et al., : ). Whilst we value this clarification, the dynamic potential for liminality as ongoing practice, rather than a state, continues to be under-explored in the organizational literature. An obvious consequence of permanent liminality is that settled identities may never emerge, so researching identity work then demands a different sort of theoretical and empirical commitment, one that takes account of the movements, flows, experimentation, and playfulness implied by being betwixt-and-between. This implies a continuously emergent liminality that is better described as perpetual than permanent (Ybema et al., ). Johnsen and Sørensen () approach this issue by engaging with Agamben and Deleuze, whose analyses of modern society emphasize the blurring of those categorical dualisms so pervasive in the organizational literature. In particular, they examine the increasingly fuzzy boundary between working and living. Our project here continues this exploration of liminality as perpetual and generative identity work that blurs the distinctions between the individual and the organizational, and between stasis and change. In building our argument, we adopt a process ontology of becoming (Chia, ), which privileges the movements and flows of living practice ahead of the stabilized entities that punctuate and define the limits of process. This is not to say that entities do not exist, but rather to recognize that they are abstractions derived from the ongoing flow of process. To be clear, the sequentiality that is evident in van Gennep’s understanding of liminality, the progress from pre-liminal, to liminal, and then post-liminal phases, is not what we are talking about. Rather, a process ontology requires us to shift our theoretical and empirical gaze from the stuff of the situation, or its past/present/future phases, to its continuously emergent and performative movements. By way of illustrating these ideas, we now turn our attention to an empirical inquiry into collaborative leadership development, in which leadership is understood as liminal practice emerging continuously, without beginning or end, out of the relational dynamics of the situation. Following Mead (), we see these dynamics as the ongoing identity work that builds sociality. Our objective then, is not to discover certain identities that are constructed in this social process, but rather to follow the emergent flow of co-constructive identity work. We read the empirical materials through the lens of liminality, seeking to illuminate the liminal experience of perpetual in-between-ness and to trace the emergent dynamics of identity work in stories of developing collaborative leadership.
I L S
.................................................................................................................................. The leadership studio was conceived as a series of three half-day workshops conducted with a group of around thirty participants from a Scottish Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), one of thirty-one new HSCPs established in by Scottish statute with the objective of integrating the provision of healthcare and social care services across the nation. In establishing these new HSCPs, the government sought to promote new ways
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of working, and in particular a new mode of collaborative leadership capable of transcending the very different leadership mind-sets of the predecessor Health Boards and Local Councils. The purpose of the leadership studio, which was facilitated by the first author, was to help participants from all levels of the Partnership, from directors to service users, to develop a more inclusive and more collaborative leadership practice that explicitly acknowledges and welcomes leadership at every desk and in every position across their organization. The leadership studio was designed to draw lessons from the experience of collaborative leadership at a community justice centre (CJC) that was originally created in by the local Council, and was subsequently restructured into the new HSCP. CJC provides a range of psychological, social, and practical services to ‘women with convictions’—women who have served prison sentences for serious criminal offences. From its inception, it was a multidisciplinary one-stop-shop that brings together in the same location expertise in mental and physical health, addictions, social work, housing, and prisons. CJC has always maintained a commitment to co-production that sees the professional staff working together across disciplines, and with the women who use this service, to tackle the wicked problems generated by multiple and complex care needs. Ongoing collaborative leadership has seen the purpose and vision for CJC evolve into a service that moves flexibly with the diverse and changing needs of the women, accommodating their individual capacities and motivations while also building a strong sense of community. As such, it is an exemplar of continuous change, and a likely site of perpetual liminality. A variety of activities were undertaken during, and between, the three studio sessions. These included a fishbowl conversation amongst four members of CJC, two of whom were seconded from agencies external to the HSCP, one was a medical professional employed by the Health Service, and the fourth was a former user of CJC’s services who now volunteers at the centre. During this conversation, the members shared their experiences of the collaborative environment within which CJC does its work while all the other studio participants actively listened to this exchange. Studio participants then broke into groups, each of which included a representative from CJC. These groups used D mapping techniques to construct models representing perceived obstacles to implementing CJC’s collaborative style of leadership across the HSCP, and this in turn led to discussions about how these obstacles might be overcome. A rapporteur from each group then presented their group’s insights to all the studio participants, using the collaboratively constructed models to support and illustrate their presentations. The data that we use in this chapter are drawn primarily from these presentations, which were audio-recorded and transcribed. We also use some of the written ‘homework’ that participants undertook between studio sessions. Our analysis identifies three movements that emerged continuously as participants struggled to develop new expressions of leadership for a world in perpetual motion.
CJC S P L
.................................................................................................................................. We have argued that leadership development and identity work are intimately intertwining processes that emerge in the perpetual liminality of living experience. In analysing the
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leadership studio data we looked for movements associated with liminality, such as transition, edginess, fluidity, and being in-between. However, by virtue of their dynamic nature, these movements are difficult to apprehend in the orthodox sense of stable representational constructs. Rather than resorting to conventional and over-privileged methods of identity research such as interviewing to capture individuals’ retrospective reflections (Carroll, ), we propose the use of travelling concepts (Simpson et al., ) that can shift and morph as movements evolve. Travelling concepts reflect the recent ‘mobility turn’ in social research (Urry, ) that seeks new ways of engaging with the continuously emergent and performative qualities of social and relational action. Instead of defining fixed constructs that precondition the researcher’s expectations, travelling concepts go with the researcher’s actions in a world that is itself on the move. It is in this spirit that we now explore three travelling concepts that emerged in the work of the leadership studio: risk-taking and rule-breaking; innovating and incubating; and learning and resilience.
Risk-Taking and Rule-Breaking Given the traditional public service origins of the HSCP, it is perhaps not surprising that the handling of risks and rules came up repeatedly throughout the leadership studio as topics of concern. An instructive example comes from a story told by Susan,1 one of the CJC participants in the fishbowl conversation, recounted here by the first author (a verbatim record of this conversation is not available): Susan is on secondment to CJC for a period of years from an external institution that is renowned for its adherence to rules and regulations. Within her first few days in this new job, a social worker asked her for information about a specific user of CJC’s services. Coming from an organization that prioritizes security and confidentiality above all else, Susan was horrified to even be asked such a question. She simply didn’t know how to respond, so she just made her excuses and left the conversation as quickly as she could. Susan then sought advice from her former manager who suggested that working at CJC requires a change in mind-set. She subsequently made a full adjustment to the collaborative context of CJC to the extent that she is now wondering how she will cope when her secondment ends and she returns to her normal job.
A classic reading of this story might emphasize Susan’s transition from her former rulebased and security-conscious identity, through the profoundly unsettling ‘horror’ of liminality, to a safe landing in a more relationally responsive and collaborative identity. This type of analysis emphasizes the presumed strength and solidity of terminal identity states, but the in-between-ness and relationality of how identity work actually unfolds remains largely invisible. However, it was the actual experience of liminality, with all of its discomforts and anxieties, which preoccupied participants in the leadership studio, particularly as they reflected on the challenges of risk-taking and rule-breaking. This was illustrated, for example, immediately following the fishbowl conversation, when studio participants listed some keywords to reflect what they had just heard: breaking down barriers; take risks and breach rules; taking risks to do things differently; vulnerability; moving away from the comfort zone; passion for change; and asking why?
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all of which speak to the ‘how’ of liminality, drawing attention to the uncomfortable dynamic processes of ‘breaking’, ‘taking’, ‘moving’, and ‘asking’, in the ongoing identity work at CJC. During the group work that then followed, studio participants continued to elaborate this theme. Group ’s rapporteur (R) recounted their discussion about what it is like to be a worker at CJC: ‘you’re a worker and it’s a bit about taking risks and it’s also about having the safety net to make mistakes and how you actually deal with fear . . . how do you deal with that?’
Fear emerged as a major issue for all participants, either as a source of unwelcome disruption (R): ‘on one hand you had a potential disaster, so that was to represent potentially an explosion but . . . even although that partly influenced the fear . . . [it] was actually more about you had the authority and support to make mistakes’
or as Group ’s rapporteur (R) reported, as something that just needs to be dealt with: ‘once you realize the worst that could happen, so the worst is that you don’t get a job, the worst thing is you lose the job you’ve got, And actually that’s . . . you’ll deal with that if you’ve got a sense of where breaking the rules can take you’
Commenting on Susan’s story from the fishbowl conversation, R related Group ’s view that rule-breaking can be liberating: ‘once you start breaking some rules or questioning, um, like the [external service] talking about actually the freedom that comes with breaking rules and then going home at night and thinking “I’ve just shared information with somebody that asked me something because everyone else was doing that at [CJC], and then realizing that it was alright, it was OK” ’
but for this to be the case, the right conditions need to be fostered: [at CJC] ‘there was permission given for risks to be taken’.
As R observed above, it’s about having a ‘safety net’ that protects workers if they make ‘mistakes’, while R sees risk-aversion as a wider societal problem, rueing the fact that ‘we bring up our kids to not question rules and to actually expect rules . . . this is about how you get hung for making mistakes’.
In many ways, identities may be understood as sets of rules, or templates, that tell us how to act in certain situations, but in a context such as CJC, which is always changing and always confronting uncertainty, fixed identities do not serve individuals or organizations well. What is needed is a willingness to face the fear that comes with breaking rules and taking risks. It is this willingness that can liberate us from the ‘horror’ of not knowing what to do, and facilitate action in the face of this uncertainty.
Innovating and Incubating The perpetually changing context of CJC’s work requires a fleetness of foot, a willingness to explore alternatives, and an openness to trying out new ways of service provision, all of which supposes an orientation towards continuous innovation. Rather than focusing on the
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big ‘innovative’ outcomes though, our interest here is in the myriad small moves that combine to produce novel responses in unexpected and uncertain situations. R reported that her group had discussed at some length the types of conditions that were created at CJC in order to foster innovation: ‘We had to protect innovation because we knew if we had exposed it too early . . . we might have just picked at organization and we wouldn’t have got to where we are today. So thinking about that we thought in terms of the challenge, you’ve got the old ways . . . of institutionalized thinking we’ve set up.’
Here the group recognizes the importance of breaking away from pre-liminal ‘institutionalized thinking’ in order to step into the creative betwixt-and-between of liminality. However, for this breaking away to succeed, the budding new CJC had to be protected from external interference and criticism. ‘[CJC] was incubated. There were deliberate decisions taken to not allow folk to come; not to set targets’.
The D model that Group constructed to depict the challenges its members perceived in the development of collaborative leadership included a sturdy wall that created a separation between CJC and the rest of the HSCP. ‘you need a wall. We were saying you needed that wall to protect, as a kind of protection to allow it to incubate and allow it to develop but also give permission to be taking risks and breaking rules. But recognizing we had to build a wall so that the folk here [pointing outside CJC on the model] couldn’t see the rules being broken’.
Further emphasizing the importance of this protection, David, a member of Group , commented: ‘you’ve got almost like a sandbox environment that we were all very proud of, so no one ruin it. That was the sense I got – don’t anyone ruin it’.
The wall served not only as a way of defending CJC’s staff and their new approach to service provision, but also as protection for the users of these services. As Jason, a member of Group , noted: ‘Some of the protection that was put in there, it’s kind of funny . . . not realizing just how much in the first two years was kept down. It’s as much protection for the women [service users]’.
In practice, however, this wall cannot be impermeable. It must be possible, although not necessarily easy, to cross from one side to the other (R): ‘We called this [pointing to an opening in the model’s wall] an “Ah but gateway”, a door. So see the folk that say to you “Ah but ye cannae do it like that”. So we’re giving them a door to go through because they can go back. They can go back to the institutionalized way of thinking, because they’re not gonna make it through there if it’s all about the “ah but” ’.
Speaking from his personal experience, Jason observed: ’the “Ah but gateway” was such a huge, huge . . . I’d love a pound for every time we’ve done that – aye but we’ve done that, aye but we’ve been there, aye but we’ve worked with these women, aye but . . . The interesting thing is that some of the folk who were the loudest “aye buts” became the strongest advocates for the service’.
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Incubation can never become a permanent state though. At some stage CJC has to emerge from behind this protective wall in order to continue to expand its influence and its work. Indeed, at the time of the leadership studio, this figurative wall was in the process of being dismantled, but care was also being taken to embed lessons and insights that would allow CJC to continue in its liminal ways. R commented that the very fact incubation was seen as necessary could be taken as an indictment of ‘the old ways of institutionalized thinking’. However, as David commented it is because now ‘the genie is out of the bottle [that] to some extent is why we’re here’ and able to learn from this collaborative leadership studio experience.
Learning and Resilience Living with liminality evokes continuous learning as a necessary response to relentless uncertainty. Nothing, and no one, is fixed, or at least not for very long, so new solutions and new ways of working together are always being drawn out through co-productive action. This collaborative learning dynamic was articulated particularly strongly by Group (R): ‘one of the things about [CJC] that has been different is just how much we embedded the feedback from the women [service users]. It’s partly the lessons that we learned, so the coproduction part of it was really around . . . this was a new approach to working with women in [local authority area] that we had to ensure’.
CJC paid careful attention to the feedback received from the service users. There was a genuine commitment to experimentation—if something didn’t work, it was taken as a learning opportunity (R): ‘you put a programme in . . . women were like “it’s rubbish”, and we stopped it. But we were able to evidence it and for staff it was actually about giving an assurance that it was a learning process rather than necessarily a defined position that the service was trying to deliver on’.
The service team developed resilience in this learning process by sharing knowledge and making sure that the necessary skills were never located in one person only (R): ‘it was about learning skills and knowledge and a bit about sharing . . . you do have a role and a remit within a team but the difference was that we flipped it within [CJC] where it was much more about the generic shared experience gave you a level of confidence and an assurance that you didn’t need to be an expert in certain subjects but you were able to go to a particular person in the team who had that level of knowledge that was their particular contribution. So for us knowledge and skills was crucial but likewise the peer support and the collective ability to fix things and learn and get support from your peers’.
It was this distributed skill that was initially so shocking for Susan (in her story above), but eventually it became a source of great encouragement and reassurance for her. This capacity for liminal learning was colourfully described by studio participants in terms of sociality and the metaphor of ‘walking in another’s shoes’. As part of a homework exercise, several participants commented on the usefulness of this metaphor: ‘I have reflected on dialogue and standing in others’ shoes. Not been easy mostly due to my own feet being deeply rooted in my own way of looking at things’.
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‘Particularly poignant for me was the “walk in their shoes” exercise. Whilst I have been mindful for many years about including SUs [service users] in decisions about their care, I reflected that I give staff less autonomy in creating and enabling change within the team’.
Another source of resilience for the team was what R described as the ‘lessons log’, which is a continuing record of all developments and changes at CJC: ’the lessons log would talk about why things were introduced, why things were developed, and there would be a conversation and an understanding collectively as well as individually. Some of the lessons were relevant to maybe one element of the team, Scottish Prison Service secondment for example, or service user engagement. So there would be different elements’.
Although the purpose of this lessons log has changed over time from a tool for governance and planning to more of an internal management tool, it remains central to CJC’s ongoing learning. It is this capacity for learning and moving, rather than adherence to targets and plans, that characterizes the experience of perpetual liminality. As R observed: ‘for us the lessons log has been a crucial part of [CJC] rather than necessarily the bit about staff feeling constrained about their role, or by the specification, or the target setting’. ‘we didn’t concentrate on targets at all. Targets are quite abstract . . . although they were there, they weren’t the frontline of it’.
Reading the Movements of Identity Work These three travelling concepts, risk-taking and rule-breaking, innovating and incubating, and learning and resilience, trace different types of movement in the ongoing relational processes of developing collaborative leadership. For heuristic purposes, we have presented them under three separate headings, but they can be more productively understood as continuously intertwining and co-constituting dynamics. We argue that it is out of the performative confluence of these threads of process that identity work is itself constituted as a process. We do not intend to suggest though, that entities—people, spaces, artefacts—are unnecessary or unhelpful in delineating the perpetual liminality of identity work. From a processual perspective, they can be seen as punctuating the flow, thrusting themselves into it and then subsiding once their purpose has been served. As such, entities make movement sensible by mediating liminality, reshaping it whilst also being reshaped by it. The ‘lessons log’ is an example from the CJC experience that has both processual and entitative aspects. As we have described it above, the ‘lessons log’ is a continuously evolving process of living experience that reflects the learning conversations by means of which CJC develops its collaborative practice. The processual dynamics of the ‘lessons log’ are evident in the way its purpose has changed over time as CJC has itself transformed. At the same time, the ‘lessons log’ may be seen as a key artefact of identity work, a repository of information about roles, responsibilities, successes and failures, which CJC can draw on as required. What we see here is that the dual character of the ‘lessons log’ permits a more nuanced understanding of how identity work unfolds, in what R described above as a
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‘flipped’ organization where sharing knowledge, and knowing who to ask, is more highly valued than individual skills and expertise. Another key aspect of the CJC experience is the space that the service occupies. On her first visit to CJC, the first author was struck by the furnishing and layout of the centre’s main room. It is a large open plan room that incorporates a lounge space with low tables, sofas and comfy cushions, a dining table, and a basic kitchen area. All of this contributes to an informal, inviting, and collective environment, a relational and collaborative space that encourages conversation and sharing. As such, it is a dramatic contrast to the more formal design of an office space in which lines of desks create barriers between staff and service users. As R commented: ‘We shaped and reshaped the environment that the women came in to. So the whole thing given much more of a lounge/dining/kitchen feel to it, more of a, homely’s too strong a word, but less office kind of function. They were areas as well that we suddenly realized women actually benefitted from a much more informal space rather than something that was still relying on health and safety and barriers and the whole thing around about alarms and stuff.’
One of the benefits of this space is that it is very flexible, so it too is capable of shifting to accommodate the various different needs that the centre has, from a simple community space to a more ordered place for meetings with external stakeholders. Thus, although we understand this space primarily through the entities that occupy it, we can also see it as fluid and flowing as needs require. There are many other examples of the interaction between processes and entities that could be drawn from CJC, but faced with a word count limit, we hope that these two will suffice to demonstrate the complementarity between processual and entitative approaches to research.
D
.................................................................................................................................. Many readers may be querying whether our empirical materials point to identity at all. Indeed we hope this is the case, as our intent in this chapter is to shake ‘the tree’ of identity scholarship in an attempt to enter into the same risky and generative liminality that the leadership studio participants speak of, to navigate the ‘ah but gateway’ of fear and doubt, and to learn to thrive amidst the continuous innovation of a nomadic existence (Johnsen and Sørensen, ). Shaking the tree in this way, we aim to demonstrate the perpetual liminality of identity work (Ybema et al., ) in which there are no permanent, coherent identities. Rather identities are ephemeral and precarious as they are formed and re-formed within the dynamic flow of identity work. Deepening our understanding of identity thus requires us to develop a more dynamic mode of engagement. Before advancing this argument though, there are both theoretical and methodological challenges to tackle. The theoretical ‘branches’ of this tree make ‘a clear analytical distinction between internal personal “self-identities” and external discursive “social-identities” ’ (Watson, : ). These ‘branches’ are also often considered in the absence of any meaningful contextual phenomena. As Brown (: ) suggests, ‘we are almost wholly ignorant
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regarding whether, for example, consonant identity work topics or strategies are drawn on and shared generally by members’ and how organizations might ‘enable (facilitate), direct (usurp and control), partner (share-in) and impede (actively hinder) their participants’ identity work’. These two classic dualisms—self versus social, and substance versus context—arguably cut across the very dynamics of interest in identity work. Our response is to propose an ontologically processual approach that focuses on the ‘branches’ in motion, and the mutuality of their movements with those of the tree that is becoming. We have deliberately foregrounded a processual approach in this chapter, because this perspective still remains significantly under-represented in identity scholarship (Ibarra, ). Whilst not denying the entities that punctuate and shape identity work, this approach gives ontological priority to the emergent movements and flows of identity in the making. It is an approach that has potential to transcend the theory versus practice dualism, which is such a pervasive problem in organizational research, by offering an alternative account that resonates directly with participants, and also more broadly with organizational practitioners, for whom this is their daily lived experience. Methodologically, we have drawn on the ‘mobility turn’ to propose the notion of travelling concepts, which sensitize researchers to the empirical movements of which they themselves are also emergent aspects. By contrast, conventional empirical research focuses on the stabilities, whether defined in theory or identified in the data, which constitute the constructs that illuminate the research situation. In identity-related research, this type of empirical work feels somewhat like tunnelling through data to locate the identity components, removing them from the rest of the data pool, stripping selected material down into identity pockets, categorizing and clustering them, and then deconstructing their discursive and linguistic components. Travelling concepts allow us instead to hold liminality at the forefront of the researcher’s experience, leading to a process more like snorkelling: moving slowly across the surface of the data, allowing currents to take us where they will, trying to see places to dive deeper to explore, and then re-surfacing to scan and breathe before diving again. Our attention was thus drawn more towards movements as expressed through small changes of imagery, vocabulary, and tone, rather than the stuff—people, spaces, artefacts—of the emerging identity situation. What we are proposing here is a radical reformulation of identity work that privileges ‘work’ with all its implications of flow, movement, and change. ‘Identity’ then, is derived from, and secondary to the flow of this work. More conventional approaches take an ontologically entitative position that privileges identity ahead of process. Either way, scholars are seeking a comprehensive understanding of identity work—the difference between these two partial yet complementary accounts is simply a matter of emphasis. However, shifting the focus from entities to process has profound implications for identity scholarship, requiring a rethinking of how we understand key concepts and how we, as researchers, participate in empirical situations. In this chapter we have contributed a processual theory that associates identity work with the liminality of collaborative leadership development, and we have also drawn out three travelling concepts to guide our practical engagement with participants in a leadership studio. From this modest beginning, we hope that other scholars of identity work may be inspired to take up the challenges of applying a process lens to the actual goings-on in organizational life. If indeed complexity
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and dynamism are the hallmarks of the ‘modern condition’ of organizing (Czarniawska and Mazza, ), a process approach with its becoming ontology seems to offer a novel, and potentially productive way forward.
N . Pseudonyms are used in presenting the leadership studio data.
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Johnsen, C. G. and Sørensen, B. M. (). ‘ “It’s Capitalism on Coke!’: From Temporary to Permanent Liminality in Organization Studies’. Culture and Organization, (), –. Johnson, G., Prashantham, S., Floyd, S. W., and Bourque, N. (). ‘The Ritualization of Strategy Workshops’. Organization Studies, (), –. Lewin, K. (). ‘Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science Equilibrium and Social Change’. Human Relations, (), –. Mabey, C. (). ‘Leadership Development in Organizations: Multiple Discourses and Diverse Practice’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Mead, G. H. (). The Philosophy of the Present. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing. Nicholson, H. and Carroll, B. (). ‘Identity Undoing and Power Relations in Leadership Development’. Human Relations, (), –. Paton, S. and Hodgson, D. (). ‘Project Managers on the Edge: Liminality and Identity in the Management of Technical Work’. New Technology, Work and Employment, (), –. Shotter, J. (). ‘Understanding Process from Within: An Argument for “Withness’-Thinking” ’. Organization Studies, (), –. Simpson, B. and Buchan, L. (). The Leadership Studio: Learning Together about Public Leadership. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal//The_Leadership_Studio_Digital_Version_ Small.pdf. Simpson, B. and Carroll, B. (). ‘Re-viewing “Role” in Processes of Identity Construction’. Organization, (), –. Simpson, B., Tracey, R., and Weston, A. (). ‘Traveling Concepts: Performative Movements in Learning/Playing’. Management Learning, (), –. Söderlund, J. and Borg, E. (). ‘Liminality in Management and Organization Studies: Process, Position and Place’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Sturdy, A., Schwarz, M., and Spicer, A. (). ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Structures and Uses of Liminality in Strategic Management Consultancy’. Human Relations, (), –. Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, , –. Turner, V. (). ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality’. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, (), –. Turner, V. (). Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Urry, J. (). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Van Gennep, A. (). The Rites of Passage, trans. M. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (original work published ). Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, , –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Narrative, Life Story and Manager Identity: A Case Study in Autobiographical Identity Work’. Human Relations, , –. Ybema, S., Beech, N., and Ellis, N. (). ‘Transitional and Perpetual Liminality: An Identity Practice Perspective’. Anthropology Southern Africa, (–), –.
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IDENTITY KINDS AND TYPES ........................................................................................................................
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Critical Potential and Challenges .......................................................................................................................
Abstract Age is one of the major social identities by which people are categorized but it has received meagre attention within organization studies. Organizations, however, are one of the key contexts in which age identities—and the relations between them—are accomplished. Age also constitutes a special case of identity fluidity and temporality: people are expected to progress sequentially through age categories and the meanings attributed to physical change experienced over time trigger instability, threatening coherence and continuity of self. This chapter discusses the critical potential and challenges of age identity through a review of the literature organized around five main themes: generations and generational identity, age identity categories such as the ‘older worker’, the intersection of age with other social identities, the meanings and experiences of retirement, and finally, the identity changes associated with later life and its management. The author concludes by arguing that a focus on age identities can encourage broader critical reflection about the colonization by work and production across the whole of life.
I
.................................................................................................................................. In organization and management studies, age identity has attracted increasing interest over the last fifteen years (Collien et al., ; Joshi et al., ; Thomas et al., ). Yet the amount of scholarship falls far short of that dedicated to exploring other body-based social identities such as gender or race the meanings of which also centre on the cultural value attributed to physical difference. Indeed, it is a topic rarely considered by mainstream research and theorizing on identities in organizations generally (e.g. see Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Caza et al., ). Nevertheless, age identity has the capacity to aid in further
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understanding many issues of ongoing concern to organizational scholars including identity-as-embodied-relation (Knights and Clarke, ), temporality of self, negotiation of stigmatized social categories, triggers of identity change, and tensions between identity coherence and continuity on the one hand, and fragmentation and disruption on the other. In this chapter, I discuss a selection of the literature on age identity in organization studies to demonstrate its critical potential and challenges. While all identities are inherently dynamic, age identity constitutes a special case of normative identity fluidity and temporality: individuals are expected to belong to different chronologically sequenced age identities over the course of their lives (Calasanti, ). An individual may have a sense of self that is built up and continuous over time (Giddens, ) but ageing is accompanied by changes in how others perceive an individual, prompting more frequent and intense ‘identity work’, i.e. efforts to craft a coherent self from the resources available, in interaction with others and in relation to a specific context (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Brown, ; Watson, ). An individual may exercise agency in constructing a version of self but this needs to be accepted as legitimate and plausible by those around them and inevitably involves engaging with dominant discourses. Age thus brings the social aspects of identity into sharp focus: the complex interplay between ‘internal strivings and external prescriptions, between self-presentation and labelling by others, between achievement and ascription and between regulation and resistance’ (Ybema et al., : ). Of course, not all age identities are equally valued and much of the literature in cultural gerontology and sociology has discussed at length the stigma that accompanies older age identities and the efforts individuals undertake to resist being labelled ‘old’. As individuals’ self-identity becomes more destabilized due to ascription to older age identities, they are exhorted to engage in practices to manage their own ageing to minimize its effects. Awareness of ageing may thus trigger more intensive identity work at the same time as individuals’ freedom in crafting a sense of self is subject to multiple constraints. At some point, though, individuals have to confront the bodily limits to agency that ageing brings. Hence, ageing ably illustrates the material limits to remaking the self: ‘biological ageing places at risk the ability to control the body, and thus deprives it of its civilized normality’ (Tulle, : ). To date, there has been a tendency to equate age identity with ageing and older age groups. There is thus clear potential for further exploration of how younger people are constructed, the implications this has for their experiences of organizations and how they navigate, and respond to, others’ negative and positive constructions of their youth. This is particularly relevant to the first body of literature I discuss—the powerful yet ambiguous ideas of ‘generations’ and ‘generational identity’. This is followed by an overview of literature on ‘older worker identity’ that shows how focusing on this category can reproduce, rather than challenge, its negative associations as well as how organizations themselves ‘produce’ age identity. I then consider the intersection of age with other social identities, with particular emphasis on gender and age and how different versions of gendered and aged identities are naturalized in certain occupational and industry ideals. Later life is the subject of the final two sections. Retirement as an institution is in flux but still characterized by normative constructions of ‘successful ageing’ and ongoing engagement in work or work-like activity. Partly, this is to distance the self from the ‘oldest-old’,
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the theme of the last section. Here I argue later life has the potential to challenge identity coherence and continuity as well as the dominance of work and production in contemporary society.
G I
.................................................................................................................................. For a concept that circulates widely in popular culture, generational identity has attracted surprisingly little attention from critical scholars in work, management, and organization studies (Fineman, ; Thomas et al., ). It has, however, received considerable coverage in mainstream organizational behaviour. Much of this research is problematic because it assumes ‘generational differences can be simply observed . . . by comparing random samples of people born within certain birth years’ (Lyons and Kuron, : ). Such an assumption shows little engagement with major generational theories in the social sciences such as the ‘social forces’ tradition originated by Mannheim () which maintains that a ‘generation’ requires those born around the same time to have experienced a significant event or social upheaval around their ‘coming-of-age’ that has had an influence on the consciousness of their age group. Lyons and Kuron () suggest the potential for further generational scholarship in the Mannheim tradition within management and organization studies, but note it has not, to date, been widely adopted. An exception is Joshi et al.’s () framework of three types of generational identities in organizations. In addition to an agebased identity, they propose that people who have started in an organization within a particular time-period may possess a ‘cohort-based generational identity’ as well as an ‘incumbency-based’ form of generational identity stemming from their work role. Their aim is to theorize what organizational conditions will ‘trigger’ one or other of these types of generational identity to come to the fore and the consequences for intergenerational relations and the extent to which they are characterized by cooperation or conflict. Conflict between ‘generations’ is also the focus of empirical studies by Pritchard and Whiting () and Urick et al. (). In their research examining the discursive construction of ‘generations’ in online news in the UK, Pritchard and Whiting () detail how particular generational categories are invoked in public debate over increasing competition for jobs and declining career opportunities. They show how subject positions relating to both younger and older generational labels are constructed in order to explain and attribute blame for labour market conditions. Resonating with other critical research (e.g. Phillipson et al., ), here they find that ‘baby boomers’ are constructed as the problem ‘generation’, seen as ‘greedy’ and enjoying the benefits of earlier economic booms while thinking little about the world they leave to those who come after them. In contrast, younger people are a ‘lost generation’ unable to find a foothold in the labour market. They argue such constructions contribute to reifying generational identity categories, fuel intergenerational conflict, and downplay the differences among those targeted by a particular generational label and the role of broader economic and political structures in contributing to labour market inequalities. More recent research by Urick et al. () shows further this association between ‘generation’ and constructions of conflict between age groups. Drawing on interviews
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with older and younger people in Canada, they explore people’s understandings and deployment of ‘generation’. They found that invoking generational stereotypes was associated with constructions of intergenerational conflict as well as more active identity work on the part of participants who felt they deviated from age-based norms. However, ‘generation’ was also a flexible ‘floating signifier’, with multiple meanings. The indeterminacy of ‘generation’ is the focus of another study by Foster (), again with interviewees in Canada from a wide range of ages, backgrounds and occupations. Conceptualizing ‘generation’ as a discursive ‘vehicle for thought and action’ (Foster, : ), she identifies two broad ways in which it was used by her participants: to account for perceived differences and in stories about social and economic change. In relation to the first, ‘generation as an axis of difference’ (Foster, : ), older participants drew on ideas of younger people’s sense of ‘entitlement’, focus on formal qualifications, impatience and naïvety regarding work to both construct and explain perceived differences between the attitudes and behaviour of younger and older people to work. Younger people showed awareness of such negative generational constructions but attributed them to different values and priorities: older people had a myopic focus on work and career whereas they took a more balanced view of the place of work in life. In addition, Foster identified how her participants relied on ‘generation’ to account for social change. Whether discussing technological change or opportunities for women, they used ‘generation’ to explain change but in ways that overstated the degree of progress, elevated the power of individual choice, values, and attitudes, and downplayed the influence of structural conditions or historical forces. For example, in narratives about shifts in women’s participation in work over time, interviewees invoked ‘generation’ rather than gender to account for a perceived ‘revolution’ in the extent of opportunities now available to current younger people, in ways that did not acknowledge ongoing constraints women face in the labour market. The overall effect was to construct categorical differences, individualize the causes of those perceived differences, and deflect attention away from changing contextual conditions. She concludes that people invoke ‘generation’ as a convenient ‘one-word lens’ to make sense of their experiences of work but simultaneously struggle with its ‘clumsiness’ (Foster, : ) and instability of meaning. These studies show why constructions and deployment of generational identity and intergenerational relations should attract more critical attention. Despite its ambiguity, ‘generation’ fuels constructions of conflict, and exaggerates and essentializes differences between age groups while downplaying the influence of structural conditions. Following Foster () and Urick et al. (), future critical identities research should not assume the meaning of ‘generation’ but explore how it is constructed, when it is used in particular contexts, and the implications this has for reproducing or challenging social inequality, including access to work and careers.
F ‘O W’ A W
.................................................................................................................................. In contrast to the relatively scant critical scholarship on generations, much attention has been directed at age discrimination towards older workers, consistent with the historical
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focus of age studies on ageism towards the old (Krekula, ; Krekula et al., ; Manor, ; Taylor and Earl, ). Within management, work and organization studies, research has explored how the identity category of the ‘older worker’ itself has been constructed and the implications such constructions have for challenging or reproducing age inequality. Not all older people in work experience ascription by others to the identity of ‘older worker’—it seems to be triggered when continued productive engagement becomes problematic, targeting those who have experienced job loss, periods of unemployment, and difficulties in re-entering paid work. However, research has shown how those attempting to redress age discrimination against older people and promote their employment can end up reproducing it through the ways they construct the identity of ‘older workers’. For example, using data from an Australian government inquiry into the problems faced by those aged over who had been out of work, Ainsworth and Hardy (, , ) demonstrated how discourses of marketing and consumption were used to construct the ‘older worker’ as an inherently ‘unattractive product’ requiring more resources and assistance to ‘sell’ to employers (Ainsworth and Hardy, , ). Older workers themselves were seen as needing to take responsibility for minimizing the physical signs of their ageing in order to compete for jobs as well as lower their expectations of the type of work they should seek and accept. In this research context, various ‘experts’, labour market service providers, and politicians participated in constructing a normative process of adjustment that older workers should experience in response to loss of employment and career. Here, discourses of ageing-as-inevitable physical decline, and the psychology of grief, were mobilized in such a way that resistance by older workers was taken as evidence of their ‘maladjustment’ to their changed circumstances. Only by accepting their inevitable decrement would they be able to ‘move on’ and regain paid work (Ainsworth and Hardy, ). Once constructed, this combination of physical and psychotherapeutic discourses functioned to create an ‘identity cul-de-sac’ where the agency of those targeted by the category of the ‘older worker’ was severely constrained. Other scholarship has shown how seeking to remedy the labour market exclusion of older people can result in reproducing their marginality. In a study of recruitment texts by a large UK supermarket, Riach () illustrated how older workers were seen as suitable for certain types of low-paid, flexible work deemed a good match for their ‘unique characteristics’ (i.e. as store ‘greeters’). Their financial needs were downplayed and older workers’ ‘voices’ used to emphasize the main benefits of work (i.e. of any type) as delaying ageing by remaining active. Attempts to combat the negative associations of older age can thus produce new stereotypes that function as restrictive subjectivities or reinforce inequalities (see Collien et al., ): the older worker is either the ‘victim’ of age discrimination or the ‘valuable employee’ (Taylor and Earl, ) because of their age-specific qualities of loyalty, stability, reliability, etc. which further cement their associations with the past, not the future, of work. Given the current focus on the future of work, entrepreneurship, and innovation (e.g. World Economic Forum, ), the associations drawn between older workers and the past should be cause for concern but often go unchallenged in public discourse. However, they have been examined by several scholars: Down and Reveley () showed how being an ‘entrepreneur’ is equated with youth or ‘prime age’ while Ainsworth and Hardy () critique how the discourse of enterprise is promoted as accessible to all while excluding
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older people. In this study, politicians, experts, and labour market service providers differentiated between forms of entrepreneurship that were of more or lesser value: purchasing franchises or self-employment were constructed as both less legitimate as well as more commonly pursued for older people. Even when older entrepreneurs themselves engage with the discourse of enterprise they can reproduce the associations between enterprise, innovation, and youth. In a longitudinal study of two men who had started their own businesses in late career, Mallett and Wapshott () detailed their struggle with the age inflections of enterprise in constructing their own identities as entrepreneurs, including the sense their ventures did not measure up to the ideals of entrepreneurship reproduced in media and popular culture. This research illustrates that while older people can innovate by using a variety of discursive resources to construct their identity as an ‘olderpreneur’, their agency can be constrained by engaging in exclusionary discourses that have become ‘sedimented’ in ways that mask their origins, like enterprise and age-as-decline. Many organizations seek to be associated with innovation, entrepreneurship, and a future-orientation (Anderson et al., ; Drucker, ). In this context, older employees can be seen as signifying attachment to the past, and jettisoned as part of ‘brand renewal’ (e.g. Spedale et al., ) or continual organizational regeneration and change, a dynamic Riach and Kelly () characterize as a ‘vampiric’ drive by organizations for ‘fresh’ human resources to secure their own continuation. Measures to promote the re-employment of older workers without addressing the more fundamental meanings of age and age relations in contemporary organizations are thus misdirected (see Roberts, ). In addition, organizational desire for youth-as-signifier cannot be translated into actual treatment of younger workers who are often expected to withstand working conditions unsustainable over the longer term (Duerden Comeau and Kemp, ). For example, Zanoni’s () case study of an auto-plant in Belgium shows how supervisors deployed pejorative constructions of younger people in response to their resistance to the extreme demands of production. Older (and younger) age identities are thus not only constructed in relation to their difference from an ‘unmarked’ ideal standard but in relation to systems of production. Overall, these critical perspectives demonstrate the need for more attention to how contemporary ideals of work and organization themselves produce age identities and relations including the problem of the ‘older’ or ‘younger’ worker.
T I A O I
.................................................................................................................................. Age identity categories such as the ‘older worker’ tend to individualize social problems by overstating people’s capacity for choice and responsibility, and treating those targeted by the category as a homogeneous group (Ainsworth and Hardy, , ; Riach, ; Riach and Kelly, ; Riach and Loretto, ). On the other hand, exploring the intersection of age with other social identities such as gender, race, disability, and class among others, can help to illuminate diversity within age categories and how different structuring conditions influence people’s experiences and understanding of the self.
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The most frequently studied intersection has been gender and age, specifically gendered ageism experienced by women (Ainsworth, ; Duncan and Loretto, ; Handy and Davy, ; Jyrkinen, ; Trethewey, ). Research has shown how negative associations with being ‘older’ are triggered at earlier chronological ages for women but that being ‘younger’ is also problematic. It seems then that women are ‘never the right age’ (Duncan and Loretto, ; see also Jyrkinen, ; Moore, ); infantilized and sexualized at younger ages and then ‘written off ’ and rendered invisible as they age. Perhaps for these reasons, we should regard the idea of a ‘prime age worker’ as an inherently masculine ideal. Some critical research has highlighted the processes by which older women are rendered invisible. For example, in a discursive study of older worker identity in a government inquiry, Ainsworth () showed how constructions of gendered difference functioned to focus attention on the problems faced by male older workers. This was achieved by naturalizing older women’s participation in part-time, low-skill, and casual employment, thereby rationalizing their ‘flexibility’ and suitability for this type of low-quality, insecure work which rendered them relatively advantaged, compared to older men. In this context, the interaction of gender and age generated a competitive identity dynamic over recognition as ‘most disadvantaged’ to attract more attention and support. Older women face challenges in navigating invisibility to achieve identity recognition (Riach et al., ). In Spedale et al.’s () study of programme changes at the BBC, older female broadcasters were literally ‘dropped from view’, reflecting an institutional preference for younger female and older male counterparts in pursuit of organizational rejuvenation. Here it was difficult to keep both gender and age in focus, without privileging either: in the case brought by the complainants against their employer in a UK Employment Tribunal, it was claims of age, rather than gender, discrimination that were successful. Physical changes that accompany gendered ageing further complicate the navigation of identity for older women working in organizations structured around a masculine norm (Acker, ). The experience of menopause can generate episodic, unpredictable material changes that destabilize their capacity to control their embodied subjectivity at work (Jack et al., ). In addition, physical signs of gendered ageing risk being mobilized by others to undermine or diminish the legitimacy of older women’s concerns. Rather than a preexisting subject, Irni () demonstrates how ‘cranky old women’ are produced by organizational conditions and relations at work. Using interviews with male and female employees, HR managers and union representatives from Finnish organizations, she highlights how discursive and material practices create higher and different workloads for older women but that their grievances and resistance to such inequity is constructed as ‘natural’ for their time of life. Concomitantly, as organizations benefit from such gendered expectations, by reducing women’s resistance to biology, they avoid having to recognize, redress, and/or reward them for this extra work. The complexity of women’s experience of work and its unfolding over time is particularly suited to narrative inquiry (Lieblich et al., ). However, dominant narrative forms, which value identity coherence and linear plotlines, regulate the ways individuals can accommodate the tensions between continuity and change central to processes of ageing. For example, in Tomlinson and Colgan’s () study of the imagined futures of older women involved in microenterprise courses, they found women felt compelled to accomplish a plausible account of why they had not yet started their own business, in a way that exhibited
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self-consistency over time. In another study, Bendien () uses narrative analysis to explore older women’s ‘frayed careers’, and critiques how the cultural norms of telling a ‘sensible story’ constrain multiple narrative trajectories and identity fragmentation. It is, of course, not only older and younger women who are aged and gendered but also older and younger men. Making the dynamics of gender and age identity more visible involves highlighting how particular versions of aged/gendered identities underpin certain occupations and industries. In Duerden Comeau and Kemp’s () study of IT, this is epitomized by the ‘-year-old white male programmer’ that reproduces a myopic dedication to technical work and long hours unlikely to be sustainable as they age. In a very different industry, hedge funds in London, Riach and Cutcher () argue for a view of age, class, and identity that recognizes their mutual constitution in ongoing processes of occupational embodiment. The athletic self-care their middle-aged male subjects undertook enabled them to perform a current masculine identity—capable, resilient, and ‘battlehardened’—that connected their previous and future selves. Here, fitness regimes were undertaken to repair past excesses but bore traces of their working-class origins and underpinned an imagined retirement where they remained active and resisted decline.
R
.................................................................................................................................. This vision of the self in retirement reflects dominant discourses of ageing that influence international policy and popular culture. However, whether conceptualized as a period of time, a role or a life stage, retirement has now become less structurally determined and stable: individuals now face more uncertainty regarding ‘who they will be and what they will do in those years’ (Laliberte Rudman and Molke, : ) prompting more intense identity work. Retirement can be a time of unprecedented freedom, depending on economic resources, but at the same time raise the prospect of marginalization in a work-focused society. Losing a previously valued identity associated with occupation, profession, or career may be resisted by some who still identify strongly with their pre-retirement selves and former status (e.g. Smith and Dougherty, ; Manor, ). Retirement itself can be rejected outright, taking the form of a refusal to disengage from work (Foweraker and Cutcher, ). In Laliberte Rudman and Molke’s () study of newspaper discourse, this featured in two dominant later-life subjectivities: the ‘perpetual worker’ and the ‘proactive work planner’ who purposefully transitions to self-employment. Both assumed ample resources and lack of physical restrictions—the financial necessity of continuing to work was downplayed while at the same time being presented as a responsible and desirable course of action. According to these subjectivities, the individual could stave off ageing by continuing to work and broader society would benefit from their continued involvement and self-sufficiency. While retirement may provide opportunities to explore alternative non-work identities, research indicates it can also be experienced as menacing: a ‘threatening and frightening’ ‘emptiness’ (Manor, : –) where time is unstructured in the absence of work. In Manor’s () study of Canadian retirees, fear of being stigmatized as non-productive was associated with work-like self-care, to avoid slipping into old age. Identity management focused
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around the ageing body to fulfil broader cultural ideals of ‘successful’ or ‘active’ ageing. Identity was negotiated through denial of ageing and distancing from those considered ‘old’, i.e. those who showed signs of physical decline, dependency, and engaged in activities designated for ‘old people’. However, attachment to work-based identity may be overstated and change with a subject’s closeness or distance from retirement (Sargent et al., ). This is demonstrated by Sargent et al. () who focused on the metaphors retired managers use in their identity work. Their findings suggest traditional retirement—as a time of leisure and consumption— is not necessarily outdated. Some interviewees had resisted retirement and kept working, others were struggling with the uncertainty about who they were and what to do with their time, while another sub-group had constructed new identities and meaning for this time of their lives, seeing it as a necessary stage of ‘recovery’ from the demands and ‘toxicity’ of work. These variations coincided with how long individuals had been ‘retired’ suggesting that withdrawal from work may be experienced as disorienting and confronting at first but over time gives way to a process of adjustment. The more positive leisure-based constructions of retirement featured among those who had been retired for eighteen months or more. This theme, of the interconnections between temporality, identity, and retirement, has been further explored by Driver (), but her focus is on what retirement means for those for whom it is a distant ‘fantasy’. Adopting a Lacanian framework, she investigates how retirement discourse is mobilized in ‘fantasmatic scenarios’ of younger people’s imagined futures and current selves. As with Sargent et al. () retirement had a variety of meanings for her respondents: some supported the continuing domination of life by work (declaring an intention not to retire because they anticipated a loss of self) while others questioned the construct of retirement itself and its availability. As one of her interviewees said, ‘not everyone gets to retire and do what they love at the end of their career, which makes me truly think more of what I would like to do with my life now’ (Driver, : ). Driver concludes by arguing attention to people’s construction of future retirement can prompt greater critical reflection about the centrality of work in society, what it offers and what it demands. Retirement is defined by what it is not—a more-or-less permanent cessation of work—and given work’s importance in contemporary society, it occupies the stigmatized, lesser half of a work/non-work binary. This resonates with critique from cultural gerontology about how retirement has become dominated by productivist discourse that prescribes work and ‘worklike’ activities (such as volunteering, working on the self) as the only routes to a legitimate identity in later life (Biggs and Kimberley, ; Gilleard and Higgs, ; Katz and Calasanti, ; Moulaert and Biggs, ). The question is whether it is possible to construct alternative legitimate identities in later life that escape this work/non-work dualism.
I L L: W F B W?
.................................................................................................................................. Addressing this question requires critical consideration of why a work and production paradigm has come to dominate discussion of later life. Moulaert and Biggs () attribute
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this partly to the early influence of critical political economy that assumed the solution to ageism against older workers was to promote their continued engagement in the labour market. As a result, they argue we now face a situation of ‘over-inclusiveness’ or ‘age colonization’ of older age by a middle age norm, which in the process denies any difference or uniqueness about later stages of life (Biggs and Kimberley, : –). This colonization of later life by productivism is reinforced by expectations that selfidentity should demonstrate continuity and coherence over time. Biggs and Kimberley () argue this restricts people’s capacity to let go of a previous self and explore other concerns and ways to be that reflect the finiteness of the human lifespan (see Knights and Clarke, ). One way forward then, is to recognize discontinuity and fragmentation as legitimate aspects of age identity that may be particularly relevant to this period of the lifecourse. Rather than an erasure of differences between age groups this would lead to consideration of what is distinctive and unique about later life as well as challenge the centrality of work to identity. For such possibilities to be realized the discourses of successful and active ageing, and the normative subjectivities they create, would need to be unsettled. This could involve critique of how, in an increasingly ‘somatic society’ (Gilleard and Higgs, ; Tulle, ), the general obsession with health and self-care becomes amplified in later life because age identity is mediated through the physical body. We can think of this as later life versions of the ‘enterprise self ’—where the individual is expected to practise autonomy, independence, and self-reliance and treat the self as a ‘project’ that can be worked on and, if not improved, then at least maintained for as long as possible. In later life, practices of self-management and self-care designed to delay physical or cognitive decline have become an expected part of what it means to age successfully but they contribute to the denial and repression of older age as well as its individualization. Moreover, the responsibility to take care of oneself to avoid dependency and frailty takes on the quality of a moral imperative that fails to recognize the ways in which social inequality and biological limits reduce people’s capacity to pursue such an ideal (Gilleard and Higgs, ; Katz and Calasanti, ). Katz and Calasanti () argue that ‘successful ageing’, based on an implicit ‘middle age’ standard, is thus exclusionary, elitist, and ageist. For example, in the narratives of retired people, Laliberte Rudman (: ) found the body functioned as an ‘age identity card’, the locus for identity work and self–other categorization. Her respondents distinguished themselves from those they saw as ‘old’, i.e. exhibiting signs of bodily and functional decline and dependence. The responsible ageing subject was someone who monitored the self for signs of deterioration, and took preventative and remedial action to combat decline. Failure to maintain independence and functional capacities was attributed to individuals’ neglect of themselves, rather than a consequence of physical processes beyond their control or lack of resources with which to engage in this ageing ideal. In this and other studies (e.g. Manor, ), the identity work of older people is focused around maintaining their status as ‘young-old’ or ‘not yet old’. However, this is not always successful, and can be challenged in social interactions with others and undermined by biological changes that signify ageing. At stake is ascription to the highly stigmatized category of the ‘oldest-old’, where claims to ‘personhood’ (Giddens, ) are more at risk and individual control over identity more tenuous. With physiological processes of
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ageing, the boundary between seeing oneself and being seen by others as ‘young-old’ or third age and ‘old-old’ or fourth age becomes increasingly harder for individuals to regulate. According to Gilleard and Higgs () this signals the difference between corporeality (i.e. the body as material) and embodiment, the latter implying subjectivity and capacity for agency. The ageing body then may ‘break through as a challenge to our relatively disembodied concerns and projects; and it does so in circumstances not of our own choosing’ (Gilleard and Higgs, : ). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ways age identity and relations are enacted in institutionalized systems of aged care where older people deemed unable to care for themselves are sequestered (Hazan, ) from the rest of society. This is illustrated in a study by Hyde and colleagues (Hyde et al., ) who undertook fieldwork in several facilities in the UK. Drawing on Deetz’s () concept of ‘corporate colonization’ they explored how residents were disciplined through interrelated processes that subjected them to decisions and practices that separated them from previous lives and selves. Ageing bodies were the key site for such colonization, with potentially temporary loss of functioning or accidents constructed by others as the start of permanent decline. They show how familial dynamics and the desire ‘not to be a burden’ contributed to some residents’ acquiescence and acceptance that their former autonomy, possessions, and property needed to be relinquished. Through spatial organization, routinized practices of care, language, placement of residents and control of their movements, their capacity to exercise agency was diminished though not eliminated. Some residents resisted by deploying tactics to influence how they were handled physically but this was in the face of a totalizing institution that constructed a single trajectory for ageing subjects: decline involving not just the loss of previous identity but any identity, i.e. recognized by others as retaining an embodied subjectivity. Ageing thus presents a challenge to agency, autonomy, and identity itself (see Knights and Clarke, ): at what point is one regarded as bodily matter, corporeality to be worked on by others, regulated by institutionalized practices of dealing with the oldest old? It is thus not only the age of the workforce that should be studied but also the ways organizations organize and enact age identities and relations for society more broadly, including, of course, those particular institutions and businesses most explicitly founded on age.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Gullette (: ) asserts that although age and ageing may seem to be the most ‘unabashedly bodily of all the body-based conditions, we should look first and hardest for [its] constructedness’. The literature discussed in this chapter attempts, in different ways, to do just that—explore age identities as constructed and relational, and denaturalize their common-sense meanings to show possible alternatives to dominant ways of thinking and being, reinforced by current ideals of work, organizations, and institutional arrangements. Conversely, age and ageing can provide a way to further investigate current issues of concern to identity and organizational scholarship such as embodiment (Knights and
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Clarke, ) and physical modes of identity work (Caza et al., ); points of identity ‘sensebreaking’ and divestiture (Ashforth and Schinoff, ); the limits to individual agency in identity construction (Knights and Clarke, ); and the ways in which past, present, and possible future selves are mutually constituted (Ashforth and Schinoff, ; Caza et al., ). Critically-oriented scholars in particular should find much of interest in the work on age identity and organizations. Generations, age identities at work and their intersection with other categories of social difference, retirement and later life all show identity’s power effects. Generational identity fuels constructions of group conflict, exaggerates differences between age groups, and overstates individual agency. Future research could explore not only its ambiguity of meaning but also what it is used to accomplish in specific contexts. Moreover, given the profusion and circulation of generational categories related to youth, how are these used in organizations and what identity work does it prompt from those targeted by these labels? We know that focusing on age identity categories such as ‘the older worker’ has tended to reproduce, rather than challenge, its negative associations, even when undertaken by those seeking to combat age discrimination at work. One way forward then, is not to focus on identity categories but explore the meaning of age and organization in a broader sense, the ways age and ageing are deployed for specific purposes in interactions at work (Krekula, ), and ‘produced’ by the demands of contemporary capitalism. A major contribution of the work on the intersection of age and gender has been to explore the dynamics of cultural visibility and invisibility of identity. Rather than equating the study of age with those who deviate from an unmarked norm of a ‘prime age’, usually older age, making age identity visible means recognizing all subjects as aged and ageing, just as they will also be ‘raced’ and gendered. One promising avenue is to further explore how versions of age identity underpin certain occupational and industry ideals and what this accomplishes in terms of inculcating norms around employees’ availability and dedication to work. Scholarship on age identity and later life invites organization studies scholars to explore how and why work has come to dominate the range of possible identities seen as legitimate and valued. This takes the form not only of promoting continued engagement in paid work but the prescriptive engagement of older people in work-like activities based around the body to ensure individuals ‘successfully age’ and maintain their independence. This threatens to exclude a large proportion of people including those who lack the resources to ‘age well’ or are not physically able. Rather than rely on external markers of failing physical health or disability, Katz and Calasanti () argue we need to see older age ‘from the inside’, as it is experienced. Finally, we also need to recognize that the bodily work on the selves older people are encouraged to undertake has its own power effects: such efforts are undertaken in part to dis-identify with the most stigmatized ‘oldest-old’ where identity disruption is enforced by institutionalized arrangements that govern all aspects of life. Far from challenging ageism then, fulfilling the ideals of productive and active ageing may reinforce and intensify it by displacing it onto another more stigmatized group. Rather than evidence of a failure to ‘age successfully’, perhaps being unproductive and inactive in older age could be seen as a potential form of resistance. More generally, expanding the scope of organizational scholarship on age identity to later life, whether as currently experienced or imagined in the
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future, provides the opportunity for critical evaluation of the ways work, either in its presence or absence, risks colonizing the whole of life, constraining the possibilities for legitimate identity construction. Moreover, if identity construction is understood as efforts to achieve coherence of the self across time (Ashforth and Schinoff, ), then time’s passing threatens to undo this achievement. Therefore, the possibility of alternative waysof-being in later life could help to deconstruct the very notion of identity itself as the pursuit of a coherent, continuous, stable, and separate self.
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Duerden Comeau, T. and Kemp, C. L. (). ‘Intersections of Age and Masculinities in the Information Technology Industry’. Ageing & Society, , –. Duncan, C. and Loretto, W. (). ‘Never the Right Age? Gender and Age-Based Discrimination in Employment’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Fineman, S. (). Organizing Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, K. (). ‘Generation and Discourse in Working Life Stories’. British Journal of Sociology, (), –. Foweraker, B. and Cutcher, L. (). ‘Work, Age and Other Drugs: Exploring the Intersection of Age and Masculinity in a Pharmaceutical Organization’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Giddens, A. (). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Identity in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gilleard, C. and Higgs, P. (). ‘Unacknowledged Distinctions: Corporeality versus Embodiment in Later Life’. Journal of Aging Studies, , –. Gullette, M. M. (). Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Handy, J. and Davy, D. (). ‘Gendered Ageism: Older Women’s Experiences of Employment Agency Practices’. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, (), –. Hazan, H. (). Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyde, P., Burns, D., Hassard, J., and Killett, A. (). ‘Colonizing the Aged Body and the Organization of Later Life’. Organization Studies, (), –. Irni, S. (). ‘Cranky Old Women? Irritation, Resistance and Gendering Practices in Work Organizations’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Jack, G., Riach, K., and Bariola, E. (). ‘Temporality and Gendered Agency: Menopausal Subjectivities in Women’s Work’. Human Relations, (), –. Joshi, A., Dencker, J. C., Franz, G., and Martocchio, J. J. (). ‘Unpacking Generational Identities in Organizations’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Jyrkinen, M. (). ‘Women Managers, Careers, and Gendered Ageism’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, , –. Katz, S. and Calasanti, T. (). ‘Critical Perspectives on Successful Aging: Does It “Appeal More Than It Illuminates”?’ The Gerontologist, (), –. Knights, D. and Clarke, C. (). ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Krekula, C. (). ‘Age Coding: On Age-Based Practices of Distinction’. International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, (), –. Krekula, C., Nikander, P., and Wilińska, M. (). ‘Multiple Marginalizations Based on Age: Gendered Ageism and Beyond’. In L. Ayalon and C. Tesch-Römer (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on Ageism. Cham: Springer, pp. –. Laliberte Rudman, D. (). ‘Embodying Positive Aging and Neoliberal Rationality: Talking about the Aging Body within Narratives of Retirement’. Journal of Aging Studies, , –. Laliberte Rudman, D. and Molke, D. (). ‘Forever Productive: The Discursive Shaping of Later Life Workers in Contemporary Canadian Newspapers’. Work, , –. Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., and Zilber, T. (). Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lyons, S. and Kuron, L. (). ‘Generational Differences in the Workplace: A Review of the Evidence and Directions for Future Research’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, , S–S. Mallett, O. and Wapshott, R. (). ‘Making Sense of Self-Employment in Late Career: Understanding the Identity Work of Olderpreneurs’. Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Mannheim, K. (). Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Manor, S. (). ‘Trying to Be Someone You Can Never Be Again: Retirement as a Signifier of Older Age’. Ageing & Society, , –.
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Moore, S. (). ‘ “No Matter What I Did I Would Still End Up in the Same Position”: Age as a Factor Defining Older Women’s Experience of Labour Market Participation’. Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Moulaert, T. and Biggs, S. (). ‘International and European Policy on Work and Retirement: Reinventing Critical Perspectives on Active Ageing and Mature Subjectivity’. Human Relations, (), –. Phillipson, C., Leach, R., Money, A., and Biggs, S. (). ‘Social and Cultural Constructions of Ageing: The Case of the Baby Boomers’. Sociological Research Online, (), –. Pritchard, K. and Whiting, R. (). ‘Baby Boomers and the Lost Generation: On the Discursive Construction of Generations at Work’. Organization Studies, (), –. Riach, K. (). ‘ “Othering” Older Worker Identity in Recruitment’. Human Relations, (), –. Riach, K. and Cutcher, L. (). ‘Built to Last: Ageing, Class and the Masculine Body in a UK Hedge Fund’. Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Riach, K. and Kelly, S. (). ‘The Need for Fresh Blood: Understanding Organizational Age Inequality through a Vampiric Lens’. Organization, (), –. Riach, K. and Loretto, W. (). ‘Identity Work and the “Unemployed” Worker: Age, Disability and the Lived Experience of the Older Unemployed’. Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Riach, K., Loretto, W., and Krekula, C. (). ‘Gendered Ageing in the New Economy: Introduction to Special Issue’. Gender, Work and Organization, (), –. Roberts, I. (). ‘Taking Age Out of the Workplace: Putting Older Workers Back In?’ Work, Employment and Society, (), –. Sargent, L. D., Bataille, C. D., Vough, H. C., and Dean Lee, M. (). ‘Metaphors for Retirement: Unshackled from Schedules’. Journal of Vocational Behavior, , –. Sargent, L. D., Dean Lee, M., Martin, B., and Zikic, J. (). ‘Reinventing Retirement: New Pathways, New Arrangements, New Meanings’. Human Relations, (), –. Smith, F. L. M. and Dougherty, D. S. (). ‘Revealing a Master Narrative: Discourses of Retirement throughout the Working Life Cycle’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Spedale, S., Coupland, C., and Tempest, S. (). ‘Gendered Ageism and Organizational Routines at Work: The Case of Day-Parting in Television Broadcasting’. Organization Studies, (), –. Taylor, P. and Earl, C. (). ‘The Social Construction of Retirement and Evolving Policy Discourse of Working Longer’. Journal of Social Policy, (), –. Thomas, R., Hardy, C., Cutcher, L., and Ainsworth, S. (). ‘What’s Age Got to Do with It? On the Critical Analysis of Age and Organizations’. Organization Studies, (), –. Tomlinson, F. and Colgan, F. (). ‘Negotiating the Self between Past and Present: Narratives of Older Women Moving Towards Self-Employment’. Organization Studies, (), –. Trethewey, A. (). ‘Reproducing and Resisting the Master Narrative of Decline: Midlife Professional Women’s Experiences of Aging’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Tulle, E. (). ‘The Ageing Body and the Ontology of Ageing: Athletic Competence in Later Life’. Body and Society, (), –. Tulle, E. (). ‘Theorising Embodiment and Ageing’. In J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds.), The Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. London: Routledge, pp. –. Urick, M. J., Hollensbe, E. C., and Fairhurst, G. T. (). ‘Differences in Understanding Generation in the Workplace’. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, (), –. World Economic Forum (). The Future of Jobs Report, . Centre for the New Economy and Society. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, , –. Zanoni, P. (). ‘Diversity in the Lean Automobile Factory: Doing Class through Gender, Disability and Age’. Organization, (), –.
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Responding to Institutional Challenges .......................................................................................................................
Abstract Focused upon occupational professionals in an organizational context, and their transition towards being a managerial or commercial hybrid, the authors of this chapter debate whether such a transition represents progressive or regressive professionalism. They balance consideration of agency enacted by the individual professional, with that of the institutional challenge transition constitutes. They highlight how the extent to which the individual professional can enact agency is influenced by their status. A powerful professional may be able to blend, buffer, or decouple competing institutional logics, and so remain in control of the transition to retain their autonomy and even aggrandize their status. Simultaneously, organizations may gain from more efficient and effective utilization of resource across the wider client population. If transition towards hybrid professional identity is thus seen as desirable by both organizations and professionals, then organizational support is required, in large part to socialize the incoming role holder towards the demands of the new role through liminal spaces, specifically networks, education, and mentoring. Nevertheless, in their analysis, the authors caution taking an overly optimistic view of hybrid transition. Lower status professionals may experience reduced levels of personal control through interventions that foist on them managerial or commercial identities. In short, we need to take a more nuanced view of professional responses to hybrid transitions.
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.................................................................................................................................. O chapter focuses upon professional hybrid identities in an organizational context (as opposed to self-employed professionals), characterized as emerging identities in the
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workplace formed by adapting ‘expert’ independent professional identities to reflect organizational priorities of profitability, business efficiency, and optimum resource management (Evetts, ; Leicht and Fennell, ; Muzio et al., ; O’Reilly and Reed, ). Our focus is on occupational, rather than organizational, professionals, the latter of whom experience significant and common training for their professional role, as well as associated socialization mandated by a regulatory body, commonly overseen by government (Evetts, ). That is, we take a narrow conception of ‘professional’, as for example a doctor, rather than a so-called human resources professional (Currie et al., ). In enacting a hybrid identity in their work role, such professionals are expected to combine their traditional identity with that of a management identity (Llewellyn, ; McGivern et al., ), or more commercial, enterprising identities (Bishop and Waring, ; Cohen and Musson, ; Doolin, ). The hybrid identity reflects a new role focus and while ‘willing’ hybrids view it as a progressive step bringing their practitioner expertise into management, others are more resistant regarding it as a threat to their professional integrity or ethics (McGivern at al., ). Hybrid professionals are particularly evident in public services within a wide range of settings, from doctors, nurses, and other professionals allied to medicine (Currie and Croft, ) and teachers in secondary schools (Busher and Harris, ), to lecturers in further education (Alexiadou, ; Gleeson and Shain, ) and higher education (Clegg and McAuley, ; Hellawell and Hancock, ; Parker and Jary, ), social workers (Jones, ), research scientists in the public sector (McAuley et al., ), and tax inspectors (Currie et al., ). Hybrid identities, enacted through hybrid roles, also extend to occupational professionals working in the private sector, such as accountants (Carter and Spence, ) or lawyers (Faulconbridge and Muzio, ), whose professional identity may also be under pressure from managerial and commercial forces. The increasing prevalence and perceived ambiguity of hybrid roles in the economy has generated increasing research attention, for example, special issues of peer reviewed journals are devoted to the topic (Denis et al., ) and it represents a central theme within the Journal of Professions and Organization (cf. Currie et al., ). Meanwhile, within the wider context of identities research, in particular the intersection of individual and organizational agency, the hybrid identity is perceived as the site of both proactive identity work (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Snow and Anderson, ; Svengingsson and Alvesson, ) and ‘coercive’ institutional pressure (Caza et al., ); making it both interesting and contested as an occupational role. In this chapter, we focus upon hybrid identities that bridge both professional and managerial or commercial identities; where ‘identities’ refers to the professionals’ idea of themselves, who they are and what they do at work (Pratt et al., ). After positioning hybrid professional identity in the context of identity research, we orientate our analysis around interlinked questions: Is the hybrid identity a progressive or regressive professionalism? What variation is there in enacting hybrid professional identity? What is the institutional challenge of enacting hybrid professional identity? When viewed as progressive, how can transitions towards hybrid professional identity be supported? What other questions does the hybrid identity at work raise for professionals and for organizations? Towards the end of the chapter, we suggest pathways for future research.
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W H P I?
.................................................................................................................................. As a starting point, we might consider what professional identity means and how that meaning is evolving in current literature. Being professional involves social obligations to work mainly for the benefit of society (Brint, ). ‘Professional’ is an exclusive identity, developed through qualifications, training, and socialization, creating social identity boundaries and enhanced careers (Exworthy and Halford, ). From this perspective, enacting a hybrid role, of which there are two main types—professional/managerial hybrids and professional/commercial hybrids—may move professionals away from their ideal type identity thereby challenging their altruistic raison d’être. From a functionalist sociology perspective, professional identity is characterized by a moral or ethical imperative at its core, whereby the professional must sacrifice self-interest and accept responsibility for the client (Carr-Saunders and Wilson, ; Flexner, ; Parsons, ; Tawney, ). For healthcare professionals in particular this responsibility involves human life and death, so stakes are high, and in this light, managerial and commercial pressures on enactment of the professional role are often unwelcome. Meanwhile, from a critical management perspective, ‘professionalism’, and its attendant competencies, behaviours, and countenances (Fournier, ; Grey, ), represents a disciplinary mechanism used by organizations to control labour. For example, Fournier’s research on creeping professionalization within the service sector establishes a link between the ‘disciplinary logic’ of professionalism and the ‘extension of professional discourse to new occupational domains’ (Fournier, : ). Through this lens, where professionals are subject to governmentality (Foucault, ), the new hybrid professionals, whether combining managerial or commercial attributes with their professional roles, are unwittingly sacrificing their perceived professional autonomy albeit for financial gain or increased status within their organizations. While both these functionalist and critical management analyses offer their own perspective on individual awareness and agency in identity transition to hybrid roles, what is not contested is the dilution of professional client focus to accommodate, more fully, organizational interests and, perhaps, demands. The professional/managerial hybrids are individuals with a professional background who take on managerial roles, requiring them to move between different organizational groups (Ferlie et al., ; Kippist and Fitzgerald, ; O’Reilly and Reed, ; Tummers et al., ). Their potential strength, at least from a managerial perspective, comes from their ability to view organizational issues through a ‘two-way window’ of a managerial and professional perspective (Llewellyn, ), reducing resistance to, and encouraging uptake of, managerial reform by professional groups (Ackroyd et al., ; Bejerot and Hasselbladh, ; Ferlie et al., ; O’Reilly and Reed, ; Tummers et al., ). Research on identification helps us conceptualize the construction of these hybrid identities, where identification allows identity to emerge and ‘embed the individual’ in the relevant identities (Ashforth et al., ). Differing levels of identification can affect how individuals feel and act in their work identity, for example identifying strongly as a professional or as a manager, contrarily, feeling dis-identification or self-alienation where the organization tries to dictate optimum work identity (Costas and Fleming, ). The ability of professionals to make ‘cognitive comparisons’ (Foreman and Whetten, ) can address conflicted identification,
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for example, where an individual may feel pushed by commercial pressure and company loyalty to disregard professional ethics or regulatory duty. The increasing prevalence of professional/managerial hybrids is reflected in healthcare settings (Montgomery, ). In a UK hospital context for example, whilst general managers or ‘professional’ managers represent around per cent, hybrid professional/managers now represent around per cent of staffing, with the most significant representation coming from the ranks of doctors and nurses (Buchanan et al., ; Walshe and Smith, ). Exemplifying a hybrid professional/manager, in the case of nurses, they might be ward managers, delivering direct care at the same time as they manage care delivery of others. In the case of doctors, a hybrid professional/manager is represented by a clinical director, responsible for clinical care in a specialist hospital department. While these hybrid professionals retain the ‘patient first’ focus in supporting medical outcomes, embodied in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Geneva (Jackson, ), they have a wider field of vision in terms of hospital and resource management, using a managerial lens to help steer decision-making. Meanwhile, less researched professional/commercial hybrids are individuals that enact business-oriented or more commercial practices, which often reflect the growing influence of corporate interests (Cohen and Musson, ; Thomas and Hewitt, ). An example of these hybrids are the so-called company pharmacists, professional pharmacists employed by multiple retailers, such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, where from within a commercial setting of health and beauty retail stores, they provide advice to patient-clients and dispense prescription and non-prescription medication. They combine a professional identity as clinicians and healthcare providers, with a commercial identity as shop managers and corporate employees, tasked with maximizing shop income and profit.
A H I—P R P?
.................................................................................................................................. Understanding of the interaction of professionalism and managerialism has moved beyond a dualistic and oppositional characterization, with hybridization of professional work now seen as prevalent and somewhat desirable (Bevort and Suddaby, ; Blomgren and Waks, ; Farrell and Morris, ; Loewenstein, ; Noordegraaf, ; Postma et al., ; Skelcher and Smith, ). Consequently, we see managerial and professional principles that might previously have been conceived as contradictory, such as quality and efficiency, now combined to frame professional practice; i.e. systematically organizing for quality, as well as offering quality in the treatment of a client, becomes central to professional practice (Nooredegraaf, ). The ability of hybrids to view organizational issues through a ‘two-way window’ of professional and managerial perspectives (Llewellyn, ) facilitates their movements between the distinct realms of management (Noordegraaf and Van Der Meulen, ) and their pre-existing professional group, mediating the alignment of professional and organizational or political demands (Ferlie et al., ; O’Reilly and Reed, ; Tummers et al., ). As a result of their potential influence, research studies claim the development
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of professional hybrids may lead to higher organizational productivity, lower staff turnover, and increased stakeholder satisfaction (Curry and Ham, ; Ferlie et al., ; King’s Fund, ). In addition, increased political focus on professional hybrids across the globe has derived from resistance to managerial reform in professionalized organizations (Darzi, ; Hartley and Allison, ; O’Reilly and Reed, ). By moving between managerial leadership (within the formal management structure of the organization) and professional leadership (Marnoch et al., ), hybrids can, in principle, encourage the ‘colonization’ of managerial priorities in professional practice, standards, and discourse, thereby influencing positively or negatively the uptake of managerial reform by professional groups (Ackroyd et al., ; Bejerot and Hasselbladh, ; Ferlie et al., ; O’Reilly and Reed, ; Tummers et al., ). Thus, the development of hybrid managers might be regarded as controlled professionalism (Noordegraaf, ). With controlled professionalism, the policy intent is to convert professionals into managers and reconstitute their identities through their co-option into such roles, enabling governance from a distance (Martin and Learmonth, ). From this more critical viewpoint, the thrust of literature tends to regard the effects of hybridization upon professional discretion and autonomy, where insecurity and anxiety is induced by institutional performance management and disciplinary processes, as regressive (Knights and Clarke, ). As a counterpoint, the development of hybrid managers can be seen as part of the emerging phenomenon of organizing professionalism. Within organizing professionalism, professional action is positioned within managed and organized surroundings that both respect and restrain professionalism, within which professionals are connected to other stakeholders, such as policy-makers, executive managers, and the public and clients, but where the locus of control remains within the professional space (Noordegraaf, ). From this viewpoint, professionals benefit from enacting hybrid roles, through buttressing their power and status over others in ensuing dynamics of professional organization (Abbott, ; Freidson, ).
W V I T E H P I?
.................................................................................................................................. Identity salience determines how central an identity is to an individual’s values and beliefs and whether it will be invoked in a given situation (Stets and Burke, ). If a professional judges their identity is salient, then they will respond positively towards its enactment (Ashforth, ). Some professionals may give salience to the identity ‘manager’, whilst others perceive being a ‘manager’ and the associated tasks as less central or even eroding their cross-cutting professional identity (Ashforth and Johnson, ). In short, individuals, even within the same occupation, may vary in the salience they attribute to different identities, professional and others, such as a managerial or commercial identity (McGivern et al., ; Spyridonidis et al., ).
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Research into hospital physicians and their transition to hybrid roles illustrates a complex relationship between cross-cutting and nested identities, that is, the ‘original’ predominant professional identity and the peripheral identities acquired by workplace setting (Spyridonidis et al., ). There are likely to be more socio-psychological factors influencing perceived salience such as professionals’ cultural, gender, and political backgrounds, including their countries of personal or family origin. Research has shown that hybrids can feel under pressure to navigate between the managerially or commercially defined leadership of their formal position, and the values associated with their professional identity (Kippist and Fitzgerald, ). Professional identity relates to ‘what you do’ (Pratt et al., ), and is developed during a period of professional training, socialization and identity transition. Ongoing identity work by individuals in the workplace allows them to engage in ‘cognitive, discursive, physical, and behavioral activities’ (Caza et al., : ) to regulate and manage, revise, repair, and strengthen identity (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Snow and Anderson, ; Svengingsson and Alvesson, ). In this way, professional identity will adapt over time as an individual experiences role transition (Ibarra, ). However, for some individuals moving into hybrid roles, a period of identity conflict resulting from a change in ‘what you do’ triggers subsequent identity transition, sometimes conflict (Chreim et al., ; Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ; Pratt et al., ). Exemplifying the challenge of identity transition, in healthcare, consistent with studies of identity salience, extant research suggests variation in the willingness of professionals, even within the same occupation, to take on a hybrid role. Some healthcare professionals prove reluctant to defect to the ‘dark side’ of management, whilst others actively choose it. Some professionals feel hybrid roles, either managerial or commercial, are incongruent with professional values, so resist transitioning to a hybrid identity and stick with their professional identity. Meanwhile, others may align professional values with competing, managerially driven organizational initiatives (Bishop and Waring, ; Currie and Croft, ; Doolin, ; Evetts, ; Goodrick and Reay, ; Iedema et al., ; Kitchener, ; Llewellyn, ; Nugus et al., ; Sehested, ). When different professional occupations are considered, even in the same setting such as healthcare, variation is even more evident. For example, different status between professionals appears to be significant, with doctors seemingly enjoying more control over, and benefit from, transitioning towards a hybrid identity than nurses (Currie and Croft, ). Another significant factor is the length of professional service, with those longer established in their professional roles more secure in making the transition into hybrid roles (McGivern et al., ). In short, professional response towards transitioning into hybrid roles is not monolithic. More specifically in healthcare, doctors encounter some identity conflict during the move into hybrid roles, but they seem able to adapt their professional identity, mediating a critical boundary between general managers and their professional peers (Iedema et al., ; Llewellyn, ; Pratt et al., ). While medical hybrids may perceive themselves as doctors first and managers second (Kippist and Fitzgerald, ), they are relatively successful in occupying an influential formal role in the managerial structures of the organization (Nugus et al., ). Despite a continuing commitment to their professional ideology, in keeping with professionals’ ability to develop ‘provisional’ selves (Ibarra, ), doctors will adapt their identity to make it fit with the demands of their new role (Pratt
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et al., ). Further to this, recent work suggests medical hybrids are now constructing identities as a new professional cadre, cementing their influence as a managerial elite across multiple organizational contexts (Jarl et al., ; Llewellyn, ; Lockett et al., ; Noordegraaf and Van Der Meulen, ). In explaining this, doctors can be characterized as powerful and autonomous professionals, able to ‘try on’ different identities to see if they fit their work roles or change their work roles to suit themselves (Ferlie et al., ). They enjoy pre-existing social influence as ‘natural leaders’ within the organizational structure, and their role is relatively compatible with managerial demands (Hallier and Forbes, ). Such an opportunity may be denied to professional nurses challenged with transferring to hybrid managerial roles. Nursing is a professional group whose identity has long been associated with symbolic as well as functional roles (Goodrick and Reay, ). Images of Florence Nightingale, encouraging feminine ideals of obedient, altruistic, and passive caring, dominate the symbols of the nursing profession (Davies, ; Goodrick and Reay, ). This continues to shape identity for nurses, despite increasing technical skills, academic education, and management roles required by modern nurses (Apesoa-Varano, ). We do not suggest it is merely the high proportion of women within nursing that causes problems for those taking on hybrid roles, but the continuing adherence to a professional identity stereotype encouraging institutional work that protects feminized ideals. As nurses take on ‘hybrid’ roles, they are required to work simultaneously across clinical and management jurisdictions, which necessitates they enact a different type of identity than that prescribed solely by their professional identity. Thus, nurses may ‘feel the role of the nurse and manager are in conflict’ (Bolton, : ), even as they constitute the bulk of hybrid professional managers in a typical hospital (Walshe and Smith, ). Thus, some comparison across professions is necessary, as they are differentially arranged regarding their social position, from which status and power derive (Battilana, ), and this impacts their agency in identity transition towards hybrid roles.
W I I C E H P I?
.................................................................................................................................. Identity construction requires ‘identity work’, which is a type of institutional work (Spyridonidis et al., ). Transitions, contradictions, disruptions, confusions, and changing relations with professional and/or organizational contexts heighten the need for identity work (Chreim et al., ; Kreiner et al., ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ), and so in modern dynamic organizational settings beset with ‘change’, it is a necessity. Identity work is required to manage tensions between professional and hybrid identities (Kreiner et al., ), specifically during role transitions (Chreim et al., ), when transitions are visible and deviate from institutionalized social norms (Ashforth, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ). Identity transition towards hybrid professional roles is an institutional challenge, with a shift in logics at the macro-level impacting micro-level professional identity (Chreim et al.,
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). The introduction of new institutional logics can disrupt identities (Greenwood et al., ), yet the interaction of changing institutional influences, specifically institutional logics and professional identity remains under-researched (Barbour and Lammers, ; Lawrence and Suddaby, ; Thornton et al., ). Particularly relevant to hybrid identity is the interaction of managerial and professional logics. While different logics can work side by side in an organization (Greenwood et al., ), managerial and professional logics can be thought of as ‘competing institutional logics’ (Reay and Hinings, ). ‘Managerial logic’ emphasizes efficiency, markets, and the strategic management of resources and is organizationally orientated, while ‘professional logic’ emphasizes discretion, trust, autonomy, and collegiality, and is profession-orientated (Greenwood et al., ). Such competing logics represent alternative social frames providing meaning to activity, conditioning sensemaking, action, and identity (Friedland and Alford ; Thornton et al., ). Professionals, acting as ‘institutional agents’ (Scott, ), may: reconcile contradictory institutional logics, such as the managerial logics associated with government policy and professional organization, so they are complementary (Hargrave and Van de Ven, ; Seo and Creed, ); manage coexisting, but competing institutional logics (Reay and Hinings, ); and create, maintain, or disrupt professional structures (Hargrave and Van de Ven, , Zilber, ). Hybrid professionals exert influence and ‘craft’ institutional elements in their environments, so the implementation of government policy converges with professional organization (Scott, ). Identity work is a type of institutional work carried out to authenticate, reframe, or culturally reposition professional identity in the face of new institutional logics (Kyratsis et al., ). Detailing an institutional perspective further, the importance of maintaining professional credibility and collegiality for hybrid professionals amongst colleagues is often a paramount concern (Witman et al., ). Consequently, some professionals, when placed in a hybrid role, may merely enact the role as a ‘representative’ of their professional peers in line with professional interest and traditional ‘professional bureaucracy’ structures (Mintzberg, ). In their role as institutional agents, they may protect or ‘buffer’ their professional interests (Fitzgerald and Ferlie, ; Noordegraaf, ), they may maintain professional structures, and even co-opt managerial systems to bolster professional systems (McGivern and Ferlie, ; Waring and Currie, ). At the same time, individuals may change their own position within the professional field (Battilana, ). For instance, professionals moving into hybrid roles may stratify themselves as a managerial ‘elite’ compared to their peers (Currie et al., ; Kitchener, ; Nugus et al., ). Beyond the confines of enacting a managerial role, more business-oriented or more commercial practices for professionals, which reflect growing influence of corporate interests, prove problematic for professional identity (Cohen and Musson, ; Thomas and Hewitt, ). While some professional occupations, such as lawyers (Faulconbridge and Muzio, ), bank underwriters (Smets et al., ), and accountants (Carter and Spence, ) have attempted to portray commercial activities they take on as a necessary part of professionalism in clients’ interests, others, such as doctors, have resisted commercialism (Waring and Bishop, ), in part because it is perceived as morally tainted ‘dirty work’ and likely to diminish their status (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Hughes, ; Leicht, ; Light, ). Where they enact a commercial role, professional/commercial hybrids may become increasingly stigmatized, so that identity transition becomes threatening for the
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individual (Muzio et al., ). In retail pharmacy, where the professional pharmacist is a store manager, a role that incorporates both clinical and commercial/managerial identities, the threat of identity conflict has become a public concern investigated by journalists in the public domain (BBC Inside Out, ; Chakrabortty, ). This aspect of professional identity, ‘from the outside in’ extends the debate on identity beyond colleagues, occupational groups, and self-perceptions to society-at-large. Research on family doctors in Canada demonstrates that their identity is impacted by external ‘others’ engaging them in social interactions, and enabling ‘rearrangement of institutional logics’ (Reay et al., : ).
S T T H P I?
.................................................................................................................................. How professionals are able to navigate the potential identity conflicts associated with a hybrid role, and adapt their professional identity accordingly, and if and how organizations might support this, remain important research gaps. Within professional contexts, scholars call for attention to interactions and agency as fundamental to meaning construction (Brown, ; Côté and Levine, ; McAdams and McLean, ). Reflecting upon how they develop their occupational identity over time, professionals have developed numerous repertoires of texts and tactics within educational programmes (Ibarra, ; Pratt, ), mentoring (Ibarra, ), and professional networks (Raj et al., ). Validation from peers for identity occurs during professional education (Pratt et al., ), with appropriate competencies and interaction styles highlighted by role models, the latter of whom also set out what physical appearance and demeanour should be displayed in pursuit of professional credibility (Ibarra, ; Pratt and Rafaeli, ). Such educational programmes and networks can be viewed as liminal spaces, within which nascent professionals fall into the ‘gaps’ between social groups rather than being perceived as members of the group (Turner, ). Liminality refers to the temporary state associated with identity transitions, triggered by the move into a different job role (Beech, ). For many, a period of liminality is a time of uncertainty and identity conflict, usually leading to identity transition, and culminating in a new, less fractured identity, but one that nevertheless may not prove stable (Thomas and Linstead, ). Liminal spaces can be used to mediate identity conflict, facilitating movement between different identity groups for those professionals taking up hybrid roles (Beech ; Ellis and Ybema ; Garsten ; Sturdy et al., ; Thomas and Linstead, ). The foundation for professionals wanting to take hybrid roles, and enact them in ways that transform professionalism and healthcare, appears to be formative identity work or later identity reconciliation work. Socialization before and after role transitions affects how roles are enacted (Nicholson, ). Therefore, hybrid ‘role modelling’ (Cruess et al., ) and ‘identity-based leader development’ (Ibarra et al., ), in which professionals develop hybrid identities validated by peers and mentors (Ibarra, ; Pratt et al., ), may be the most effective training for future hybrids, with significant impact on professionalism and public services. We caution, however, that such impact may prove negative, both for public services and professionalism, as undermining the latter may prove deleterious to the ethos upon which
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effective service delivery depends (Perry and Wise, ). Nevertheless, the concept of liminal space offers insight into the ways professional hybrids are able to move between, and influence, different organizational groups (Croft et al., a, b; Czarniawska and Mazz, ; Marnoch et al., ; Sehested, ; Williams, ). Being able to construct a positive liminal space to move between different identities, and respond contingently to professional and managerial leadership demands, may prove a successful tactic for professionals if they feel hybrid demands benefit them (Iedema et al., ; Noordegraaf and de Wit, ). Professionals may use liminal space to explore how they could be influential in multiple contexts and evoke different constructions of identity depending on their audience, allowing for increased creativity and influence among different groups (Ellis and Ybema, ; Sturdy et al., ). Supported by their use of liminal space to mediate identity conflict, hybrids are developing as a professional group in their own right (Jarl et al., ; Noordegraaf and Van Der Meulen, ). This concept of professional-led identity construction relates back to our previous discussion on the organizing professional and his/her agency. In terms of controlled professionalism where the occupational group does not have the initial autonomy and status of say, doctors in the UK NHS, the liminal space in professional identity transition is more likely to be subject to the governmentality of senior management (Fournier, ). For example, those commercially situated professionals working for companies may find that the liminal space is one of challenge or competition where professional identity meets corporate identity, or indeed human resources policy. Again, comparative, contextualized research is called for.
F R P
.................................................................................................................................. Extant literature does not take advantage of opportunities for the comparative study of professional occupations, something that may lead to more robust theory. The influence of hybrid managers on managerial processes is often considered to be uniformly positive. We cannot, however, assume hybrid managers are homogeneous, or that hybridity affects professional identity uniformly, and neglect to consider the nuances of the ways different hybrid managers enact their roles (Burgess and Currie, ; Currie and Croft, ). Hybrid professionals are likely to respond differently to the demands of their managerial or commercial role, due to their professionally-bound socialization and relative position in the professional hierarchy (Bolton, ; Goodrick and Reay, ; Nugus et al., ). Further, some hybrid managers may be willing, and others reluctant, to enact different aspects of their roles (Doolin, ; Hallier and Forbes, ; Kitchener, ). Some professionals embrace managerial, ‘entrepreneurial’ (Llewellyn, ), or ‘calculative’ financial and accounting discourses (Kurunmaki, ) using them to shape their hybrid managerial identities (Doolin, ). Others resist managerialism, or ‘play’ with hybrid managerial identities (Iedema et al., ), or ‘balance’ and ‘blend’ managerialism and professionalism (Montgomery, ). More research is required to understand the contingencies at stake in these dynamics. Furthermore, within organizations it is the job profile, the management tool that sets up and scrutinizes roles and responsibilities, and confers
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status and triggers financial reward that is the building block of hybrid identity. It would be useful to have more empirical data on how job profiles relating to these roles are created, developed, received, and implemented over time. Responding to calls for insight into the interrelationships between institutions and micro-level identities (Barbour and Lammers, ; Lawrence and Suddaby, ; Thornton et al., ), our analysis reveals more complexity and variation. It suggests that the impact of hybrid roles is influenced by the extent to which they are enacted in practice or loosely coupled (Townley, ), which largely depends on hybrids’ identity work. More specifically, in the face of institutional influences, the value of ‘dirty work’ and its impact upon the development of hybrid identities for professionals is worthy of further investigation (Leicht, ; Light, ; Muzio et al., ). This is particularly true for those professional groups based within the commercial sector (in healthcare or otherwise) that do not necessarily regard their institutional setting as ‘dirty’ but as offering choice or convenience, or value for money for patients/customers. Looking within UK healthcare, there are gaps in understanding the realities of professional identity formation and transition for example in dentistry, pharmacy, and physiotherapy; as well as those physicians and nurses working in ‘outsourced’ or independent private medical settings. And while the movement towards managerialism and marketization in healthcare consolidates, will it bring a greater number and therefore a new consensus on the normality of hybrids or will changes in the market itself, for example an expansion or increased intensity of marketization, affect the processes of identity hybridization that we have discussed? A focused research interest in longitudinal studies will keep empirical and theoretical insights relevant and meaningful to practitioners. In examining variation in hybrid identity transition within a professional occupation, little research has examined role and identity transitions later in professionals’ careers. While Pratt’s research on professional identity construction offers oft-cited analysis of both primary care and specialist physicians, the study focuses upon postgraduate medical residents at the cusp of their professional careers (Pratt et al., ). Experience, maturity, professional legitimacy, and control over material resources may provide senior professionals with greater agency for reframing and re-enacting professional roles within wider institutional constraints (Chreim et al., ). For doctors transitioning into hybrid roles, greater social status may be gained from hybrid roles that enable them to diverge from institutionalized norms (Battilana, ; Lockett et al., ). It would be useful to have comparative research on doctors at early and late stages of their careers to assess if those entering the profession decades ago, although experienced and of high status, differ from younger professionals whose internships and early career work have taken place in a marketized setting. Similarly, comparative research on healthcare professionals working in both public and private practices or institutions could offer valuable insights into professional identity and professional hybrid roles. Drawing upon the broader concept of liminal space as supporting transition, we know relatively little about whether management training (e.g. MBAs) encourages professionals to identify with hybrid roles (McGivern et al., ). More generally, the antecedents of developing hybrid identities and how these later affect the enactment of hybrid roles and professionalism require further research; as do incentives such as salary change, and consequent mobility in executive management.
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Finally, as institutions increasingly outsource occupational categories and organizational fabric loosens to accommodate new economic models of business, research into the impact of such structural and political change on professional and hybrid identities would be welcome. The research net needs to be cast across a wider population of professional and nascent professional occupations to test the transferability of current theory and its evolution. A research instinct to describe the diverse patterns of healthcare provision in the UK as a ‘national’ and therefore homogeneous system needs to be tempered with further case studies that validate extant theory. Likewise, as workplace diversity increases in UK healthcare, affected by immigration policies particularly with respect to European Union countries, populations of physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, cannot easily be compared with their predecessors. That is, our research should be sensitive to cultural and political factors including the professionals’ own experience of working in and being socialized into different types of healthcare markets.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Our focus in this chapter has been upon occupational professionals in an organizational context, and their transition towards being a managerial or commercial hybrid. We have argued for a balanced view regarding whether such a transition represents progressive or regressive professionalism. To some extent whether transition is progressive or regressive derives from agency enacted by the individual professional, but also represents an institutional challenge. The extent to which the individual professional can enact agency is to a large extent influenced by their status. From an institutional perspective, a powerful professional may be able to blend, buffer, or decouple competing logics, and so remain in control of the transition and retain their autonomy and discretion. Indeed, some professionals may be able to take advantage of transition to develop an elite status amongst their peers. If transition towards hybrid professional identity is thus seen as desirable, then organizational support is required, in large part to socialize the incoming role holder to the demands of the new role through networks, education, and mentoring, and more generally consider the liminal spaces through which hybrid professionals might move. Nevertheless, we caution taking an overly optimistic view of hybrid transition. We need to take a critical view on development of hybrid professionals, particularly as it applies to those of lower status. Lower status professionals may end up more controlled by the organization through intervention that co-opts them into managerial or commercial identities, with consequent diminution of their autonomy and discretion. Evidently, we need to take a nuanced view of professional responses to hybrid transitions.
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Abstract This chapter examines how and why sexual identity remains a fruitful site of scholarly research in the organizational literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. Despite the vast attention that is now lavished on identities in organizations generally, LGBTQ+ identities have, at least until now, been relatively ignored in the organizations and identities literature. Accordingly, this chapter historicizes LGBTQ+ sexualities and identities, providing insights into why identity is such a prominent concept in the broader literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. The theoretical diversity in how LGBTQ+ sexualities have been conceptualized in terms of identity is considered. The core sections of the chapter review some of the principal concepts and scholarly contributions within research on LGBTQ+ identity disclosure (e.g. personal motives and organizational factors that influence how and when disclosure occurs) and identity management (e.g. management strategies and the identity implications of the normalization of some LGBT+ sexualities). Knowledge gaps are exposed and avenues for future research are signposted.
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.................................................................................................................................. When I hear of people in the media coming out, I think, why do they even feel the need to mention it? It is so old-fashioned to make a big deal of it. That isn’t even an interesting thing to say at a dinner party any more. Richard Hammond, UK journalist and TV presenter,
T importance of sexuality as a basis for identity is acutely evident in the struggles of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer + (LGBTQ+)1 people who work in heteronormative organizational contexts. The normative status attributed to heterosexuality as a sexual orientation that is ‘healthy’, ‘right’, and ‘natural’ has often rendered homosexuality as its inferior opposite (Ahmed, ), clearly identifiable in how homosexuality has been
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variously understood as a sin, a form of sexual deviance, and a disease (Adams, ; Eliason, ; Weeks, ). LGBTQ+ employees have long had a complicated and problematic relationship with the negative meanings ascribed to homosexuality and the people and institutions that espouse them. Over four decades of research on LGBTQ+ organization sexualities show that employees presumed or known to be LGBTQ+ have been bullied, persecuted, and marginalized, with an adverse impact on their self-esteem, confidence, and mental health, as well as undermining job tenure and truncating careers (Corrington et al., ; Humphrey, ; Levine, ; Tilcsik et al., ). The picture, however, is increasingly mixed, with recent studies also revealing the measures organizations are taking to cultivate inclusive cultures that enable LGBTQ+ employees to disclose as LGBTQ+ and contribute to organizational life (Everly and Schwarz, ; Rumens, ; Wax et al., ). Indeed, organizations are important in LGBTQ+ people’s lives, not simply as places where work gets done and jobs are performed, but for developing relationships and work-related identities, constructing a sense of professionalism, feeling valued, providing services, and contributing to the economy (Colgan and Rumens, ; Köllen, ). Here we can see part of why LGBTQ+ people attach importance to disclosing and managing sexual identities within organizational settings. Accordingly, the remarks of TV presenter and journalist Richard Hammond, that it is ‘old-fashioned’ to come out today in the UK, are likely to ring hollow for those LGBTQ+ individuals who need to signal their intention to participate openly in society. In this chapter, I provide an overview of why and in what ways sexual identity remains a fruitful site of scholarly research in the organizational literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. As an aside, it is worth noting that despite the vast attention that is now lavished on identities in organizations generally, LGBTQ+ identities have, at least until now, been relatively ignored. Two recent reviews on identities and identity work in organizations draw attention in that respect (Brown, ; Caza et al., ). I set the scene by historicizing LGBTQ+ sexualities and identities, with the intention of providing insights into why identity is such a prominent concept in the broader literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. This is vital as, to borrow the words of historian Jeffrey Weeks, the ‘search for valid sexual identities has characterized the history of homosexuality, male and female, since the nineteenth century’ (: ). In this part of the chapter, I discuss some of the approaches scholars have taken to theorize LGBTQ+ sexualities in terms of identity. Next, I locate the organizational literature on LGBTQ+ identities within the wider scholarship on LGBTQ+ organization sexualities before outlining some of the principal concepts and scholarly contributions within research on LGBTQ+ identity disclosure and management. I conclude by sifting out ideas for future avenues of research.
H LGBTQ+ S I
.................................................................................................................................. In the literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities, identity is a core concept that is frequently mobilized by scholars to illuminate the diverse histories and challenges of living LGBTQ+ sexualities in everyday life. Sociologists of sexuality have written extensively about LGBTQ+ sexualities as social identities, and also the wider landscape of human sexuality,
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revealing how the terms ‘homosexuality’ and heterosexuality’ are relatively new cultural inventions (Faderman, ; Greenberg, ; McIntosh, ; Weeks, ). In particular, sociologists have helped us to rethink sexuality as something that is socially constructed. One of the first to propose this idea was Mary McIntosh () who conceptualized homosexuality as a ‘social role’ that could be studied historically. McIntosh () debunked the humanist idea of sexuality as a fixed property of the individual and nurtured a sociology of sexuality. The social construction of homosexuality (and sexuality more generally) soon became well established within the sociology of adult sexuality. By historicizing homosexuality, sociologists departed from other scholars of sexuality (e.g. sexologists) who concentrated on sexuality only at the individual level, typically searching for answers to questions such as: what makes people homosexual? ‘The construction of homosexuality’ refers to the idea that ‘homosexuality’ and the ‘homosexual’ have been, and continue to be, socially (re)defined in various ways across cultures and in specific times. For example, although the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality have a scientific ring to them, they entered into the English language in the private correspondence between Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in May . Kertbeny was an Austrian-born Hungarian journalist, human rights campaigner, and legal reformer who advocated a liberal approach to homosexuality, using both terms in his efforts to reform Germany’s sodomy laws, asserting that private consensual sexual acts should not be the subject of criminal legislation. Analysing the discursive shifts in how we understand sexuality, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, author of three volumes of The History of Sexuality (, , ), explored how the cultural invention of the homosexual was bound up with the (re)construction of sexual categories of knowledge. Foucault’s discursive understanding of the construction of sexuality, a feature that largely set him apart from other historians of sexuality at the time, brings together sexuality, knowledge, and power to conceptualize sexuality along three axes: () the formation of sciences that refer to it; () relations of power that regulate sexual practices; and () the forms by which individuals are obliged to recognize themselves as sexual subjects (: ). In regard to the third axis, Foucault argued that it is only towards the end of the nineteenth century when the ‘homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history and a childhood, a character, a form of life’ (: ). As such, sexuality becomes individuated assuming a high level of importance in how individuals define themselves and are defined by others and society. The construction of the homosexual and the heterosexual had and continues to have profound effects, not the least of them being the capacity for societies to designate different sexual practices as (in)appropriate, enabling people and institutions to affix their concerns and fears about same-sex intimacies onto a target: the homosexual. While anxiety and suspicion about same-sex intimacy predates the idea of the homosexual as a person and an identity (Bray, ), the emergence of homosexuality can be read as representing an object of knowledge that is constituted and deployed as a means of social control. This is illustrated poignantly in research on the nefarious methods of diagnosis and ignominious treatments of homosexuality in the UK medical profession since the s. Diagnosed as an abnormal sexual orientation or a state of arrested development, clinicians prescribed and used psychoanalytic conversion therapy, electric shock aversion therapy and drugs to reduce sexual libido (Smith et al., ). While the discursive
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constitution of Western bodies of knowledge on homosexuality within the medical and psychiatry professions has largely rejected this understanding of homosexuality, its legacy is not easily erased. Notably, the British LGBT charity Stonewall reported in Unhealthy Attitudes (Somerville, ) that conversion therapy was still being offered to individuals to ‘cure’ them of their homosexuality. The ongoing slew of sexual prejudice and discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals gave rise to what scholars have described as identifiable LGBTQ+ communities and subcultures, such as those that emerged during the s and s, which provided safe havens for these people to socialize, form friendships, obtain support, and be intimate (Kennedy and Davis, ; Nardi, ; Vicinus, ). The communities played a vital role in reshaping how individual LGBTQ+ people could identify and define themselves. Weeks (: ) reminds us that the adoption of the term ‘gay’, a word that entered into circulation in ‘all Anglophone countries’ from the s onwards, to counter the negativity associated with identifying as a homosexual, represented a landmark in the development of a positive and meaningful sexual identity. Influential also was the emergence of gay and lesbian rights-based movements during the s and s which heralded the creation of sexuality based political identities that aimed to unite LGBTQ+ people through a shared sense of oppression (Gamson, ). In these circumstances, sexual identity cannot be reduced to how we feel about ourselves and the self-image we may wish to project to others (Seidman, ); rather, sexual identity was conceptualized as a personal and a social identity, with the latter referring to how our sense of self can be based on our membership of social groups (Tajfel, ). During the s and s, LGBTQ+ identities tended to be regarded as relatively stable; a fixed sexual identity was required in order to organize politically and claim equal rights (Gamson, ). While the idea of a collective sexual identity helped to increase the visibility and participation of LGBTQ+ people across the public and private spheres of life, by the end of the s internal disputes and conflicts had erupted within gay and lesbian rights-based movements that manifested more differences than similarities between LGBTQ+ people (Richardson and Monro, ). For example, lesbians criticized gay men for not paying attention to how they could be oppressed by misogyny while many bisexuals and trans people felt ignored and excluded from mainstream gay and lesbian politics (Tremblay and Paternotte, ). This started to rupture the idea of a collective LGBTQ+ identity and thus ushered in a new era of how LGBTQ+ sexualities could be understood in identity terms. Queer theorists, for instance, have problematized the idea of a fixed LGBTQ+ identity (Butler, , ; Edelman, ; Halperin, ; Rahman, ; Rumens, ). The term ‘queer’, which in the historical past was used, among other things, as a negative epithet for homosexuals, was appropriated and deployed during the s by some LGBTQ+ academics and members of the radical political group Queer Nation. In this process of reclamation, queer was conceptualized as an anti-identity insomuch as it rejected the notion of LGBTQ+ (and other) identities as fixed and universal (Edelman, ; Halperin, ; Warner, ). The anti-identity politics of queer theory problematized the minority status ascribed to LGBTQ+ sexualities and energized queer theorists to expose and attempt to shatter the heterosexual/homosexual binary, as well as promote the growth of non-normative sexualities and genders (Butler, ; Eves, ;
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Halberstam, ; Sedgwick, ; Warner, ). In so doing, queer theorists roundly criticized identity categories, acknowledging that although they can facilitate a sense of connectivity and a precarious and fictitious sense of ontological security, they are, as Butler (: ) puts it, ‘instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression’. While queer theory has destabilized the LGBTQ+ identity categories scholars and activists have used to organize politically, the enduring popularity of queer theory is partly because it unceasingly critiques the limits of identity categories, encouraging us to transcend them, seeking out non-normative modes of identification. Hitherto, the discussion of LGBTQ+ sexualities and identities has focused on historicizing them within the wider social, cultural, and political landscape. This is a limited account due to space constraints, but its purpose has been to contextualize the discussion that follows, which examines some of the principal concepts and scholarly contributions made thus far to the study of LGBTQ+ sexual identities of people in organizations.
LGBTQ+ I O
.................................................................................................................................. LGBTQ+ sexual identities scholarship is nested within the wider literature on LGBTQ+ organization sexualities and stretches over four decades from the point dialogues started to concentrate on: () the idea that organizations and sexuality are mutually constitutive rather than organizations being a container for sexuality (see Burrell, ; Hearn and Parkin, ) and () the workplace experiences of LGBTQ+ employees (Baker and Lucas, ; Humphreys, ; Levine, ; Levine and Leonard, ; Ragins et al., ; Tilcsik et al., ). Regarding the latter strand, until the late s there were isolated studies on homosexuality that touched on employment issues (Leznoff and Westley, ), but it was during the s and s that increasing numbers of scholars began to examine the LGBTQ+ sexualities of people in organizations. Initially, researchers examined gay men and lesbians only. Given a cultural climate of hostility and opprobrium towards LGBTQ+ people during these decades, debates focused narrowly on the cause and effects of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation (Levine, ; Levine and Leonard, ). This scholarship was significant for ‘calling out’ the heteronormativity of the workplace and its noxious effects on those who were perceived to be or who disclosed as LGBTQ+. Identity disclosure and identity management quickly emerged as research topics whose salience remains undiminished over four decades later. I discuss each research site in turn.
Identity Disclosure Identity disclosure, colloquially dubbed ‘coming out’, typically refers to how and when individuals make their sexuality known to themselves and/or others. That is, LGBTQ+ individuals can come out ‘internally’, i.e. acknowledge their sexual identity to themselves, and externally, whereby they disclose their sexual identity to family members, friends, colleagues, etc. (Guittar, ). One reason why identity disclosure has endured as a
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research topic for organizational analysis is that organizations around the globe are heteronormative (see Colgan and Rumens, ; Köllen, ; Ng and Rumens, ; Ozturk, ). Within heteronormative organizational environments and cultures, the assumption of heterosexuality is often so taken-for-granted that it goes unnoticed. We rarely ask employees if they are heterosexual but questions are asked about employees who are known or presumed to be LGBTQ+. In that regard, the heteronormativity of organizational life can occasion identity dilemmas for LGBTQ+ employees. For instance, if they wish to avoid being mistaken for heterosexual, LGBTQ+ employees must disclose their sexual identity to colleagues. It is in this commitment to disclose as LGBTQ+ that the heteronormativity of organizations is exposed, sometimes ruptured, which is why disclosing a LGBTQ+ sexual identity can be a politically charged process and, as research shows, potentially dangerous (Connell, ; Ozturk, ). Disclosure in the workplace can mean LGBTQ+ employees become targets of hostility, bullying, and discrimination from colleagues and employers (Bowring and Brewis, ; Einarsdóttir et al., ; Humphreys, ; Willis, ). For those LGBTQ+ employees who anticipate negative repercussions, one option may be non-disclosure (Ragins et al., ; Tilcsik et al., ), and it is here that coming out is often conjoined with another concept, ‘the closet’. The construct of ‘the closet’ has various meanings. In the Oxford English Dictionary, it can be a ‘room for privacy’, with the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ being a familiar term in common parlance within many Western societies. The relationship of the closet with LGBTQ+ identities is complex but concerns how an LGBTQ+ identity is concealed. The closet has been conceptualized in various ways that emphasize its relationship with LGBTQ+ oppression and its relational, discursive, and spatial characteristics (Brown, ; Sedgwick, ; Seidman, ). In organizational terms, the concept of the ‘corporate closet’ has at times been invoked to capture notions of concealment centred on sexual identity (Woods and Lucas, ). Notably, ‘the closet’ tends to be constructed as a negative epithet that is linked to LGBTQ+ oppression (Seidman, ), as opposed to its twin concept ‘coming out’ which has come to represent an act of identity-based liberation that enables LGBTQ+ individuals to ‘be themselves’. In light of this, there have been pressing calls to ‘open the corporate closet’ (Caudron, ), with questions being asked about why certain workplace closets are closed (Smith et al., ) and why firms must come out of the closet and acknowledge LGBTQ+ employees (Parry, ). Whatever way we elect to understand the closet concept, it is intimately bound up with identity disclosure and, as discussed later, identity management. Scholars have paid attention to conceptualizing the dynamics of LGBTQ+ identity non/ disclosure. One of the most influential models was formulated by Cass (), who located identity disclosure as a critical stage in a linear trajectory of identity development (see also Troiden, ). Initially, such psychology stage-based models of identity disclosure were popular, but they have drawn criticism from scholars who have exposed their essentialist assumptions, which imply LGBTQ+ people follow a similar process of identity development (Degges-White et al., ; Eliason, ). Stage-based or linear models of LGBTQ+ identity development have clearly defined beginnings and endings, which suggest identity can be an accomplishment rather than viewing it as an ongoing state of becoming (Ward and Winstanley, ) The instability of sexual identity over time and, as studies have shown, the misalignment between a claimed sexual identity and the sexual behaviours
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normatively associated with it (Savin-Williams, ), indicate that identity disclosure is not a linear and uniform experience for all LGBTQ+ people. Organizational scholars have also made similar arguments, with Dejordy () and others (Croteau et al., ) noting that much of the organizational research on identity disclosure tends to treat sexuality as a static and ahistorical construct. Some scholars have turned to queer theory to overcome this limitation. Ward and Winstanley () mobilize ideas from Judith Butler’s (, ) writing on gender and performativity to show how coming out is performative. Understood in this way, identity disclosure is an ongoing process of discursive citation, whereby LGBTQ+ employees have to (re)cite the sexual norms by which they are performatively constituted as LGBTQ+. Conceptualizing identity disclosure as performative avoids treating identity (non)disclosure as a binary, where an individual might be viewed as being either in or out, rather than both. More broadly, the examination of LGBTQ+ identity disclosure in organizations encompasses more than its conceptualization. Research has been conducted on the motives behind LGBTQ+ disclosure in the workplace (Baker and Lucas, ; Clair et al., ; Griffith and Hebl, ; Ragins et al., ). Some of the scholarship in this area has galvanized ideas from Goffman’s sociology, in particular his writing on stigma (Clair et al., ; Ragins, ; Rumens and Broomfield, ). Following Goffman (), individuals can carry a visible stigma such as race, gender, or a physical disability which makes them vulnerable to becoming discredited, as the stigma is already known or visible. Individuals who carry an invisible and undisclosed stigma such as homosexuality, mental illness, or radical political behaviour are potentially discreditable (because the stigma has yet to be revealed). Goffman () argued that homosexuals can carry an invisible stigma of sexual orientation and that focus must be paid to the contexts and social norms that construct homosexuals as stigmatized. Studies show that the stigma of homosexuality can have negative effects on those who are known or presumed to be homosexual including stress, depression, bullying, harassment, and suicidal ideation (Vincke and Bolton, ). Stigma-based models have been deployed by organizational researchers to examine how an invisible stigma patterns LGBTQ+ employees’ decisions around (non)disclosure (Ragins, ; Ragins et al., ). One finding from this research is that LGBTQ+ employees have to evaluate their organizational settings in terms of threats to personal safety and dignity as well as to their careers (see also Baker and Lucas, ; Griffith and Hebl, ; King et al., ; Rostosky and Riggle, ). For example, Baker and Lucas’ () study of thirty-six working LGBTQ adults shows that the dignity of their study participants was compromised by ‘identity-sensitive inequalities’ that included social and physical harm, autonomy violations, and career damage. Yet for some LGBTQ+ employees, the risk of harmful disclosure related outcomes was mitigated by the opportunity disclosure afforded them to maintain a sense of personal integrity that could be free of stigmatization or, put another way, ‘being true to oneself ’ (Clair et al., ). Turning to more empirically driven contributions, one fruitful site of analysis are the contextual factors, both external and internal, that enable LGBTQ+ employees to disclose. External factors include the introduction of anti-discrimination employment legislation based on sexual orientation and the progress made by LGBTQ+ political organizations. Regarding the former, the introduction of anti-discrimination employment legislation
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based on sexual orientation and gender diversity has provided protection for some LGBTQ + employees, regarded by some scholars as one of many important factors that can help LGBTQ+ employees to disclose in the workplace (Pizer et al., ). However, such legal reforms are not universal and can, for instance, omit minority groups such as trans+ employees (Law et al., ). Additionally, as Beatty and Kirby (: ) aver, the stigma associated with LGBTQ+ sexualities ‘cannot simply be legislated away’. Acknowledging this, an important corpus of research has examined the influence of internal organizational factors on disclosure, with a general consensus emerging among researchers that factors such as employer gay-friendliness, LGBTQ+ inclusive policies, and top management support can have a positive effect on identity disclosure, as well as contributing to higher levels of job satisfaction, lower job anxiety, and improved psychological well-being (Baker and Lucas, ; Capell et al., ; Everly and Schwarz, ; Griffith and Hebl, ). For example, Capell et al. () found that when LGBTQ+ inclusive organizational policies and practices generated trust, LGBTQ+ employees were more willing to disclose their minority identity. Furthermore, the gendered dynamics of organizations can influence whether LGBTQ+ employees feel comfortable about disclosing their sexual identity. In organizations dominated by men and heteromasculinity, wherein stereotypes such as gay men are not ‘real’ men and lesbians are too manly, disclosing as LGBTQ+ can be an ongoing challenge, as documented in the accounts of gay men and lesbians who have served in the police and fire services (Burke, ; Rumens and Broomfield, ; Ward and Winstanley, ). While LGBTQ+ identity disclosure in the workplace is generally well researched, aspects of the topic remain underdeveloped. One such area is the differences in identity disclosure between LGBTQ+ employees. Differences in patterns of identity disclosure between LGBTQ+ individuals is more developed in the wider LGBTQ+ literature (e.g. Barringer et al., ; Martos et al., ) than it is within organizational scholarship on LGBTQ+ identities. However, both strands of research have tended to lump together various sexual minorities (typically gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals) or studied a minority group independently, without delineating the nuances between how LGBTQ+ people experience identity disclosure (Barringer et al., ). Similarly, organizational research on identity disclosure has either grouped LGB study participants together without drilling into the data to examine the issue of difference, or zoomed in on specific minorities, predominantly gay men (Rumens and Broomfield, ; Woods and Lucas, ) and lesbians (Driscoll et al., ; Fassinger, ). Less research has been conducted on the particular experiences, and potential similarities and differences, in how bisexual, trans, and queer+ employees disclose their sexual identities. Yet, from the wider LGBTQ+ literature on identity disclosure, it is known that sexual minorities can experience identity disclosure differently. For example, bisexual employees face specific issues that are shaped by the widespread biphobia that can emanate from heterosexuals and LGTQ+ people (Green et al., ). Sexual stereotypes about bisexual individuals (e.g. that they are ‘greedy’ people when it comes to sexual partners or that they are simply undecided about their sexuality) can deter bisexuals from disclosing (Wandrey et al., ). Research shows bisexual men may be less likely to disclose than gay men given the combined effects of homophobia and biphobia (Schrimshaw et al., ). Organizational research has only begun to examine some of these issues around identity disclosure (Arena and Jones, ; Corrington et al., ). For
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example, Corrington et al. () show that bisexual men are less likely to disclose at work than bisexual women, as they reported more workplace discrimination than bisexual women. Similarly, Arena and Jones () found evidence suggesting bisexual employees were less likely than gay and lesbians to disclose their sexual identity at work, partly explained by the negative views about bisexuality held by heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians. Biphobia is a serious impediment to identity disclosure for bisexuals in organizational settings (Green et al., ), raising questions about how ‘inclusive’ LGBTQ+ friendly workplace policies and practices actually are. Other concerns about differences in identity disclosure, as yet unexplored, relate to how employees can identify sexually in ways that exceed the identity categories with which organizations are generally familiar and codify on equal opportunities and managing diversity forms (e.g. as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender). Disclosing as pansexual, intersex, asexual, non-binary, to mention just a few, may be a more perilous and psychologically demanding process. One reason for this is that employees who choose to identify as such are rejecting a narrowly restrictive system of sexual categorization and, in so doing, may expose ignorance, generate prejudice, and incite searching questions from others in the workplace about what these identities mean. Additionally, research that examines the intersectionality between sexuality and other human differences such as race, ethnicity, class, age, and disability is rare. Some research has addressed how sexuality and race both influence identity disclosure. Ragins et al. () found that gay employees of colour were less likely than non-white gay employees to disclose at work, shedding light on how heterosexism, sexuality, and race are related. Nonetheless, this area of research remains wide open empirically as more studies are needed to analyse how demographic aspects of individual difference interrelate and influence identity disclosure.
Identity Management To reiterate, identity disclosure and identity management are analytically distinct concepts but nevertheless closely intertwined. Phrased differently, it is not the case that a LGBTQ+ person discloses as such and then embarks upon a process of managing an ‘out’ identity. Crucially, managing an LGBTQ+ identity predates disclosure (Ragins et al., ; Woods and Lucas, ). Strategies used to manage the (non)disclosure of a LGBTQ+ sexual identity can vary considerably. Woods and Lucas’ () US study of gay male professionals has been well cited in that respect. They conceptualize three main strategies for managing a gay male identity in the workplace: () counterfeiting; () avoidance; () and integration. Counterfeiting refers to efforts made by gay men to ‘pass’ as heterosexual in the workplace, thereby giving out the ‘wrong’ message about their gay identity, which remains concealed. Strategies of avoidance include attempts to disclose as little personal information as possible, deflecting attention away from the issue of sexuality. In contrast, strategies of integration refer to coming out and managing a sexual identity in ways that conform to prevailing organizational expectations and cultural norms around sexuality and gender. In each strategy the individual manages what information about their sexual identity is disclosed, to whom, how and when. In Woods and Lucas (), the angle of analysis is slanted towards focusing on the costs of these strategies in terms
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of the unrealized benefits of disclosing. This approach is common in identity management models (DeJordy, ), underpinned by assumptions that disclosure is universally desirable. However, this obscures how identity management strategies such as passing and counterfeiting in the workplace may be used positively, for improving workgroup interactions and in conjunction with other strategies including integration (Chrobot-Mason et al., ; Rumens and Broomfield, ). Studies have examined the anxiety induced when managing LGBTQ+ identities in organizations. For example, many of Burke’s () gay and lesbian police officers opted to deploy strategies of avoidance and passing to manage their sexuality at work. Outside of work, many of the same employees identified as gay or lesbian to friends and family but did not disclose their occupation. This strategy of leading a ‘double life’ or having a ‘dual identity’ can be intensely stressful, not least because it is difficult for individuals to be certain if they have kept their sexuality secret from colleagues, friends, and family (see also Ward and Winstanley, ). For example, when colleagues ask probing questions about socializing outside the workplace, LGBTQ+ employees must carefully choreograph and articulate responses if they wish to avoid giving away information about their sexual identity. Burke’s () study draws on the stigma concept, evident in other studies that examine the challenges LGBTQ+ employees face when they deploy specific identity management strategies (King et al., ). One recurring theme in this literature is that LGBTQ+ employees have to manage their stigmatized identities both on an ad hoc and strategic basis, responding to (un)predictable and changing situational factors such as questions from employees about their private lives, the likelihood of acceptance and rejection from colleagues, and the perception of LGBTQ+ inclusive policies and culture. Despite these insights, there is limited research on differences in identity management strategies between and among LGBTQ+ employees. Notably, researchers have investigated how other individual differences can influence how LGBTQ+ employees manage sexual identity in organizations. Reed and Leuty (: ) investigated the interplay between personality traits (e.g. extraversion, openness, and neuroticism), aspects of sexual identity development (e.g. identity confusion, internalized heterosexism), and organizational factors (e.g. perceptions of workplace climate and heterosexism) to explain the deployment of specific identity management strategies. Their study findings revealed how perceptions of the workplace climate towards lesbian and gay individuals are related to the use of identity management strategies, but most interactions between individual difference and situational variables were not supported. As with identity disclosure, it is important to pay attention to how the wider cultural, political, social, and economic milieus within which LGBTQ+ live and work influence how sexual identities are managed in the workplace. In some parts of the world, where same-sex intimacy is criminalized, punishable by death or imprisonment, identity strategies of concealment and passing may be the only approaches that enable LGBTQ+ employees to work safely. In contrast, some academics hold that the increasing liberalization of Western societies has enabled more LGBTQ+ people to deploy identity management strategies based on integration and normalization (Seidman, ). Evidence for this is found in how some LGBTQ+ people are conferred status as citizen-subjects through institutions such as marriage and the legal provisions that enable same-sex couples to adopt children (Richardson, ). Noting these and other outcomes of the normalization of some
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LGBTQ+ sexualities, Altman (: ) remarks that there is an ‘increasing overlap in the mores of the gay and straight worlds’, where the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is so blurred that we might be witness to the ‘end of the homosexual’, and the decentring of sexual identity in the lives of many LGBTQ+ people. While the normalization of LGBTQ+ individuals is underway in some quarters, not all LGBTQ+ individuals are permitted to participate openly as citizen-subjects. Drucker () argues that numerous trans and genderqueer people remain isolated and excluded in many areas of life, and continue to be disproportionately subject to forms of gender-based discrimination. Normalized LGBTQ+ sexualities, typically those characterized as white, middle-class, affluent, able-bodied gay men and lesbians, are subject also to social control. Research has exposed the heteronormative terms and conditions upon which normalization is granted, which include demonstrating gender conformity, professionalism, upholding family values, patriotism, and choosing marriage as the institution for organizing intimate relations (Drucker, ; Seidman, ). Empirical insights into how the normalization of LGBTQ+ sexualities has influenced how LGBTQ+ employees manage their sexual identities in organizations have started to emerge over the last decade (David, ; Rumens and Kerfoot, ; Williams et al., ). For example, Williams et al. () interviewed a number of LGB employees who were open about their sexuality in the workplace but who experienced discursive closure in the types of subject positions occasioned within organizational discourse. Normative standards about what constitutes an organizationally ‘viable’ and ‘out’ gay and lesbian subject informed how study participants dressed and behaved at work; specifically, in ways that did not attract unnecessary attention to their sexuality, such as wearing ‘professional’ office attire and not discussing their private lives at work. Such discourses operate strategically, inasmuch as performing ‘normal’ gay and lesbian identities at work is contingent on maintaining a state of ‘invisibility’. Williams et al. () conceptualize this as a ‘gay-friendly closet’. This variation of the closet concept is useful because it trains attention on how identity management strategies of integration can be encouraged within organizational cultures, as they emphasize LGB employees’ similarities rather than differences with normative constructions of heterosexuality. As such, the gay-friendly closet regulates LGB sexual identities at work by incorporating them into a heteronormative regime that forecloses opportunities for non-normative sexual identities (e.g. queer+ identities) to develop. Similarly, in a study of Filipino transwomen call centre workers, David () found that some transwomen were expected to manage their sexual identity in ways that conformed to stereotypical notions of femininity (through bodily appearance, conduct, and dress). Call centre managers encouraged transwomen employees to be ‘wholesome’ (i.e. not being sexually promiscuous). Those transwomen employees who struggled to be ‘wholesome’ were constituted as less ‘productive’ and subjected to forms of exclusion given the more precarious nature of these undesirable organizational subjectivities. In these examples, the wider normalization of LGBTQ+ sexualities places emphasis on identity management strategies of integration that enable LGBT employees to be folded into the heteronormative fabric of organizational life. While there are tangible benefits for these employees (e.g. employment, being seen as professional and respectable) there are drawbacks, such as the
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heteronormative prescriptions that require employees to manage sexual identity in organizationally prescribed ways. In summary, identity management strategies reveal the various responses made by LGBTQ+ employees in order to negotiate the heteronormativity of organizational settings. Like identity disclosure, identity management is contingent, open to alteration and ongoing. When both bodies of literature are taken together, one yawning knowledge gap concerns the shortage of theoretical and empirical insights into how LGBTQ+ organization identities are mediated by age, class, ethnicity, race, and disability. More broadly, the relative lack of interest in LGBTQ+ identities by scholars focused generally on identities in organizations is also of concern (e.g. Brown, ; Caza et al., ). Overall, the study of organizations, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ identities remains empirically open.
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.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, I have reviewed some of the main concepts and streams of organizational research on LGBTQ+ identities. The significance of LGBTQ+ identities in organizations as a research topic is brought into sharp relief once organizations are acknowledged and understood as heteronormative. Crucially, organizations are neither universally nor uniformly heteronormative, as the research on identity disclosure and management attests. However, the persistence of heteronormativity in organizations, whether they are perceived as friendly, tolerant, accepting, or hostile towards LGBTQ+ sexualities, is an enduring challenge for LGBTQ+ employees. As such, identity disclosure and management remain salient in the lives of LGBTQ+ employees and merit considerable further attention from contemporary organization studies scholars.
N . Throughout the chapter, the LGBTQ+ acronym is deployed, where the + refers to the myriad sexualities that exist (e.g. asexual; androgynous; non-binary; pansexual; two-spirit). In some instances, a contracted acronym is used when referring to research that specifically focuses on some minority groups but not others (e.g. LGB).
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McIntosh, M. (). ‘The Homosexual Role’. Social Problems, (), –. Martos, A. J., Nezhad, S., and Meyer, I. H. (). ‘Variations in Sexual Identity Milestones among Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals’. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, (), –. Nardi, P. M. (). Gay Men’s Friendships: Invincible Communities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ng, E. S. and Rumens, N. (). ‘Diversity and Inclusion for LGBT Workers: Current Issues and New Horizons for Research’. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l’Administration, (), –. Ozturk, M. B. (). ‘Sexual Orientation Discrimination: Exploring the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Employees in Turkey’. Human Relations, (), –. Parry, T. (). ‘Travel Firms Must Come Out of the Corporate Closet’. https://www.ttgmedia.com/ news/lgbt/travel-firms-must-come-out-of-the-corporate-closet-. Pizer, J. C., Sears, B., Mallory, C., and Hunter, N. D. (). ‘Evidence of Persistent and Pervasive Workplace Discrimination against LGBT People: The Need for Federal Legislation Prohibiting Discrimination and Providing for Equal Employment Benefits’. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, , –. Ragins, B. (). ‘Sexual Orientation in the Workplace: The Unique Work and Career Experiences of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Workers’. In J. J. Martocchio (ed.), Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, vol. . Bingley: Emerald, pp. –. Ragins, B. R. (). ‘Disclosure Disconnects: Antecedents and Consequences of Disclosing Invisible Stigmas across Life Domains’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Ragins, B. R., Cornwell, J. M., and Miller, J. S. (). ‘Heterosexism in the Workplace: Do Race and Gender Matter?’ Group & Organization Management, (), –. Ragins, B. R., Singh, R., and Cornwell, J. M. (). ‘Making the Invisible Visible: Fear and Disclosure of Sexual Orientation at Work’. Journal of Applied Psychology, (), –. Rahman, M. (). ‘Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities’. Sociology, (), –. Reed, L. and Leuty, M. E. (). ‘The Role of Individual Differences and Situational Variables in the Use of Workplace Sexual Identity Management Strategies’. Journal of Homosexuality, (), –. Richardson, D. (). ‘Desiring Sameness? The Rise of a Neoliberal Politics of Normalisation’. Antipode, (), –. Richardson, D. and Monro, S. (). Sexuality, Equality and Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rostosky, S. S. and Riggle, E. D. (). ‘ “Out” at Work: The Relation of Actor and Partner Workplace Policy and Internalized Homophobia to Disclosure Status’. Journal of Counseling Psychology, (), –. Rumens, N. (). ‘Queering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Identities in Human Resource Development and Management Education Contexts’. Management Learning, (), –. Rumens, N. (). Queer Business: Queering Organization Sexualities. New York: Routledge. Rumens, N. and Broomfield, J. (). ‘Gay Men in the Police: Identity Disclosure and Management Issues’. Human Resource Management Journal, (), –. Rumens, N. and Kerfoot, D. (). ‘Gay Men at Work: (Re)Constructing the Self as Professional’. Human Relations, (), –. Savin-Williams, R. C. (). Mom, Dad, I’m Gay: How Families Negotiate Coming Out. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Schrimshaw, E. W., Siegel, K., Downing Jr, M. J., and Parsons, J. T. (). ‘Disclosure and Concealment of Sexual Orientation and the Mental Health of Non-Gay-Identified, Behaviorally Bisexual Men’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, (), –. Sedgwick, E. K. (). Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
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Abstract The notion of stigma refers to a perceived blemish or devaluation of a person or group, based upon a characteristic that a society (or a significant subset of it) deems unworthy. Individual-level stigma within organizations can arise from many different sources—the organization (e.g. corporate scandal, tainted products/services), the occupation (e.g. dirty work jobs), or the person him/herself (e.g. disabilities, mental illness, obesity). Given that stigma can underpin workplace interactions, the authors explore how it may have considerable consequences for an individual’s identity and perceived image. Indeed, they argue that stigma can affect all three levels of individual identity (collective, relational, and personal). They show how individual- and group-level stigma has been treated in the organizational literature, including research on individual-level and collective-level tactics to counteract the image and/or the effects of stigma at work. They also suggest how stigma research might move forward, especially in light of its close conceptual relations to identity and image.
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.................................................................................................................................. L’ face it. Not every job is glamorous. Indeed, considering the many ways that a person, job, or organization may be tainted, whether physically, socially, or morally, we begin to see that a wide swath of individuals in today’s organizational life are stigmatized in one way or another (Heatherton, ; Major and O’Brien, ). These stigmas—that we place on each other—can have enormous consequences for our identities. These effects can manifest at the individual, group, occupational, and organizational levels. This is the focus of our
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chapter—the intersection of stigma and individual identity.1 We revisit the conceptual foundations laid by Goffman () and integrate much of the subsequent four decades of stigma research with his ground-breaking ideas. We also link stigma to various identityrelated theories and literatures, including identity work, the tripartite approach to selfconcept (i.e. personal, relational, and collective identity), social identity theory, identity threat, image, occupational identity, and organizational identity (for recent reviews of these identity literatures, see Brown, and Caza et al., ). To do so, we first articulate the basic nature of stigma and its relation to individual identity, followed by a categorization of individual-level stigma. We then discuss several sources and challenges of individual-level stigma, followed by an exploration of various identity- and image-based responses to stigma, both by those who are stigmatized themselves and by others in the organization. Our chapter ends by looking forward, suggesting promising paths for future research that intertwines stigma and identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. Stigma is but one example of an identity threat for an individual. According to Goffman (), who provided the field’s seminal treatment on the topic, stigma arises when there is an apparent discrepancy between an individual’s desired and perceived identity. If there is an apparent discrepancy between these two identities, it can ‘spoil’ an individual’s identity (Goffman, ). When this occurs, the stigmatized attribute is recognized as a devalued identity (Crocker et al., ). Goffman () categorized multiple attributes that may be stigmatized, including what he termed as physical (e.g. physical deformities, disabilities), character blemishes (e.g. mental disabilities), and ‘tribal identities’ (e.g. race, religion). To best differentiate stigma from similar constructs, we adopt Link and Phelan’s comprehensive approach to stigma as existing when ‘elements of labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination co-occur in a power situation that allows these processes to unfold’ (Link and Phelan, : ). This requires an understanding of the relationship between an individual with a stigmatized identity and the situation or audience they interact with. Together, the individuals in an interaction or situation essentially determine stigma (Meisenbach, ). Therefore, an attribute that is stigmatizing in one situation may be neutral or positive in another. In addition, stigma is neither inevitable nor permanent and instead, due to shifts in culture or values, may change overtime (Paetzold et al., ). Indeed, whether something or someone is stigmatized at all (and to what degree) can vary based on cultural, historical, and demographic differences (Ashforth and Kreiner, ). For example, Gonzalez and Pérez-Floriano () examined police officers in border towns to show how varying cultural beliefs about questionable conduct interacted with stigma consciousness. Hence, stigma is not necessarily constant or absolute, but is socially constructed and therefore can change (Jones and King, ; Major and O’Brien, ). Overall, we emphasize that stigma has both image (outward-facing) and identity (inwardfacing) ramifications. And although image and identity are intrinsically linked, we find value in teasing apart the dynamics in order to more thoroughly unpack stigma processes. As Jones and King (: ) argued, identity management in the context of stigma is both a
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‘within- and between-person phenomenon’. Hence, how a person or collective experiences and responds to stigma will vary according to situational and personal factors.
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.................................................................................................................................. Not all stigmas are ‘created equal’. Although there are many ways to classify types of stigma, given our emphasis on the individual level of stigma, we highlight two particularly fruitful (from the past) and promising (for the future) themes—visibility and saliency. Visibility. An individual’s stigmatized feature(s) can vary in its degree of visibility (Jones and King, ), which depends both on the decoding capacity of the audience as well as ‘how well or how badly the stigma is adapted’ (Goffman, : ). If the stigma has a high degree of visibility, it will be difficult to conceal it from perceivers. Thus, despite an individual’s own desires, their identity may be recognized via stigma symbols (e.g. a hearing aid signalling a disability). These visible symbols draw attention towards an apparent discrepancy, leading to a reduction in the valuation of an individual (Goffman, ). If, in contrast, a stigma has a low degree of visibility, it may be unobservable. Some examples of often unobservable attributes include an individual’s values or beliefs, sexual orientation, or religion. Occupations also often provide an invisible stigma, as illustrated in this quotation, ‘When people meet me, they often have a hard time reconciling who I am with what I do. I am an eighty-year-old grandmother with silver hair, a “sweet old lady” to the average eye. But I am also a mortician: a funeral director, an undertaker, a servant in the death care industry’ (Nadle, : ). Indeed, this quotation also illustrates the point that stigma is often merely one component of a complex, multifaceted self. Goffman () further discusses visibility as the plight of the discredited versus the discreditable. The distinction is important because an individual’s goals may vary, depending on the stigma’s degree of visibility. For example, the goal for an individual with a visible stigma is often to manage the tension in interpersonal relations. This is illustrated in Mikolon et al.’s () study on homeless newspaper vendors; they found a ‘stigma magnification effect’ through which stigmatized individuals tried to compensate for their stigma in customer interactions. By contrast, the goal of an individual with an invisible stigma is to manage information about the stigma, such as when or if to disclose to a coworker. So while both scenarios require identity management, concealable stigmas pose the option ‘to display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case to whom, how, when, and where’ (Goffman, : ). Saliency. In addition to visibility, a stigmatized identity may vary in terms of its relative saliency. Identity salience is determined by both the identity’s subjective importance and situational relevance (Ashforth and Johnson, ). Subjective importance is determined by an individual’s preference. If an individual views their stigmatized identity as central to their individual core sense of self or related to their goals or values, then this aspect of their identity would have relatively high importance (Ashforth and Johnson, ). This notion of subjective importance is compatible with Stryker’s () salience hierarchy, where one aspect of an individual’s identity may take precedence over another. If a stigmatized
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identity has higher importance, then an individual is more likely to enact the identity, describe a situation as identity-relevant, and ‘retain and recall identity-related information’ (Ashforth and Johnson, : ). In addition to subjective importance, situational relevance also affects the saliency of a stigmatized identity. Situational relevance is determined by the social norms of a given context. Because an identity’s subjective importance tends to remain stable in the short term, but the situational relevance varies throughout an individual’s day, situational relevance is responsible for causing the most shifts in the relative salience of identities (Ashforth and Johnson, ). For example, a female may openly identify as a feminist to her female colleagues, but refrain from enacting this identity in front of her male colleagues whom she believes would stigmatize that identity. These saliency shifts are facilitated by overlap in identity content, generalization of identification, and transition scripts (Ashforth and Johnson, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Stigma can derive from a multitude of sources, across all levels of analysis (national, regional, organizational, occupational, group, or individual). Given our emphasis on individual level stigma in the workplace, we suggest two useful categorizations—() is the stigma source internal or external to the work domain, and () is the stigma short-term or long-term? Internal versus external to the work domain. To understand the source of stigma or stigmatization, it is useful to distinguish between () those sources that stem from within an organizational context and () those sources that stem from outside the work domain. Stigmas generated from an organizational context may derive from an individual’s roles, his/her experiences while performing these roles, the occupation, or affiliation with the broader organization or industry (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Paetzold et al., ). This source of stigma differs from stigma that is affixed to an individual for reasons not associated with the organization or occupation—characteristics that originate from outside of the work domain (e.g. sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, minority status, obesity, ex-prisoners). Unlike the stigma that arises from within the work domain, these sources of stigma may only partially overlap with membership within the organization and may or may not directly bear on job performance. This distinction in stigma sources is further exemplified by applying Ashforth and Johnson’s () model of nested identities versus cross-cutting identities. While nested identities reflect the formal social categories (e.g. job, workgroup, department) within an organization’s structure, cross-cutting identities include formal social categories (e.g. committees, task forces) as well as informal social categories (e.g. demographic clusters, common interest social groups) that may affect individuals across the embedded institutionalized organizational structure. The two sources of stigma help to determine and bound who is a member of the stigmatized social category within an organization. For example, a stigma that arises from a nested identity at a workgroup level would affect members of the
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workgroup, but a stigma that arises from a cross-cutting identity like gender may affect all female employees regardless of their formal identities (or membership in stigmatized groups) within the organization. In addition, these two sources of stigma (internal and external to the work domain) may interact, leading to a variety of challenges and responses. Short-term versus long-term stigma. Stigma scholars have distinguished between shorterand longer-term stigmas, which has implications for the stigma’s salience for the individual. Shorter-term stigmas might result from sudden events, such as a corporate scandal (at the organizational level) or the onset of a disability (at the individual level). Goffman () directly addressed some of these temporal issues in stigma by describing ‘affiliation cycles’—oscillations between supporting, identifying with, and participating with the newly added sub-identity due to the interaction between pre-stigma and post-stigma conceptions of one’s self. Goffman further described various socialization patterns that a stigmatized individual might deal with. Being born with a stigmatizing quality implies a different socialization process than a stigma that comes later in life. Further, there are differences even with temporary or later-in-life stigma. For example, some stigmas might occur any time during adulthood (e.g. job loss or permanent physical impairment due to injury) or a person might learn of a disability as an adult (e.g. a person on the autism spectrum un-diagnosed until adulthood). Another temporally-related issue in determining stigma, then, is whether an individual’s stigma comes from a more enduring character trait or from a stigmatizing event/downfall (such as misconduct charges or firing). Threats to organizational identity due to scandal, for example, can trickle down to become a shorter-term stigmatizing identity threat for employees (Piening et al., in press). Given such temporal influences, ranging from a single event to a core attribute of an individual’s identity, a stigma may vary in its salience. For example, Hudson and Okhuysen () discuss ‘core stigma’ as one that is enduring over time (such as the gay bathhouses they studied) versus ‘event stigma’, which often comes as a shock and typically dissipates. As another example, a CEO who is fired is often stigmatized by that event, and the stigmatization is greatest in those cases when the firing is attributed to a CEO’s personal character as opposed to exogenous factors such as the economy (Schepker and Barker, ). Note how this exemplifies that when blame for a stigmatizing event is affixed to the person rather than the situation, the stigma has more sticking power.
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.................................................................................................................................. Given that one’s sense of self is so often rooted in one’s salient roles, and that such roles may be tainted, stigma can create considerable challenges for those who experience it. As noted in our introduction, we take a dual approach to understanding stigma dynamics, examining both the image-based (outward-facing) and identity-based (inward-facing) processes associated with stigma. We now examine these image-based and identity-based challenges in turn. Image-based (outward-facing) challenges. Being discovered as having a stigmatized identity prejudices both the individual’s current social situation as well as established
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relationships because the image that others have of the individual becomes tainted. Thus, ‘the stigma and the effort to conceal it or remedy it will become “fixed” as part of personal identity’ (Goffman, : ). Due to the stigma, individuals may become subject to bullying, harassment, or social rejection (Paetzold et al., ). In addition, social scientific research and employment statistics show that people with various stigmas have a harder time getting and keeping jobs (Derous et al., ). Challenges often occur because perceivers infer negative attitudes, beliefs, or emotions about the stigmatized individual (Paetzold et al., ). This may lead perceivers to develop ideologies to explain the inferiority of the stigmatized, which may include using stigmatizing terms or attributing additional imperfections to the original ones (Goffman, ). In addition, perceivers may interpret minor accomplishments as signs of ‘remarkable and noteworthy capacities’ (Goffman, : ), while attributing minor failings as a ‘direct expression of stigmatized differentness’ (Goffman, : ). Furthermore, non-stigmatized individuals may either avoid creating new or terminate existing relations with stigmatized individuals because of a fear of ‘courtesy stigma’ (Goffman, ), i.e. the tendency of stigma to spread from the stigmatized to their close connections (e.g. prison guards being stigmatized through their contact with prisoners (Ashforth et al., ); see Kulik et al., for a model of this process). All of these behaviours increase discrimination towards stigmatized identities. Identity-based (inward-facing) challenges. Stigmatized individuals may also face internal identity challenges. For example, with an increased awareness of one’s differentness, a stigmatized individual may ‘be self-conscious and calculating about the impression he is making, to a degree and in areas of conduct which he assumes others are not’ (Goffman, : ). As we will note below, a stigmatized individual must choose to conceal, reveal, or signal their stigma to others, each of which can bring significant challenges. If an individual chooses to conceal or signal (in contrast to reveal), the strategies require relatively high amounts of attentional resources (Clair et al., ). Ragins et al. () studied the effects of disclosing an invisible stigma and found that the most severe negative consequences are associated with concealing a stigma in both work and nonwork domains. This form of denial led to ambiguity and stress, while the healthiest situation was full disclosure in both work and non-work domains, as to avoid a ‘disclosure disconnect’ (Ragins et al., ). Yet, Blithe and Wolfe () found that stigmatized individuals (in their case, brothel workers) over-emphasize segmenting (as opposed to integrating) work and non-work domains. Stigmatized individuals may also form negative self-identities that become self-fulfilling prophecies (Paetzold et al., ). Indeed, as predicted by system justification theory, members of stigmatized groups often accept and internalize the very societal beliefs and ideologies that stigmatize them (Kreiner et al., ). In addition, because multiple stigmatized identities may be salient at the same time (e.g. occupation and disability), individuals may face tension as a member of two distinctly stigmatized groups. For example, during a conversation about race, a black female may feel that she cannot partition support from her race towards her gender, but she may also feel the opposing tension in a conversation about gender (that she cannot advocate for her race), despite her overlapping identity as a black female. Research on those who occupy membership in two different groups (so-called ‘edgewalkers’) illustrates the cognitive challenges of such a position (Krebs, ).
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Research on employee identification further illustrates the possible perils of being affiliated with a stigmatized organization or occupation. For example, research has shown that dirty work employees often experience ambivalent identification, the state of both identifying and dis-identifying with an entity (Kreiner et al., ). Similarly, when one’s organization becomes stigmatized (such as through scandal), individuals associated with the organization have been found to experience various forms of ambivalent identification. These forms all produce cognitive and emotional strain for the individual, and include ‘selective identification’ in which the individual chooses to identify with only certain parts or people in the organization; ‘conditional identification’ when the individual declares that identification might be resolved in the future but only if the organization changes or meets various demands; and ‘reconciled identification’ in which the individual goes through a difficult ambivalence experience but ultimately resolves the negative aspects of dis-identification (Eury et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. As noted, individuals with a concealable stigma may choose to conceal, reveal, or signal this identity to others (Jones and King, ; Ragins, ). Engaging in one of these ‘stigma identity management’ strategies is constrained by the type of stigma (i.e. relative visibility and saliency), but can have powerful short- and long-term effects in the workplace (Lyons et al., ). The primary predictor of an individual’s decision to conceal, reveal, or signal is the interaction an individual has with the confidante. If an individual anticipates acceptance, then they are more likely to engage in revealing rather than concealing behaviours (King et al., ). The decision to conceal, reveal, or signal also involves a calculation of the potential positive and negative outcomes. Whereas the risk of revealing is often most salient, potential positives of revealing include identity congruence (Kreiner and Sheep, ), reduced cognitive dissonance (DeJordy, ), and higher competence and warmth evaluations (Lyons et al., ). Conceal. If an individual wishes to de-emphasize a stigmatized attribute, they may attempt to ‘pass’ or otherwise conceal this aspect of their identity. Passing is ‘the management of undisclosed discrediting information about [the] self ’ (Goffman, : ). For example, in a practice called ‘resume whitening’, members of ethnic minorities sometimes conceal or downplay racial cues in job applications (Kang et al., ). Passing can also be used by those with ‘temporary’ stigmas, such as pregnant women who conceal their pregnancies as long as possible in order to avoid a negative bias against them (Jones et al., ). Concealing, we argue, can take its toll on identity authenticity, as the individual can have a strong sense of inauthenticity towards others when they hide aspects of who they are. Further, individuals who act inauthentically and engage in ‘facades of conformity’, which are false representations made by employees to appear as if they support organizational values, are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion and leave the organization (Hewlin, ).
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Reveal. Individuals may also choose to reveal their stigma. In these instances, individuals may aim to celebrate their uniqueness by using their stigma for ‘secondary gains’ (Goffman, : ). This route can aid in authenticity of identity—since the individual is consistent between inward and outward expressions—but can come with pragmatic costs of being stigmatized. In addition, individuals may choose to see their stigma as a ‘blessing in disguise, especially because of what it is felt that suffering can teach one about life and people’ (Goffman, : ) or use the stigma as a basis for organizing life, accounting for why they possess a given stigma (Goffman, ). After revealing a stigma to others, a stigmatized individual sometimes subsequently chooses to ‘cover’ (Goffman, ), which involves hiding reminders of that already-disclosed stigma. For example, an individual might disclose that they are hard of hearing, but subsequently avoid asking people to repeat what they have said, lest they remind others of the impairment. We suggest that covering can be used to strike a balance between authenticity (by disclosing the stigma) and image preservation (by not repeatedly reminding others of the stigma). Signal. Individuals may also attempt to signal a potential stigma. This is an information seeking strategy that an individual may use to better gauge how an audience may respond to their stigmatized identity (Jones and King, ). Signalling behaviours include dropping hints, clues, or providing implicit messages (Clair et al., ). This strategy is most often utilized in ambiguous situations, where an individual is unclear about the relative risk of disclosure (Jones and King, ). Signalling might prove to be a bit of a tightrope walk in terms of identity authenticity; in a sense, the person is partially disclosing their stigma (which conveys authenticity) but in another sense the person is partially withholding their stigma (frustrating authenticity). Once an individual is known for a stigma they possess—whether because they have revealed an invisible stigma or because the stigma is visible—they have available to them a variety of outward-facing responses to manage the meaning and impression of that stigma. Some of these strategies are undertaken more independently, whereas others are performed collectively. Individual strategies. The research on dirty work occupations has yielded numerous tactics undertaken to counter the effects of taint, many of which are transferable beyond rolebased stigmas. One category of these tactics involves ‘ideological techniques’ that reframe, recalibrate, or refocus the meaning of work; these are elaborated in Ashforth and Kreiner (). They note how reframing involves highlighting the work with positive worth or minimizing the negative worth; this creates a re-evaluation of the underlying meaning of the stigma. Recalibrating changes the standards by which the quality and the degree of stigmatized aspects of a person or role are evaluated; this makes seemingly ‘big problems’ seem little and vice versa. Refocusing attempts to shift attention away from the stigmatized components of the person/role toward the non-stigmatized components; like a cognitive ‘shell game’, it redirects focus from one aspect to another. Many of these ideological techniques use discursive strategies, and Toyoki and Brown (), in their study of prisoners, suggest three categories for such strategies: appropriation of the negative label (which casts the label into a more flattering light); claiming coveted social identities (such as parent, spouse, friend); and representing oneself as a ‘good person’ (despite the stigma).
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In addition to these ideological techniques, which focus on attributes of the stigmatized entity (job, person, organization), another set of processes focus on managing relationships with outsiders/non-stigmatized individuals. One type of this process is referred to as ‘social weighting’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, ) in which stigmatized individuals distinguish among other types of people and treat them differentially. Specifically, they can () ‘condemn condemners’ (Ashforth et al., ), or discredit those who would stigmatize them in order to delegitimate their claims; () support supporters, in which members of the in-group and others friendly toward them are elevated in importance; and () engage in selective social comparisons to cast themselves in a more positive light than other similarlystigmatized individuals or groups. Ashforth et al. () also found that stigmatized workers would directly confront clients and members of the public who challenged their dignity, and would then extol the virtues of their work and/or rebut the challenges. Beyond the ideological and social weighting techniques, qualitative research on stigmatized workers has also shown several other tactics to manage taint. One approach, for example, is ‘social buffering’ in which stigmatized individuals surround themselves with similar (or sympathetic) others in order to provide a bulwark against identity threats (Ashforth et al., ). This can even go so far as choosing an occupation or organization based on social buffering. For example, gay men and lesbians often concentrate in jobs that provide a high level of task independence in order to protect themselves from possible threats stemming from interpersonal interactions (Tilcsik et al., ). Other techniques uncovered in stigma research include using humour as a cognitive defence; overcompensating for perceived taints (in order to show competency); distancing oneself from the tainted job/person/organization; accepting the limits of countering the stigma (rather than trying to counter them); and ‘identity writing’—therapeutic journaling about the stigma and its effects on identity (Ashforth et al., ; Brewis and Godfrey, ; Taub et al., ). Collective strategies. Thus far, we have focused on strategies undertaken individually, but other strategies are conducted collectively, whether in localized groups or more broadly. Indeed, stigmatized individuals can find much potential in banding together to counter the effects of stigma rather than facing it idiosyncratically on their own (Ashforth and Kreiner, ). When members of a stigmatized group feel threatened, and this threat sensitizes the members to perceive events and issues through the lens of their stigmatized category, stigmatization can lead to group empowerment (O’Brien, ). The group may advocate for softer labels for their stigmatized category, appear as ‘speakers’ (Goffman, ), or sponsor publications that give a ‘voice to shared feelings’ (Goffman, : ). Research has also uncovered small group processes that help stigmatized individuals prepare for problematic interactions with non-stigmatized individuals. For example, O’Brien () found two types of ‘stigma management rehearsals’—small group interactions among stigmatized individuals through which leaders and members encourage their peers to adopt normative stigma responses. In the first type, direct preparation, stigmatized individuals were coached regarding the anticipation of an impending interaction with outside stigmatizers. In the second type, deep education, group members used back-stage time together to coach each other in acceptable cultural justifications for their stigma management strategies, and to explore a wider range of potential stigma responses. Through small interest groups or larger collective movements, ‘stigma can be a call to action to overcome discrimination and restore justice’ (Paetzold et al., : ). For
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example, both ‘culture of the deaf ’ and ‘queer theory’ arose from positive identity responses to stigmatization (Paetzold et al., ). In these scenarios, individuals within a psychological group, which describes a group of people that have the same social category membership but do not necessarily interact with other members (Turner, ), came together to form a social group (Ashforth and Johnson, ), which has a social structure with roles and norms and in which members have interpersonal interdependencies and interactions, as well as collective goals. This shift can enable stigmatized individuals to move beyond idiosyncratic responses to stigma towards more coordinated ones, as well as foster a sense of entitativity (or ‘groupness’). Indeed, some research has found that stigmatized groups can quite overtly manage the meaning of the stigma affixed to them. For example, members of mixed martial arts (MMA) occupations used the stigma to their advantage by () coopting negative labels in order to raise approval of supportive audiences and () drawing from those labels to ‘correct’ the antagonistic beliefs held by non-supportive audiences (Helms and Patterson, ). Hence, stigmatized individuals can actively and creatively manage the attributes that give rise to the taint, and (at least partially) manage outsiders’ negative reactions.
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.................................................................................................................................. Thus far, our emphasis on responses to stigma has been on the stigmatized individuals themselves. But, as Mikolon et al. () note, to focus only on the stigmatized person is to miss half of the equation. Hence, we now consider how non-stigmatized individuals can respond to those who are stigmatized, and the potential effects on the stigmatized. Indeed, individuals may proactively look towards others to help manage their stigma. As Goffman (: –) notes, in most cases stigmatized individuals will find there are ‘sympathetic others who are ready to adopt his standpoint in the world and share with him that he is human and essentially normal’. These sympathetic others provide moral support and sometimes share the same or a different stigma (Ashforth et al., ). Various corners of the stigma literature have used varying terms for such individuals, including ‘allies’ (Sabat et al., ), ‘go-betweens’ (Goffman, ; Jones et al., ), and ‘the wise’ (Goffman, ). Although the labels and definitions vary somewhat, they share the common attribute of an individual who is not him/herself stigmatized (at least with the same stigma) and who is trying to aid or assist the stigmatized individual. These individuals often participate in minimizing tensions and smoothing awkward relationships between stigmatized and non-stigmatized individuals, as well as in advocating for stigmatized workers more broadly speaking (Jones et al., ). These non-stigmatized individuals can be thought of in two categories of roles—formal and informal. Those who are in formal roles occupy organizationally-based positions that are designed to help stigmatized individuals. These include, among others, social services counsellors (Vogel et al., ), mental health workers (Schulze, ), job coaches for individuals with disabilities (Johnson et al., ), human resources managers (LengnickHall et al., ), and ethics/compliance officers (Treviño et al., ). By contrast, other
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individuals are informal allies to stigmatized individuals—people without a job title or position that formally prescribes caring for the stigmatized but who do so for personal and/ or moral reasons. These informal allies are often those who can relate to a stigmatized person through personal experiences with stigma, whether their own or others’. For example, an employee with gay or lesbian family members may be an ally for a gay or lesbian co-worker. Importantly, these non-stigmatized individuals can play key roles both for helping the stigmatized individual cope with the stigma and in helping to de-stigmatize that person. Such de-stigmatization might only be ‘local’ in that only the immediate co-workers and organization are affected, or it might be more globalized and longer-term, affecting (eventually) society more broadly (Johnson et al., ). Dirty work research has shown how friends and family members of stigmatized workers can provide important resources, both in terms of coping and identity management. These include () social supports, in which comfort is given to the stigmatized individual, and () social buffering, in which the stigmatized individual is protected from outsiders deemed as potentially harmful or identity threatening (Ashforth and Kreiner, ). Further, Ashforth et al. () documented several ways that managers, in particular, can buffer or counter the effects of stigma for their subordinates. These can occur during the three overarching phases of the lifecycle of an employee—recruitment/selection, socialization, and continuing employment. During the recruitment/selection phase, managers were found to select individuals who had an affinity for the dirty work or components of it, as well as to provide a ‘realistic stigma preview’ to potential workers so that they could selfselect out of the job if it would not be a good fit. During the socialization phase, managers used targeted divestiture to expunge previous perceptions that would make the job harder; helped workers develop perspective-taking to reframe the stigma; helped newcomers to manage external relationships (e.g. family and friends’ perspectives/biases); and utilized desensitization and immersion techniques. During the continuing employment stage, managers fostered social validation to reinforce their worth and value both as a person and as an employee; protected workers from hazards associated with the stigma; and negotiated what is known as the ‘front-stage/back-stage’ boundary, helping workers understand the kinds of behaviours that should not be shown to the public (‘front-stage’) but should only be expressed among safer in-groups (‘back-stage’). Taken together, these managerial strategies suggest a wide variety of options available to those who would like to help co-workers, friends, or family members assuage the negative effects of stigma.
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.................................................................................................................................. So, what is next for the world of stigma and identity research? We view this as an intersection between two fields of study that—despite their own rich histories thus far independently—bears a tremendous amount of potential for future research when examined together. Given the clear identity implications of stigma, and given the widespread nature of stigma, studying the intersection of these two domains more thoroughly is highly promising and can build on the inroads established thus far.
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First, we suggest that researchers examine how stigma is related to the tripartite approach to individual identity—that is, the personal, relational, and collective levels of the self-concept (Brewer and Gardner, ). Bear in mind that levels of self refer to how an individual defines him/herself in terms of the identities attached to each level of analysis. As we noted above, stigma might stem from any or all of these three self levels. On the personal level, something the person has done might lead to a stigma (e.g. a moral or legal transgression). On the relational level, an individual might receive a ‘courtesy stigma’ (Goffman, ; Kulik et al., ) because of the people they work with (e.g. prison guards). And on the collective level of self, an individual might belong to a stigmatized group through their occupation (e.g. dirty work) or organization that has been stigmatized by a current event or core stigma (Hudson and Okhuysen, ; Piening et al., in press). Given that recent research has unpacked key differences across these three levels of self (e.g. Ashforth et al., ; Sluss and Ashforth, ), future research can examine the interrelatedness of these three levels of self in the context of stigma management. For example, how does a stigma from one level of self cross over or contaminate another level? Or, how do multiple stigmas occurring within or across levels of self operate? Or, do the management strategies have differing degrees of efficacy based on the level of the stigma? Or, how does one’s identity orientation (Brickson, ) affect stigma management? Exploring the tripartite approach to identity in the light of these stigma dynamics can help answer these and other pertinent questions. Second, we consider the possible connections between stigma identity management and other literatures to be highly promising. On the one hand, the concept of stigma has been compared to several other concepts in its nomological net, particularly such closely-related constructs such as legitimacy, status, respect, and reputation (e.g. Ashforth, ; Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Helms et al., ; Jones and King, ; Rogers et al., ). On the other hand, we see great value in connecting stigma identity management to a wide swath of both traditional and contemporary organizational behaviour and management topics. On the more traditional side, these could include topics such as leadership (e.g. how leadership theories might need to be altered if leading stigmatized groups or when the leader is stigmatized); motivation (e.g. how managers can overcome motivational challenges of stigmatized work and/or working with stigmatized people); teams (e.g. how team dynamics change when one member is stigmatized or when the group as a whole is stigmatized). Regarding more contemporary trends, we can envision research examining stigma in the so-called ‘gig economy’ (e.g. how emerging occupations shed their initial stigmas of low credibility) or in the face of increasing technology usage in the workplace (e.g. how various technologies exacerbate or ameliorate some of the typical effects of stigma). Third, we call on organizational scholars to look to stigmatized populations who have not received their due attention in our top journals. This would include workers with intellectual disabilities (e.g. autism, Down syndrome (Johnson and Joshi, )), physical disabilities (e.g. hearing or vision impaired (Lengnick-Hall et al., )); workers with learning disorders (e.g. dyslexia (Bartlett et al., )); and workers with mental health challenges (e.g. depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder (Cook et al., ; Michalak et al., ; Schulze, )). We see this as the next frontier of stigma research in the workplace, given that very little space in our premier journals has been devoted to these populations, and yet they represent an increasing proportion of the workplace. For example, one in every
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sixty-eight children in the USA is being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders and over a half a million youth on the spectrum will be entering the workplace in the next five years (Center for Disease Control, ). The pragmatic reality is that we need better to understand the processes experienced not only by these stigmatized workers themselves, but by those around them as well. Such research can inform both practical applications and theoretical advances, especially as we intertwine the fields of stigma and identity together.
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.................................................................................................................................. In summary, given that individual-level stigma within organizations can arise from so many different sources—the organization, the occupation, or the person him/herself—and that stigma can underpin workplace interactions, we clearly see how it can have considerable consequences for an individual’s identity and perceived image. Indeed, stigma can affect all three levels of individual identity (collective, relational, and personal) and therefore influence a multitude of workplace outcomes. Given the pervasiveness of stigma and its potential applications to a wide swath of organizational phenomena and literatures, we urge scholars to further interweave stigma dynamics into their own areas of research.
N . Although stigma occurs at multiple levels of analysis—individual, group, occupational, and organizational—given the focus of this volume on the individual level of identity, we maintain our focus on that level of analysis.
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Nostalgic Identities in Organizations .......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter starts with an exanimation of the emotion of nostalgia drawn from different fields, including psychology, politics, and organization studies and identifies some current points of agreement as well as disagreement. After a brief discussion of current conceptualizations of identity, especially in relation to emotions, the author looks at the literature that seeks to link nostalgia to identity both as a group phenomenon and as an individual experience. The chapter examines in turn nostalgia in relation to individual identity, organizational identities, and more broadly social and national identities. It is argued that nostalgia aims to maintain a sense of continuity in the face of discontinuity and disruption, both at the individual and group levels. It is an emotion that can strengthen communal bonds but can also assume aggressive forms against ‘othered’ social groups that are cast in the role of wreckers or disruptors. Within organizations, nostalgia can support employee resistance against modernizing forces, but can also be appropriated by modernizing management regimes to legitimize changes ostensibly aimed at restoring desirable qualities of the past. The chapter concludes by proposing that nostalgia can be viewed as an anchor to the past, one that stops identities from drifting or being overwhelmed or wrecked by a changing world and offers some reflections for future research.
‘The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite that ever I was born to set it right’ (Hamlet, Act , Scene )
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that stood in the way of progress and modernity. By the last decade of the twentieth century this was changing and since then there has been a growing academic interest in nostalgia along with a more nuanced and complex appraisal of its personal and social import. In , the ISI Web of Science listed five articles with nostalgia in the title, a figure that had grown to ninety-three in . This rise in interest in nostalgia may be related to the part it has played in politics and especially the rise of populist movements across many nations which regularly seek to evoke memories of past glories. These include Trump’s election to the presidency on the back of the promise to ‘Make America great again’ and a Brexit referendum result which, in the words of Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, was ‘driven by nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’ (https://www.libdemvoice.org/vincecable-on-today-this-morning-.html). While interest in nostalgia by academics and political commentators is relatively novel, nostalgia in the public sphere has long fuelled many areas of consumption, including the heritage and museum industries, large parts of the cultural industries including film, music, advertising, and the fine arts, as well as various ‘styles’ like retro and vintage. In addition, we have become increasingly aware of the part that nostalgia for a nation’s glory days has played in firing up various nationalist dreams, not least those of Nazi and fascist movements. More significantly, for the purposes of this chapter, it is entirely implausible to imagine that nostalgia was ever absent from the kaleidoscope of emotions that constitute the experiences of individuals working in organizations, especially older ones. It is also quite bizarre to imagine that there was ever a time when people did not seek to incorporate in their identities, however these may be conceptualized, elements and stories from their past, lovingly preserved and sorely missed. As a feature of identity, the relevance of nostalgia is readily apparent. Daily experiences of life in organizations as well as several academic studies testify that many people, especially older ones, rely on memories and narratives from their organization’s past to construct and maintain their identities. This past is sometimes experienced as representing a Golden Age for their organization or at any rate to be much better than the present; it is often seen as separated by the present by an irreversible discontinuity and it is felt to be irredeemably lost. Yet, frequent references to this past in reminiscences, narratives, stories as well as tangible artefacts, like images and objects, can make the nostalgic past very much part of an organization’s present. At the same time, it is rare for nostalgia to define fully a person’s, let alone an organization’s identity. Such may be the case for individuals suffering from clinical obsession with their past, people who have been identified as literally living in a time cocoon made up of old objects and old memories (Kaplan, ; Sohn, ; Werman, ). Instead, for many individuals nostalgia is one of several elements that constitute their identity, an element that assumes prominence at certain moments and recedes in others. As a feature of collective or social identities too, nostalgia may assume a particular profile in certain circumstances and at certain periods and recede at others. What is undeniable though is that nostalgia, as an emotion and as a feature of different stories and narratives, readily becomes ‘a component of self, that valuable but precarious web of truths, half-truths and fictions which surround the entity which we familiarly refer to as “I” ’ (Gabriel, : ). For this reason, it would seem that nostalgia should be viewed as a valuable conceptual
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resource for identity and identity work theorists, one that potentially holds the key to how identities, in whatever way they are conceptualized, can be anchored in the past of individuals and collectivities. And yet in spite of its apparent attractions, nostalgia presents a problem for identity theorists. In the first instance, it is an emotion and emotions have been generally neglected in the mushrooming literature of identities, personal, group, and social (Brown, : ). In his detailed review of emotion and identity work, Winkler () notes that the majority of studies use emotion to describe the experiences of identity work defined as ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising’ identities (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ) but not as constitutive of identities or indeed identity work. By far the commonest emotion in this connection has been anxiety (Winkler, : ) with lesser attention being given to excitement and joy (Ibarra and Petriglieri, ), love of the work (Clarke et al., ), and cynical disdain or disgust (Contu, ; Fleming and Spicer, ). In general terms then, it would seem that emotion has not been a core element of identity theory at least in the area of organizations and, as such, the exploration of specific emotions like anger, envy, hate, fear, and, indeed, nostalgia has been limited. There is another reason for the relative neglect of nostalgia. There has been, among scholars, a generalized dislike and a visceral mistrust of an emotion that is always close to sentimentality, one that appears to offer nothing but an emasculated critique spawned by ‘a melancholic yearning for a lost authenticity, whether cultural, moral or ontological’ (Grey, : ). Indeed, if nostalgia is the ‘the composite feeling of loss, lack and longing’ (Pickering and Keightley, : emphasis added), it can be viewed, to put it bluntly, as a losers’ emotion, an emotion that constantly harps about the good old days and has an inherently conservative bias. At a time when ‘innovation’, ‘creative destruction’, and ‘disruption’ are lionized as universal virtues, mulling over the past seems decidedly passé. This hostility to tradition persists to our times. Yet, a decline of faith in large-scale utopian visions has arguably led to some rehabilitation of the past which makes a re-evaluation of the role of nostalgia in identity theory timely. This chapter starts with an exanimation of the emotion of nostalgia drawn from different fields, including psychology, politics, and organization studies and identifies some current points of agreement as well as disagreement. After a brief look into current conceptualizations of identity, especially in relation to emotions, we look at the literature that seeks to link nostalgia to identity both as a group phenomenon and as an individual experience. We examine in turn nostalgia in relation to individual identity, organizational identities, and more broadly social and national identities. The chapter concludes by proposing that nostalgia can be viewed as an anchor to the past, one that stops identities from drifting or being overwhelmed or wrecked by a changing world and offers some reflections for future research on the subject.
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.................................................................................................................................. The word ‘nostalgia’ originated in medicine as one of those terms which sought to medicalize a complex of emotional and behavioural disorders. It was first used by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in to describe the morbid symptoms of Swiss
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mercenaries who spent long periods away from home. The term combined the Greek words ‘nostos’ meaning homecoming and ‘algia’ or pain and was used to signify acute or morbid homesickness, a sense it still retains in some European languages. It was only in the early part of the twentieth century that nostalgia was de-medicalized, and its emphasis shifted from a place to a time in the past that becomes the focus of loss, lack, and longing. As such, it represents a warm but bittersweet feeling of yearning and longing towards the past, which can be experienced at an individual, group, or national level. But what kind of past is nostalgia endlessly fixated to? This is a highly idealized image of the past, devoid of flaws or blemishes. This past is experienced as valuable and precious (Kaplan, ), a valuable heritage or patrimoine (Brown and Humphreys, : ) that needs to be preserved, celebrated, protected, and treasured. The nostalgic past is quite distinct from the historical past and positively eschews any encounter with the work of historians who may qualify or undermine it. The nostalgic past can be a past of struggle, strife, and suffering provided that these can be viewed as serving a higher purpose or being crowned by a happy end (Davis, : viii). For this reason, nostalgia must be seen as par excellence a mythopoetic emotion, one from which myths and legends spring as expressions of collective fantasies, giving voice to deeper and often unconscious wishes and desires (Samuel and Thompson, ). Nostalgia thus reflects the discontents of the present rather than the contents of the past, a point on which most researchers agree (e.g. Daniels, ; DaSilva and Faught, ; Davis, ; Gabriel, ; Ivanova, ; Murphy, ; Werman, ). And for this reason, the foci on which nostalgia fixates can give us deep insights into those elements of the present that cause discomfort, anxiety, and distress, making nostalgia a useful instrument for the study of individuals and groups. While nostalgia creates a past in glowing manner, it also affirms that this is a part of a ‘world we have lost’. In organizational terms, the past is frequently separated from the present through a radical discontinuity which cannot be undone often referred to as ‘the changes’ (Gabriel ), such as the move to a new building, the introduction of a radically new technology, a corporate take-over or a new managerial regime or ethos. Employees who experienced the change from old to new see themselves as different from those who joined later, and at times may see themselves as ‘survivors’ from an earlier age. Their past is a shared heritage that binds them together, and excludes those who never tasted life before the fall. While nostalgic narratives are of loss, nostalgia is quite distinct from mourning and grief. The devastating loss of a child or loss of a beloved partner are unlikely to trigger nostalgic feelings. Nostalgia, unlike the emotions of grief, guilt, and sorrow associated with mourning, is not a means of overcoming or managing a loss; instead it seeks to compensate for it and make up for ongoing current discontents and frustrations. This is what gives it its sentimental and wallowing qualities, restoring a measure of self-esteem and interest in sharing one’s experiences with others. In recent times, a different type of nostalgia, distinct from the sentimental or elegiac varieties described above, has attracted scholarly attention, not so much at the level of individuals or organizations but at the level of nations and regions. Following the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe there were widespread reports about the rise of ‘nostalgia for real socialism’ (Velikonja, ), a retrospective utopia of the socialist past as a time of order, solidarity, justice, and stability. This nostalgia frequently assumed a strident aggressive quality, often aligned with a yearning for a ‘strong leader’, capable of restoring
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order and bringing back the glories of the past (Boym, ; Marsh, ). Aggressive nostalgia has in recent decades become a feature of populist and nationalist discourses that extol a heroic national past free from the dominant afflictions of the present, economic, political, demographic, ideological, or technological. This abrasive and aggressive nostalgia easily assumes xenophobic and chauvinistic qualities. It does not recall a past through rosetinted glasses, but rather seeks to resurrect the mythological past, by force if necessary (Gabriel, ). This aggressive nostalgia is even more likely than sentimental nostalgia to cement social bonds of belonging and community (Bennett, ; Boym, ; Sedikides and Wildschut, ) in the face of a threatening other (Smeekes, ; Smeekes and Verkuyten, ).
I I N
.................................................................................................................................. Individual nostalgia may be defined as ‘sentimental longing for one’s past’ (Sedikides and Wildschut, ) brought about by experiences and memories that evoke powerful feelings. In spite of the recognition that the past is lost, nostalgia, at least in its English usage, refuses to collapse into despair even if, at times, it is tinted by feelings such as self-pity or melancholy. Nostalgia can then be viewed as a socially constructed emotion and different languages deploy the word nostalgia or cognate terms in different ways. For this reason, individuals may actually experience nostalgia differently depending on their cultural and social contexts (Fineman, ). Individual nostalgia may be an intensely private affair or it may be one shared with others in a variety of ways, including showing and sharing photographs, music, and other artefacts, participation in group rituals and ceremonies, and in telling stories and narratives. In his foundational book on nostalgia, Davis (: ) argued that such nostalgic narratives are ‘one of the means . . . we employ in the never ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities’. Davis devoted an entire chapter of his book to how nostalgic recollections shape identity, arguing that such narratives help us deal with life’s discontinuities and dislocations by creating a sense of continuity and wholeness in our identities. More particularly, when shared and honoured by others, nostalgic narratives enhance our self-esteem and self-confidence. The fact that we experienced first-hand momentous events or, even, that we helped shape them bestows on us a certain selfworth (Davis, : ). No matter how low, infirm, or powerless we are now, we take heart from earlier glories and grandeurs. With passing time, as physical and other infirmities reduce our social position and status, recollections of a time when we espoused unconventional beliefs and tastes, when we lived life to the full, when we stood out from the crowd, when the time was ‘our era’ act as powerful consolations for current disappointments and sorrows. In this way nostalgia enables a ‘has been’ to ‘be someone’ again through his or her enduring association with the past. In addition, in focusing on positive memories, nostalgia filters out of the past unpleasant or painful events that would lead to shame, guilt, or disappointment. When reminded of such events, a nostalgic person is likely to devalue them, rationalize them away, or dismiss them altogether. In this manner, identities based on nostalgia can be purged of painful or negative experiences and events.
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The positive effects of nostalgia for personal identities have been further amplified by extensive experimental research by Sedikides and associates (Sedikides et al., ). Like Davis, they view nostalgia as a response to discontinuity and in particular negative discontinuity, exercising a positive influence on how individuals perceive themselves, their lives, and their relationships with others. Furthermore, nostalgia may protect individuals (Juhl et al., ) against threats posed to their identities (Petriglieri, ) by subsequent failings and reversals. More generally, Sedikides and Wildschut (: ) argue that nostalgia ‘helps people find meaning in their lives, and it does so primarily by increasing social connectedness (a sense of belongingness and acceptance), and secondarily by augmenting self-continuity (a sense of connection between one’s past and one’s present)’. What makes this individual nostalgia particularly apposite to the study of identity in organizations is that it is well-suited to the particular types of discontents fostered by organizational life and experiences. By their very nature, bureaucratic, impersonal, emotionally curtailed, organizations harbour the types of disillusionments and discontents for which nostalgia can supply effective consolation, namely injuries to our narcissism, our need to believe that we are unique, important, and irreplaceable. Impersonality is a fundamental affront to our narcissism. From being unique members of a family or a community, organizations from school onwards consign us to the status of cogs, important perhaps, but ultimately dispensable and replaceable. Organizational nostalgia (Gabriel, ), i.e. the nostalgia for the organization of old, focuses on those features that we find unpalatable in today’s organization: in contrast to today’s formality and impersonality the organization of old is remembered as having a family spirit and being a community; in contrast to the facelessness of today’s organization, the organization of old was full of extraordinary characters; in contrast to the ruthless, careerist leaders of today’s organization, the organization of old was led by people who cared. As we noted earlier, nostalgia knows how to pick its terrain in precisely those areas where the past is sure to triumph over the present. If today’s organization is experienced as chaotic and disorderly, the past is cast as orderly and organized; if today’s organization is experienced as unjust, the past is cast as a time of organizational justice and fairness; if today’s is seen as being full of conspiracies and feuds, the past is cast as a time of harmony and peace, and so forth. In all of these ways, organizational nostalgia proclaims that our identity as members of an organization was shaped at a time when important qualities, values, and principles were held in high esteem; hence they remain core features of our identity now, at a time when these qualities, values, and principles have been degraded or corrupted. In all of these ways, nostalgia seeks to undo the painful effects of living in a world of impersonal organizations, as if the organization of old was nothing but an extension of our loving, caring family and were at its centre. And in so doing, nostalgia seeks to restore our ailing narcissism.
O N G I
.................................................................................................................................. While nostalgia can be an intensely private emotion shaping to a greater or lesser extent an individual’s identity, it can also be a social emotion experienced by groups facing similar
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challenges and threats. As such, it can be a feature of group identities, a source of solidarity and community and even a driving force for collective action. As in the case of individual nostalgia, group nostalgia thrives on transition, on the subjective discontinuities that engender our ‘yearning for continuity’ (Davis, : ). In particular, it can act as a means of maintaining respect and bolstering collective identity, especially for ‘forgotten’ or under-privileged people, in times of uncertainty. In two seminal contributions, Brown and Humphreys (, ) examine the role of nostalgia in organizations and argue that it is ‘key to the understanding of the dynamics of individual and organizational identityconstruction’ (Brown and Humphreys, : ). A study of faculty members of a Turkish vocational training institution revealed how nostalgia acted as a coping mechanism for employees dealing with unwelcome and threatening changes. Nostalgia, they argue, ‘informs collective self-narratives as people reflect on the attractive images and shared experiences that participation in the organization offers as loci for identification and loyalty’ (Brown and Humphreys, : –). Such narratives do not merely bolster self-esteem and solidarity but, equally, they act as defences in two interrelated ways: first, they defend against anxieties brought about by progressive encroachment of education values by Islamic ones and managerial assaults on academic freedoms, and second, they act as a source of resistance to these threats. In this regard, Brown and Humphreys postulate the core concept of a defensive nostalgia, ‘a means of resisting the competing hegemonic claims of bureaucracy and Islam that opened up an – albeit precarious – discursive position for them to occupy’ (Brown and Humphreys, : ). In the subsequent study based on three distinct groups of academics in a recently merged UK-based College of Further Education, Brown and Humphreys () broaden their conceptualization of identity to refer to something more fluid and dynamic. As in the previous study, they found considerable evidence of defensive nostalgia among some staff and this was especially trenchant for those who had been relocated as a result of the merger and maintained a firm identity anchorage to their earlier place of work. In this instance, however, Brown and Humphreys found evidence that nostalgia, important as it was as a discursive resource for the identities of older staff ‘was also self-defeating, as it did not permit them to engage and counter effectively the business-oriented and success-slanted discourses drawn-on by the S[enior]M[anagement]T[eam]’ (Brown and Humphreys, : ). Brown and Humphreys’ respondents at the Further Education College give the impression of being relatively isolated in their nostalgic cocoons. My own research in five different settings in , suggested that in some organizations nostalgic voices get lost in the buzz of everyday life. In others, however, nostalgia may become embedded in organizational culture and may play a pivotal role in the collective experiences and identities of employees (Gabriel, : –). This was also the case in an Irish newspaper, studied by O’Leary () in which a nostalgic narrative made of numerous stories about the heroic days of journalism formed a powerful counterpoint to the managerial discourses of the present. These stories extolled the past as a time of camaraderie, honesty, heavy-drinking, and serious investigative reporting opposed to modernizing narratives of efficiency, careerism, deceitfulness, and injustice. By emphasizing the caring, authentic, and meaningful qualities of the past, these narratives cast today’s organization as a profit-hungry monster. O’Leary’s argument also offers a contrast between nostalgic stories and a different type of
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organizational counter-narrative based on cynical stories. These too cast the organization as a monster, but instead of seeking to sustain identities by incorporating them into an idealized past, they did so through dis-identification and distancing from the organization of today. Denigration of the present, insinuated indirectly in nostalgic stories, becomes the focal point of cynical ones, which never miss an opportunity to besmirch the organization for its injustice, its deceitfulness, its inconsistency, and its brutality. In both nostalgic and cynical narratives, the past, selectively and strategically reconstructed or alluded to becomes a discursive resource, more or less effectively deployed in the conduct of ongoing political struggles. If nostalgia is a discursive resource for marginalized groups in organizations, it can also be a resource for organizational elites that either seek to preserve their privileges or seek to implement change against organizational resistances. Thus, McDonald et al. () demonstrated how NHS consultants effectively mobilized a nostalgic discourse to preserve a cherished professional identity and at least temporarily stem the onslaught of modernization that would have seen their privileges erode. Instead of harping over a distant past, ‘doctors were nostalgic about aspects of medical work which they saw as under threat, disappearing or disappeared. Whereas other studies focus on the use of nostalgia as fostering a collective organizational identity narrative, doctors’ accounts convey a collective professional identity narrative’ (McDonald et al., : emphases added). Nostalgia as a collective identity resource for professionals seeking to ‘do their job properly’ may not by itself be enough to hold back various modernizing initiatives, but it would appear to add strength and plausibility to reasoned arguments against such initiatives and draw in public support based on their own idealized recollections of the NHS. What is telling is that UK governments themselves have sought to capitalize on public nostalgia for the ‘good old days of the NHS’ through a ‘reintroduction of matrons (albeit “modern” matrons) and the move towards more locally based NHS services seem designed to evoke the image of a former age when life was much simpler’ (McDonald et al., : ). The selective or strategic deployment of nostalgia by modernizing and management elites has been closely studied in works by Strangleman (Strangleman, , ; Strangleman and Roberts, ) who argued that both nostalgia and its corollary, nostophobia (or aversion and disparagement of the past) play important political parts in numerous organizations where the new confronts the old. In an exemplary study of the post-privatization railway industry in the UK, Strangleman (: ) argued that several rail companies relied on a ‘subtle reworking of the past, with heritage and tradition . . . emerging as commodities that can be packaged and sold’. Such extolling of the past coexisted with a nostophobic element stressing ‘thirty years of neglect’ or a ‘legacy of mismanagement’ as a justification for poor performance, thus somehow harmonizing a ‘good old days’ discourse with a ‘bad old days’ one. The strategic deployment of nostophobia by management is further demonstrated in a study of an engineering company conducted by Strangleman and Roberts () in the north-west of Britain where a modernizing management regime sought to delegitimize traditional employee identities by casting them as Luddite dinosaurs or ‘jurassics’, who in turn had to emphasize their technical skills to resist some of the new management initiatives and did so with a degree of success.
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The value of this study lies in demonstrating how the charge of being stuck in past identities that have no place in the present is regularly used by ‘modernizing’ management elites in their attempts to push through changes that will shift the balance of power in their favour. This is a point that has received ample support in studies by Munro () who argues that a ‘rubbishing’ of the past aims at undermining the workers’ sense of belonging, especially matters of tradition, loyalty, and custom and Ybema (, ) who, through a study of employment relations in an amusement park, proposed the concept of postalgia as a management strategy that not only rubbishes the past, as per Munro and Strangleman, but idealizes the future in a mixture of paranoid anxieties (‘All is lost unless we change’) with hyped-up or utopian fantasies of future success. Ybema sees nostalgia and postalgia as elements of generational identity dividing up older staff whose emotional investments are firmly in the past from younger ones whose attitude towards the past varies from the condescending to the dismissive. This argument is developed in a subsequent article (Ybema, ) based on ethnographic field research in a Dutch national newspaper suggesting that the temporal discontinuity based on the contrast between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, as represented in nostalgia and postalgia, becomes itself a feature of collective identities. In summary, this section addressing nostalgia in organizational contexts indicates that, in line with studies of individual nostalgia and identity, most scholars have approached nostalgia as a feature of collective identities that helps them cope with discontinuity and change and defends them against some of the anxieties raised by modernizing initiatives that encroach on acquired privileges and rights. As a defensive resource, nostalgia may be more or less effective, though it undoubtedly plays a part in building collective identities (including professional identities) that rely on a sense of belonging and sharing common experiences form the past. Several scholars have demonstrated a parallel trend—that of organizational elites and modernizing management teams deploying nostalgia as a discursive resource either to rubbish and diminish opposition to change and justify optimistic fantasies of the future or to legitimize initiatives that selectively borrow from the past and build on the nostalgia of their organization’s public.
S N S I
.................................................................................................................................. This section addresses nostalgia and identity in wider social contexts, in relation to wider categories of class, gender, race, and nation that frequently enter the domains of organizational identities. A type of nostalgia that has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in this regard has been one that idealizes a masculine, working-class identity as proud, self-confident, militant, and potentially rebellious. The figure of the working-class hero looms large in several publications on nostalgia, including Lawler’s () interpretation of a theatrical play in which nostalgic figures of masculinity are used to highlight the shortcomings of today’s white working class which is presented as somehow emasculated and lacking. Lawler stresses the reactionary implications of melancholy narratives of decline that fetishize heroic images from the past, in all their gendered and racial prejudices and also encourage a highly condescending attitude towards today’s workers.
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The view that working-class identities in Britain today are represented as increasingly vacuous and valueless is also explored by Loveday () who studied students and academics in four colleges who continue to identify as working class, in spite of its negative connotations. Loveday’s study offers a good example of how a wider social nostalgia feeds organizational identities in four higher education institutions. Maintaining their connection with their working-class roots, argues Loveday, enables some of the students and staff, especially male ones, to build a more positive orientation to the future, one in which working-class subjectivities are accorded recognition and honoured once again. Loveday concludes that ‘far from being regressive, . . . a recourse to the past can be seen as a retroactive strategy, which enables the negotiation of gendered working-class subjectivities in the present, as well as providing a critical perspective on the future for those whose classed identities are so often rendered as valueless’ (Loveday, : ). These observations are further developed in a study of ‘dirty work’ (refuse collection and street cleaning) by Slutskaya et al. () who explicitly address the intersection of class and masculinity. What is notable in this study is that nostalgia for traditional working-class and masculine identities is reinforced by esteem-reinforcing comparisons with women and migrant workers. This is one of the few studies of workplace nostalgia actually relying on othering of particular groups (migrants, women, agency workers) as ways of reinforcing masculine organizational identities. The result is a merging of nostalgia and anger as the basis for men’s resistance to status devaluation but leads also to their subjective entrapment in employment relations where the ample supply of agency staff and weakness of union representation make resistance largely symbolic. In contrast to the sentimental variants of nostalgia that have mostly been examined hitherto, Slutskaya et al. offer a convincing example of aggressive nostalgia in the workplace. Aggressive nostalgia has assumed considerable importance in contemporary political discussions of populist and extreme right-wing ideologies and identities. These, it has been argued, are sustained by ideals of a mythological and frequently heroic past, free of migrants, foreigners, and other undesirables as against a present of multiculturalism, eroding national frontiers, mass migration, and globalization. This is a racialized and gendered nostalgia, harping after a monocultural past of fixed national and gender identities and persistently vilifying those who stand outside such cultural stereotypes. In a paper based on interviews with white mothers in South London, Bridget Byrne () explores the nostalgic construction of ‘whiteness’ as core to English national identity, or what she calls Englishness, which involves ways of being, a sense of place and belonging. Among her respondents, Englishness was a highly racialized kind of identity, based on a ‘green and pleasant land’, land of ‘hope and glory’, akin to that described by Wright () in On Living in an Old Country. This Englishness is contrasted to Britishness, a multicultural entity that is acknowledged as diverse, noisy, and exciting but is also smelly, polluted, and dirty. While some of her respondents expressed feelings close to nostophobia for white Englishness, others felt a deep sense of loss, a loss not only of the idealized rural middle-class English idyll, but very specifically a loss of national identity itself. Byrnes’ research is neatly complemented by Kasinitz and Hillyard’s () rich ethnographic study of white working-class residents of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighbourhood that had changed irrevocably with the arrival of Black and Latino ‘newcomers’. Like Byrne’s respondents, nostalgia for the past supported the identities of old-timers as the ‘authentic
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voice’ of the community while expressing deep disaffection with the present. The past was remembered as one of communal solidarity and economic self-sufficiency destroyed by the arrival of ‘outsiders’. Unlike Byrnes’ highly individualized white mothers trapped in their private stories of loss, the nostalgic stories shared in this study, and especially narratives of lost respectability, close family and community ties, and economic prosperity, constituted a form of symbolic capital that was deployed in local political conflicts and in dealings with the local press. Nostalgia then represents both an emotional response to loss and a resource for addressing current struggles. This ambiguity of nostalgia is developed in several other studies drawn from contexts as diverse as the Labour Party under Corbyn (Robinson, ), racially changing neighbourhoods in Chicago (Maly et al., ), academics (Cannizzo, ), displaced groups of people (Akhtar, ) (MacKenzie and Foster, ), alumni networks (Bardon et al., ), samples of Dutch people (Smeekes, ; Smeekes and Verkuyten, ) and old people in palliative care (Synnes, ). In different ways, these studies highlight that nostalgia emerges from discontinuity, and constructs an idealized image of the past; that it has a positive effect on strengthening collective and individual identities, even when it emphasizes the loss of coherent past identities; that it often ‘others’ particular groups seen as having caused the disruption; that it can be an effective political resource in contemporary struggles and, as such, it can lead to various types of aggression against outsiders and newcomers. By contrast to such conservative views on nostalgia, a small number of studies have detected progressive (May, ; Wilson, ) and even utopian elements (Pickering and Keightley, ) in nostalgia, summed up in the following statement: Nostalgia can . . . be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past, but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian. (Pickering and Keightley, : )
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.................................................................................................................................. Whether we look at nostalgia as a private emotion or as one shared by numerous people in groups, organizations, and societies at large, it is clear that it is an emotion that does not merely get embedded in our identities but constitutes an inseparable part of them, dictating our identity narratives both personal and collective. As with all identity narratives, any questioning, belittlement, or disrespect for these narratives is experienced as insulting (Gabriel, ). Whether nostalgia is enacted in public ceremonials, from memorialization of significant historical events and museum visits to farewell functions in organizations to private contemplation of treasured artefacts, it is not an add-on identity feature that is evoked ad hoc, but a fundamental way of incorporating the past into present experiences, tastes, attitudes, and actions. Nearly all the studies examined here further recognize that nostalgia emerges out of an experience of discontinuity and loss in an effort to maintain the integrity of identity and
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provides consolation for current discontents and privations by constructing a past that is precisely the opposite of whatever these current discontents and privations happen to be. In so doing, nostalgia boosts self-esteem and strengthens feelings of self-worth. In organizations and communities, nostalgia can enhance solidarity and strengthen group identities by stressing the shared qualities of past experiences and their meaning for the collective. In all these ways, nostalgia serves a variety of defensive functions against anxiety and against changes that are viewed as threatening. In some instances, nostalgia can prompt acts of individual or collective resistance against such changes, when it can be deployed strategically and more or less effectively to defend existing rights and practices against modernizing forces. These forces, in turn, may deploy nostalgia to push through and justify innovations as ways of restoring desirable aspects of the past. Alternatively, modernizing forces may resort to nostophobia or ‘postalgia’ to contest and oppose the nostalgic past as inefficient, indulgent, or decadent and push forward agendas for renewal and change. One element of nostalgia that is not consistent across different studies is whether it is the product of a loss that is accepted as inevitable or whether it is experienced as a response to a loss that is the product of deliberate and motivated destruction or betrayal. In the latter case, othering those seen as responsible for wrecking the past gives nostalgia an aggressive quality, one that includes a desire and a will to bring back the past by force if necessary. Aggressive nostalgia, in contrast to sentimental nostalgia, fuels xenophobia and scapegoating and has become entrenched in populist discourses and political propaganda. Aggressive nostalgia is discernible in organizations where a conflict between the old and the new becomes endemic; in such situations, the old guard casts the newcomers as wreckers and vandals, while the newcomers cast the old guard as dinosaurs and luddites. Whether focusing on sentimental or aggressive nostalgia, it is telling that the majority of scholarly contributions approach it as a dark or negative emotion. The exceptions are those who detect a progressive or even utopian element in nostalgia as well as Sedikides and his colleagues who, on the back of their experimental psychosocial studies, consistently cast nostalgia as a positive force, an emotion whose outcomes are invariably positive for personal health and identity maintenance but also for maintaining social meanings and community bonds. All of these accounts, positive and negative, approach nostalgia as an anchor to the past, an anchor to a fantasy past often, an anchor whose effects may be progressive or regressive, but an anchor all the same. As an anchor, it stops identities, individual and collective, from swaying with the tide, from drifting under the influence of currents and fads or from being cast loose and potentially wrecked following extreme storms and dislocations. This raises a number of interesting questions regarding identity: Are there other ways, besides nostalgia and its opposite, nostophobia, of incorporating the past in present identities? Are there alternative ways of anchoring identities in the past? For example, it is well known that psychologically, a very different way of addressing the past, when experienced as unbearable loss, is through mourning. How does mourning relate to nostalgia? And how do different narrative constructions of the past, for example, as triumph, as trauma, as endurance, as idyll, as turmoil, as oasis and so forth result in amalgamating nostalgia with a range of other emotions, such as pride, anger, despair, hope, shame, envy, and guilt?
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Another promising line of inquiry is into the relation between nostalgia and cynicism as identity shapers. Like nostalgia, cynicism grows out of a deep disenchantment with the present and, like nostalgia, it is generally viewed as at best a limited resource for resistance to change (Costas and Karreman, ; Fleming, ; Karfakis and Kokkinidis, ). Yet, unlike nostalgia, cynicism is often associated with withdrawal and individualistic carping from the sidelines; its emphasis is on puncturing and vilifying the present rather than idealizing the past. A further line of inquiry is an examination of the relationship between nostalgia and conspiracy theories (Goertzel, ; Keeley, ; Schreven, ). Like aggressive nostalgia, many conspiracy theories emerge from Jeremiads of the fall (Murphy, ) and seek to discover suitable targets to blame. Conspiracy theories, like aggressive nostalgic narratives, are regular features of populist political discourses and fuel xenophobic sentiments. Where conspiracy theory goes well beyond nostalgia is in its conviction that the past has been systematically distorted and misrepresented by vested interests and therefore needs to be purged and reclaimed. Thus, unlike nostalgia, many conspiracy theorists are quite diligent in conducting historical research and seeking missing details (Berlant, ; Schreven, ) treating them as ‘the smoking gun’ that offers conclusive evidence of the ‘real past’ and its falsification. Finally, an important line of inquiry on nostalgia and identity is to examine more closely the role and nature of forgetting. Selective forgetting is a core element of nostalgia both at individual and group levels as negative elements from the past are systematically obliterated in the interest of idealization. Total forgetting, however, whether wilful and the product of psychological repression and denial or as a natural by-product of the passage of time down the river of Lethe can be viewed as an alternative way of addressing the past as an identity ingredient: instead of anchoring identities to a past, the past is let go so to speak as an object of indifference and irrelevance. This type of neophilia, like nostophobia, is closely linked to a discourse of progress (Rhodes and Pullen, ), but unlike nostophobia it is not hostile to the past. It is merely indifferent to it as though the past did not exist and if it did it no longer matters. In conclusion, I hope that this chapter has demonstrated that far from being a minor, marginal, or idiosyncratic subject in studies of identities in organizations, nostalgia represents a major force in how identities are shaped, how they are anchored in the past, and how they deal with discontinuity and threat. It has shown that nostalgia is deployed as a significant resource in many organizational practices and conflicts and how it can promote solidarity and belonging. Finally, the chapter has demonstrated the considerable potential that the study of nostalgia holds for future research on identities in different contexts.
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Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, (), –. Synnes, O. (). ‘Narratives of Nostalgia in the Face of Death: The Importance of Lighter Stories of the Past in Palliative Care’. Journal of Aging Studies, , –. Velikonja, M. (). ‘Lost in Transition Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-Socialist Countries’. East European Politics and Societies, (), –. Werman, D. (). ‘Normal and Pathological Nostalgia’. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, , –. Wilson, J. L. (). Nostalgia: Sanctuary of meaning, nd edition. Duluth: University of Minnesota, Duluth Library Press. Winkler, I. (). ‘Identity Work and Emotions: A Review’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Wright, P. (). On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso. Ybema, S. (). ‘Managerial Postalgia: Projecting a Golden Future’. Journal of Managerial Psychology, (), –. Ybema, S. (). ‘Talk of Change: Temporal Contrasts and Collective Identities’. Organization Studies, (), –.
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Abstract This chapter focuses on national identity in and around multinational corporations (MNCs). The authors offer three conceptualizations of national identity and demonstrate how it may be studied in MNCs. First, they argue that organizational actors (re)construct their national identities via references to, and associations with, particular ideologies and worldviews. These are rigid constructions, which are deeply rooted in actors’ fundamental views about the world and their place in it. Second, national identity is (re)constructed through group-level relations vis-à-vis relevant ‘others’ in the organizational context. Such constructions are relatively stable but they are relational in the sense that they are rooted in actors’ identification with their cultural group. Finally, national identities are (re)constructed by organizational actors through mundane everyday relations and interaction. These are fluid and temporary constructions contingent on the immediate interests of those involved and the social dynamics of specific interactions. Based on their conceptualizations, the authors outline avenues for future research to understand better the changing roles and implications of national identity in modern organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. T chapter deals with national identity in and around multinational corporations (MNCs). This topic deserves specific attention because of recent developments in how people relate to their national identification and make sense of ‘who they are’.
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We increasingly observe how globalization collides with nationalism in different parts of the world. Talk of freedom of movement and speech, and a world without borders, is increasingly tramped (or ‘trumped’) down by forces of protectionism and isolation. Political leaders build their careers and electorates by talking about national interests, closing borders, stricter controls, and military power. They speak against international agreements and institutions, relocation, and migration. Results of recent elections and referenda are evidence of the rising nationalism around the globe. As such, nationalistic idea(l)s are often imbued with strong cultural, racial, and territorial elements, and they are heavily power-laden. Defending one’s cultural authenticity or protecting one’s geographic borders can easily translate into inferiorization of ‘others’. Those who are from different, ‘other’, cultures or geographic territories easily become less worthy. After decades of advocating and even glorifying the benefits of open borders, free movement of capital and resources, cross-pollination of cultures and ideas, diversity and multinationality (e.g. Friedman, ; Singer, ), MNCs are faced with challenges of dealing with the rise of nationalism on a global scale. How can MNCs ensure that employees with different cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds located in multiple locations across geographic, cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries work together efficiently despite nationalistic sentiments and allegiances? As Ailon-Souday and Kunda () argue, the multinational context of MNCs is unable to eradicate fully both nationalism and cultural differences within relations and interactions between actors located in the different units across the world. What is even more intriguing from an analytical perspective is that individuals working in these organizations are more often than not reluctant to let their national identifications and affiliations, and those of others, lie peacefully. National identity offers a rich reservoir of powerful discursive resources to (re)construct oneself and others in particular ways to arrive at plausible explanations of the world. Overall, MNCs provide fertile ground for the expression of nationalistic idea(l)s and the reproduction of cultural differences. As Phillips and Hardy (: ) put it: ‘We cannot understand processes of organizing unless we understand identity.’ Importantly, national identities concern both key decision-makers engaged in joint strategy development processes in geographically dispersed business units and employees working in cross-functional and cross-unit teams consisting of individuals with various national backgrounds and cultural heritage. In this chapter, we review some of the ways in which extant literature has discussed national identity and illuminate the complex and multifaceted nature of national identity in and around contemporary MNCs. We provide three conceptualizations of national identity and demonstrate how it may be studied in MNCs. First, we argue that organizational actors (re)construct their national identities via references to, and associations with, particular ideologies and worldviews. These are rigid constructions, which are deeply rooted in actors’ fundamental views about the world and their place in it. Second, national identity is (re)constructed through group-level relations vis-à-vis relevant ‘others’ in the organizational context. Such national identity constructions are relatively stable but they are relational in the sense that they are rooted in actors’ identification with their cultural group and its members. Finally, national identities are (re)constructed by organizational actors through mundane everyday relations and interaction. These are fluid and temporary constructions contingent on the immediate interests of those involved. In this chapter, we elaborate on these facets of national
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identity construction in MNCs and use examples from extant research, including our own, to highlight key issues. We conclude by outlining avenues for future research to understand better the changing roles and implications of national identity in modern organizations.
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.................................................................................................................................. Identities are people’s subjectively construed understandings of who they were, are, and desire to become. They are ‘implicated in almost everything that happens in and around organizations’ (Brown, : ). Identities relate to ‘a dynamic, multi-layered set of meaningful elements deployed to orientate and position one’s being-in-the-world’ (Karreman and Alvesson, : ; Bardon et al., ). They are produced in ‘complex social interactions with others who may agree but more likely seek to negotiate or even contest our preferred versions of who we are’ (Brown, : ). Identities are constantly in progress and continually worked on by individuals in response to changing external stimuli and circumstances as well as personal preferences so that they are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept (Snow and Anderson, ). In the modern world, ‘traditional identity certainties anchored in one’s class, race, family, markets and society generally have diminished forcing people to accept responsibilities which engender anxieties that are combatted through the formulation of identity narratives’ (Brown, : ). Contemporary capitalism has resulted in a corrosion of many traditional identity anchors. Changes in organizations and at work have created, arguably, an identity crisis whereby organizational actors today face a number of insecurities— existential, social, economic, and psychological (see Knights and Clarke, ). It means that identities are used increasingly by actors to impose a degree of coherence on their everyday ‘reality’ in the face of multiple vulnerabilities (Clarke et al., ). Such identities are situational, sociologically and psychologically complex, embedded in and drawn from wider societal circumstances and discourses, rarely consistent and generally fluid (Alvesson, ; Brown, ; Karreman and Alvesson, ). We subscribe to the position that identities in organizations are socially constructed through situated practices of language use (Boussebaa and Brown, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ), resulting in identity narratives featuring ‘an edited past, a preferred present and a desired future’ (Wright et al., : ), and offering a sense of coherence for people in organizations (Essers and Benschop, ). On this basis, we pave the way for a novel and more complete understanding of national identity in and around complex organizations, such as contemporary MNCs.
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.................................................................................................................................. We advocate a perspective that conceptualizes national identity as dynamic, relational, and interactional, and something that is constantly and continuously (re)constructed by
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organizational actors and others, such as the media. We build on extant research to suggest that processes of national identity construction in MNCs are multifaceted and occur simultaneously at three interrelated levels: macro- (transnational), meso- (organizational), and micro- (individual). We consider the three levels in more detail and provide examples from extant research, including our own. We start by discussing how national identities are (re)constructed at the macro- (transnational) level and then proceed to explicate how macro-level constructions trickle down to the meso- (organizational) and the micro(individual) levels in MNCs.
Macro-Level: Ideologies and Worldviews as Overarching Structures in National Identification At the macro-level, national identities are closely interlinked with, and fed by, discourses and discursive struggles circulating in wider society. At this level, national identities are constructed by actors through their rhetorical and discursive practices as members of particular social groups. These construction processes involve foundational, underlying ideas about what constitutes one’s culture, nation, way of being, worldview, and what are one’s relations to others in a historical, geopolitical, and philosophical sense. As such, we argue that these processes are ideological by nature, meaning that they reflect particular foundational or axiomatic belief systems that organize and control the discourses and other social practices of those involved as members of particular social groups with supposedly related goals and interests (see Van Dijk, ). The ideological basis of national identity constructions at this level makes these constructions durable, rigid, and powerful in shaping social and power relations between actors in and around MNCs. For instance, Koveshnikov et al. () illustrate how employees in a Finnish-Chinese MNC employed their respective beliefs and value systems representing the West and the East, how they constructed ‘who they are’ and ‘who others are’, and how these constructions affected relationships between the two parties and (re)constructed specific power relations between the Finnish headquarters and the Chinese subsidiary. Juxtaposing Western and Eastern ideologies of work, Chinese managers blamed their Finnish counterparts for being too result- and fact-oriented in line with their Western ideas about work and for paying insufficient attention to people management and personal relations. Aimed at producing a harmonious workplace these were portrayed as more important in China than Western objective performance figures and numbers. Moreover, the Western systematic way of conducting business was perceived to be slow and too risk averse for the Chinese context, in which one needs to be fast to capture the abundant, but constantly shrinking opportunities. Through these constructions, local managers implied that if they were in charge the company would pursue a more appropriate risk-tolerating strategy in China and be more successful. In response, Finnish managers described their Chinese colleagues as incompetent, non-systematic, and excessively reliant on personal networks and emotions. The Chinese culture in general was depicted as archaic, tradition-driven, and emotion-centred, and Chinese employees as irrational, short-term oriented, and overly opportunistic. These features clearly contradicted the Western ways embodied by Finnish managers, self-constructed as logical and rational, and, hence, more effective and superior to the Chinese.
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This example illustrates how deep-seated beliefs about human nature and work (here, Western and Eastern ways of being and working) and one’s culture with its values and worldview (here, a focus on facts versus emotions) play a fundamental role in the national identity construction processes among managers in MNCs. These beliefs represent powerful discursive and ideological resources that feed the construction of managers’ national identities in terms of ‘who they are’ and ‘who others are’. As the Western and Eastern references in the example above suggest, national identity constructions are not necessarily bound to particular countries. They can be implied in connections between certain ideologies as foundational belief systems and broader geographies in which these ideologies thrive. To take an example of a recent study, to explore the use of political ideology in the discursive construction of the multinational hotel industry, MacLean et al. () examined public speeches by Conrad Hilton, the founder of Hilton hotels. The authors show how Hilton employed the ideology of anti-communism and world peace through international trade and travel to build the foundations of a global hotel industry and to promote Hilton hotels internationally by constructing the company as an exemplar of the American business model offering a route to freedom and prosperity for its business partners and associates. Although not dealing with identity construction of employees in the company itself, the study illustrates how powerful organizational actors, such as founders and chief executive officers (CEOs), can utilize broad political ideologies to construct a specific nationalist (here, American) organizational identity, which both employees and external stakeholders find appealing enough to identify with. There are also other ideologies that MNC actors can employ when constructing ‘who they are’ in terms of national identity. An intriguing approach to one’s national identity, which some actors in MNCs deliberately opt for, is distancing from any national affiliation and embracing instead more ‘universalistic norms related to openness, tolerance and virtues such as rejection of parochialism and ethnocentricity, respect for cultural difference and commitment to dialogue between cultures’ (Skovgaard-Smith and Poulfelt, : ). In this way, individuals may construct themselves as cosmopolitan ‘citizens of the world’ (Nussbaum, ; see Calhoun, ). Importantly, constructing one’s identity in this way also carries certain power implications for those involved. For instance, in their study of transnational professionals in Amsterdam, Skovgaard-Smith and Poulfelt () analyse how these professionals draw on cosmopolitanism to construct themselves as ‘non-nationals’. The authors show that these constructions are not power neutral but demarcate the cosmopolitan ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’, i.e. those with national and (mono)cultural identification. In addition to ideologies, national identity constructions at the macro-level can also be history-driven and invoke historical and colonial relations between nations. Examining HQ–subsidiary relations as individual managers’ identity work, Koveshnikov et al. () offer the case of Finland-based MNCs in Russia to highlight a complex situation in which different constellations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ both at HQ and in subsidiaries are simultaneously at play in identity work, bearing different power implications. On the one hand, representing the HQ, Finnish managers construed their identities as superior to the backward Russians, which presumably gave them the right to impose different practices and processes on the Russian subsidiaries and their managers. On the other hand, Russian managers at the subsidiaries retained their own sense of superiority based on ideas of Russia as a vast (neo) colonial power and the past colonial relations between the two countries. As it happens,
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Finland was colonized by Imperial Russia from – and this historical context continues to mark Finnish–Russian relations. Resisting the superior status of their Finnish colleagues, Russian managers referred to the fact that Russia is a much larger country in terms of both territory and population and has a much longer history in which Finland was one of the constitutive parts. From this perspective, Russian managers questioned the dominance of Finnish colleagues as representatives of the HQ in Finnish–Russian business relations. As such, the example demonstrates how MNC actors use colonial history as a discursive resource in their national identity construction processes to renegotiate power relations between actors. As mentioned, at the macro-level, media play a key role in shaping national identities and identification in and around MNCs. Constructions of national identity often rely on historical events associated with the society in question as well as its common myths, memories, economy, and political relations (Smith, ). These are constantly (re)produced, shared, and circulated by media contributing to the society’s common identity and forming a basis for national identification of the society’s members (Kelly-Holmes, ). Media constantly remind members of the society of their ‘national pride in a world of nations’ (Billig, : ). They engage people in nationalist discourse and forge national communities and confrontations (Anderson, ; Tienari et al., ). Media reproduce what we mean by ‘nation’ and its relational orientation to other nations (Chang et al., ). They position their audiences in national terms and invite them to reflect on their nation in relation to others—for example, discussing nationalism in other countries as ‘irrational’ and their own as ‘patriotic’. In these ways, media are central for national identification construction processes influencing how MNC actors construct national identities of ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’. To illustrate the role of media in constructing nationalistic idea(l)s around MNCs, Riad et al. () investigated how different facets of international relations were (re)produced in media accounts of an acquisition of American IBM by Chinese Lenovo, thus providing fruitful ground and discursive resources for national identity constructions among organizational actors involved in the acquisition. There were different key discursive themes and rhetorical elements promulgated in the examined media. English-language texts discussed the deal as a ‘threat’ to US security and the economy further exacerbating the situation in which over the years many US jobs were lost or outsourced to China. In contrast, Chinese texts emphasized the notions of ‘peaceful rising’ and ‘going out’ in relation to Chinese businesses and companies. Both media also employed strong emotional rhetoric. Whereas English-speaking texts expressed ‘fear’ and ‘concern’ over China’s increasing economic power and technological sophistication, Chinese texts were full of ‘cheer’ and ‘strong national pride’. Finally, there were pronounced ideological underpinnings, such as the ‘Cold War’, reproduced in and through the media texts on both sides but with very different effects. In English-speaking texts, these were used to oppose the acquisition whilst in Chinese texts to support it. In the former, several texts aligned Lenovo at a national level with ‘red’ (communism and the Red Army) and the sale of IBM to Lenovo was referred to as ‘arming China’. In relation to ‘globalism’, the deal was presented as a way to manage international relations with China by helping it to become more Western. In Chinese texts, the ‘Cold War’ ideology featured in representing the acquisition as a response to US imperialism and US nationalism. The
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‘globalism’ ideology was used to present the deal as accelerating Lenovo’s attempts at ‘global’ positioning. Although reproduced by media outside of the MNC context, such nationalist constructions inevitably influence how actors in the two MNCs perceive themselves and ‘the other’ and provide ample discursive resources for actors to construct their national identities vis-à-vis ‘the other’. To summarize, ideology-laden and history-embedded discourses (re)produced by media texts influence how actors in MNCs construct themselves and others by providing them with multiple ideas, concepts, and narratives to help define ‘who they are’ (or ‘who they are not’) in terms of their national identity. These national identity constructions trickle down to the organizational level. There, they influence how actors construct their subject positions in relation to ‘the other’ in the organizational context and carry considerable implications for organizational processes and outcomes.
Meso-Level: Using National Identities for Specific Organizational Purposes The organizational level concerns the use of nationalistic idea(l)s to accomplish a particular objective, to fulfil a concrete interest, and to (re)construct a particular subject position. These are used relationally to construe a particular version of organizational reality with a specific constellation of power relations, thus benefiting some groups of actors at the expense of others. In this way, national identity construction processes are performative in that they have concrete implications for how power relations between different (national) groups play out and how positions of superiority and inferiority are constructed in organizations. For instance, Van Marrewijk () studied Dutch–Indian teams involved in geographically and culturally dispersed IT projects and elucidated the constructed nature of cultural differences. They found that team members used constructions of cultural differences as strategic resources to reach their specific goals by legitimizing or de-legitimizing asymmetric power relations between teams in the projects. Emphasizing the political nature of national identity construction processes, in turn, Ybema and Byun (: ) suggested national culture to be conceptualized as ‘a symbolic resource that is actively and creatively used by organizational actors to create a sense of identity and cultural distance in political struggles in multinational corporations’. Ailon and Kunda () warned that while there is considerable rhetoric about the global in MNCs, this should not be taken for granted. These organizations do not replace or compete with nation-states, for example, but ‘make use of nationalism, national identity, and national sentiment in their operations’ (Ailon and Kunda, : ). Thus, Ailon and Kunda (: ) elucidate how actors in subsidiaries of MNCs use nationalism, strategically exercising their discretionary power ‘deciding when to activate and when to suppress nationality in the global organizational universe’. One aspect of MNC management around which nationalistic confrontations between organizational actors proliferate is corporate language policies. Vaara et al. () examined a merger between a Finnish and a Swedish financial services company and showed how the choice of corporate language in the new MNC had significant implications as it (re)constructed and defined meanings and membership categories. Language choice empowers national identities, making such identities more (or less) salient and attractive for actors employed by the MNC. National identities associated with the preferred MNC
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language become closely associated with professional competence and constitute effective resources in the corporate race for top positions and promotions. In contrast, those whose national identities are not associated with the chosen corporate language may be excluded from important corporate decisions and career appointments. In short, the corporate language policies of an MNC create particular webs of power relations among actors and define which national identities are ‘winners’ and ‘dominant’ and which are ‘losers’ and ‘dominated’. Any global organization, such as the MNC, strives in one way or another to build its global image and organizational identity. Yet, organizational actors in local units with their particular interests and agenda often resist such aspirations by using nationalist rhetoric to counterbalance the globalist rhetoric aired by the HQ. National identity constructions play an important role in these processes. Exploring these issues, Vaara and Tienari () studied the making of a financial services corporation through a series of cross-border mergers in the Nordic countries. They focused attention on antenarratives (Boje , ) defined as ‘fragments of organizational discourse that construct identities and interests in time and space’ (Vaara and Tienari : ) as essential means for giving a sense to change and for managing meaning (Boje, ). Vaara and Tienari () illustrated how the corporate top management used globalist antenarratives to legitimate the merger and to create a new MNC identity. However, these antenarratives were challenged by local managers’ nationalistic storytelling that highlighted and focused on national identities and interests. These depicted the new company as a crucial step in the development of national financial services sectors, and promoted national interests especially in the distribution of top positions, resource allocation and cutback decisions, and in choices regarding organizational systems and practices. Organizational actors in local units mobilized national identification via crosscultural comparisons especially around controversial issues and decisions. While the construction of national identities was an antidote to globalist storytelling, it led to developing a common, regional Nordic identity for the new merged organization. As such, national identity construction processes had direct implications for how the new organization came into being. Finally, it is worth noting that national identities co-evolve with other sources of identity and identification in the functioning of MNCs. Tienari et al. () analysed explanations by Danish, Finnish, and Swedish male senior executives in an MNC for the absence of women in the top echelons of the organization. The authors elucidated how such vertical gender inequality was distanced: its sources were located elsewhere in space (in other nations) and time (in particular histories). Significantly, Tienari et al. () illuminated how national identities were discursively (re)constructed in such distancing. Danish, Finnish, and Swedish male senior executives each mobilized nationalistic discourses by (re)constructing national differences in terms of what is equality and how it should be attained, rendering one’s own way as self-evident and that of others as inferior. Tienari et al. () argued that MNCs intensify such discursive (re)constructions and that they represent a significant arena for (re)producing gendered relations of domination. Beyond the differences identified, a specific type of ‘universal’ man prevailed in the discursive constructions of the senior executives: business-oriented and competitive, mobile and fully committed to work. Overall, Tienari et al. () elucidated how gender intersects with nationality in shaping the MNC and the identities of male executives in globalizing business.
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At this level, organizational actors (re)construct their national identities vis-à-vis the other by employing strategies, such as distancing and nationalistic storytelling, and discursive resources, such as narratives and corporate language, to create particular subject positions that allow them to pursue their interests. Concomitantly, at a more micro-level, national identities are also constructed by organizational actors in their daily interactions, not necessarily in pursuit of political agendas or interests, but to construct their individual ‘selves’ and to make sense of situations and encounters.
Micro-Level: National Identities in Daily Interaction At the micro-level, nationalistic idea(l)s and narratives fed by ideologies and geopolitical and colonial sentiments, are used by organizational actors to make sense and construct a particular version of specific organizational situations or processes. They are also used more mundanely and situationally with no major implications but for actors’ self-definition in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Use of nationalistic idea(l)s by organizational actors in their daily interactions is often improvised, but nevertheless based on a rich reservoir of ideas about the self and the other. Cultural and discursive resources invoke references to past events such as wars, conflicts, and political events, and may have allusions to sport as well as cultural prejudices and symbols of various kinds. They are at the actors’ disposal due to various types of ideologies (macro-level) and narratives used by organizational actors as members of specific cultural groups to make sense of their organizational reality (meso-level). A powerful and widely used discursive resource that organizational actors in the MNC employ to construct their national identities in daily interaction are cultural stereotypes, i.e. generally held and fixed conceptions of difference of ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’. Stereotypes in a particular context are (re)constructed through mobilization of ideas and concepts widespread in that context (Billig, ; Vaara and Tienari, ; Wodak et al., ). Often related to historical relations between nations as well as the currently predominant rhetoric of those in positions of power, stereotypes tend to be generalizations reflecting simplistic conceptions of national cultures and differences (Wodak et al., ). Organizational actors can use stereotypes in the construction of their national identities in several ways. For instance, by using humour and humorous remarks involving stereotypical ideas organizational actors may attempt to construct their national identity vis-à-vis the other as different and, more often than not, in some ways superior. To illustrate this, in their study of a merger between Israeli and US companies, Ailon-Souday and Kunda () describe how Israeli employees spoke English with an American accent to each other when their colleagues from the American company were absent. They did so to emphasize the difference between themselves and their US colleagues and to construct their national identity as superior. It is noteworthy that during their study the authors encountered an interesting practice among Israeli employees, i.e. to label their colleagues from the partner US company as ‘Americans’ or ‘Jimmys’. The latter was used to turn the personal names of US colleagues into ‘general, impersonal labels’ implying that ‘these names were meaningless . . . typical American names’ (Ailon-Souday and Kunda, : ). In another example, Koveshnikov () examined a Russian acquisition of a Finnish company. While conducting interviews in Russia it became obvious that it was common for
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Russian employees to tell ‘funny’ stories, jokes, and anecdotes about their Finnish colleagues, their factual owners. For instance, they could talk in English with a strong Scandinavian accent or compare Finns to a slow-witted Estonian (Estonia is a country which, at least in Russia, is often closely associated with Finland) taxi driver. One Russian interviewee described the differences in the working approaches of Russian and Finnish managers using a colourful metaphor of putting either a bee or a fly into a jar and observing how the two try to escape. He compared Finns to bees, who, considered intelligent, will try to escape from the jar so that ‘it will fly only in one . . . direction and then, after a dozen of attempts, it will just fall and die’. In contrast, a fly, representing the Russian way of working, in the same situation ‘will just move around randomly here and there but it will finally find the way out [and] the problem [will] be solved’. Similar humorous remarks were observed also among Finns, who on several occasions referred to their Russian colleagues through the metaphor of ‘Russian bear’ or simply stated that ‘this is Russia for you’ when faced with a particular situation or a practice in Russia that they found hard to understand. When told, there was always an emphasis on the innocent nature of these jokes and remarks, yet they indicate how national identities are (re)constructed by organizational actors in mundane ways using stereotypical ideas about ‘the other’. They help to make sense of daily encounters with ‘the other’ and offer simple, and often stereotypical, rationalizations and justifications of what happens. Starting from this premise, in their study referred to above, Koveshnikov et al. () argue that considering that national cultures and cultural differences play a central role in managerial identity work, a significant part of this identity work is actually stereotypebased. They define stereotype-based managerial identity work as a process through which managers in intercultural encounters construct the identities of ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’ by using widely held, but relatively fixed and over-simplified, ideas rooted in the cultural and geopolitical category membership of themselves and others. They in particular elucidate three forms of stereotype-based identity work with enabling or constraining power implications. The first, stereotypical talk, refers to identity work whereby managers enact their stereotypical conceptions of ‘the other’ to bolster their self-image and inferiorize ‘the other’. The second, reactive talk, is identity work that emerges as a reaction to stereotypical talk whereby managers aim at renegotiating the proposed social arrangement for their own benefit. Finally, the third, self-reflexive talk, refers to identity work whereby managers attempt to go beyond the social arrangement produced through stereotypical and reactive talk by distancing themselves in a self-reflexive manner from essentialist cultural conceptions. Albeit largely situational and to some extent reactive, these types of identity work can potentially have broader than merely self-definitional implications for organizational actors in organizations in terms of positions and appointments, resource allocation, delegation of authority, and decisions related to control and autonomy. Similarly, tropes such as metaphors are an important form of everyday national identity construction. In a study of a merger between Swedish and Finnish financial services companies, Vaara et al. () explored the ways in which employees used metaphors to describe themselves, the other, and the common future in exercises facilitated by the human resources department of the new organization. The authors argue that through metaphors actors connect ‘meanings from different social domains . . . to each other to create and recreate cultural understanding in the form of prototypes and stereotypes’ (Vaara et al. (, ). Thus, metaphors allow actors to create meanings, which are situation-specific creations, and are useful vehicles for making sense of new situations such
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as cultural encounters, cross-cultural challenges, organizational changes, the meaning of an organization for oneself, and one’s own organizational membership and role. Vaara et al. () explicated how metaphors were used by organizational actors (a) to construct one’s own identity in relation to the other party, that is, images of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and (b) to construct a common identity in the new organization, that is, images of the ‘common future’. The metaphors invoked reflected the Finnish-Swedish socio-cultural and historical context. From to , Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Finns are still keen on interpreting signs of Swedish dominance, and Swedes are nonchalant about their relationship with Finns. Finns eagerly construct themselves as the ‘little brother’ in the relationship, while Swedes (in true ‘big brother’ fashion) usually find this incomprehensible. For example, Finnish self-descriptions in the study involved a defensive attitude towards the Swedish other. One of the metaphors construed, Asterix’s Gaulish village, is revealing in this sense. Those who are familiar with the cartoons by Uderzo and Goscinny may agree that Asterix’s little village is itself originally a metaphor for local (Gaulish!French) traditions and ways of life against (Roman!American) imperialism and colonization. In Asterix cartoons, the villagers are undisciplined and quarrelsome, but when the colonizers try to invade their territory, the villagers unite and repel the mighty opponents. Here, Swedes were seen as colonizers. Finns reconstructed their national identity by establishing a sense of common defence against (neo)colonialism. In addition, Vaara et al. () found several other metaphors used to make sense of the merger, namely family, war and battle, and sports and games. The study illustrates how the metaphoric perspective reveals specific cognitive, emotional, and political aspects of situational national identity building driven by actors’ interaction with the other and the need to make sense of it. Hence, at the micro-level, actors (re)construct national identities in their daily interactions, not necessarily in pursuit of political agendas or interests, but more in a selfdefinitional or reactive manner to make sense of, and give meaning to, a particular situation or encounter. Most of the time, actors are able to suppress and control the expression of these idea(l)s, yet in certain situations, when provoked or prompted by ‘the other’, they may become useful once activated to make sense of daily encounters with ‘the other’, to resolve ambiguities, or to position oneself in a more positive light. Such situations often revolve around constructing national identities of ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’ using nationalistic idea(l)s that can involve humour, stereotypes, and metaphors.
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.................................................................................................................................. The ways actors in MNCs (re)construct their national identities have fundamental implications for those actors and for the functioning of their organizations. Drawing on extant research, we have elucidated three levels on which national identities operate in and around MNCs, that is, macro, meso, and micro. Key features of each level of national identity construction in MNCs are summarized in Table .. We here point to future research avenues that can further enrich understanding of national identities in and around MNCs: the interplay and intersections of national and other identities, forms of colonialism
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Table 37.1 Three levels of national identity construction Level
Nature
Macro- (national/ Based on wider discussions trans-national) constituting the social world (e.g. geopolitics, national interests) Strong intertextual nature (links to media, politicians, socioeconomic development, colonial past) Meso- (organizational)
Resources
Implications for organizational actors
Ideologies
Construction of webs of power relations
Worldviews (Post & neo) colonial rhetoric
Based on cultures and cultural (Ante)narratives National symbols identifications
Often related to specific issues Storytelling or projects (e.g. image building)
Micro- (individual/ Mundane, daily individual group) encounters Situational, short lived
Shaping international relations/relations between nationalities Construction of nationality-related organizational identities Construction of superiority–inferiority relationships Construction of competencies, ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
Stereotypes (auto, Situational construction hetero) of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ Humour, irony Situational empowerment Metaphors (e.g. Sense of group war, sport, family) membership
in the construction of national identities, cosmopolitanism and elitism, and the evolving role of mass and social media in national identification. First, national identities are connected with other identities such as gender (Tienari et al., ). There is often a tendency to focus on specific identities in organizational research, but we argue that future studies should also examine the linkages between different forms and types of identities. In particular, intersectionality as a focus on how different elements of identity constructions such as gender, race, and social class come together in the experience of oppression and discrimination offers a fruitful prospect for future research (Crenshaw, ). It has traditionally been associated with analysis of those who find themselves in disadvantageous or exploited positions in organizations and in society (McCall, ), and we argue that this approach can also be applied to explore the functioning of MNCs (Koveshnikov et al., ). It is, we argue, important to examine how specific forms of national identity are linked with gender, race, and social class in producing superiority and inferiority, inequality, and exploitation in MNCs. Second, there are other perspectives, such as cosmopolitanism, that offer opportunities to better understand identification in MNCs that transcend specific national identities. In
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particular, cosmopolitan managers and employees have been understood to play a key role in MNCs, connecting cultures and networks (Levy et al., ; Skovgaard-Smith and Poulfelt, ). However, less is known about how such cosmopolitan identities are created and how they are linked with national identification. It would be interesting to examine the identity work of those who regard themselves as cosmopolitans in MNCs and other organizations. Considering oneself a ‘cosmopolitan’ may be linked with a background of living in several countries as well as language skills or other competencies. It is likely to be associated with privilege and corporate elites. Understanding the power implications of cosmopolitan identity construction is another interesting area for future research on power and prestige in MNCs. Third, as our examples show, national identities are closely associated with international relations, and especially historically produced relations of power associated with colonialism and neo-colonialism (Prasad, ). Future research could examine how international relations are (re)produced and challenged in contemporary organizations. In particular, historical perspectives can elucidate how these (re)constructions involve specific interpretations of history, instrumental use of the past, and selective storytelling. Future research might explore how specific legends, myths, or stereotypes have been created and how they are used instrumentally in contemporary settings. Such analyses could use discoursehistorical methods to uncover the micro-level discursive processes and mechanisms at play (Wodak, ). Drawing from post-colonial studies can cast light on identity issues linked to globalization and the hegemony of Western cultures (Boussebaa et al., ). With the rise of new emerging economic powers such as China and India, new types of nationalism are also forming, and are affecting organizations and the identity work of individual organizational members both in those countries and elsewhere (McKenna, ). For instance, acquisitions by China-based MNCs across the world have created power relations emphasizing Chinese culture and identity. Such phenomena offer fascinating opportunities for future research on national identities in organizations. Fourth, and finally, although our analysis has focused on MNCs, it is important to emphasize the role of mass and social media in reproducing and at times transforming our understandings of nationhood, nationalism, and national identities. In particular, the development of social media during the past ten years has created new kinds of fora for sensemaking and opportunities for the spread of various conceptions, narratives, and discourses in and around organizations. This is the case with nationalism, the dark side of which results in the reproduction of xenophobia, prejudice and stereotyping, and sometimes the creation of new forms of stigma or hate speech. At the same time, social media may also offer opportunities for challenging such occurrences. How all this plays out in and around MNCs is, however, still poorly understood.
C
.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we have taken a closer look at how national identity is (re)constructed in and around MNCs. We have explicated three distinct but closely interrelated levels at which national identity construction among MNC actors occurs. Starting from the macro-
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level, we have pointed out how ideologies fed by mass media and broad socio-economic and historical relations between nations inform national identity construction processes in MNCs. We have elucidated how national identities are (re)constructed relationally between groups of actors pursuing their agendas and interests in MNCs, and ultimately how they are an important constitutive part of actors’ individual sensemaking of their cross-cultural interactions with ‘the other’. At each of these levels, national identities are (re)constructed with particular types of discursive resources and produce specific implications for actors and their organizations. Given the rising collision of the globalist rhetoric and nationalistic idea(l)s globally, we anticipate national identification to play increasingly more important roles in MNCs. The extent to which MNCs are able to minimize the political use of national identity constructions by organizational actors and instead construct an appealing common organizational identity and images of a common future will largely predetermine their global success and competitiveness. Different views notwithstanding, the rising prominence of national identity opens up numerous exciting avenues for future research. As we have discussed in the last section of this chapter, exploring national identity construction processes can help researchers also to cast light on other topical contemporary issues. Possible examples are the intersection of gender, race, and nationhood in MNCs, the power balance between Western and emerging economies, the growing power of mass and social media in (re) constructing particular events and situations, and the formation of transnational elites.
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Individuals in Organizations Becoming Their Best .......................................................................................................................
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Abstract Why do people work so hard to establish and grow an identity that is positive? Individuals in their work organizations engage in ongoing identity work to establish and sustain positive identities in pursuit of life, energy, viability, well-being, and growth. However, the pursuit of positive identities does not altogether negate the negative, nor is it a simple, linear path to growth. It is often a complex process, riddled with contradiction and tension, with aspirational identities paradoxically unfolding in a persistent tension with their opposites that can be residuals from past history and/or emergent from current crisis or perceived future threat. The literature exploring positive identities (part of a larger stream of a ‘positive’ turn in psychology and organizational scholarship) has grown steadily over the past two decades. The novel focus of this chapter is to explore the paradoxical, tensional aspects of and tactics involved in positive identity work, highlighting current perspectives, criticisms, and ways forward in research.
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.................................................................................................................................. H (and their acts) in movies and video games stimulate a sense that we, too, can overcome our most threatening nemeses or circumstances to become our best selves and to reap the benefits. Much of the activity on social media, particularly in a professional sense (e.g. LinkedIn), is directed towards projecting a positive image of the self. Is it just me, or does it seem that everyone else is having a better time than I am? Similarly, individuals in their work organizations engage in ongoing identity work to establish and sustain positive
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identities in pursuit of life, energy, viability, well-being, and growth. Individuals often construct positive aspects of personal identity by experimenting with possible selves, overcoming identity threats, and identifying with groups or other affiliations of ‘good’ reputation. However, the pursuit of the positive does not altogether negate the negative, nor is it a simple, linear path. It is often a complex process, riddled with contradiction and tension, with aspirational identities paradoxically unfolding in a persistent tension with their opposites that can be residuals from past history and/or emergent from current crisis or perceived future threat. The persistent backdrop of the negative serves both as exigency for escaping/minimizing a detrimental identity and the logic(s) for pursuing/maximizing a beneficial identity, while neither completely disappears from the tension due to their mutual implication. In this chapter, the literature on positive identities (part of a larger stream of a ‘positive’ turn in psychology and organizational scholarship) is reviewed and analysed to explore the paradoxical, tensional aspects of positive identity work in and through organizations (e.g. Dutton et al., ; Kreiner and Sheep, ; Roberts and Creary, ; Roberts and Dutton, ). A tensional/paradoxical view of individual identity more generally has also been proposed (Sheep et al., b). The new path to be opened in this chapter is to explore and begin to theorize a tensional/paradoxical view of positive identity work. Individual or personal identity is usefully conceptualized as implicating ‘certain forms of (often positive) subjectivity’ that: thereby entwines feelings, values and behaviour and points them in particular (sometimes conflicting) directions. From this vantage point, collective visions of self, such as group and organizational identities, become not so much the “main show” as important resources in the formation of personal notions of self. (Alvesson et al., : )
These assumptions set the stage for positive identity, a particular perspective that has its roots in positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship (POS). Positive identity is defined here as an individual’s self-identity that is competent, resilient, authentic, transcendent, and holistically integrated (Kreiner and Sheep, ). To be clear, positive identity ‘does not connote a “prestigious” identity so much as one that enables the individual to function efficaciously in the world as an integrated, whole, coherent, competent individual—thereby experiencing greater life satisfaction and happiness’ (Kreiner and Sheep, : ). As such, developing and sustaining a positive identity often involves ongoing identity work, or the tactics employed by individuals to ‘create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’ (Snow and Anderson : ). The ‘work’ is necessary through discourse and behaviour strategies if one assumes that identity is often a precarious accomplishment to be negotiated rather than an objectively inherent attribute. The precarity of a positive identity is exacerbated by its threats, detractors, sceptics, competitors, and social stigmas that continually nip at the heels of one’s best efforts at self-presentation with a positive frame around ‘who I am’ (identity). One might reasonably ask whether all identity work is somehow teleologically engaged in positive identity growth. Would anyone wilfully construct a negative identity? It is difficult to imagine that one might wake up one morning and say, ‘Today I will become
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known to all as a thief ’ or a terrorist, a liar, an unethical business person, or a bully. Even for individuals who seem to aspire to infamous/illegal role identities or even revel in becoming pariah figures (whose numbers are relatively small, one would hope), a typical identity move is to reframe what are generally regarded as negative labels into more positive ones. For example, common thieves become ‘wet bandits’, thereby emphasizing creativity over crime (as in the classic Home Alone movie series). Societally stigmatized ‘dirty workers’ such as gravediggers and hospital orderlies nevertheless craft highly positive work role identities through reframing, refocusing, and recalibrating certain aspects of their occupation (Ashforth and Kreiner, ; Ashforth et al., ). Thus, could it be that most, if not all, identity work is directed towards establishing a positive identity (from one’s own frame of reference, at least), sometimes by finding ways to legitimate a negatively-regarded one? The individual quest for a positive identity is cast as a fundamental, inevitable component of a larger motivation: Much of philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, economics, literature, and the arts are, in one way or another, pursuits of the “good life.” . . . In these various efforts to understand positivity, the question of identity, or how the self is related to others and the world at large, inevitably emerges. (Sanchez-Burks and Lee, : )
The motivations for seeking positive identities (although sometimes implicit in other constructs) are long-standing concerns of psychology. For example, we are driven to protect or enhance self-esteem through establishing and sustaining those positive aspects of our identities that provide a ‘greater sense of self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, and meaning’ (Vignoles et al., : ). In theories of attribution, individuals are motivated to make internal self-attributions for their successes in order to achieve a positive presentation of self (implicating identity) to others (Kelley and Michela, ). Psychologists have also long noted a ‘self-serving bias’ (e.g. Arkin et al., ) in order to shift negative attributions to external contingencies (rather than threatening selfpresentations of personal identity), while positive attributions are readily claimed as deriving internally from ‘who I am’. Since ‘one of the least contested claims in social psychology is that people are generally motivated to protect and enhance their self-esteem’ (Vignoles et al., : ), and since ‘identity is arguably more fundamental to the conception of humanity than any other notion’ (Gioia, : ), the quest for positive identity that enhances self-esteem and enables effective social functioning and meaning is one of the most basic motivations to explain human behaviour in organizations.
C O-A P
.................................................................................................................................. That said, focusing on strictly positive identities in work contexts, as above, has been criticized as eliminating ‘any acknowledgment that work is experienced by most people, in large measure, as degrading and exploitative’ (Learmonth and Humphreys, : ). That
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is, identity viewed through a positive lens (e.g., as theorized by Dutton et al., ; discussed below) runs the risk of appearing to sidestep a more critical literature which posits workers as constructing ‘satisfying’ identities through resisting the ‘traditional interests of managers’ through dissensus (rather than consensus), power, conflict, and struggle (Learmonth and Humphreys, : –). Brown (: ) also highlights more critical (and Lacanian psychoanalytic) views on positive identities that recast it as a ‘modernist quest’ or ‘narcissistic fantasy in which individuals are victims of an obsession with the pursuit of illusory fetishized end-states such as self-knowledge and self-esteem’. Dutton et al. (: ) provide a rebuttal to such criticisms, accounting for critical concerns while highlighting their positive efficacy. For example, they do ‘not discount or eliminate the negative circumstances that abound in many organizations’, but they instead foreground individual agency in organizational contexts ‘to actively construct identities that are a source of strength and resilience’. Moreover, they argue that ‘positive identity construction can directly benefit any individual (manager or employee) by fostering the cultivation of psychological, physiological, and social resources’ that ‘may be particularly relevant for individuals in oppressive systems to empower actions that resist managerial or organizational interests and foster structural change’. An example of such resistance behaviour paradoxically brought about through positivity is documented in the work of Alexei Yurchak (), a Russian-American professor at Berkeley who analysed life in the Soviet Union prior to its collapse in the late s and early s. Yurchak described numerous paradoxical aspects of this ‘last Soviet generation’ in terms of the paradoxical discourses and identity positions individuals constructed for themselves to sustain a positive outlook on life. Yurchak labelled one such positive identity mechanism by the Russian word vnye (typically translated as ‘outside’), reframing it in paradoxical terms as: a condition of being simultaneously inside and outside of some context – such as, being within a context while remaining oblivious of it, imagining yourself elsewhere, or being inside your own mind. It may also mean being simultaneously a part of the system and yet not following certain of its parameters. (Yurchak, : )
Through such paradoxical dynamics of attaining and sustaining a positive sense of self (identity) through seemingly negative means of resistance and disengagement, a more nuanced view begins to emerge that simultaneously accounts for the role of the negative vis-à-vis the positive by viewing it through a paradox lens, which I discuss next.
P I W S T P/T L
.................................................................................................................................. Paradox is most basically defined as a persistent tension between ‘contradictory yet interrelated elements—elements that seem logical in isolation but absurd and irrational when appearing simultaneously’ (Lewis, : ). In their seminal book on positive identities, Roberts et al. (: ) posed an important question implicating both positivity
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and negativity: ‘How can positive outcomes emerge from identity conflict, tension, and threat?’ If we take seriously a paradoxical/tensional view of the world (and therefore of individuals in organizations; Lewis and Smith, ), then we understand that any concept (including positive identity) implicates its opposite (negative identity) in some pattern of relationship. Such implications arise from the ‘unity of opposites’ (Schad et al., : ), defined as ‘a meta-theoretical principle of paradox research dealing with the interrelatedness or interdependence of opposing elements’. That is, ‘things cannot exist without their counterpart’. Light without dark, autonomy without connectedness, good without the potential of evil, would be quite limited in meaning if viewed only as singular, unrelated constructs. Thus, unity of opposites implicates the mutually constituted nature of interdependent contradictions. All identities derive some of their meaning by implicating their opposites, or what Alvesson et al. (: ) called anti-identities: ‘visions of the “other”, or disidentification, all of which constitute the self around what it is not’—or perhaps what it is attempting to disavow. Extant work on individual identity paradoxes (e.g. Sheep et al., b, provide a typology) proposes that identity can be seen as both inherently paradoxical and variously constructed as such by actors: Identity work is rarely a straightforward endeavor. Indeed, identity work is born of and productive of paradoxical tensions . . . Distinctions between self and other are prone to construct difference in ways that produce identity paradoxes – “who I am” versus “who I am not.” Similarly . . . dualities are constructed as “managers draw on mutually antagonistic discursive resources in authoring conceptions of their selves” that “incorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms”. (Clarke et al., : ; Sheep et al., b: )
To sum, identity work is paradoxical (Sheep et al., b). Positive identity work is a precarious process in persistent tension with negative identity processes and threats (Brown, ; Petriglieri, ). Logically, then, positivity in identity is seen as paradoxical in its ongoing tension with its implicated opposite—negativity. In the following section, I explicate the interplay between the opposites of this paradox.
T P P-N P I W
.................................................................................................................................. All positive identity work implicates the paradox of positivity versus negativity itself. Kim Cameron () usefully explicated the positivity-negativity paradox in ways that undergird the logic of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS; Cameron and Spreitzer, ), with which the literature on positive identities is often associated. According to Cameron (: ), the ‘positive’ in POS indicates heliotropism, or ‘the tendency in all living systems toward positive energy and away from negative energy—or toward that which is life-giving and away from that which is life-depleting’. However, Cameron also accounts for the importance of the negative in producing positive outcomes and for the paradoxical persistence of both the positive and negative existing simultaneously in humans.
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Paradoxically, negativity usually overpowers heliotropic tendencies and has more emotional impact on individuals because humans learn early that ‘ignoring negative feedback could be dangerous and produce unpleasant consequences’ (Cameron, : ). Moreover, ‘one single negative thing can cause a system to fail, but one single positive thing cannot guarantee success’ (Cameron, : ). These dynamics at least partially account for the bias towards researching negative phenomena in organizations. Such a bias becomes Cameron’s (: ) rationale to rectify the imbalance by attending more to positive processes that ‘unleash heliotropic tendencies and produce positive change in human systems’. To highlight the ‘both-and’ paradoxical interdependence of positive and negative, Cameron (: ) summarizes as follows: Both the positive and negative are requisite for positive outcomes . . . an overemphasis on either the positive or the negative is dysfunctional. Over time, a constant focus on the negative leads to paranoia, defensiveness, and degeneration . . . Similarly, the effect of constant positivity is also dysfunctional, as illustrated by an unrealistic Pollyannaish perspective or a complete absence of corrective feedback. The Arab proverb is apropos: “All sunshine makes a desert”.
Therefore, the paradoxical view of positivity-negativity is necessary to produce solutions to divergent (rather than convergent) problems. Much like the tame versus wicked problem conceptualizations of Rittel and Webber (), convergent (similar to tame) problems have a single solution and can be ‘solved’. Divergent or paradoxical (similar to wicked) problems cannot be reduced to a single solution and are often indeterminate, but addressing them through a paradox lens produces ‘innovations, breakthroughs, and elevated understanding that would not be forthcoming otherwise . . . Without the tension that exists in the presence of simultaneous opposites, individuals and organizations seldom push themselves to a higher or transcendent level’ (Cameron, : ). Brown (: ) also noted that positivity-negativity is one of the ‘five fundamental, interconnected debates in contemporary identities research’. A relevant example of positive-negative identity work in organizations is that of ‘dirty work’, or workers whose identities are variously stigmatized by societal norms and who attempt to ‘reframe, recalibrate and refocus understandings of their selves and thus secure positive self-meanings’ (Brown, : ; Kreiner et al., a). However, Brown () also points to work from psychology and sociology that finds not all such attempts to be successful, with negative perceptions of organizational selves persisting despite coping strategies and reframing attempts—thus indicating the ongoing struggle and persistent paradox between positive and negative identities. The identity threat literature also notes the positive-negative identity tension. Positive outcomes can often emerge from identity conflict, tension, and threat, normally viewed as negative circumstances. Thus, ‘attempts to control and eliminate all forms of identity threat also remove opportunities for the beneficial consequences of identity change and growth’ (Petriglieri, : ). Three foundational reviews in the positive identities literature are next elaborated. I propose that the integration of these typologies or frameworks theoretically lead to a multiplicity of paradoxical tensions of positive identity work with associated tactics and aspirational outcomes (summarized in Table .).
Table 38.1 Positive identity paradoxes: aspirational outcomes, tensions, and tactics to navigate overall paradox of positivity vs. negativity in identity construction (Cameron, 2017; Sheep et al., 2017) Positive identity work tactics to navigate tensions (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Work-related identity perspective(s) (Dutton et al., 2010)
Positive identity theoretical frame (Roberts and Creary, 2012)
Overarching tension: Positive identity coherence paradox
Developing Spiritual Identity at Work: Finding meaningfulness; Development of inner life
Virtue: Develop virtuous qualities that are ‘inherently good’
Narrative-as-Identity
Aspirational Outcome: Both holistic integration of identity AND connected transcendence with a larger whole
Structural (complementary): one identity can facilitate the expectations of another identity
Identity narrated in terms of: Holistic integration
vs. fragmentation
‘something greater than oneself ’ (Ashforth and Pratt, 2003)
vs. self-interest
collaboration
vs. competition
Aspirational Outcome: Individual creates a narrative that makes sense of multiple aspects of positive identity or of integration/fragmentation paradox
Aspirational Outcome: Coherence of self-identity
Paradoxical tension(s) as consequence or construction of positive identities
Positive identity work tactics to navigate tensions (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Work-related identity perspective(s) (Dutton et al., 2010)
Positive identity theoretical frame (Roberts and Creary, 2012)
Overarching tension: Positive identity threat/growth paradox
Transforming Identity Threats: ‘identity threat jujitsu’ (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Evaluative: Construct identities that are favourably regarded by the self or by others
Identity Work: Agentic identity performance, identity negotiation
Identity work discourse and action focused on: identity opportunity
vs. identity threat
collaborative synergy in relationships
vs. competitive threat
Identity-protection and identityrestructuring responses (Petriglieri, 2011); Reframing and improving relationships with those who threaten identity Overcoming stigmatized identities (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999)
Aspirational Outcome: Threat overcome by identities that are favourably regarded
Aspirational Outcome: More positive identity structure and evaluation; sense of self as virtuous
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Paradoxical tension(s) as consequence or construction of positive identities
threat as means of growth/ change (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
vs. fight against/ flight from threat (Martiny et al., 2011)
Aspirational Outcome: Resilience, protection, safety, improved relationships
Paradoxical tension(s) as consequence or construction of positive identities
Positive identity work tactics to navigate tensions (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Work-related identity perspective(s) (Dutton et al., 2010)
Positive identity theoretical frame (Roberts and Creary, 2012)
Overarching tension: Internal identity gap paradox
Experimenting with Possible Selves (Ibarra, 1999; Markus and Nurius, 1986)
Positive identity narrated as:
Aspirational Outcome: Decreased gap between real and ideal selves
Developmental (Progressive): Individuals create possible selves aligned with developmental life stages and progression towards ‘ideal’
Narrative-as-Identity: Identity transition/uncertainty; Integrate life experiences across time; create narratives of growth
hoped for (ideal, aspirational) identity
Aspirational Outcome: Individuals progress towards their perceived ‘ideal’ identity—a quest for the authentic self
vs. imitation (fake self, emulated identity)
Overarching tension: Internal-external identity gap paradox
Leveraging (In)congruence (potential for growth in both): Adaptation to environment (P-E fit).
Positive identity fit framed as aligned or misaligned in terms of:
Incongruence of person-environment provides opportunity for dynamic tension to spur growth (springboard for adaptation, change, growth) (Kreiner et al, 2006a—HR).
person (internal)
vs. environment (external)
congruence
vs. inconguence (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Tactics become paradoxical: adaptation-staying process, learningexiting process (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009), or both in a paradoxical sense— similar to vnye (Yurchak, 2005)
Developmental (Adaptive): Individual adapts to external environment for better ‘fit’ (i.e. gap closed between) internal and external standards
Aspirational Outcome: More positive sense of development and identity structure
Identity Theory: Align actions with role expectations Aspirational Outcome: More positive sense of adaptation and identity structure
Aspirational outcome: To realize increased congruence (better fit— resulting in a more positive identity vis-à-vis the organization)
Aspirational Outcome: Holistic integration, competence (continued )
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authenticity (real self)
vs. feared (discrepant, disavowed) identity (Hoyle and Sherrill, 2006; Ibarra, 1999)
Paradoxical tension(s) as consequence or construction of positive identities
Positive identity work tactics to navigate tensions (Kreiner and Sheep, 2009)
Work-related identity perspective(s) (Dutton et al., 2010)
Positive identity theoretical frame (Roberts and Creary, 2012)
Overarching tension: Positive identity balance paradox
Search for Optimal Balance: Search for an ‘optimal balance’ in identity—‘a state of being neither too distinct/independent nor too inclusive/dependent in relation to a social identity’ (Kreiner et al., 2006b: 1033).
Structural (balanced): Reduce tension between needs for inclusion and differentiation
Social Identity Theory: Group identification
Social identity with groups constructed as balance between: inclusion
sameness
vs. distinctiveness (Kreiner et al., 2006b) vs. difference (Brewer, 1991)
Managing integration vs. differentiation; ‘me among the we’ (Kreiner et al., 2006b) Identity work that emphasizes either ‘suppressed’ or ‘privileged’ paradox elements to maintain optimal balance (Cuganesan, 2017) Aspirational Outcome: Competence, authenticity
Aspirational Outcome: balanced personal and social identities
Aspirational Outcome: More positive identity structure and evaluation
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Table 38.1 Continued
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P T P I W
.................................................................................................................................. A typology of paradoxical identity work tensions was proposed by Sheep et al. (b), with the caveat that such a typology was not exhaustive. The possibility is thus open for other tensions to be particularly relevant to positive identities. Such tensions are implicit in or logically derived from extant positive identity frameworks, although not currently identified explicitly as such. In Table ., three extant frameworks are interrelated to derive a series of five overarching positive identity paradoxes (and tactics to manage them). They are: • Positive identity coherence paradox: integration versus fragmentation • Positive identity threat/growth paradox: identity threat (competition) versus identity opportunity (collaboration/growth) • Internal identity gap paradox: ideal (aspirational/hoped for) versus actual (discrepant, feared, disavowed) identity • Internal-external identity gap paradox: person (internal) versus environmental (external) congruence • Positive identity balance paradox: sameness versus difference These five paradoxical tensions are conceptually linked to extant typologies of positive identity tactics (Kreiner and Sheep, ), positive work-related identity perspectives (Dutton et al., ), and positive identity theoretical frames (Roberts and Creary, ). First, the typology developed by Dutton et al. (: ) posits four work-related positive identity perspectives—virtue (virtual identity content), evaluative (favourable regard of content), developmental (progress towards ideal identity or better fit), and structural (balanced or complementary identities). Each of the four perspectives ‘highlights a different source of positivity and opens new avenues for theorizing about identity construction’ (Dutton et al., : ). Though theoretically useful, the perspectives are not neatly mutually exclusive, as we see some degree of overlap in their relations to the two frameworks that follow. Second, these four perspectives relate to five positive identity work tactics proposed by Kreiner and Sheep (): () developing spiritual identity at work; () searching for optimal balance; () transforming identity threats; () experimenting with possible selves; and () leveraging (in)congruence. Third, Roberts and Creary () organized the positive identities literature primarily by four classic identity theories: () social identity theory (group identification); () identity theory (role-identity); () narrative-as-identity (crafting narratives of identity growth); and () identity work (negotiated, agentic identity performance). Each theory suggested a different impetus and mechanism for construction, with different effects on self-views. The integration of these frameworks (Table .) both relate theoretically to and explain tactics for the effective navigation of the five overarching paradoxical tensions of positive identity to produce positive outcomes in the midst of positive-negative tensions. Each of
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the tensions is next explained and elaborated, each introduced by a crucial positive identity question that is addressed by the tension.
. Positive Identity Coherence Paradox: Virtue and Structural (Complementary) Perspectives: Narrative Frame Tactic: Developing a Spiritual Identity of ‘Holistic Integration’ at Work Do the different aspects of my identity fit together in any sort of logical relationship or story, and how does that make my identity more positive? According to Dutton et al. (: ), the virtue perspective emphasizes that identity is deemed positive if its content is ‘infused with virtuous qualities or character strengths that correspond to the qualities that distinguish people of good character’. Another of their perspectives, the structural perspective (where identities are seen as complementary rather than conflicting), shares commonalities with virtue in terms of tactics and tensions. That is, an overarching set of virtues (derived from one’s values) can serve as the common thread that weaves different social or role identities into a single fabric (or narrative), thereby creating positivity through identity complementarity, coherence, and integration in the process. As noted by Dutton et al. (: ), ‘A greater degree of complementarity between identities is a positive psychological condition that enables people to make connections and derive meaning from the disparate elements of their lives’. This notion of identity coherence has long been a teleological assumption of identity formation in social psychology (e.g. Erikson, ). Brown (: ) defines identity coherence as ‘individuals’ sense of their own continuity over time, clarity in awareness of the connections between their multiple identities, a sense of completeness or wholeness, and embrace of the essentially integrated nature of their selves’. However, an assumption of coherence alone is problematic, calling forth its opposite—identity fragmentation. Fragmentation can result from ‘ambiguity or “meaning-giving tensions” (Beech : )’ that arise from certain ‘aspects of the human condition,’ including ‘self-doubt, insecurity, fragility and inconsistency,’ (Brown, : ). The resulting paradox is a persistent tension that individuals must navigate, striving to create coherence and complementarity vis-à-vis the reality that, much as the principle of entropy in physics (in which matter left to itself tends towards disorder), identity tends to fragment more naturally than it coheres absent of any agential attempts to integrate the disparate elements of it. Kreiner and Sheep () propose a tactic to achieve such holistic integration (which they define in terms of both identity coherence and wholeness) that is also developed in the literature of workplace spirituality (e.g. Mirvis, ). However, the tactic is effective only when both poles of the paradox are attended to by the human actor, necessitating the active construction of a narrative of identity complementarity in the face of fragmentation. Such complementarity may also be realized by wrestling with the tension between one’s identity being defined as a collaborative involvement in ‘something greater than oneself ’ (Ashforth and Pratt, ) versus by a competitive self-interest, the latter of which is seldom regarded as virtuous if pursued without regard to the good of the greater whole.
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. Positive Identity Threat/Growth Paradox: Evaluative Perspective: Identity Work Frame Tactic: Transforming Identity Threats How should I respond to a challenge to my identity in ways that will enhance positive identity? Deriving from the collaborative versus competitive tension, a second positive identity paradox arises from how one treats a challenge to positive identity—as an identity threat (competition) versus an identity opportunity (collaboration/growth). The first response would involve a reaction of fight/flight against the threat, while the second would instead transform threat into an opportunity for growth. The second work-related identity perspective from Dutton et al. (: ) is the evaluative view, which declares identities to be positive if they are favourably regarded by the self or others as such. From such subjective evaluations, individuals derive self-esteem and general self-efficacy by ‘seeing themselves as competent, capable, accepted, and valued by others’. Of course, not everyone evaluates identities uniformly as positive or negative. That would beg the question: in whose eyes is it necessary for an identity to be evaluated as a positive one? For example, according to whom is it a positive identity to be a Democrat, Republican, Millennial, Boomer, immigrant, lawyer, evangelical, progressive, politician, academic, biker, capitalist, socialist? Would it not vary by the individual making the assessment? Should we care what others think of us? Although we are prone to overestimate the harshness with which others ‘judge’ us (Savitsky et al., ), we nonetheless do react to the evaluations of others regarding our identities. When evaluations are not positive, either by self or others, the individual can perceive his/her positive identity to be threatened. Thus, even as individuals pursue identities they evaluate as positive, their negative opposites are always lurking in the wings—implicated as we flee from them or work (fight) to overcome them through discursive reframing or countervailing behaviour (Martiny et al., ). Thus, much positive identity work is in the repair mode, as individuals work to remedy an identity threat (as in the case of bullying or stigmatization; Lutgen-Sandvik, ). An identity work tactic to do more than just fight the threat but also to reframe the threat as an opportunity for growth is termed by Kreiner and Sheep (: ) as ‘identity threat jujitsu’—a metaphorical phrase that prescribes: ‘individuals can strategically use the force of the threat itself as a catalyst for increased self-awareness and positive change’—thus going beyond minimizing harm to maximizing benefit. Individuals can live in the tension of addressing a competitive threat vis-à-vis realizing a collaborative synergy by improving relationships with those who threaten the identity. For example, individuals can reframe stigmatized identities in positive terms (Ashforth and Kreiner, ) and engage in both identity-protecting (with no identity change) and identity-restructuring (changing threatened aspects of identity) responses to threat (Petriglieri, ). The aspirational outcomes of navigating this paradoxical tension effectively are increased resilience in the individual, improved relationships, and a more positive identity evaluation by self and others.
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. Internal Identity Gap Paradox: Developmental (Progressive) Perspective: Narrative Frame Tactic: Experimenting with Possible Selves Who am I becoming? Who/what should I become? Dutton et al. (: ) characterize the positive identity perspective of developmental (progressive) as one driven by life stage development over time, as ‘attitudes and behaviors are brought into alignment with the structure of the self, ever progressing toward the life dream or the ideal view of what the person hopes to become’. A long-studied tactic by which individuals change through those stages is that of experimenting with possible selves (e.g. Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ; Markus and Nurius, ). These identity experiments with ‘provisional selves’ are undertaken by individuals when they perceive a gap between a hoped for (ideal, aspirational) identity at that life stage versus a feared (discrepant, undesirable) identity at that stage (Hoyle and Sherrill, ; Ibarra, ). Individuals thus seek progress towards their perceived ‘ideal’ identity—a quest for the authentic self—creating a tension between authenticity versus mere imitation (fake self or emulated identity) as different ‘selves’ are provisionally attempted. The aspirational outcome for navigating this tension is a decreased gap between the current (real) and ideal version of the self. A more positive identity results when the gap in that tension is decreased so that one can create narratives of positive identity growth over time (Roberts and Creary, ).
. Internal-External Identity Gap Paradox: Developmental (Adaptive) Perspective: Identity Theory Frame Tactic: Leveraging (In)congruence Is my identity a positive/beneficial fit with my organizational environment? Dutton et al. (: ) define the developmental (adaptive) perspective of positive identity as applying when ‘individuals systematically alter the content of the identity to achieve a more appropriate fit with a set of internal or external standards’. The identity tension that results is created by the gap between internal identity and external environmental demands—real or perceived—similar to the concept of person-environment fit (Kristof-Brown et al., ). Kreiner and Sheep () proposed an overall tactic to deal with this tension as that of leveraging the incongruence to spur identity growth—a springboard to adapt. Two tactics are proposed—both as avenues to growth but opposite in action taken. The tactics thus become paradoxical—one involving an adaptation-staying process, the other a learningexiting process (Kreiner and Sheep, ). It is the classic question of ‘should I stay or should I go?’ Or is it possible to do both in different ways? Recall the discussion above regarding the Russian word vnye, in which one can be ‘simultaneously inside and outside of some context . . . simultaneously a part of the system and yet not following certain of its parameters’ (Yurchak, : ). Yet, an outcome of positive identity was achieved in this paradoxical way. Adaptation to an environment,
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whether an oppressive one or an enlightening one, nevertheless involves selective or prioritized adaptation. One may never adapt as a ‘perfect’ fit, nor is that necessarily a positive goal if one desires to keep any degree of personal autonomy or empowerment. Therefore, the decision to stay or go in order to grow a more positive identity can be a matter of ‘how much’ the scales are tipped in either direction—can I adapt here in selective ways and still have a reasonably congruent fit, or must I physically go elsewhere to grow in those areas I have selected? In either case, identity will be more positive if I have aligned my role expectations with my identity (Roberts and Creary, ).
. Positive Identity Balance Paradox: Structural (Balanced) Perspective: Social Identity Theory (SIT) Frame Tactic: Searching for Optimal Balance How am I similar to and different from others, and how does that balance impact positive identity? The very title of Marilynn Brewer’s () introduction of the concept of optimal distinctiveness suggests its paradoxical basis: ‘On being the same and different at the same time’. Kreiner et al. (b: ) define a similar concept of optimal balance in tensional terms as ‘a state of being neither too distinct/independent nor too inclusive/dependent in relation to a social identity’. The positive identity concern with optimal balance is based in a SIT framework (Ashforth and Mael, ; Roberts and Creary, ), with the potential for considerable negative consequences to positive identity growth if imbalance becomes excessive. That is, excessive uniqueness can lead to ‘isolation and loneliness’, while excessive sameness can ‘depersonalize an individual’ and result in ‘a loss of self ’ (Kreiner and Sheep, : ). Thus, a critical function of positive identity work becomes a delicate balance of navigating the paradoxical tension between inclusion versus distinctiveness, or sameness versus difference. Dutton et al. (: ) also highlight the structural (balanced) perspective of positive identity. Specifically, the relationship between personal and social identities can ‘create structural “torsion” or tensions that require individuals to balance inherent desires for inclusion and belonging against the desire for uniqueness and differentiation’. Kreiner et al. (b) provide a model of optimal balance, in which individuals attempt to navigate demands towards the collective versus demands towards individuation. Multiple tactics are identified that integrate personal and social identities, differentiate them, or can be applied to either. More recent work has found that emphasizing ‘suppressed’ or ‘privileged’ elements of a paradox can also work to maintain optimal balance (Cuganesan, ). All of the tactics work together (although in opposite directions) to work towards optimal balance and thus a more positive sense of self vis-à-vis the social groups/organizations with which one identifies. Having now identified five paradoxical tensions of positive identity (work) as crucial to positive identity growth (in the identity questions they address and the tactics they call forth), I now turn to the potentialities they suggest for a productive research agenda for further theorizing positive identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. While certain aspects of the five tensions are implicit in extant frameworks, they have not been made explicit previously as a paradoxical/tensional framework for the research and practice of positive identity formation. While a paradox lens has been applied to individual identities in general (Sheep et al., b), three of the five tensions derived from extant positive identity frameworks are unique and distinct from those proposed in the more general sense. Derived from positive identities literature, two tensions overlapped the more general framework (Sheep et al., b): () the paradox of conformity (similar to the positive identity balance paradox of this chapter); and () the paradox of temporality (similar to the internal identity gap paradox of this chapter, with the latter focused more on internal identity processes than on temporality). Even so, it can be seen from differences in foci of these tensions that they are not identical conceptually. Therefore, through integration of extant positive identity frameworks, one novel contribution of this chapter is the proposal of an explicit typology of tensions that address crucial questions in the practice of ongoing positive identity work. The tensions are paradoxical (opposite yet interrelated, persistent), and thus require ongoing, agential attention in order to result in positive identity growth. There are also novel concepts introduced that can open promising streams of future research both in the positive identities and paradox literatures. For example, as noted in the discussion of the ‘coherence’ paradox, entropy is seen as a metaphor for the default tendencies of a tension towards disorder or undesirable consequences (negative pole of the paradox) if no agency is actioned to manage it. Indeed, for all five of the paradoxical tensions of positive identity, it may be proposed that, apart from agential positive identity work, the more negatively evaluated pole of the tension will dominate. Fragmentation would overtake coherence. Identity threat would continue to be threatening apart from a metaphorical ‘jujitsu’ move to turn it into an opportunity (Kreiner and Sheep, ). Possible selves would never be realized apart from agential experimentation with the tension between present and future identities (Ibarra, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu ; Petriglieri, ). Identity congruence with the environment would be a random occurrence apart from intentional, developmental adaptation (Dutton et al., ). As Kreiner and Sheep (: ) note, ‘The conscious [italics in original] search for optimal balance is itself an important identity work tactic that can serve a foundational role for identity growth’. Absent such deliberate, conscious identity work, optimal balance should not be expected to occur ‘naturally’ or passively. In short, due to the entropic tendencies of paradox absent human agency to navigate and/or manage it, positivity of identity is not a default outcome. Rather, it is the result of engaging strategically and persistently with positive-negative paradoxes of identity that are identified in this chapter. No claim is asserted that the five overarching paradoxes (or their sub-paradoxes in Table .) are exhaustive, but they are undoubtedly crucial, as they are derived from prior frameworks that are remarkably consistent with one another in key
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components of positive identity work. Moreover, each of these paradoxes is crucial to address one of five fundamental questions with which one must engage in the efficacious practice of positive identity work. Therefore, future research could fruitfully develop the notion of entropic tendencies in paradox absent persistent, effective human agency. Empirical demonstration of the theoretical work developed in the positive identities literature is also needed. Opportunities abound to engage in qualitative and quantitative studies that develop theory around the constructs of positive identity and positive identity work as distinct from that of identity more generally. As a caveat, the discriminant validity of positive identity may be difficult to tease apart from that of identity research that is not labelled ‘positive’. In that regard, in what ways are the processes and findings for positive identities unique and distinct from (as well as similar to) the study of identity work more generally? As stated above, it is an open question whether all identity studies could be seen as positive identity studies when one interrogates the motivations (or lack thereof) for any individual or organization to construct a negative identity. Thus, an interesting research question might become: ‘Why would not all identity work be positive?’ In short, there is additional conceptual refinement as well as empirical study (both inductively and deductively) in which to engage. That said, it might be encouraging to note that the tensional typology of this chapter is distinct from that developed for paradoxes of individual identity by Sheep et al. (b) in at least three of the five tensions. Therefore, early indications are promising that conceptual discriminant validity of positive identity tensions is sufficiently robust to support its own research agenda. Another important theoretical advance might also be realized in exploring the question: How do the five paradoxical tensions of positive identity potentially amplify one another as ‘knots’ of interrelated tensions (Sheep et al., a; Fairhurst and Sheep, )? As stated by Sheep et al. (b: ) ‘the greater the number of paradoxes of identity work, the more likely are actors to experience them as knotted in a dynamic interplay . . . Work in relational dialectics has underscored that paradoxical tensions rarely travel alone’. How could the five positive identity tensions impact one another in mutually amplifying ways? For example, what if evaluative and developmental (progressive) paradoxes ‘collide’ as an individual engages in experimenting with a new ‘possible self ’? What if that identity ‘move’ were to be challenged with a negative evaluation or identity threat? The individual is now dealing with two tensions simultaneously, interdependently navigating a tension between a hoped-for identity versus a feared one, while the identity threat exacerbates and amplifies the salience of the ‘feared’ side of that paradox. The individual is then faced with the tension of turning that threat into an opportunity for positive identity growth versus simply fighting or fleeing the threat. Other tensions could also be brought to bear by contextual factors such as lack of ‘fit’ of the possible/provisional self with a new organizational environment, introducing another set of sub-tensions into a complex tensional ‘knot’ that must be navigated. Therefore, empirical studies that both demonstrate proposed theory and advance our knowledge beyond it are called for to investigate the ‘knotting’ dynamics of paradoxical tensions in the human endeavour to create and sustain positive identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. I conclude this chapter in an unconventional way. I have saved this part until last because this chapter is not about me, and yet, paradoxically, it is very personal to me (and likely to you, and to all members of organizations). We all have the common experience of a lifelong quest towards what we call a positive identity at work—an identity that is ‘competent, resilient, authentic, transcendent, and holistically integrated’ that enables us to ‘experience greater life satisfaction and happiness’ (Kreiner and Sheep, : ), sometimes against great odds (which contribute to the paradoxical tensions of the pursuit). For example, and such as is increasingly common with ‘protean’ careers (Hall, ), I have experimented multiple times with possible and provisional selves as I made major career transitions from serving as an officer in the US Coast Guard, to a senior minister in religious organizations, to an academic faculty member, to a college administrator. Along the way, there were threats in the form of stigmatized identities due to anything from the latest televangelist scandal (which some unfairly extended to all ministers) to an impossible evaluation by board members that one was never sufficiently conservative (or liberal). Faculty identities can be shaken by anything from a brutal article review to a single, acidic student evaluation of teaching. Do we engage in ‘identity threat jujitsu’ and grow thereby, or do we succumb to the threat with fight or flight? We have all experienced variation in how well we ‘fit’ different organizational environments or leadership styles of our bosses. We have all struggled with achieving some degree of ‘optimal balance’ to find the ‘me’ among the ‘we’ (Kreiner et al., b). In short, we all can construct a positive identity narrative that will nevertheless be subject to change and riddled with (knotted) paradoxical tensions. As we navigate those tensions each day, we might find ourselves unexpectedly surprised to discover just how much the positive identity narrative we create is actually the same as ‘the story of our life’.
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Abstract A salient if under-researched feature of the new age of global inequalities is the rise to prominence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, the pursuit of social goals through philanthropic investment in projects animated by entrepreneurial principles. This chapter proposes a typology of the philanthropic identities that wealthy individuals craft during their philanthropic journeys. The scale of philanthropic ambition is closely linked to the type of identity assumed, allied to the dominant philanthropic orientation adopted, whether institutional or transformational. Some philanthropists, who assume a localized perspective, seek to re-embed disadvantaged communities to which they feel allegiance. Others, desiring social transformation, aspire to re-set current systems through the scale of their endeavours. Four generic philanthropic identities are explored, labelled ‘local hero’, ‘pillar of society’, ‘social crusader’, and ‘game changer’ respectively. In making sense of philanthropic identities, this chapter extends theoretical approaches to the study of contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy, still at a pre-paradigmatic, embryonic stage.
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.................................................................................................................................. A salient if under-researched feature of the new age of global inequalities is the rise to prominence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, the pursuit of transformational social goals through philanthropic investment in projects animated by entrepreneurial principles. The work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in striving to eradicate diseases like malaria and polio is emblematic of a much wider social movement of super-wealthy entrepreneurs to combat poverty and other manifestations of injustice prevalent in developed and developing countries. The doctrine of entrepreneurial philanthropy, first articulated by Andrew Carnegie in what became known as The Gospel of Wealth (), is argued to
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matter more now than ever because it offers the potential to mitigate the worst excesses of ‘winner takes all’ capitalism (Acs, ). In recycling large fortunes in their own lifetimes, philanthropic entrepreneurs bring capital and expertise to bear in tackling deep-seated social problems; helping disadvantaged others help themselves while—potentially at least— arresting the politics of envy and healing social divisions (Harvey et al., ). This chapter explores the philanthropic identities that wealthy entrepreneurs craft as they extend their reach beyond business into wider society. In making sense of philanthropic identities, about which little is known (Paul et al., ), this chapter advances new theory as a platform for future research in contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy, still at a pre-paradigmatic, embryonic stage (Nicholls, ; Taylor et al., ). Philanthropic identities are embedded in wider canonical discourses that exhort entrepreneurs to assume particular moralities, and shed light on the construction of desirable past and, more importantly, future selves (Pratt et al., ; Watson, ; Ybema, ). Given the pressure emanating from wider society for wealthy individuals to assume a philanthropic disposition, philanthropy arguably ‘no longer constitutes a personal or private goal but rather a form of social duty’ (Villadsen, : ). Following Dutton et al. (: ), we adopt the view that identity comprises the meanings that individuals assign to themselves, often presented in narrative form and in interchange with others, over time. We pose two main research questions. First, how might the identities that wealthy entrepreneurs assume in becoming philanthropic be categorized and defined? Second, related to this, how do these philanthropic identities come to be formed dispositionally? This chapter is organized as follows. The next section explores the notion of identity construction in the context of entrepreneurial philanthropy. We then propose a typology of the principal identities that philanthropists assume through their charitable endeavours, dependent on the scale of giving in which they engage, whether small- or large-scale, and the orientation they adopt, institutional or transformational. Building on these ideas, we next propose a process model of philanthropic identity formation, demonstrating the importance of positive feedback from engagement in philanthropy. We then reflect on the importance of philanthropic identity work to the legitimacy and continuing authority of business elites across the world. In conclusion, we briefly consider the implications of our theoretical models for future research on entrepreneurial philanthropy.
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter is located in the context of a wider investigation into the nature of contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy, within what Acs and Phillips (: ) term the ‘entrepreneurship-philanthropy nexus’ (Anheier and Leat, ; Bishop and Green, ; Dees, ). Our conceptualization of generic philanthropic identities delineated in what follows draws on a body of research conducted over the past decade (Harvey et al., ; Maclean and Harvey, ; Maclean et al., , ; Shaw et al., ). We define entrepreneurial philanthropy as the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic
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resources (Harvey et al., : ). Entrepreneurial philanthropists are characterized by their drive to accumulate personal fortunes, allied to a concomitant impulse to deploy a portion of their wealth in pursuit of philanthropic ventures over which they retain control (Bandura, ; Ostrander, ). Hence, their focus is on the (entrepreneurial) creation of wealth and the (philanthropic) redistribution of that wealth to serve specified social goals (Acs and Phillips, ). Entrepreneurial philanthropy, however, in directly pursuing solutions to complex social problems, inevitably extends the suzerainty of wealthy entrepreneurs from the domain of the economic to the domains of the social and political (Ball, ; Bosworth, ), widening the ‘empowerment gap’ between themselves and ordinary citizens who ‘already feel shoved aside by elites and the wealthy’ (Callahan, : ). That this process is encouraged by generous tax relief on charitable giving is felt by critics to add insult to injury (Maclean and Harvey, ; Reich, ), increasing the power of private foundations, described by Reich (: ) as ‘the most unaccountable, non-transparent institutional form’ in democratic societies. This leads Horvath and Powell (: ) to question the role of entrepreneurial philanthropy in ‘reshaping government by inserting itself as a preferred provider of public goods’, eroding democracy and creating ‘a tension between philanthropy and the ideal of equality’ on which it rests (Pevnick, : ). Considered thus, philanthropy allows wealthy individuals, almost by sleight of hand, to amplify their influence and connections in such a way that it is they, not elected politicians, who determine the direction of change. As Bosworth (: ) bluntly puts it: ‘The public still pays most of the bills, but it is the philanthrocapitalist who, increasingly, sets the agenda’. All great personal fortunes are made through the ability to extract economic rents from broad swathes of the population over a prolonged period of time. The admiration that wealthy entrepreneurs inspire in society, however, has led to their being cast in the light of ‘social prophets’ (Bosworth, : ), ‘supermen’ capable of curing social ills rather than extractors of supernormal economic rents, deflecting public criticism and scrutiny (Swalwell and Apple, ). Unlike politicians, however, they are unelected and therefore unsackable. Elsewhere, we have explored the acquisition of a philanthropic identity as experienced and narrated in terms of a journey (Maclean et al., ), which is essentially a quest for meaning (Gregg, ; Hytti, ). The journey metaphor highlights the notion of identity acquisition in terms of becoming (Brown, ), illuminating processes of identity building accomplished in the course of entrepreneurial careers, forming ‘a trajectory across the different institutional settings of modernity over the durée of what used to be called the “life cycle” ’ (Giddens, : ). The journey motif casts light on the nature of professional identities as processes of discovery, unfolding over time in ways that are often meandering, discontinuous, and difficult to predict. This casts light on identities as evolving through a process of wayfinding in response to role changes, setbacks, and turning-points (Ingold, ), as actors ‘make sense of and “enact” their environments’ (Pratt et al., : ; Weick, ). Philanthropic journeys enacted by wealthy entrepreneurs may be informed by the notion of generativity (Erikson, ; Giacalone et al., ; McAdams, , ), defined as ‘purposeful action for the well-being of future generations, and the emergence of individual purpose and agency’ (Creed et al., : ); through which philanthropists fashion a legacy of the self, producing ‘generativity scripts’ which animate their capacity for
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agency. Generativity scripts constitute action outlines for ‘chapters yet to be lived’ that ‘perform something worthy to be remembered’ (McAdams, : ). As such, they play a pivotal role in ‘individuals’ self-construction of generative selves’ (Creed et al., : ). Our purpose in this chapter is to build upon this work by delineating more clearly the nature of the philanthropic identities that philanthropists assume in constructing generative selves. As such, our chapter fits within the category of papers on self-identity in organizing that focus on ‘identity conceptualization, construction and types’ (Brown, : ). Identity is bound up with a sense of place, past and present, and with engaging in activities which help to anchor individuals within that place and endow it with meaning (Bauman, ). Gatens and Lloyd (: , cited in Massey, : ) observe that ‘the determining of identities is at the same time the constitution of new sites of responsibility’. These new sites of responsibility may entail social investment in localized, targeted communities to which philanthropists feel allegiance (Maclean et al., ); where social innovation can play a developmental role in regenerating deprived local communities (Johnstone and Lionais, ; Perrini et al., ). Investment in a specific community recalls Candide’s insight from Voltaire’s () satire of the same name, which ends with the ‘hero’ discerning ‘we must cultivate our garden’ as a pragmatic response to seemingly intractable issues. Alternatively, philanthropists may aspire to have global reach; confirming Giddens’ (: ) observation that ‘the level of time-space distanciation introduced by high modernity is so extensive that, for the first time in human history, “self” and “society” are interrelated in a global milieu’. Emblematic of the latter, a banner on the Gates Foundation website proclaims that ‘all lives have equal value’ and that it is led by ‘impatient optimists working to reduce inequity’ (Gates Foundation, ). In similar fashion, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg declare that there can be a ‘future for everyone’ by applying technology to ‘help remove systemic barriers that limit individual progress’ (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ). Jamie Cooper and Christopher Hohn likewise promote ‘bold solutions to seemingly intractable challenges for children and adolescents in developing countries’ because ‘every child deserves to survive and thrive today and in the future’ (CIFF, ). Inspirational statements such as these, expressive of the global ambitions of some entrepreneurial philanthropists, are ethically highly charged. The assertion that all lives have equal value is foundational to much ethical thinking (Nagel, : ; Rawls, : ; Singer, : ), while the notion of working practically to redress injustice likewise finds support in recent influential literature on social justice (Sandel, : –; Sen, : –). Central to such universalizing statements, however, is the solidarity they express with less fortunate others. The emphasis on all lives having equal value promoted by Bill and Melinda Gates emphasizes commonalities shared with other human beings, rather than the elephant in the room, their inordinate wealth that sets them apart and reinforces inequity. Such legitimating accounts are bound up with the fashioning of social identities that are deemed desirable, designed to legitimate ‘an account maker’s . . . set of claims’ (Creed et al., : ). Virtue is demanded of today’s wealthy entrepreneurs, whom society expects to behave in a morally and ethically upright manner (Rego et al., ; Turner et al., ). Kornberger and Brown () have shown that ethics represent a crucial resource for identity work, on which individuals draw in their attempts to author preferred versions of the self.
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To command influence, purveyors of accounts must be able to present themselves as living or having lived a responsible life (Habermas and Bluck, : ; Tams and Marshall, ). In this way, quasi-hegemonic societal discourses exhort wealthy entrepreneurs to embrace particular moralities by assuming ‘publicly available “personas” or socialidentities’ (Watson, : ), urging them to ‘align with . . . societally prescribed selves’ by crafting an ostensibly philanthropic identity (Brown, : –). These discourses underline the obligation for the rich to do their ‘bit’ to assist the needy, with whom they are required to show a degree of solidarity, thereby demonstrating that we are all in the same boat. This involves the construction of a positive identity whereby the self is presented as worthy and hence deserving of high esteem (Dutton et al., ). This raises a further question: namely, to what extent are the philanthropic identities assumed by super-wealthy individuals authentic? To what extent might the self-myths they fashion and propagate amount to self-deception or be in ‘bad faith’ (Bruner, ; Sartre, )? Creed et al. () contend that generative action scripts that are quintessentially redemptive often conceal a tension between authenticity and inauthenticity. An alternative viewpoint is that philanthropists are simply putting on a guise, assuming particular moralities like new clothes, masquerading as philanthropic to deflect resentment at their wealth, which might otherwise be deemed excessive; reminiscent of the way in which rich individuals once purchased indulgences to smooth their passage into paradise (McAdams, ). Viewed in this light, philanthropic engagement might be the price of addressing the politics of envy to maintain the status quo, rather than to effect radical change by tackling social injustice and inequity. In this regard, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair asserted that philanthropy was necessary ‘to lessen hostility to the rich’, considering it a better option than state intervention to alleviate the harmful effects of rising inequalities (Mail Online, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Fundamental to our conception of generic philanthropic identities is the distinction between two main philanthropic orientations, institutional and transformational, consistent with the distinction between ‘contributory’ and ‘disruptive’ philanthropy made by Horvath and Powell (: ). These are summarized in Table .. On the one hand, thinking institutionally disposes philanthropists to support organizations and institutions they hold dear, which they believe to be especially valuable to society, established causes that might be nurtured through the investment of philanthropic funds (Heclo, : –). Support for schools, universities, healthcare organizations, community groups, and cultural institutions typically follows the socially conservative orientation of institutional philanthropy. On the other hand, thinking transformationally disposes philanthropists to invest in social innovation, in causes intended to solve deep-seated social problems at home or abroad, which cannot be tackled adequately simply by investing more in established organizations and institutions. Support for projects and initiatives designed
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Table 39.1 Logics of distinctive philanthropic orientations Philanthropic orientation Distinguishing features
Institutional
Transformational
Objective Strategy Project selection Investment decisions Project management Network orientation Project evaluation
Capacity building Opportunity driven Responsive Subjective Arm’s length Functional Qualitative
Social innovation Theory-of-change driven Proactive Objective Hands-on Strategic Quantitative
to overcome economic and social inequalities typically follows the more socially radical orientation of transformational philanthropy. The institutional model is that of responsive-mode foundations that nurture the notfor-profit sector by dispensing funds to applicants within the scope of their charitable purpose. They respond to opportunities presented to them and in general make judgements subjectively both with respect to funding levels and outcomes. They prize their independence as grant-makers. The transformational model, in contrast, seeks to transform rather than nurture society, aiming proactively to solve social problems through concentrated investment behind a radical theory-of-change (Rogers, ), often in conjunction with partners, including private companies and government agencies. Investment decisions are made and outcomes measured using quantitative data consistent with private-sector practices (Shaw et al., ). We hold that both philanthropic orientations—institutional and transformational—coexist and are not mutually exclusive, but rather that philanthropists typically are swayed more by one philanthropic orientation than the other. A second important distinction in differentiating philanthropic identities is scale, donating on a small or large scale within a given social context (Bloom and Chatterji, ; Perrini et al., ; Smith and Stevens, ). Philanthropists of relatively modest means or with substantial means and a low proclivity for generosity tend to focus their giving on local or specific causes, institutional or transformational. Their gifts are geographically embedded in areas that hold particular significance to them as donors (Marshall et al., ). Those of substantial means and a relatively high propensity to give operate across a wider geographic area and often involve themselves in more than one philanthropic cause (Chell et al., ; Steyaert and Katz, ). When this distinction is juxtaposed with that made between philanthropic orientations, four generic philanthropic identities emerge, as shown in Figure ., labelled ‘local hero’, ‘pillar of society’, ‘social crusader’, and ‘game changer’ respectively. Local heroes are institutionally-minded individuals who have prior experience of the institutions and organization they support, typically their alma mater, their local hospital, community groups, faith communities, and cultural organizations. They believe in giving
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Pillar of
Institutional
Large
Local Hero
Transformational
Orientation
Scale of giving Small
Social
Game
Crusader
Changer
Society
. Typology of philanthropic identities
back to those who once nurtured them and towards whom they feel a deep sense of gratitude and devotion (Maclean et al., ). Their generosity is a matter of record, symbolized by appointment to governing bodies, celebrated in local media, and commended by other members of the local elite. The identities crafted by local heroes are intended to speak of loyalty, selflessness, and dependability, regionally inscribed, and hence worthy of a place of honour within the local community (Marshall et al., ). Many of these self-projected virtues might apply equally to pillars of society, but with important distinctions stemming from the elevated scale and scope of their philanthropic operations. Pillars of society typically have their own foundations, inviting non-profits to apply for funding within published spheres of interest. They are on the go-to list of professional fundraisers. When they make headline gifts, running into tens of millions of pounds or dollars, it is for establishment causes of special interest, often favouring the most prestigious universities, medical researchers, hospitals, community organizations, and cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, symphony orchestras, ballet companies, and operatic societies (Ostrower, ; Schervish, ). Naming gifts on this scale lends a veneer of permanence to projected identities through attachment to auditoria, buildings, departments, and research institutes. Pillars of society are esteemed in elite circles for their munificence and acclaimed in the media as ‘philanthropists’, differentiating them from many of the super-wealthy who, in fact, give little back to society (Maclean and Harvey, ; Philanthropy Review, ). The identities they craft are expressive of foresight, virtue, and commitment. Transformational philanthropists, small and large, distinguish themselves from their more conservative, institutionally-minded counterparts by their identification with the cause of social justice (Dietlin, ; Sandel, ). They are sensitive to institutional failings that result in chronic social problems such as long-term unemployment, enduring poverty, malnutrition, high rates of infant mortality and illiteracy, and pursue innovative, systemic solutions. Many are entrepreneurs who seek to develop and implement new models of social practice based on an innovative theory of change, i.e. a fundamental solution to a deep-seated social problem (Rogers, ). Metaphorically, the approach taken by transformationally-minded philanthropists is to combat hunger ‘not by providing
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fish but a fishing rod’. The emphasis is on tackling problems at source rather than treating symptoms. Social crusaders identify problems on the ground in their localities and invest philanthropically in favoured solutions, often following the lead taken by philanthropists facing similar challenges elsewhere. In effect, they become embroiled in mimetic social movements, whereby innovations spread from one locality to another in pursuit of similar goals. Alliances between philanthropists, politicians and local government are commonplace (Kahler, ; King, ). In this way, social crusaders are pivotal to the creation of new institutional and organizational forms, their identities expressive of entrepreneurialism, reforming zeal, and social solidarity. Game changers likewise pursue reform in the name of social justice, but on a grander scale (Juris, ). Here the emphasis is on scalability, on implementing theories of change simultaneously in multiple locations in tandem with local partners. Game changers are leaders of social movements who invest substantial philanthropic resource in pursuit of goals such as the elimination of diseases, employment creation in developing countries, increasing literacy rates, and decreasing infant mortality (Keck and Sikkink, ; Noakes and Johnston, ). The philanthropic identities they craft speak of vision, leadership, and love of humanity. In constituting ‘idealized identities’ to which wealthy individuals aspire (Thornborrow and Brown, : ), all four philanthropic types arguably foster ‘a form of reflexivity that is self-confirmatory and self-satisfied’ (Brown, : ) by focusing on personal strengths and positive qualities (Luthans et al., ).
M P I F
.................................................................................................................................. Classifying philanthropists by generic identity is easier in theory than in practice for three reasons. First, as suggested, the philanthropic orientations identified—institutional and transformational—are not mutually exclusive. Certainly, the vast majority of philanthropists subscribe predominantly to one orientation or the other, but it is observable that transformationalists at times support existing institutions and that institutionalists at times support radical change. Second, a philanthropic identity does not appear fully formed the moment an individual embarks on his or her philanthropic journey. Rather, we argue, identities are crafted dynamically through engagement in the philanthropic field. Third, the resources available to an individual for investment in philanthropic ventures vary over time, as does the propensity to give, suggesting that some philanthropists might transition from one identity to another. These complications are accommodated in Figure ., which charts how identities are crafted over time through engagement in philanthropy. The notion of the philanthropic journey is helpful here (Maclean et al., ). We observe that the impulse voluntarily to give to charitable causes varies considerably between individuals, quantitatively and qualitatively. For many people, no matter how wealthy initially or how sharp the growth in their net worth, the charitable impulse remains weak throughout their lives. The social pressure to ‘give back’ and ‘make a difference’ to society beyond one’s self and one’s family may vary between communities and cultural configurations at different periods of time, but nonetheless big differences can be observed between
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Formative dispositions
Philanthropic engagement
Philanthropic practice
Institutional logic
Rewards and satisfactions Impulse to support valued institutions and organizations
Identifying with established philanthropic causes
Transformational logic
Philanthropic means
Impulse to find solutions to pressing social problems
Allocating resources between chosen causes
Philanthropic identity
Identifying with transformational ideas and social movements
Championing innovative social change initiatives
Rewards and satisfactions
. Crafting philanthropic identities
people exposed to similar social conditions in all historic eras. Put simply, philanthropy appears to be a minority pursuit, conspicuously so in the present age of inequality (Boulding, ; Piketty, ). However, a minority in society is disposed to invest in causes that promise collective betterment without material advantage to themselves (Benkler, ). Some are induced to support institutions and organizations they revere, likely because they or members of their family have benefited from them in the past. Schools, universities, and hospitals are magnetic in this regard. Others, offended by evident social ills, are drawn to causes that promise social transformation by innovative means. The dashed arrows in Figure . suggest that these impulses are not inimical to one another, but at the outset of a philanthropic journey, when the would-be philanthropist has the means, one route will likely be favoured over the other. Having the means to engage in philanthropy, positioned at the heart of Figure ., is crucial to what follows. Enjoyment of a large salary or significant bonuses might be sufficient to trigger engagement in philanthropy. However, for many, it is the occurrence of what philanthropy professionals call a ‘liquidity event’, such as receipt of an inheritance or the sale of part or the whole of a company built up from scratch, which really kickstarts the process. Suddenly, from feeling relatively cash poor, the nascent philanthropist feels positively cash rich. With the means to turn words into deeds, thoughts into actions, they become serious givers, recognized philanthropists, whether on a local, national, or international scale. The process of crafting a philanthropic identity thus commences, always contingent on the availability of means. Whatever the scale and path assumed, the imperative is to put in place the mechanisms and acquire the capabilities needed to make sound philanthropic decisions. Those operating on a small scale often lodge funds with a community foundation, invest in a donor-advised fund or set up a private family-run foundation (Jung et al., ). They often seek professional advice
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from lawyers, accountants, or philanthropy professionals. Those operating on a larger scale invest in more complex organizations, independent foundations, with considerable in-house strategic and operational capabilities, which may or may not accept funding applications from non-profits within their sphere of interest. Generally speaking, institutionally minded philanthropists are content to operate in responsive mode, making grants to organizations to which they feel a strong sense of allegiance, whereas transformationally minded philanthropists prefer to set the strategic agenda, defining problems, identifying solutions, and implementing plans (Dietlin, ). Critical to the processes of philanthropic identity formation are the satisfactions and rewards of philanthropic engagement, depicted in Figure . as positive feedback loops. Satisfactions and rewards are not coterminous, but operate distinctively to increase commitment and speed the emergence of the crafted philanthropic identities of local heroes, pillars of society, social crusaders, and game changers; individuals within each category uniquely differentiated by scale of giving, causes and modus operandi. Satisfactions are variously cognitive and emotional. Institutionalists can readily discern the difference they have made—perhaps a building that might not exist, an event that would not have occurred, or a young person having the benefit of college education—and are lionized, in person and in the media, for the contributions they make. The transformational road is almost invariably rockier, but the satisfactions often compelling as interventions save lives and create brighter, more hopeful futures for at-risk children, young adults and families, at home and abroad (Duncan, ). Identities are developed ‘in and through relationships’ (Ibarra, ; Petriglieri and Obodaru, : ), and it is frequently the personal experience of meeting those who have been helped and experiencing their gratitude at first hand that intensifies commitment and confirms the desired philanthropic identity. Rewards operate on a different level, as prior theorizing indicates (Harvey et al., ). Philanthropy necessarily involves a voluntary reduction in the economic capital of the donor, but philanthropic investments yield returns in the form of cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Cultural capital accrues as philanthropists enter new life-worlds, as when institutionalists sponsor the arts and when transformationalists invest in medical research and mass vaccination programmes. Social capital accrues as philanthropists extend their social networks beyond the realm of business into fields such as academia, social enterprise, and government. Symbolic capital accumulates as philanthropists are honoured variously by governments, universities, and learned societies, setting them apart—on a higher moral plane—than their less generous counterparts. These forms of capital, valuable in their own right, can in turn be translated, when skilfully directed and in the right circumstances, into fresh economic capital, sometimes on a prodigious scale (Harvey and Maclean, ). In other words, philanthropy is far from being a one-way street.
P I, L, E P
.................................................................................................................................. There is growing recognition of the power over society now wielded by the philanthropic elite, but the undemocratic ‘right to rule’ conferred by the ability to lavish resources on
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personally selected charitable causes has yet to be seriously challenged. Callahan () arguably comes closest to expressing what is at stake. On the one hand, he is admiring of those who have pledged to spend a large portion of their fortunes on philanthropic causes during their lifetime, potentially improving the health, education, welfare, and living standards of billions of people. On the other hand, he is wary of local, national, and international political agendas being set by unelected entrepreneurial philanthropists, circumventing democratic processes. He is left with decidedly ambiguous feelings: thankful that the wealthy are ‘giving back’ voluntarily at scale, but fearful of the resulting concentration of power (Bosworth, ). This is the uncomfortable assessment we share. The crafting of philanthropic identities assumes special significance in this context. If the dominant neoliberal economic order is to continue without serious challenge, those in commanding positions must be accepted as worthy by those whose fates they control (Piff et al., ). Such acceptance, in part at least, depends on how men and women of fortune engage with less fortunate others. A well-crafted philanthropic identity is valuable in this regard, as exemplified by the formulation we call the ‘golden couple’, life-partners who commit to philanthropy as a joint venture. Dual-career couples form an integral part of the Zeitgeist prevalent in today’s professional world (Petriglieri and Obodaru, ). In philanthropy, the joint identity of a golden couple may be that of local hero, pillar of society, social crusader, or game changer. They are ubiquitous in the United States where Bill and Melinda Gates, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, and Eli and Edythe Broad are prominent examples, authoring a new cultural identity script for other super-wealthy duos to emulate (Gergen, ; Ibarra and Barbulescu, ). While one half of the duo may have accumulated most of the money, in philanthropy there is opportunity for a partnership to which each might contribute equally. A common, albeit stereotypical theme is that one half of the duo brings analytical and organizational skills and the other half brings intuition and compassion. Together the couple has point and purpose, striving, at whatever level and in whatever ways, to make the world a better place. The fused identities of a golden couple speak of equality, solidarity, and love at the personal level and by projection with humanity as a whole, which message the media broadcasts to the world at large, fostering the cult of philanthropic celebrity. Golden couples and their philanthropic deeds make good copy, underscoring the message that much good can come from enlightened generosity, helping to legitimize inequality and contain negative reactions to people of excessive means. Considered thus, individual philanthropists and golden couples perform voluntarily a crucial role in maintaining the economic, social, and political hegemony of wealth holders globally. The philanthropic identities they craft variously—as local heroes, pillars of society, social crusaders, and game changers—deflect attention from the socially undesirable aspects of getting and remaining rich. Ordinary citizens know little of how the wealthy maximize tax advantages or exercise power to ensure that legal and regulatory frameworks operate in their favour (Maclean and Harvey, ; Maclean et al., ). Nor do they recognize that philanthropy is part of a wider game of neoliberal ideological control supported by an army of legal and financial advisers working to keep people of means in pole position in society (Bosworth, ; Villadsen, ). Philanthropic identities are ideologically charged, being ‘authored and promulgated by those who are hierarchically privileged’ (Brown et al., : ), in ways designed to legitimate the huge inequalities of
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wealth in society which philanthropy ostensibly purports to address. The manner in which philanthropy is presented, as investment in good causes that promise collective betterment without material gain for the donor, belies a more fundamental but obscured role as shoring up the status quo and consolidating current gains, according to which the super-wealthy emerge as the ‘bearers of a new accumulation strategy’ (Ball, : ; Jessop, ). While disadvantaged identities are geographically inscribed, for example, so too are the identities of the ‘materially rich metropolitan and globally-oriented class’, as evinced by the ongoing encroachment of the super-wealthy on prized neighbourhoods in global cities like London, where many of the world’s billionaires reside; contributing to a ‘spatialization of social class’ (Burrows, : ). Only occasionally, when the mask slips, do people outside the upper tiers of society gain insights into how the wealthy, including wealthy philanthropists, typically conduct their financial affairs. The protracted squabble over assets accompanying the divorce of former golden couple Christopher Hohn and Jamie Cooper, resulting in the world’s largest-ever divorce settlement at the time of writing, is a case in point. More dramatic is the case of Leona Helmsley, jailed for tax evasion, who donated the bulk of her fortune to the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. Known as the ‘Queen of Mean’, Helmsley is best remembered for the reported utterance to her housekeeper: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’ Recalling Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal saying, ‘Let them eat cake’, this statement hammers home the enormous gulf separating wealthy billionaires from ordinary citizens, despite the former’s universalizing statements to the contrary (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ; CIFF, ; Gates Foundation, ). Do these critical reflections mean that the identities crafted by philanthropic entrepreneurs and their life partners are inauthentic or insincere? Notwithstanding the tension which palpably exists between authenticity and inauthenticity in human existence (Sartre, ), we do not believe so. Philanthropy may serve to legitimize inequality, but the sincerity and good intentions of the majority of protagonists is not in question for the simple reason that those who choose voluntarily to use a substantial part of their resources to help others constitute a minority of the wealthy, even when philanthropy is institutionalized, woven into the fabric of society. They are dispositionally attuned, for one reason or another, to ‘give back’ to society and strive to ‘make a difference’ for the benefit of others (Maclean et al., ). Our analysis suggests that the satisfactions and rewards of philanthropy serve to build commitment and refine philanthropic identities as individuals and couples come to play a special role in their communities. Regular positive feedback leads to escalating commitment and the authoring of generativity scripts focused on practically caring for the fate of others and leading ethically responsible lives (McAdams, ; Singer, , ). In the process, philanthropy plays a role in helping to assuage the guilt that some super-affluent experience at having, and holding on to, inordinate wealth, for which it offers an element of redemption (Creed et al., ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we have sought to advance thinking on the definition, crafting, and significance of philanthropic identities. The contribution we make to the literature on entrepreneurial philanthropy is threefold. First, we present a new typology (Figure .) of
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the engaged philanthropist, identifying ‘local heroes’, ‘pillars of society’, ‘social crusaders’, and ‘game changers’ as four generic types of philanthropic identity. Our typology is founded on scale and orientation. Scale—small or large—is necessarily a governing parameter in determining prominence. Orientation—institutional or transformational—is a more subtle but equally compelling distinction in determining favoured causes. The juxtaposition of scale and orientation yields empirically recognizable generic types without needing to delve into contested matters such as motivation, ethnicity, or donor origins, creating a robust framework for future empirical research. Secondly, we derive a dynamic model of philanthropic identity formation (Figure .) consistent with our typology. This highlights the importance of positive feedback loops in the crafting of specific philanthropic identities and articulates the systemic relations that exist between identity, formative dispositions, philanthropic means, modes of engagement, and philanthropic practices. The model is an example of what Bourdieu (: ) terms a ‘structuring structure’, wherein philanthropic identities are crafted systemically in response to positive feedback loops, while being conditioned and mediated by philanthropic choices relating to scale and orientation. The value of the model lies in explaining how philanthropic identities become refined as commitment increases in response to rewards and satisfactions, as a sense of self-identity is strengthened through philanthropic endeavours that help overcome a putative, existential sense of lack and give meaning to existence (Driver, ; Lacan, ). Thirdly, we show that philanthropic identities are matters of consequence. Each of the four generic types—with respect to both individuals and golden couples—is expressive of socially and ethically desirable qualities and commitment on the part of the rich to make common cause with the poor in pursuit of social betterment. This, we suggest, is necessary to defend the neoliberal global economic order (Jessop, ). Whether it is sufficient remains to be seen.
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Abstract This chapter tackles the question of how race can be researched and written about as a formative rather than circumstantial aspect of identity in organizations. The authors go beyond race as a subject of inquiry for scholars who specialize in problems of managing racialized bodies in subfields such as cross-cultural management, diversity, and inclusion. Their aim is to connect the study of identities in organizations to the rich, extant literature in other fields that theorizes race and identity. The authors renew calls for understanding race as an organizing principle and conclude with the proposition that thinking about racial identity as a productive, generative identity rather than a limit and a problem of particular bodies may give a new direction to organizational studies of race and identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. I his classic exposition of life as a black man in a colonized world, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon (: ) writes: ‘I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects’. If identity is the process of finding meanings in things, in the world, and in the self, Fanon is one of the first critics to articulate the fact that identity work for those who have been racialized, or turned into ‘an object in the midst of other objects’ (Fanon, : ), should challenge our understanding of how identity work occurs. Although much of Black Skin, White Masks is concerned with the ways that colonized and racialized people do creatively and persistently engage in the work of making themselves into subjects rather than objects, Fanon’s argument is not that race happens to be the particular content of a universal, existential process of becoming a self. In a critique of Sartre’s () theorization that racial identity is a minor term that will
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be transcended in the historical progression of the dialectic towards common humanity, Fanon (: ) insists, ‘black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal’. Poignantly, Fanon’s work continues to be highly relevant in thinking about race and identity in organizations, and in organization and management studies in broader terms, because the question of how we can research and write about race as a formative rather than circumstantial aspect of identity remains. Notwithstanding ongoing developments in critical race theory, cultural and ethnic studies, studies of colonialism, and black feminist theory, the analysis of race in organization and management studies continues to be confined to subfields such as cross-cultural management and diversity and inclusion. While race is a salient concern in those fields, the fact that it does not travel far beyond them suggests that race is still understood as a problem of particular bodies, rather than a question of how racial identity both organizes and is organized and what role organizations and management practices and knowledges have in those processes (Nkomo, , Nkomo and Al Ariss, ). In this chapter, we begin with a brief review of how race and identity are written about in the organization and management studies literature, in order to elaborate our claim that race remains confined to particular subfields where it is deemed at least moderately relevant. Through reflection on these subfields, as well as consideration of some of the key recent literature from outside the field, we propose some theoretical questions and orientations that could help constructively redirect research on race and identities in organizations. In particular, we ask how we can connect organization and management studies to the rich, extant literature in other fields that theorizes race and identity; think about racial identity itself as a productive, generative identity rather than simply a limit; and begin to understand race as an organizing principle rather than a matter for scholars who specialize in problems of managing racialized bodies.
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The literature on identities in organizations has, by and large, sidestepped questions of race. This is despite the fact that race is one of the ‘big three’ social categories, with gender and class, as well as one of the key historical organizing principles of societies influenced by European imperialism and colonialism and their concomitant forms of knowledge. Race, together with gender and class, was the principal means of both structuring societies and identifying people. These legacies of European colonialisms are still with us and have remarkable powers of both endurance and recursion (Stoler, ). The concept of race as something that describes an organic reality, a naturally occurring and reproducible phenomenon, has been abandoned in anthropological and biological thought since the s (Murji and Solomos, ). Even from its first use in scientific literature in the s, the biological concept of race was always difficult to separate from the socio-cultural (Banton, ). Nevertheless, the irrefutable conclusion that there is no biological basis for racial classification has not managed to displace a quasi-biological
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understanding of race and its concomitant socio-cultural applications. This is perhaps because, as Hacking () has observed in other contexts, analyses have not been careful enough to determine precisely what about race, racism, and processes of racialization is socially and culturally constructed and how they are so. Historical studies show that racial thinking is a relatively recent form of collective differentiation, emerging in late eighteenth-century thought. It replaced older xenophobic ways of thinking that had targeted, for example, Jews, Muslims, and Africans before the emergence of race as an organizing principle (Hannaford, ). Importantly, as Patrick Wolfe (: Kindle loc. –) puts it, ‘this configuration is a specifically European (or Eurocolonial) invention. While other societies have invaded, colonised, and settled . . . the discourse of race is a distinctly European phenomenon’. The colonialism and cultural and epistemological imperialism of Europe have made race a ‘global’ quasi-biological and/or socio-cultural discourse, one on the basis of which identities, too, are built and spun around across the globe. In organization and management studies literature the unsavoury history of race as an organizer of groups and identifier of individuals means that when and where race is discussed, it almost unfailingly appears as a problem that affects and concerns particular bodies. Analysis of race is only attached to bodies that are already considered, through other, ‘broader’ social, cultural, and historical processes, to be racialized. Organizational processes themselves are not understood to be among those social and cultural processes that do the work of race-ing and racializing, and thus, as Nkomo () writes, race has not come to be considered an organizing principle in itself. Despite this history, race is a neglected topic in organization and management studies (Alfred and Chlup, ; Ashcraft and Allen, ; Cox and Nkomo, ; Nkomo, ; Nkomo and Al Ariss, ; Proudford and Nkomo, ; Swan, a). In their review of journal research between and , Cox and Nkomo () found that the number of studies addressing issues of race in organizations was small, and that the trend was declining. Reviewing the same journals some fifteen years later, Proudford and Nkomo (: ) found that little had changed: ‘we still know . . . little about the mechanisms that perpetuate and sustain . . . differences and, consequently, how to eradicate the negative consequences of racial differences in organizations’. The neglect of race has meant that despite the development of a rich literature on racial identity, formation, and representation in cultural and literary studies, history, sociology, critical anthropology, ethnic studies, and critical race theory since the s (Murji and Solomos, ), progress on making sense of how organizational structures and processes contribute to racial formation, or vice versa, has been slow. It is surprising that race and the process of producing race, racialization, have not been more central to discussions on identity, which helps us to understand how individuals relate to the groups and organizations in which they are participants. Given the role race plays in everyday life, organizational life included, it would seem that race should have more of a role in the thinking and theories of the relationships between identity and organizations than it has thus far been allocated. In his comprehensive review of identity work and identification literature, Brown () is led to mention ‘ethnicity’ only once, in passing, and ‘race’ or ‘racialization’ do not make an appearance at all. Similarly, in his retrospective of studies of (organizational) identity in a leading journal in the field, Brown
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(: , our emphasis) notes that ‘attention has from time to time been focused on gender . . . and more occasionally ethnic and moral . . . identities, sometimes in complex and interrelated ways’. It is, indeed, in the form of ‘multiple identities’ that race, in its modern, culturalized form of ethnicity, appears in identity studies (e.g. Carrim and Nkomo, ; Holvino, ; Rodriguez et al., ). Gender appears on its own, but race typically does not. The silence over race in literature on identities in organizations is both curious and disappointing, as the language of identity is ubiquitous, and the study of self-identities in organizations is an increasingly mainstream preoccupation of organization and management scholars with diverse interests (Brown, ). Identities are studied as people’s subjectively construed understandings of who they were, who they are, and who they desire to become. As such, identities are implicated in, and thus key to, understanding and explaining, ‘almost everything that happens in and around organizations’ (Brown, : ). It is also increasingly popular to view self-identities as evolving constructions, which are worked on to establish (a temporary) sense of coherence and distinctiveness in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and insecurity (Brown, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Identities are understood to be constructed in social (organizational) contexts, and they are formed, enacted, or worked on through discursive, narrative, or rhetorical means in conversations and other interactions. The literature on identities in organizations is, however, not always clear about distinctions and connections between self- and collective identities. Race as a source and form of identity brings this to the fore because it cuts across the self and the collective. Moreover, identities are not only discursive but also embodied, as they are formed and enacted in and through our physical bodies and how those intersect with the social and the organizational. While bodies are acknowledged in some recent research on identities (e.g. Knights and Clarke, ), scholars have not examined race and racialization from this perspective. Race is still neglected in the study of organizations in general and identities in organizations in particular, some thirty years after the first calls to address the matter (see Cox and Nkomo, ; Nkomo, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In areas of analysis where race has been given some attention, such as cross-cultural management, diversity, inclusion, and equality and discrimination in human resource management, there is potentially scope to understand how racial identity is formed through organizing and organizations. However, studies in these areas also tend to fall back on quasi-biological thinking instead of revealing how race works as an organizing principle (cf. Bhattacharyya, ). For example, diversity is most commonly studied as the processes and structures in which bodies that have already been racialized through other historical or social processes are enabled to enter and participate in organizations (Landau, ; Ng and Burke, ). In the functionalist tradition of diversity research, the question of how bodies come to be racialized is less important than the social (or simply demographic) fact of their difference, a difference that appears to require management (Ahonen et al., ). In critical
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traditions of diversity research, processes of racialization are treated as more salient, since scholars working in these approaches recognize that power relations are crucial to forming racial identities. In neither case, however, is diversity itself considered to be an organizational process that is one of the technologies for producing race in the present day. The racial identity of diversity subjects is recognized as a historical product of past power relations; but it is not recognized as a product of ongoing power relations that continue to produce race, even if for progressive and constructive ends (Ahonen and Tienari, ). In such cases, diversity discourse itself works to ‘conceal how social categories such as gender and race work’ (Ahmed and Swan, : ) in retaining systematic discrimination and oppression in organizations and in society. The tendency of race to dissolve as a focus of analysis in diversity research is one example of how such concealment occurs. Categories familiar from social justice struggles are combined not only with other persistent categories of difference in personhood, such as (dis)ability, age, and religion, but also with more circumstantial categories, such as hierarchical position, organizational function, and educational attainment. The result is that diversity has developed into a broad set of ideas and approaches in organizational practice as well as in research, becoming a contested terrain in both. Race disappears as a relevant social category that requires investigation—and reappears as an individual variable to be both counted and accounted for (Ahonen et al., ). In the case of discrimination in organizations the quasi-biological thinking works somewhat differently. Understood as a problem that requires management, discrimination is also considered a practice that targets bodies that have already been racialized before their entry into organizations (Chrobot-Mason, ). However, especially where such discrimination occurs in processes of recruitment and promotion, situations in which disciplinary norms of differentiating between people, creating hierarchies, and evaluating capacities are always in play, it is not clear how we could draw the line of racialization at the boundary of the organization. We would argue, instead, that such organizational norms are a crucial part of forming racial identities, and it is important to discover precisely how organizational processes do the work of making race rather than how they work on already racialized bodies. Analysis of recruitment in North American organizations by Kang et al. () makes racial identity formation and its relationship with organizational processes explicit. The team studied how non-white job applicants represent their race in résumés, which is the first form of self-representation by a candidate that an employer sees. The participants in the study demonstrated a keen awareness of the subtleties of racial self-representation and were practised in representing themselves, for example, as more or less ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ as necessary. This can be understood as a form of identity work. While the applicants know that the employer will see the colour of their skin upon being interviewed, they also understand that presenting themselves carefully and ‘correctly’ (in racial terms) in their résumés may get them onto a shortlist. The applicants acknowledged that they needed to interpret whether the employer is seeking ‘a really Asian Asian’ versus a somewhat ‘whitewashed’ one; or a black worker who ‘fits within a certain box’ versus a ‘potentially outspoken black worker who cares deeply about racial issues’ (Kang et al., : ). Participants in Kang et al.’s () study are already highly aware of the difficulty of representing themselves in exactly the normative (white) terms the employer sets. The
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extent of this problem becomes obvious when we consider what followed in the recruitment process. In cases where a ‘diversity friendly’ employer used diversity language in their advertisements, the applicants read this as an invitation to represent themselves more openly as racial minorities. Kang et al. () found, however, that despite the use of diversity language, this more explicit, even transparent, self-representation by the candidates did not afford them an advantage and in fact worked against them. Despite inviting the candidates to represent themselves as minorities, the ‘diversity friendly’ employers were just as likely as other employers to reject ‘explicitly diverse’ minority candidates. In the end, they did not ‘fit’. Kang et al. () argue the applicants were rejected because they complied with the request to represent themselves as diverse. The burden of representation of race remains on the applicants, the diversity subjects. The problem of the racialized body remains their problem. As such, organizational norms remain a crucial part of the forming and norming of racial identities, and race operates as an organizing principle.
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In developing studies of race, identity, and organization, there are several useful trajectories of work about racial identity and racialized subjectivity to draw on from scholars working in cultural studies (Gilroy, , ; Hall, ), literature (Gates and Appiah, ; Spillers, ), history (Roediger, , ; Stoler, , ), ethnic studies and sociology (Bhambra, ; Go, , ), and critical race theory (Sharpe, ; Weheliye, ; Wynter, ). In these literatures, the particular problematics of how we could write about the body’s relation to historical and social processes of racialization are mapped out in some detail. Putting this work into dialogue with an understanding of organizations and organizational life is an urgent task for any scholar interested in recovering the possibility of saying something about racial identity, discrimination, and liberation that cannot simply be reduced, once again, to predictable niche areas of study, such as diversity and inclusion. Moreover, for organization and management scholars the significance of the existing scholarship on race is that it articulates a genuine and pressing need for thinking about race as an organizing principle, which organization and management studies has the knowledge to provide. We do not have the scope in this chapter to provide anything near an exhaustive review of the state of critical scholarship on race but offer three examples of how we can take our lead from it. Paul Gilroy’s (, ) work maintains a consistent and articulate commitment to theorizing a cosmopolitanism that can organize and build a world without racial differences. In his analyses this means facing the effects of racialized modernity—including relinquishing any romantic (or indeed racist) notions of racial identity that could be tied to or found in the body. Racial identity is configured as a problem in Gilroy’s anti-racist scholarship insofar as it falls back on (quasi-)biological explanations of race that cannot be substantiated. As he suggests, the fall of scientific racism after the Second World War made biological explanations of racial identity untenable. He is equally persuasive in arguing that
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the logic of thinking ‘culture’ (or, in other contexts, ‘ethnicity’) instead of ‘race’ also tends to revert to ‘a peculiarly resistant variety of natural difference’ (Gilroy : ). The idea that those most invested in social justice might have to abandon the concept of race and possibly their own racial identities is deeply challenging. Yet Gilroy (: ) suggests ‘the idea that action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of “race” is one of the most persuasive cards in this political and ethical suit’. Whether one agrees with Gilroy’s cosmopolitanism or not, his work invites us to challenge the logic of attaching ‘natural’ differences to groups of people and then deriving meanings from them to be used in identity work (Ashe and McGeever, ). The problem for Gilroy is the operation of the logic that produces racisms and racial identities alike. He challenges us to think of other ways of organizing our understanding of individuals and groups. In a different trajectory, building especially on the work of both Sylvia Wynter () and Hortense Spillers (), Alexander Weheliye () argues that a precise understanding of how the racialized body and subject is central to the biopolitical moment we inhabit remains a crucial task of analysis. This is not because the body is an essential location of race for Weheliye anymore than it is for Gilroy, but rather because ‘the novelty of modern racializing assemblages lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately racialized’ (Weheliye, : ). For Weheliye, this is a necessary intervention in contemporary political and social theories of bare life, which consistently neglect questions of racism and colonialism, while purporting to reach definitively beyond them. Gilroy abandons knowledges that draw on the logic of race—what he calls raciology and which includes racial identity—as an important escape route towards an anti-racist future. However, Weheliye makes a convincing case that the contemporary focus and interest in bare life and biopolitics discourse is unhelpfully anti-identity politics, and threatens to leave some of key elements and experiences of life out in its pursuit of bareness, the general and the ‘unifying’. As a result, the abandonment of raciology might end up reaffirming the ‘strong antiidentity strain in the Anglo-American academic in its positioning of bare life and biopolitics as uncontaminated by and prior to reductive or essentialist political ideologies such as race or gender’ (Weheliye, : ). As a response to this, Weheliye thinks carefully through the ways in which race works through the flesh, that is to say, the body itself in the absence of all those things that black and brown people have been deprived of at various points in time, ‘kin, family, gender, belonging, language, personhood, property, and official records’ (Weheliye, : ). In doing so, it is his aim to disrupt the idea that race and racial identity are mere qualifiers of Universal Man, in an important return to Fanon’s project. The challenge of how to think about the racialized body and racial identity takes yet another possible trajectory in Ann Stoler’s work in both her historical studies of the Dutch East Indies and reflection on the more contemporary politics of the French National Front (Stoler, , ,). Like Gilroy and Weheliye, Stoler argues that race can never be fixed in the body, and she is particularly interested in the question of why and how, nevertheless, race and racism repeat and reoccur with such persistence and violence in the absence of a stable object. She argues that racism and racialization take their tactical capacity from a changing and porous relationship between the visible and invisible (Stoler, , , ) at any given moment in time and place. Whereas Gilroy suggests that we should abandon raciology, partly because race is imagined and configured differently (for example,
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DNA gives us a different idea of how the visible relates to the invisible than did nineteenthcentury racial science), Stoler’s research suggests that the dynamic relation of the visible to the invisible is what makes race a particularly potent concept, one that animates and re-animates bodies, organizations, and nations.
R I I P S S
.................................................................................................................................. The problem of how to write about the body that is racialized necessarily leads us to the general theories we have of historical, social, and organizational processes of identity formation. As Nkomo (: ) argues, one reason why dominant approaches to the study of race and organization reify race is because the production of knowledge about race falls firmly ‘within a racial ideology embedded in a Eurocentric view of the world’. Eurocentric thinking about race, as in Fanon’s work, presumes that we can develop universal theories of identity and organization and then apply them to those who have been racialized. Returning to the example of diversity management, critical scholars have made the argument that diversity discourse effectively functions to (re)create the white male norm against which all others are diverse (Ahonen et al., ; Zanoni et al., ). In those cases where the universal theories developed by social science are applied to those who are considered racially different, it is often deployed in order to validate the universal applicability of the theory. Writing about the application of Max Weber’s theories to Chinese subjects, for example, Xu (: ) notes that ‘where identifiable characteristics of the Chinese happen to fit into both Weber’s and organizational theory, the Chinese case supports and validates the claim and utility of universal theory’. By contrast, where anomalies or deviations from the theory occur, they are used to demonstrate how the racialized subjects are in need of ‘correction’, to be brought back in line with the universal theory. Theory building about identity itself, then, needs to grapple with this legacy of ‘imperial social science’. One of the most salient recent developments in scholarship on race outside organization and management studies is the emergence of a postcolonial sociology (Bhambra, ; Go, ), particularly a postcolonial sociology of race (Go, ) that might be able to grapple with the colonial legacy of social science. For Go (: ), a postcolonial sociology is ‘necessary rather than simply supplemental for a proper sociology of race’. As he understands it, the historical context of colonialism and imperialism is crucial for thinking about race today not only because colonialism was built on racial difference, but because it produced racialized and racializing knowledges, such as sociology itself. This is an important development because a ‘proper’ sociology of race is one in which racial identity is kept in its methodological and epistemological place, as Weheliye’s () work indicates, as a qualifier, rather than a constitutive concept in sociological knowledge. Like Gilroy, Weheliye, and Stoler, then, the lived experience of those who are either compelled or impelled to adopt a racialized identity is the subject of Go’s analyses, but not necessarily its object.
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Organization and management studies has already made some moves towards decolonizing its theoretical frameworks through postcolonial approaches (Banerjee and Prasad, ; Jack and Westwood, ; Jack et al., ; Prasad, ). However, these attempts at epistemological transformation have, like the study of race in organizations itself, been confined to areas of organization studies where race is deemed to be ‘relevant’ such as cross-cultural management, diversity, and inclusion. The problems and solutions are caught in a frustrating, circular scholarly process where to properly analyse how organizations produce racial identities requires decolonizing the universal theories that guide such research. However, decolonization of (some aspects of) those theories is contained to fields where universal theory has already determined race is a ‘relevant’ concern, naturalized, and seemingly unable to challenge the logic of universal theories. Intersectional analyses that refuse to separate our understanding of how racialization works from how processes of gender and class formation work, is one way to disrupt this particular operation of ‘imperial social science’ (Crenshaw, ; Mohanty, , ; Oyewumi, ; Spivak, ). Where Eurocentric theory artificially separates race from gender, class, sexuality, and disability, intersectional analyses insist that a proper understanding of the power dynamics that structure society, organizations, and organizational processes must consider how these processes interlock and affect each other. This has some potential to disrupt the tendencies of universal theory because it reminds us that on the one hand, race is produced and lived in a huge variety of ways, and on the other hand, struggles are always connected because people are the product of multiple processes of identity formation simultaneously (Acker, ). In organization and management studies, the challenge remains how to use methods that interrupt the epistemological practices of imperial social scientific theory. Scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg () and Peggy McIntosh () have argued that we need more explicit examination of that which normally remains invisible, of whiteness as a racial identity in and beyond organizations. Critical studies of whiteness have argued that ‘white people do not experience the world through an awareness of racial identity or cultural distinctiveness, but rather experience whiteness and white structural practices as normative, natural, and universal, and therefore invisible’ (Green et al., : ). As such, whiteness works as the ‘neutral and invisible norm against which other identities are measured’ and by which identities are defined historically, socially, and legally (Al Ariss et al., : ). In organizations, and in organization and management studies research, this means ‘whites do not have to acknowledge their race in organizations as only racial/ ethnic minorities are viewed as having race’ (Nkomo and Al Ariss, : ). Focusing on whiteness, or the part of normative processes of racialization that normally escapes our analysis, reminds us that racialization is a genuinely dynamic social construction: it produces not just ‘people of colour’, but also ‘white people’. Whiteness, too, is ‘multifaceted, situationally specific, and reinscribed around changing meanings of race in society. The meaning of whiteness varies in relation to context, history, gender, class, sexuality, region, and political philosophy’ (Green et al., : ; see also Young, ). An analytic focus on whiteness has the potential, once again, to conceal the workings of racialization processes. The assumption, for example, that whiteness remains ‘invisible’ to white people themselves puts back into play the idea that to move around the world in a body that has been racialized as white happens at some unspecified point ‘before’ entry into
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the world, or the organization. If whiteness accrues through processes of normalization, however, it ought to be possible to articulate how, where, and when white people become white. As a number of historical studies of whiteness have demonstrated, there are historical periods through which certain people, such as the Irish migrants in United States, have become ‘white’. This means that there are structures and organizations they encounter that engage them in processes of racial becoming (Ignatiev, ; see also Painter, ; Roediger, , ; Roediger and Esch, ; Young, ). In organization and management studies, then, a focus on whiteness should not become an alibi for whiteness to rehearse and display its innocent ignorance of processes of racialization (Swan, b), but rather a spur to understand how organizational processes teach people about their deviations or distance from racial norms. Listening to others would be a place to start in developing a ‘progressive white praxis’ in responding to racism in research in general (Swan, a: ) and research on identities in organizations in particular.
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.................................................................................................................................. Research on race in organizations aims to recognize the painful historical and social experiences of those who have been marginalized and oppressed as a result of their race. However, if we are to develop a keener sense of how organizational processes are part of the formation of racial identity, then we might also investigate whether and how those identities generate and build capacities, as much as it constrains and delimits other capacities. Cultural studies and literary scholarship on racial self-representation has already documented and mapped a number of ways in which people create books, music, paintings, fashion, and style using the situations and processes that racialize their bodies and identities. It is not possible, even in a handful of citations, to do justice to the wide range of cultural productions that black and ethnic writers, artists, and musicians have created; or to the black and postcolonial aesthetics that have been the foundation of social and cultural movements, but it would be instructive to understand how these processes also occur in organizational contexts and through the opportunities organizational life offers to both create and represent racialized identity. There is an important parallel with gender and sexuality studies here. Where the performativity of both gender and sexuality have been well understood as not only restraints on bodies that are gendered and sexualized, but the source of play, pleasure, creativity, and liveliness (Butler, ), the social construction of racialized bodies has not been understood or theorized in the same way. In organization and management studies, then, we might ask these new kinds of questions about the productivity and pleasures of racial identity. What role do organizations and their processes play in helping people to understand what their racialized capacities are? How do people respond to and take up the cues about their racial identities from what they are able to do or make in certain organizational settings? It is important to articulate some caveats here. In using the word ‘productive’ we do not mean to set up a dichotomy between research of ‘good racial identity’ and ‘bad racial identity’, but rather to draw attention to the fact that insofar as gender and sexual identities
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are understood to be socially constructed, they are understood to give rise to bodily practices that make use of and transform the body, as well as constitute the basis of new capacities. The potential difficulty in making sense of what this might mean in relation to race brings us back to the quasi-biological thinking that assumes racialized bodies are somehow, essentially, black even before the negative processes of racialization (such as inferiorization or dehumanization) are inscribed on to the surface of the body. What does blackness or whiteness make it possible to do with a body? Are there ways to enjoy, subvert, and re-perform racial identity, just as there are clearly ways to do so with gender and sexual identity? (Tate, ; Rajan-Rankin, ; Snorton, ). Again, a caveat is in order here. We are not suggesting that practices of racial appropriation (such as minstrelsy) are processes of identity production because they ‘do’ or ‘make’ things with racial identity. It is vital that we do not detach analyses of racial identity from the power dynamics and history of racial oppression. However, we do want to suggest ways in which we can reorient our research towards the ways that racial identity ‘produces’ and does not just function as a limit, negation, or burden. An indicative example might be the work of the American director and performance artist Anna Deveare Smith, who has developed a method of interviewing people who have been racialized in different ways and then physically incarnating and performing those subjects, in their own words, in her onewoman shows. As one critic notes, ‘the implicit challenge of Smith’s performance style lies in inhabiting these kinds of voices while keeping mimicry and parody in tension. Of the characters she performs, Smith writes “I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness” ’ (Wald, ). Deveare Smith’s work reminds us that it is in understanding that racial identity is a social construction in the fullest sense that might help us finally leave behind the quasi-biological understanding of race that clings to the body. The contributions discussed throughout this chapter suggest ways for doing this. Gilroy () challenges us to think of other ways of organizing our understanding of individuals and groups apart from race. For example, when we are aiming to make our organizations racially or ethnically ‘inclusive’, what does the work involve, how much of it is identity work, and who is it that will work (or end up working) on (their) identity? Weheliye’s () work also presents important challenges to studies on identity in organizations. For example, why, in critical analyses, has the turn to questions of neoliberal governmentality and identity consistently neglected race? These analyses aim to identify and examine the formation of ‘the subject’ in neoliberal conditions but seldom if ever does the subject appear as anything but the Universal Man, or at best, a gender-specific version of him. The individuals that emerge from the production factories of neoliberal regimes seem curiously ahistorical, with identities that manage to remain ‘unrace-d’ despite the fact that organizational processes regularly and consistently apply, for example, various kinds of diversity labels upon particular bodies and manage them accordingly (Ahonen and Tienari, ; Ahonen et al., ). Further, Stoler’s work (, ) offers organization and management studies the opportunity to think about the ways that racialization is reconfigured, repeated, and restructured through different organizational processes. How, for example, do diversity, inclusion, and equality each repeat or reconfigure racial identity work? What does the repetition itself do as a process of racialization? For Stoler, the repetition is itself an
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important dimension of how racialization does its work over time, since each repetition is not quite the same, but changes the tactical field in complex and often unexpected ways. The rapid proliferation of the related but also seemingly distinct fields of diversity, inclusion, and equality suggests that something tactically interesting is at work, but we would need analyses that recognize the organizational processes themselves as part of the work of racializing to understand those tactics. Intersectional analyses offer other ways to rethink race in studying identities in organizations. The lived experience of disability, for example, is connected with the lived experience of class and race because where people have access to resources and support for their disability by virtue of their class and/or race, the impact of their disability on their life course is significantly altered. Finally, critical whiteness studies help us remember that racialization is a social construction that produces white people as much as it does people of colour. The weight of white privilege in theory, method, and practice, however, works to conceal how racial identities are produced (Middleton et al., ). One of the key tasks is to lift this weight to reveal the production of racial identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. Race remains a neglected topic in organization and management studies in general and studies of identities in organizations in particular. This chapter has set out to tackle the question of how we can research and write about race as a formative rather than circumstantial aspect of identity in and beyond organizations. As such, we have begun to search for understandings of race as an organizing principle rather than a matter for scholars who specialize in problems of managing racialized bodies in subfields such as cross-cultural management, diversity, and inclusion. Taking race seriously in studies of identities in organizations is not without its challenges since, as we have argued, a core part of the solution involves reflecting on the imperial epistemology that takes race as an object for inquiry that is only relevant as a qualifier, or circumstantial anomaly, of its universal theories. Nevertheless, in bringing an organization and management studies perspective to the study of race and identity, we propose that we can begin to understand some aspects of the social construction of racialization that scholars in other fields have not been able to theorize. Organizations are not simply contexts in which the racialization that has occurred in other times and spaces is continued, but rather are structures and processes for forming and reproducing many of the norms of racialization today. Analyses of organizations that can detail and explain these processes will be key to dislodging the quasi-biological thinking that perpetuates the logic of race.
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Hall, S. (). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hannaford, I. (). Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Holvino, E. (). ‘Intersections: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organization Studies’. Gender, Work & Organization, (), –. Ignatiev, N. (). How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge. Jack, G. and Westwood, R. (). International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies: A Postcolonial Reading. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jack, G., Westwood, R., Srinivas, N., and Sardar, Z. (). ‘Deepening, Broadening and Re-asserting a Postcolonial Interrogative Space in Organization Studies’. Organization, (), –. Kang, S. K., DeCelles, K. A., Tilcsik, A., and Jun, S. (). ‘Whitened Résumés: Race and SelfPresentation in the Labor Market’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Knights, D. and Clarke, C. (). ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Landau, J. (). ‘The Relationship of Race and Gender to Managers’ Ratings of Promotion Potential’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. McIntosh, P. (). ‘Reflections and Future Directions for Privilege Studies’. Journal of Social Issues, (), –. Middleton, S., Roediger, D. R., and Shaffer, D. M. (eds.) (). The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Mohanty, C. T. (). ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. –. Mohanty, C. T. (). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murji, K. and Solomos, J. (eds.) (). Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ng, E. and Burke, R. J. (). ‘Person–Organization Fit and the War for Talent: Does Diversity Management Make a Difference?’ International Journal of Human Resource Management, (), –. Nkomo, S. M. (). ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting “Race in Organizations” ’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Nkomo, S. M. and Al Ariss, A. (). ‘The Historical Origins of Ethnic (White) Privilege in US Organizations’. Journal of Managerial Psychology, (), –. Oyewùmí, O. (). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Painter, N. I. (). The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton. Prasad, A. (). ‘The Gaze of the Other: Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis’. In A. Prasad (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. –. Proudford, K. L. and Nkomo, S. (). ‘Race and Ethnicity in Organizations’.In A. M. Konrad, P. Prasad, and J. K. Pringle (eds.), Handbook of Workplace Diversity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –. Rajan-Rankin, S. (). ‘Race, Embodiment, and Later Life: Reanimating Aging Bodies of Color’. Journal of Aging Studies, , –. Rodriguez, J. K., Holvino, E., Fletcher, J. K., and Nkomo, S. M. (). ‘The Theory and Praxis of Intersectionality in Work and Organisations: Where Do We Go From Here?’ Gender, Work & Organization, (), –.
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Abstract Creative workers, fuelled by the desire to be and be seen as creative, have come to epitomize some of the most intense identity struggles of any group of employees in modern times. This chapter begins by reviewing the significance of identity for creative work and by arguing for its heightened salience given its importance in both the processes and outcomes of creative work. Organizations play a role in inspiring and framing the creative identities that people construct. Echoing many broader discourses of creative work, organizations capitalize on these to delimit people’s aspired-to identities. While official discourses of autonomy and creativity offer the promise of self-making, they can also be understood as softer forms of control in organizations that aim to produce an ideal subject who is selfdisciplining and invests him/herself in work. This chapter concludes by arguing that creative identities are often problematic as they can blur the lines between individual and organization, work and life, and further encourage (self-)exploitation of workers in potentially harmful ways that demand further research.
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.................................................................................................................................. C workers, fuelled by the desire to be and be seen as creative, have come to epitomize some of the most intense identity struggles of any group of employees in modern times. Marked by labour market precarity, valorization of the self-enterprising individual, and heightened competition in the so-dubbed ‘Warhol economy’ (Currid, ), creative workers are under an immense burden to self-actualize in their creative ideals (McRobbie, ). Given that employment is often linked to the ability of creative workers to enact these ideals (Banks, ; De Peuter, ; McRobbie, ; Ursell, ) there is an
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increased dependence on the establishment and affirmation of creative identities. Being the ‘artist’ or ‘creator’ that others subjectively identify as ‘creative’ can be valuable in attaining future employment as well as a signpost for success in the creative industries (Ursell, ). This type of entanglement of successful identity projects with success in the creative industries represents an intensification of the role of identity not only for the outcomes of work but also for experiences in everyday working life. Creative work conducted in organizations does little to minimize the instability and precarity workers face. Elite identity discourses about unique and rare creatives establish and maintain models of competitiveness and instability which can mimic the insecure conditions experienced by those precariously employed (Josefsson, ). Organizations also use a variety of broader discourses, including those on enterprise and autonomy to elicit feelings of ‘love’ and ‘passion’ for one’s work thereby offering the alluring promise of self-realization (Arvidsson et al., ). While these promises in many cases remain only partially fulfilled, coupled with the ideology of creativity, they may manifest in worker commitment and alignment between worker and organizational objectives. This chapter explores the interplay between creative workers, identity, and organizations. More specifically it seeks to answer three important questions regarding creative identities in organizations: () What is the role of identity for creative work? () How are creative identities constructed and experienced in organizations? () How is what we know about creative identities best understood in the context of our existing theories of organization? For the purposes of this chapter, identity is defined as the discursively constructed labels and meanings relating to the self or to the groups with which one identifies (Alvesson et al., ). This chapter also relates to the extant literature which examines identity work as the ‘processes of identity construction and avowal’ (Snow and Anderson, : ) through which individuals establish who they are but also who they want to be (Watson, ). Only a limited number of studies have closely examined the identity work of creative individuals (see for example Ahuja et al., ; Beech et al., ; Brown et al., ; Josefsson, ; Morgan and Wood, Taylor and Littleton, , ; Tuori and Vilén, ; Zanoni, ). Similarly, their subjectivity—which is the entanglement of identities with ‘feelings, values and behaviour’ (Alvesson et al., : )—is rarely explored in analyses of creative work and the creative industries (for exceptions see Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; Hoedemaekers, ; Josefsson, , ; Rowlands and Handy, ; Srensen and Villadsen, ; Taylor and Littleton, ). Combining the study of creative identities with the study of the experiences of creative workers tells us more about how creative identities can be understood in the context of organizations. Given that creative workers are argued to be the ‘group of workers said perhaps more than any other to symbolize contemporary transformations of work’ (Gill and Pratt, : ) studies of these aspects offer new insights into the way work and subjectivities are organized. The phrase ‘creative work’ throughout this chapter refers to ‘those jobs, centred on the activity of symbol-making, which are to be found in large numbers in the cultural industries’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, : ). Creative workers are referred to here as those individuals employed or commissioned primarily to carry out this ‘symbol-making’ activity to produce the largely symbolic and aesthetic products of creative work. Creative organizations are those that derive value predominantly from this symbol-making activity of their members. More often, these organizations are structured around formalized and
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more stable employment, although organizing around creative work collectives may also fit into this category. According to Du Gay and Pryke (), the former are of particular interest in understanding how work is structured and how managerial practices can ‘make up’ economic activities and influence experiences of workers. These formal work organizations are of particular interest in the study of creative identities because ‘worker identity and the work process itself changes in conjunction with the strategies of firms and organizations in the creative industries’ (Christopherson, : ). As numbers of workers and aspirants in the creative industries rise—with close to , new workers in the UK alone every year (DCMS, )—there is reason to draw attention to the pressures on this group of workers employed in what can be described as a ‘high-stakes lottery’ (Ross, ). In what follows, I will review the significance of identity for creative workers and its relations to both their processes and outcomes of work. Following this, I will examine the ways in which workers experience identities and selves in relation to their work. I then examine the demands and dynamics that organizations bring to the construction of creative identities. This chapter finishes by arguing that rather than alleviating the experiences of insecurity, struggle, and exploitation observed under conditions of precarious employment, organizations often cultivate these experiences so as to benefit their own economic interests.
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.................................................................................................................................. While it has been argued that some industries and groups of workers have minimal concerns for identity in the workplace (Alvesson and Robertson, ), creative work and the creative industries represent the extreme inverse relation between identity and work. Creative workers face an inescapable demand for their identities at work—a sense of who the creator of a particular work is, is embroiled in both the processes and outcomes of creative work (Elsbach, ; Elsbach and Flynn, ). In the case of creative workers the ‘self ’ and the creative ‘signature’ by which works can be identified becomes an integral part of creative work (Elsbach, ). Spurred on by ideas of ‘self-creation’, through autonomy exercised by an enterprising subject, it is arguable that creatives more than any other group of workers exemplify Giddens’ () arguments regarding identity as a ‘project-of-the-self ’ in late modern times. Creative identity projects are driven by demands for identity work by creative workers but also their own desires to fashion themselves in the light of popular and arguably romanticized images of a unique ‘self-as-artist’ (McRobbie, ). Like Giddens (), Bauman () argues that in contemporary society identity is no longer pre-destined by the circumstances in which we find ourselves but the product of our attempts to self-create and to self-complete. Discourses which idealize autonomy, and the idea of an enterprising individual, further inspire people to regard themselves as able through their agency to amend their identity positions. These discourses encourage workers to ‘shape [themselves] in order to become that which [they] wish to be’ (Rose, : ) promoting a self-regulating and individualized worker who is autonomous and responsible for their identity. These discourses permeate the world of creative work and align with the ideals of the autonomous and individualistic creative worker who is agentic in the
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construction of their success (Banks, ; Christopherson, ; Ross, ; Weisberg, ). As Banks (; ) highlights, autonomy in creative work can take the form of ‘workers freely applying themselves to commercial activity’ but this is often blurred with a romanticized version of autonomy mostly coupled with the idea of the ‘artist’ or ‘that special, self-regulating being and “free spirit” possessed of rare and precious gifts’. The role of identity in creative work is furthered by this individualized and glamorized image of the artist or creator as solely responsible for creative works, i.e. the belief that ‘the making of art requires the special talents, gifts, or abilities, which few have [ . . . ] and by inspecting the work we see that someone special made it’ (Becker, : ). These unique ‘gifts’ are not bestowed on all equally, making it rare to be recognized as the ‘creative’, ‘artist’, or ‘creator’ one wishes to be (Becker, ). The combination of the desirability and rarity of these identity positions means that they become contested amongst the surplus of aspiring creative workers who desire to be affirmed in these identities. There is a parallel here with Bourdieu’s () theories on cultural production which describe it as a ‘field of struggles’ (Bourdieu, : ; original emphasis) where positions are never guaranteed but rather continuously contested. The incessant contestation of who or what can be defined as ‘creative’, ‘the artist’, or ‘creative work’ means that creative workers are required to take purposeful measures in order to be affirmed by others in their aspired-to identities. This creates a pressure for identities to be worked on regularly which implies that identity construction forms a salient part of creative workers’ activities. Creative identities, then, are projects that are worked on continuously as aspects of the processes of creative work. Creative workers incorporate their identities not only in the processes of their work but also the outcomes of their work—their creative ‘works’. As a part of having idealized identities affirmed, creative workers rely on the recognition by others of these ‘special’ talents or gifts (Elsbach, ). This identity affirmation is a part of the process of creative work as creative workers seek to develop a ‘signature style’ that reflects their own ‘unique qualities’ and to incorporate this within the products of their work, making it recognizable to others (Elsbach, ). The ability to incorporate their identities within their works is a means for not only being affirmed in their desired identities by others but also gaining legitimacy for their identities as the ‘creative’ within their profession, which otherwise lacks the ‘credentials, licences, or governing bodies that certify an artist as a professional’ (Elsbach, : ). Lacking the often quite formalized legitimizing means of other professions (e.g. lawyers, medical professionals, engineers) creative workers have a greater dependence on identity, and affirmation of that identity by others in work processes and outcomes, making identity a salient and meaningful concept for creative workers. Creative identity projects and their processes are interesting terrain for understanding the late-modern demands on identity in work and organizational settings. In particular, the precarity of employment faced by creative workers means that identity is an important resource for distinguishing oneself in the ‘field’ and securing employment or funding for future projects. However, unlike in the idealized version of the ‘Warhol economy’ as an efficient network of enterprising individuals, what we often observe is how identity projects and their effects are strongly coupled with experiences of ‘lack of safety net, income insecurity, an erratic schedule, uncertainty about continuing employment, the blurring of work and non-work time, and the absence of collective representation’ (De Peuter, : ). These experiences of struggle mean that creative identities do not only embody the
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contemporary working ideals but also the distinct ‘new geography of work’ of our late-modern times (Ross, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In stark contrast to the romanticized images of creative work, the actual construction of creative worker identities often includes less alluring experiences of life in organizations (Ahuja et al., ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; Holt and Lapenta, ). The personal nature of creative work also means that a sense of self in all its dimensions becomes complicated with these experiences—often heightening their emotional elements (Josefsson, ). In many cases, emotions are heightened in the extremities—swinging from extreme highs, such as the overwhelming experience of love for one’s work, to the depths of anxiety and despair (Rowlands and Handy, ). In both instances, the self is embroiled in the process of becoming—especially when attempts to self-realize either succeed or fail (Christopherson, ; Ursell, ). Yet, despite difficulties, workers may maintain their commitment to idealized creative identities because of both the tight coupling of selves to work but also the normalization and tolerance for darker aspects of work. Creative workers are often regarded as being in an opportune position to realize the ideal of self-actualization through their labour (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; McRobbie, ; Taylor, , ). Being able to produce ‘good’ work is deemed to align with selfrealization where who one aspires to be is consonant with one’s potential and talents in the work produced (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ). In this way, workers are able to construct their efforts as means through which they attain their desired identities. These fantasies of the ‘ideal’ and ‘complete’ self to be attained through work become sources of motivation for workers and drive their continued commitment to it (Driver, ; Rowlands and Handy, ). Labour becomes associated with expressions of ‘love’ and ‘passion’ due to the sense that it offers opportunities for autonomy, self-expression, and movement away from less desirable selves to more desirable identity positions (Josefsson, ). The experience and expression of feelings of ‘love’ and ‘passion’ by creative workers for their work is a well-documented phenomenon (see, for example, Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; McRobbie, ; Taylor, ). Workers often state they experience work as a ‘labour of love’ and have a strong positive experience of working on their projects (Arvidsson et al., ; Ursell, ). These expressions can be linked to their sense of artistic fulfilment (Arvidsson et al., ; Taylor and Littleton, ) gained by conducting tasks skilfully or through producing something that is aesthetically pleasing to oneself and to others. Expressions of love are also constructed in comparisons with other kinds of work, i.e. they can be seen as a means for justifying one’s own career path in contrast to alternatives (Taylor and Littleton, ). Love can also be explored in its connections with its ability to render work meaningful by imbuing it with a sense of purpose (Driver, ). Yet these expressions and experiences of meaningfulness at work are sometimes fleeting, being constructed in the reflexive re-contextualization of time through the consideration of past and future significant events (Bailey and Madden, ) rather than in the
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moments experienced as ‘now’. Often, the sense of love achieved from self-actualizing activity is not sustained but must be continuously worked at—love and passion are in these instances illusory promises of creative work. Creative workers, at times, construct themselves employing darker accounts of creative work. In particular, the precarity commonly experienced by creative workers becomes expressed as anxieties in their accounts of identity (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; Rowlands and Handy, ; Ursell, ). One aspect of this is the general oversupply of workers in the creative industries and the increased competition between these aspirants for the limited number of jobs available in some countries (Rowlands and Handy, ). Other documented subjective experiences of selves at work include feelings of despair, cynicism over work situations, and a general disillusionment with work conditions (Ahuja et al., ), but also expressions of pain and suffering (Josefsson, , ). While these darker experiences may not differ greatly from those of other professions, what remains interesting in the context of creative work is the extent to which workers remain committed, even addicted (see Rowlands and Handy, ), to these work settings. There are two main reasons why people remain committed to their creative work despite negative experiences. The first is a romanticized view of the artist suffering for their art. Struggle, sacrifice, and suffering are normalized by cultural narratives and may become appropriated by creatives (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ). Second, the discourse of sacrifice for one’s work downplays the value of monetary reward and places creative workers’ focus on intrinsic rewards (Becker, ; Caves, ; Taylor and Littleton, ). These include the ability of the creative worker to fabricate oneself through work and to experience meaning, love, and passion for it. Identity projects are thus the sustenance required to maintain creative workers’ commitment to their work in the face of the harsh realities of organizational life.
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.................................................................................................................................. Studies of creative work have examined it predominantly from the perspectives of selfemployed creative workers (Haunschild and Eikhof, ; Kennedy, ; McRobbie, ; Taylor, ; Taylor and Littleton, ) and of creative workers working as freelancers or on short-term contracts (Butler and Stoyanova Russell, ; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, , ; Hoedemaekers, ; Randle and Culkin, ; Rowlands and Handy, ; Ursell, ). Less is known about creative work and creative identities within formal work organizations where work is structured and carried out in relation to organizational demands and dynamics. These structural constellations govern the appropriate ways of being and thereby mediate workers’ subjectivities. Creative identities and identity projects are the products of the ‘self-positioning of employees within managerially inspired discourses about work and organization with which they become more or less identified and committed’ (Alvesson and Willmott, : ). This implies that the socio-political context of the creative organization has a considerable role in the construction of creative identities. For example, Judith Blau’s () seminal study of the functioning of architecture firms in the s showed how these
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organizations were a source of power inequalities that governed architects understandings of themselves and their careers. Ahuja et al.’s () recent study of architecture firms builds on Blau () illustrating how these identities are constructed in relation to the discursive regimes that govern them. Discourses, they argue, are not merely resources for identity work but rather inspire a certain amount of identity struggle as individuals attempt to position themselves in relation to an idealized professional identity (Ahuja et al., ; Brown et al., ). The organizational discourses that structure the everyday ‘realities’ of organizational life and worker subjectivities, then, both inspire and frame the constructions of creative identities in organizations. The kinds of organizational discourses embedded in organizations inform the kinds of creative identities that are constructed. Discourses of creative workers as enterprising, selfmade individuals observed in societal contexts (Christopherson, ; McRobbie, ) are echoed within creative organizations (Josefsson, ). These discourses encourage workers to develop identities which align with the ideals of autonomy, independence, and individuation. Conversely, discourses of creative work existing within art worlds acknowledge the more social nature of creative work (Becker, ) and encourage workers to construct themselves in relation to the audiences for their works, often peers or superiors but at times also consumers of their products. These audiences for creative goods have been shown to have sufficient power to shape both the processes and outcomes of creative work (Ertug et al., ; Menger, ) and thereby also the identities that are formed in relation to that audience. For example, an artist might tailor their creative style and artistic identity to the specific benefactor funding their work, or a game designer may identify with a certain subculture and audience of gamers. Lastly, discourses that normalize sacrifice and struggle as a part of creative work also feature prominently in creative organizations, regularizing both the kind of creative worker one should be and also the kinds of activities that come to dominate these organizations (Josefsson, ). One other more prominent discourse which permeates creative work and creative organizations is that creativity is valued and valuable yet rare, carrying ‘associations of something magical or metaphysical [ . . . ] in some guises, a sort of messenger from God or, in others, an intensely perceptive spirit able to elevate our seeing to a superior reality’ (Negus and Pickering, : ). In this regard, Tuori and Vilén (: ) note that the ‘ “hype” around creativity can be seen as a form of discourse with real-life effects on organizations and the people in them’. In their study of two creative organizations, a games company and an opera house, they showed how a positive discourse of creativity was used to distinguish the boundaries of who or what could be deemed creative. In both organizations, creativity was used to legitimate the activities of both individuals and groups (Tuori and Vilén, ). An elitist sense of who or what was creative produced power effects and hierarchies denying some individuals access to certain idealized subject positions. The power effects of discourses of creativity delimit identities and intensify the competition for rare but (notionally) desirable identities. In this way, Bourdieu’s () field of struggles takes place in the context of the organization where individuals compete amongst their peers to be labelled as creative. Position taking through the affirmation of an aspiredto identity is continuously challenged as a result of internal competition amongst workers for these desirable but contested selves. This implies that these aspired-to identities are not stable and fixed but rather understood as ‘unstable fantasies’ driving identity work
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(Thornborrow and Brown, ). These kinds of tensions in the identity work of creatives have been seen in the case of opera performers’ narration and re-narration of their aspirational identities (Beech et al., ). Organizations further promote such insecure positions by developing mechanisms that attempt to distinguish between good and bad work. These include the awarding of prizes for ‘good’ creative work or developing channels where collective feedback is offered to workers (Josefsson, ). Ultimately, creative organizations develop these methods as ‘control mechanisms that serve to seduce workers into putting a great deal of themselves into what they do’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, : ). In summary, creative organizations develop structural constellations of discourses that govern worker identities and subjectivities. These discourses often draw on those of the broader creative work context and include those of an enterprising and autonomous worker, but also of a worker who is dependent on the socio-political context of the organizations they inhabit. Discourses of creativity in creative organizations further emphasize struggles in the identity projects of creative workers—defining both the boundaries of, and means through which, who and what is deemed creative. These organizational constellations ultimately influence not only creative workers’ identities but those experiences of selves in organizations that culminate in feelings of love and passion for one’s work but also of anxiety, despair, cynicism, and pain.
C C I C O
.................................................................................................................................. The socio-cultural dimensions of creative organizations underpin creative workers’ identity projects that satisfy the interests of both workers and organizations. Workers are motivated by the potential to engage in their identity projects directly through work, while organizations benefit from harnessing their subjectivity in delivering desirable products and services. Organizations further harness the subjectivity of workers through organizational discourses that draw on those in the broader societal context of creative work. These means capture worker subjectivity as a part of production and align and reinforce worker commitment to organizational objectives. The idea that organizations harness the subjectivity of workers in order to produce value is not a new one (see, for example, Fleming and Sturdy, ; Hanlon, ). Achieved through the alignment of managerial interests with worker interests this is an exercise in organizational control (Bojesen and Muhr, ; Michaelson, ). More specifically, the use of softer means of controlling workers has reflected a change from the harder, more coercive methods of worker manipulation to methods that seek to inspire a self-regulating worker commitment to organizational objectives (Heelas, ; Kärreman and Alvesson, ; Thrift, ; Warhurst and Thompson, ). This sort of ‘soft capitalism’ is vitally aware of the increasing importance of subjectivity, self, and the political game for recognition that accompanies it (Thrift, ). In this way, organizations capitalize on ‘the individual striving from meaning in work, seeking identity in work, whose subjective desires for self-actualisation are to be harnessed to the firm’s aspirations for productivity,
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efficiency and the like’ (Rose, : ). Attempts to mobilize and manage subjectivities are conducted through the positioning of certain discourses inspiring the incorporation of self-identities and work on identity projects in the production of economic value. These discourses inspire the collapsing of identity and identity projects into work processes and outcomes so that the two are intimately intertwined. Holt and Lapenta (: ) argue that the ideology associated with creativity is enough to encourage this ‘general shift towards a biopolitical governance of labour, in which the production of value and the production of subjectivity tend to coincide, and the provision of forms of subjectivity becomes a way to shape and govern the valorisation process’. The positive discourse of creativity is a powerful motivational factor which helps to obscure the mundane and less creative realities of everyday creative work (Arvidsson et al., ). Other discourses observed in relation to creative work more broadly but also in creative organizations that have a similar purpose relate to autonomy, the enterprising individual, and the creative worker as unique and rare ‘artist’. These elevate the salience of identities for creative work but also the involvement of the affectual in constructions of experiences in creative work. In this way, selves and identities become complicated in the means of production in a way that corrupts the boundaries between identities and work as selves become deeply embroiled in the processes and experiences of work. While these experiences can lead to expressions of ‘love’ and ‘passion’, the highly competitive nature of position-taking of rare but desirable aspired-to identities means that feelings of ‘love’ for one’s work become punctuated by experiences of anxiety, despair, cynicism, and even pain. While creative organizations appear to be ideal contemporary sites for self-actualization, and experiencing states of meaningfulness and love for one’s work, what results is not a stable idealized state but rather a turbulent fluctuation between the positive experiences of creative work and less pleasant experiences that accompany it. Indeed, the odds ‘against achieving individual stardom are overwhelming’ (Huws, : ) and workers must be prepared to pay a high cost for small glimpses of their ideals. While it is difficult to argue that these moments of identity construction where aspired-to identities are affirmed by others cannot contribute to a sense of meaning and love as well as increasing worker selfconfidence and well-being, we must acknowledge the often fleeting nature of these experiences. This exemplifies life in Bourdieu’s () field of struggles as workers struggle to achieve their aspirational identities. What results is a precarious existence, which is experienced both in and out of creative organizations, so that the creative organization continues to play on the instability and insecurity of becoming a successful ‘creative’. While creative organizations’ intent on promoting identities in creative work may be understood as aligning with modern desires for autonomy and individuality, ultimately creative identities and work are transformed into means of capitalistic production. Creative organizations incorporate workers’ self-desires in the processes of creating the ‘selfdisciplined capitalist subject’ (Hanlon, : ). These subjects not only self-discipline but also self-exploit. Selves and identities become a part of the processes of work, committing to work in the hopes of being affirmed in their aspired-to identities. This phenomenon has been described in studies examining the identity work of other types of workers including for example consultants (Gill, ), soldiers (Thornborrow and Brown, ), and lawyers (Kuhn, ). While these other types of workers have been shown to
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self-invest through a strong identification with organizationally inspired discourses, creative workers also self-invest by identifying with the processes and products of their work so that their subjectivity (their personal attributes) are appropriated as part of their work. The attractiveness of being ‘creative’ and ‘expressing oneself ’ through work makes incorporating workers’ creative identity projects a normalized endeavour and, thereby, intensifies issues of identity at work. This process can make creative workers blind to their own exploitation in that creative work ‘blurs the lines between work and play, production and consumption, voluntary activity and precarious exploitation’ (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, : xxix). From this more critical perspective, the blurring of these boundaries can be seen as bridging the divide between ‘life’ and ‘work’ where our once personal and non-work selves are evoked and enveloped in the processes and outcomes of work (Fleming, ). Creative identities thus become entangled in capitalist ideologies and means of production (Huws, ; Ursell, ). Further research is required to examine fully these softer means of organizational control and the fluctuations between emotional states, continued insecurity, and self-exploitation that accompany them.
S
.................................................................................................................................. The structuring of creative work makes identity a central part of its processes and outcomes. Identity is caught up in workers’ experiences of self and with emotions such as love and passion, but also despair, cynicism, and pain. Societal discourses relating to creative work—regarding autonomy, enterprise, eliteness and rarity, the normalization of suffering and sacrifice, as well as an (arguably) idealized view of creativity—all contribute to the construction of creative identities. The overall surplus of aspirants to creative positions in the West, and the struggle for jobs, is observed in a number of accounts of creative work where workers are precariously employed (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, ; Ross, , ; Rowlands and Handy, ; Taylor, ). This chapter has described how this insecurity occurs even in organizations where workers operate under more stable employment conditions. In addition to insecurity arising from short-term contracts and struggles for employment, anxieties and insecurities observed in creative organizations also result from the struggle to be affirmed as a creative individual by others. Creative organizations promote idealized identities through their promise of selfrealization that also lead to potentially self-exploitative behaviours. By using soft control mechanisms, such as identity regulation, to align the interests of the organization with the interests of the individual, creative organizations are able to harness the subjectivities of their creative workers. Future research in this area could examine the means through which workers become subjugated by these methods. Also of interest would be to understand if there are differences in the identities constructed, and the experiences of workers, between different forms of creative organizations—for example, between a highly professionalized creative company (such as an architecture firm) and a more loosely structured organization (a start-up computer games company, for example). Further research on emotions in creative organizations would develop our understanding of creative identities in organizations and the role of emotions in creative processes. While it is possible to
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imagine that expressions of love and passion represent positive outcomes for workers— such as for their self-esteem and well-being—we can also examine how these expressions could be a means through which subjectivities are harnessed for economic ends (Fleming, , ). This chapter has contributed to developing our understanding of creative identities in the context of organization studies. In particular, it has elaborated the role of identity for creative work, how creative identities are experienced and constructed in creative organizations, and how these become entwined with the interests of organizations. Creative workers are positioned as autonomous and enterprising workers who are responsible for constructing themselves but who simultaneously become burdened with the responsibility for the consequences of these constructions (De Peuter, ; O’Connor, ; Taylor, ). Arguably, these pressures for identity work, and the blurring of the boundaries between work and self, can be identified more starkly in these contexts than in other studies of worker identity construction (Josefsson, , ). Examining the identities and experiences of creative work has the potential to add to a growing counter-narrative that reflects the changing landscape of contemporary work (Neilson and Coté, ). It is my hope that this chapter inspires future research on creative work identities encompassing aspects of the individual, organizations, and societies.
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Taylor, S. (). ‘The Meanings and Problems of Contemporary Creative Work’. Vocations and Learning, (), –. Taylor, S. (). ‘A New Mystique? Working for Yourself in the Neoliberal Economy’. Sociological Review, (), –. Taylor, S. and Littleton, K. (). ‘Art Work or Money: Conflicts in the Construction of a Creative Identity’. Sociological Review, (), –. Taylor, S. and Littleton, K. (). Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Thornborrow, T. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘ “Being Regimented”: Aspiration, Discipline and Identity Work in the British Parachute Regiment’. Organization Studies, , –. Thrift, N. (). Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Tuori, A. and Vilén, T. (). ‘Subject Positions and Power Relations in Creative Organizations: Taking a Discursive View on Organizational Creativity’. Creativity and Innovation Management, (), –. Ursell, G. (). ‘Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification and Subjectivity in UK Television Labour Markets’. Media, Culture & Society, (), –. Warhurst, C. and Thompson, P. (). ‘Hands, Hearts and Minds: Changing Work and Workers at the End of the Century’. In P. Thompson and C. Warhurst (eds.), Workplaces of the Future. London: Macmillan, pp. –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, , –. Weisberg, R. W. (). Creativity: Beyond the Myth of the Genius. New York: Freeman. Zanoni, P. (). ‘Unveiling the Subject behind Diversity: Exploring the Micro-Politics of Representation in Ethnic Minority Creatives’ Identity Work’. Organization, (), –.
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Abstract This chapter reflects on some of the implications of globalization for identity regulation, with specific reference to the multinational enterprise (MNE). The chapter first elaborates on the MNE as an organization and shows how globalization in this corporate context results in identity regulation being stretched across nations and, in turn, mediated by country-specific discourses and institutions. The chapter then situates such processes in the wider context of neo-colonialism. It highlights how MNEs have been, until recently, mostly headquartered in the ‘West’ and how a growing proportion of their work is performed in countries that were once under colonial rule and which remain, to varying degrees, subject to neo-colonial domination. In this context, identity regulation becomes enmeshed with not only national discourses/institutions but also neo-colonial power relations. The chapter concludes with a call to integrate globalization—and by implication (multi)nationalism and (neo)colonialism—into the field of research on identities in organizations and suggests some avenues for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. S the s, ‘globalization’ has emerged as one of the defining issues of our time (Steger, ). Much debated and contested, no single definition of it exists but it is widely understood as a process involving increasing cross-national flows (of capital, goods, services, knowledge, culture, and people) and, consequently, greater degrees of connectivity, interdependence, and integration among nations (Held et al., ). Advances in communication technology and transportation together with the lowering of regulatory barriers to international trade have been important enablers. So too have efforts by the politicaleconomic elites of dominant, expansionist nation states—together with the international organizations which they control (e.g. IMF, WTO, World Bank)—to promote globalization
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and create institutional conditions favourable to it as a means of accessing the world’s markets and resources (Chang, ). Seen from this perspective, globalization is little more than Western imperialism in a new guise (Smith, ). However we choose to view it, the ubiquity of globalization cannot be denied. Indeed, the phenomenon has spawned a vast body of scholarship in the field of management studies and the wider social sciences (Guillén, ). In a review of globalization theories, Robinson (: ) notes that ‘[a]ll disciplines and specializations in the academy, it seems, have become implicated in globalization studies’.¹ Yet, surprisingly, there is relatively little analysis of globalization in the field of identities in organizations.² Here, scholarship has examined how employee identities are implicated in various processes such as organizational change, managerial behaviour, and leadership development (for recent reviews, see Brown, , ; Caza et al., ) but few studies situate their analysis in the wider context of globalization or consider the impact of globalization on identities in organizations. Much of the field is in effect based on domestic studies that rarely reflect on the implications of globalization for their object of analysis (but see Boussebaa and Brown, ). Kenny et al.’s () Understanding Identity and Organizations devotes some attention to globalization but only in passing over a single page. Even studies conducted in global corporations (e.g. Alvesson and Kärreman, ; Thomas et al., ) have little, if anything, to say about globalization; the ‘global’ scope of the organization being purely incidental (but see Jack and Lorbiekci, ; Lai et al., ). This scholarly gap is startling given the importance of globalization but also considering the process involves, as Giddens (: ) puts it, ‘transformations in the very texture of everyday life [ . . . ] affecting even intimacies of personal identity’. My aim in this chapter is to reflect on some of the identity implications of globalization.³ I concentrate on matters of identity regulation, i.e. on the ways in which managerial elites and wider discursive regimes regulate employee identities as a means of organizational control (Alvesson and Willmott, ). If control in contemporary organizations is, increasingly, achieved by managing the identities of employees as well as their behaviours, then, what are the implications of globalization for such a process? To address this question, I focus on one of the most significant organizational forms of our time and indeed a key driver of globalization: the multinational enterprise (MNE). The number of MNEs has ‘grown exponentially’ (Dicken, : ) in the last few decades and the largest among them now dominate markets around the world through networks of subsidiaries and branch offices serving customers from Glasgow and Paris to Algiers and Beijing.⁴ Many MNEs also manage complex global production networks into which numerous seemingly ‘local’ or ‘national’ companies are plugged. Importantly, MNEs put considerable effort into managing employees across national borders. MNEs are thus a particularly important organizational context in which to reflect on the implications of globalization for identity regulation. The chapter is organized as follows. In the next section, I elaborate on the MNE as an organization and show how globalization in this corporate context results in processes of identity regulation being stretched across countries and, in turn, mediated by national contexts. In other words, the ‘multi-nationality’ of the MNE brings into the organization a multiplicity of country-specific discourses and institutions that become entangled with managerial discourses while also shaping employee identities in ways not always compatible with the former. In a subsequent section, I situate such processes in the wider context
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of neo-colonialism. I highlight how most MNEs have been, until recently, headquartered in the ‘West’ and how an increasing proportion of their work is performed in countries that were once under colonial rule and which remain, to varying degrees, subject to neo-colonial domination. I show how, in this context, processes of identity regulation and identity work become enmeshed with not only national discourses/institutions but also neo-colonial power relations. I conclude with a call to integrate globalization—and by implication (multi)nationalism and (neo)colonialism—into the research agenda of identities-focused organization studies and suggest some avenues for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. Globalization affects organizational life in myriad ways. In the case of MNEs, it means organizational activities and ways of controlling and coordinating them are stretched across national borders. The process in effect makes organizations multi-national in scope and composition, and gradually endows them with ‘the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if they do not own them’ (Dicken, : ). How does this process affect identity regulation (as a means and outcome of organizational control)? At the most basic level, it may be argued that identity regulation is of greater significance in MNEs than it is in domestic organizations. This can indeed be inferred from the international management literature where it is now commonly understood that the development of ‘shared norms and values’ is critical to achieving control in MNEs (e.g. Nohria and Ghoshal, ). This is because the ‘multi-nationality’ of the MNE tends to call for unusually high levels of decentralization in operational decision-making and this can only work if the organization is, as Ohmae (: ) puts it, ‘held together not just by structures and systems but also by a deeply and universally held set of values’. Indeed, while not elaborating on the matter, Ohmae contends that effective MNE control is ultimately a ‘question of identity’ (: ). This is arguably even more the case in ‘professional’ service MNEs where norms of professional autonomy further militate against central control (Boussebaa and Morgan, ; Greenwood et al., ). One could thus argue that MNEs are identity regulators par excellence and hence a highly significant context in which to examine processes of identity regulation, if not a context requiring prioritization given the importance of MNEs today. But the ‘multi-nationality’ of the MNE matters for another—theoretical—reason: it mediates processes of identity regulation in ways not found in domestic organizational contexts. This is evident, firstly, in the way the MNE’s home-country institutions and discourses come to shape the ways of being and doing that MNE elites seek to impose on employees around the world. For instance, in their study of the Anglo-American Big Eight (now Big Four) accountancies, Soeters and Schreuder (: ) found ‘significant effects of the U.S. culture’ on the work practices of offices in The Netherlands. A similar study
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conducted in the UK found that ‘the cultural values of British accountants working in U.S. firms operating in Britain reflect the cultural values of U.S. accountants’ (Pratt et al., : ). Along similar lines, a substantial body of research informed by institutional theory reveals significant ‘country-of-origin’ effects on various modes of organizational control inside MNEs (e.g. Harzing and Sorge, ; Morgan et al., ). Whilst not concerned with discursive-identity processes, this body of work nevertheless suggests that the management of identity in MNEs is mediated by home-country contexts and, hence, that understanding the former requires attentiveness to the latter. Concomitantly, the multi-nationality of the MNE also brings into the organization host-country contexts, which themselves can also be expected to mediate identity regulation. Indeed, in a rare discursive cross-national (Finland–UK) identity-related study, Merilainen et al. () show the ways in which MNE employees talk about their work and careers vary across countries. Specifically, and with reference to American multinational consulting firms, the authors point to a tension between a ‘dominant normalising discourse’—that of the ‘ideal’ consultant (ambitious, competitive, hard-working, assertive)— propagated by the firms and individual subjectivity mediated by host-country contexts. The authors show how British and Finnish consultants attempted to live up to the ‘ideal’ consultant but also, simultaneously, drew on alternative country-specific discourses in constructing their identities. Thus, for instance, in the UK, consultants talked about having little ‘work/life balance’ and for them ‘ “life” is the problem, because it gets in the way of “work” ’ (Merilainen et al., : ) while their Finnish counterparts drew on a different discourse, that of the ‘balanced individual’. The authors relate these differences back to different state-level institutions in the two countries. In short, host-country contexts provide alternative discourses, triggering or enabling resistances to identity regulatory efforts by the centre. Such home- and host-country effects, in turn, point to how the regulation of identity may be especially precarious in the MNE context, arguably more so than in domestic organizations. For instance, Boussebaa and Morgan’s () study in a UK-headquartered MNE reports significant resistance to attempts by the centre to transfer its way of evaluating and developing managers to the French arm of the business. Underpinning such an approach was the discourse of ‘talent management’, originally produced in the USA and later diffused to Britain. The discourse represents managerial development as a matter of measuring and identifying leadership ‘potential’ in employees and then developing those with ‘high potential’ through coaching, training, etc. Boussebaa and Morgan show how British managers put much effort into having their French counterparts adopt this approach in order to harmonize practices across the French and UK parts of the company. French managers, however, continually challenged the effort by questioning the meaning of ‘talent management’ and its relevance to the French context. They defended a (French) counter-discourse that emphasized the role of the Grandes Écoles in identifying ‘talent’ and ‘high-potential’ and, relatedly, a career system in which managers were made and promoted based on criteria that go beyond a mere concern with individual talent and job performance. Such findings suggest that the management of identity may be particularly challenging in MNEs, with multi-nationality in effect producing powerful alternative sources of identification and, therefore, significantly weakening efforts by the centre to manufacture ‘appropriate’ corporate selves.
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The sociological ethnographic research of Ailon-Souday and Kunda (; also Ailon, ) is particularly useful here. In a study of an American–Israeli merger, the authors show how the merged firm’s senior managers put much effort into integrating the organization and, as part of this, nurturing a common—‘global’—identity among its staff. Yet, this effort was continually undermined by employees (and also managers themselves) frequently conjuring up the discourse of ‘national identity’ in their identity work. Israeli employees often utilized ‘national identity’ to distinguish themselves from American counterparts and, in the process also constructed (labelled) Americans as ‘others’ by pointing out their ‘Americanness’. The process also served to create nation-based hierarchies within the firm through forms of stereotyping which denigrated US employees while elevating Israeli ones to the status of ‘superior’ corporate (wo)men and ‘ “purer” manifestations of organizational ideals’ (Ailon-Souday and Kunda, : ). Paradoxically, in so doing, they were also ‘acknowledging the superiority of an ethos that was as American as their contesting, organizational others’ (Ailon-Souday and Kunda, : ) given the traits they ascribed to themselves were also evident in the ‘others’ they denigrated. Similar insights can be found in management studies concerned with the intricacies of nationalism and stereotyping inside MNEs (e.g. Koveshnikov et al., ; Vaara et al., ). For instance, Cooper et al. (: ) show how senior members of the professional service MNE they examined drew on and elaborated various stereotypes (‘aggressive’, ‘caring’, ‘imperialist’, ‘bureaucratic’, ‘efficient’, etc.) as means of distinguishing themselves from professionals based in other country offices. Again, stereotyping was used to produce not only to cultural differences but also nation-based hierarchies within the firm, with some— ‘us’—being represented as ‘superior’ professionals and others—‘them’—as ‘inferior’. Cooper et al. () also show how such processes operated as a means of exclusion. For instance, they explain how a construction of the ‘aggressive German’ was drawn upon by other Europeans to resist the German office of the MNE overseeing a planned investment in Russia. Interpretive cross-cultural management studies shed further light on these dynamics (e.g. Byun and Ybema, ; van Marrewijk, ; Ybema and Byun, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The MNE context reveals how globalization leads to processes of identity regulation and identity work being mediated by multiple national contexts. I believe, however, that the analysis needs to go further: it must situate the individual–organization–nation nexus in the wider context of neo-colonialism. This first requires appreciating that most of the world’s largest multinationals have been headquartered in the USA and, to a lesser extent, former colonial powers (particularly Britain, France, and Germany). Since the s, major MNEs have also surfaced in Japan and, in the last decade or so, important rivals have begun emerging in ‘rising powers’ such as China and India (Boussebaa and Morgan, ). Thus, until very recently, MNEs have mostly been ‘Western’ (principally American) organizations expanding into the world in search of new markets, resources, and investment opportunities. The process has been facilitated by, among others,
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globalization-promoting international organizations such as the IMF, WTO, World Bank (Chang, ) and Western firms providing various professional services (e.g. accounting, law, consulting) necessary to global expansion (Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, ). An important aspect of this Western expansionism in the last fifty years has been the increasing relocation of certain activities to low-wage countries in the so-called ‘developing’ world as a means of lowering labour costs at home. As Barnet and Muller wrote back in the s, ‘The essential strategy of the global corporation is based on the international division of labor. Top management continues to be recruited from rich countries; workers increasingly come from low-wage areas. [ . . . ] wage differentials are becoming more critical in maintaining competitive profit margins’ (: ). This essential strategy remains in place today and indeed Western MNEs have, in recent decades, greatly increased their efforts to expand into ‘developing’ countries, especially ‘emerging markets’,⁵ through various offshore-outsourcing relationships.⁶ Initially limited to the manufacturing and retailing sectors, offshore outsourcing is now also common in the services industry, where ‘emerging markets have become one of the primary preoccupations of the early twenty-first century’ (Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, : ).⁷ Today, MNEs make increasingly significant parts—often more than half—of their profit in the ‘developing’ world (Smith, ). The implication of this international division of labour is that control in MNEs, in addition to being multi-national in scope and thus mediated by national contexts, is shaped by—and constitutive of—the wider hierarchical structure of the global political economy, itself rooted in the history of Western colonialism and sustained by contemporary forms of colonial practice or what Nkrumah () referred to as ‘neo-colonialism’ (for a recent discussion, see Langan, ). In other words, MNE control is not only enmeshed with different country-specific discourses/institutions but also marked by neo-colonial power relations. My research in the last decade or so represents an effort to shed greater light on such relations and to place them more centrally in the analysis of MNEs, their internal workings (Boussebaa, , a, b, b; Boussebaa et al., , b), their offshore outsourcing relationships (Boussebaa et al., a), and their activities in the wider realm of transnational governance (Boussebaa, ; Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, , ). As part of this, I have argued for the need to re-conceptualize the MNE as a ‘neo-imperial space’ (Boussebaa, b; Boussebaa and Morgan, ). But what does all this mean from an identity regulation perspective? It first means that MNEs are to a large extent managed by ‘Western’ managerial elites. This is reflected in the firms’ boards of directors and top management teams, which tend mostly to be Western in composition (see, for example, Boussebaa, a, b, ; Ghemawat and Vantrappen, ). Some evidence also suggests that non-Western employees are given few opportunities to take up leadership roles at global or regional headquarters (Dewhurst et al., ). Employees from outside the West are in effect largely absent from top management and, by implication, voiceless in processes of strategy formation, decision-making, and organizational control. Illustrating this, Dewhurst et al. (: ) relate how a senior MNE executive told the authors that ‘[i]n our top--executive meetings, we spend more than half of our time speaking about Asia. But if I look around the room I hardly see anybody with an Asian background’. The authors cite another executive who put it more bluntly: ‘Leaders tend to promote and hire in their own image’ (: ). Such West-centrism also applies to the management of overseas operations; MNEs tend to rely strongly on Western expatriates for such work (Spiegel et al., ). This said, like in
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colonial times, global expansion is also dependent on co-opted ‘indigenous’ managers or what Boussebaa et al. (a) call ‘comprador managerial cadres’, to assist with the management of operations in the ‘developing’ world. It follows that those orchestrating the regulation of identities inside MNEs are in effect Western managerial elites (in collaboration with comprador managers). There is little research on this phenomenon, but a few studies scattered across the field of management and the wider social sciences provide useful initial insights. One key idea is that identity regulation in the MNE represents not only an effort to secure loyalty and commitment from employees (Alvesson and Willmott, ) but also an attempt to assimilate corporate (wo)men from the ‘developing’ world into ‘Western’ ways of being and doing. As in the days of colonialism, the ‘Other’ is invited, encouraged, if not coerced, to become like ‘Us’. This is perhaps best seen at the level of comprador managers. For instance, Dewhurst et al. () show how MNEs such as the German media giant Bertelsmann attempt to ‘groom local highfliers’ in emerging markets through specialized training programmes at Western business schools. They give the example of India where employees considered to have ‘high-potential’ can apply for an INSEAD Global Executive MBA. The company also runs a programme aimed at bringing these high-potentials to the firm’s headquarters in Germany for limited periods of time: ‘Having spent a couple of years at the center, recruits then compete for senior roles in local or regional markets. They return with a solid understanding of the organization and its strategy’ (Dewhurst et al., : ) and, by implication, also a more Westernized identity. Gagnon and Collinson’s () discursive identity study of leadership development programmes at two Western MNEs is useful here. While not specifically concerned with the question of globalization, the study nevertheless reveals how the programmes researched indirectly worked to normalize a conception of the ideal leader as ‘western’ (Gagnon and Collinson, : ). That is, the programmes not only served to teach leadership skills but ‘also prescribed [ . . . ] cultural background’, including language (English) and even accent. The programmes in effect promoted a Western and more specifically English-speaking leader identity. The authors note how participants in one of the programmes were ‘required to speak, write and present in English with fluency and confidence. Indeed, the TGMP programme director wondered “whether we are sometimes looking only at that” ’. Such expectations were found to produce ‘tension and anxiety around enacting a competent, English-speaking self ’ (Gagnon and Collinson, : ).⁸ The same processes have been observed in cross-cultural training programmes; implicit in these is typically an expectation that non-Western employees adapt themselves to Western ways of working, and not vice versa (Jack and Westwood, ; Koppmann et al., ). Similar insights can be gleaned from research on global professional service firms (Belal et al., ; Boussebaa, b, ). As they expand into emerging markets, the firms seek to maintain consistency in professional behaviour and this, in turn, requires professionals in such markets adhering to the ways of being and doing established in the West. To this end, the firms invest heavily in universalizing a Western (principally Anglo-American) model of professional practice and way of being a professional. This is achieved through various informal mechanisms such as training, socialization, and staff transfers. The process is enabled and reinforced by the firms’ imposition of English as the official global corporate language (Boussebaa, b, ). This research in effect suggests that, as
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Boussebaa and Faulconbridge () put it, ‘[p]rofessionals around the world are [being] “subjectified” and moulded into Western professionals’. The process also extends beyond managerial and professional groups, as revealed by ethnographic research on the experience of Indian employees in offshore outsourcing companies serving Western MNEs (Boussebaa et al., a; Cohen and El-Sawad, ; Das and Dharwadkar, ; Ravishankar et al., ). For instance, it has been shown that Indian IT software developers who have contact with Western staff are required to undergo mandatory cultural training designed to encourage them to ‘act [ . . . ] like Westerners’ (Koppman et al., : ). In offshore call centres, employees manning the phones are even required to don Western pseudonyms and trained to use Western accents as well as more general Western ways of being while dealing with the customers of the Western MNEs they serve. Mirchandani (: ) puts it as follows with specific reference to call-centre employees serving American MNEs: ‘These [ . . . ] workers live and work in India, but are required to organize their lives in terms of American times, celebrations, and communication styles. They are expected to speak with American accents, take on American names, adopt American holidays and greetings, and work on American time.’ In short, non-managerial employees also appear to be undergoing extensive socialization aimed at ‘re-making’ them as Western. Associated with, and indeed legitimizing, these processes of Westernization are modes of representation that routinely ‘inferiorize’ the Other. Prior to the wave of decolonization that swept the world in the latter half of the twentieth century, European powers justified colonialism through an imperial binary involving a fundamental distinction between Western and non-Western alterities, generally portraying the latter as ‘inferior’ and thus in need of reform (Said, ). Today, in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ era, a similar distinction can be observed in the work of MNEs, not least in their use of the ‘developed/developing’ terminology. In this binarism lies difference but also inequality in that the two alterities are not considered of equal value; the organizational context is ‘marked by historical inequalities, by explicit and tacit forms of racial subordination’ (Srinivas, : ). For instance, Koppmann et al. (: ) find that ‘team members from emerging countries [ . . . ] are not treated as professionals by their Western [ . . . ] counterparts’. The authors show how Indian employees view themselves as ‘high-status professionals’, and indeed many of them have ‘graduated at the top of their class from prestigious engineering institutions’ (Koppmann et al., : ), yet they are continually represented as ‘inferior’ workers while also being assigned comparatively less complex/interesting work (see also Boussebaa et al., a). Of course, like power in general, neo-colonial power does not go unchallenged (Said, ) and this is indeed (indirectly) reflected in the rise of new MNEs from the non-West (a point I return to below). How such agency manifests itself in intra-MNE processes of identity regulation is not entirely clear given the dearth of relevant research on the question, but a few insights can be glimpsed from the studies discussed above, especially those informed by postcolonial theory (Boussebaa et al., a; Das and Dharwadkar, ; Ravishankar et al., ). A common theme here is that of ‘ambivalence’ (Bhabha, ) among the targets of Westernization. On one level, much conformity is observed in the accounts of employees, with Westernization being described as a positive development or perhaps a means of constructing new identities. As part of this, employees often engage
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in ‘mimicry’ (Bhabha, ), willingly imitating the language, dress, and working practices of Western counterparts while, presumably, intentionally suppressing their own cultural identity (Boussebaa et al., a). Yet, on another level, contestation and resistance also appear common: employees are found to question and complain about Western ways of doing and being and to draw on various discourses—e.g. exploitation, oppression, national identity, Westernization—to contest and resist efforts to re-make them as ‘Western’. For instance, Boussebaa et al. (a: ) show how offshore Indian employees embraced English as a working language yet they also expressed reservations, describing it as ‘something alien and unwanted, as something that oppressed [them] and that restricted their ability to express themselves freely’. The authors also show how employees in some cases resisted their ‘Englishization’ by distancing themselves from it in their identity work and by utilizing hybrid linguistic forms at the workplace. Efforts to regulate identities in the MNE context thus appear to produce conflicted or hybrid identities that, simultaneously, signal Westernization and opposition to it (see also Frenkel, ). Micro-processes of ambivalence and resistance should, however, not distract us from macro-level developments—in the present case, a gradual process of Westernization working in accord with Western managerial elites’ globalization project (cf. Boussebaa, b, ; Boussebaa et al., a).
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.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, I have argued that ‘globalization’ has received little attention in research on identities in organizations despite its socio-economic importance and the fact that debates on the phenomenon now stand at the heart of the social sciences. I have sought to address this lacuna by reflecting on the question of identity regulation in the important context of MNEs. What my analysis shows is that globalization brings into the organization ‘multinationality’. This means that, firstly, processes of identity regulation and identity work are intertwined with a multiplicity of country-specific institutions and discourses. It also means, secondly, that such processes become enmeshed with neo-colonial power relations given MNEs not only operate across different nation states but are also integral to an international division of labour rooted in the colonial past and present. In this context, the management of identity becomes a modality of ‘global’ organizational control and one that is inseparable from efforts by political-economic elites in expansionist nations to access and control world markets and resources. Thus, the current focus of identities research on ‘individual-level identity in organizational contexts’ (Brown, : ) needs broadening to include the wider (multi)national and (neo)colonial contexts in which organizations and their employees are embedded. As part of this, managerial elites must be situated in such wider extra-organizational contexts and approached not just as ‘organizational’ actors but also as ‘societal’ ones (Morgan et al., ; Savage and Williams, ). Relevant questions should thus concern not so much how identities are regulated by managers but rather how societally embedded managerial elites from expansionist countries work to shape identities on a transnational, often global,
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scale in line with their globalization projects; how particular ways of being and doing are being imposed around the world by such elites; and how employees in different countries, especially those in ‘emerging markets’ given their significance for MNEs, consent to and/or resist such efforts. In pursuing these questions, it is important to keep in mind that, as Dicken (: ) puts it, ‘[t]he global economic map is always in a state of “becoming” ’ while also recognizing ‘[t]he new does not totally obliterate the old’ (Dicken, : ). This is evident in the historical transition from a ‘West’ dominated by European colonial powers to one in which the US empire now occupies centre stage. It is also evident in the ongoing transition to a ‘post-American world’ (Zakaria, ) in which non-Western nations such as the BRIC countries play an increasingly important role. This shift of power away from the West means globalization in the twenty-first century is no longer simply a Western project but, increasingly, a polycentric one, involving political-economic elites from ‘developing’ countries as well as ‘developed’ ones. As part of this, as noted earlier, MNEs from the non-West are gradually emerging to rival Western ones (for example, Wipro in India and Huawei in China). Research is required on such a development and its identity-regulation implications. Perhaps most pressing is the need to understand identity regulation inside Chinese MNEs as the growth of these organizations in the last two decades or so is the most striking manifestation of the observed change—the Fortune Global list now includes more than MNEs headquartered in China (Fortune, ).⁹ Importantly, processes of identity regulation in these organizations may differ from the ones analysed in this chapter, not least given Chinese MNEs’ recent emergence and China’s distinctive institutional context. Indeed, a recent study of a high-tech Chinese MNE reveals unrelenting efforts to regulate the identities of Chinese employees (in line with the firm’s internationalization plans and also in congruence with China’s nationalist discourses) but, in contrast, no attempts to replicate such efforts in relation to non-Chinese employees in Europe (Lai et al., ). This suggests Chinese MNEs’ approach to identity regulation as a means of global organizational control may differ from that discussed in the present chapter. Research on such difference and its implications for the identity dynamics and associated neo-colonial power relations analysed in this chapter would be very useful. Research is also required in organizational contexts not discussed in this chapter. These include international organizations such as the IMF, WTO, and World Bank and indeed equivalent or competing organizations currently being formed by the BRIC nations—for example, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Particularly interesting are universities. These have in some ways always been ‘global’—with international research collaboration going back centuries—but, in recent years, they have pursued further ‘globalization’ through, for instance, international partnerships and overseas campuses. How are employee identities being regulated in this context? The increasing pursuit of international students also raises the question of how universities are contributing to the corporate processes of identity regulation discussed in this chapter. In particular, business schools work closely with MNEs and arguably play an important role in the fabrication of employee identities deemed appropriate for corporate globalization (cf. Boussebaa, a). In short, research is needed beyond the organizational context of the MNE. In the meantime, I hope my analysis can encourage students of identities in organizations to pay greater attention to
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globalization in their analyses and to contribute towards efforts across the social sciences to place the phenomenon at the centre of scholarly inquiry.
N . The ongoing populist backlash against globalization and associated discussions about ‘de-globalization’ andnew globalizing actors (e.g., China) suggest the phenomenon is likely to remain as intensively debated and researched in the first half of the twenty-first century as it was in the second half of the preceding one. . By ‘identities’, I refer to ‘individuals’ subjective interpretations of who they are’ (Caza et al., : ). I follow the view that identities are not ‘fixed’ but rather ‘worked on’ (Brown, : ). That is, identities are not ‘given’ but produced through ‘identity work’, i.e. the ‘ongoing mental activity that an individual undertakes in constructing an understanding of self that is coherent, distinct and positively valued’ (Alvesson et al., : ). . My analysis is based on a review and synthesis of disparate bodies of research dispersed across the field of management and the wider social sciences, including comparative management studies, interpretive studies of cross-cultural management, discursive studies of national stereotyping inside MNEs, sociological ethnographies of intra-MNE processes of identification, research on everyday life in offshore outsourcing companies, and post-colonial management studies of globalization. When taken together, these unconnected bodies of research provide useful insights into the dynamics of identity regulation inside MNEs and the global supply chains they control. . According to the United Nations, there were already more than , MNEs in operation a decade ago (UNCTAD, ). . Emerging markets are countries considered to be in a transitional phase between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ status. . These relationships are organizational arrangements whereby labour-intensive assembly and other low-skilled tasks are subcontracted to companies located in ‘developing’ nations. Some of these relationships are ‘in-house’, i.e. owned by the MNE, while others are ‘arm’s length’, involving independent suppliers. In either case, MNEs generally exert significant control over the offshore companies (Dicken, ). . One example is the IT industry where back-office activities such as software coding and testing are transferred to companies located in countries such as India (Ravishankar et al., ). Another example is offshore call centres providing services to customers based in the West on behalf of Western MNEs (Mirchandani, ). Employees in these centres typically make telemarketing calls or provide assistance to Western customers calling about issues such as broadband connection problems or credit card and insurance claims inquiries. . TGMP stands for Top Global Managers Programme. . In , the number of Global companies headquartered in China (including Taiwan) reached a record , exceeding for the first time the number of US-based companies () (Murray and Dunn, ).
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IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES ........................................................................................................................
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Identity and Spatiality ......................................................................................................................
Abstract This chapter explores the management and organization studies (MOS) literature concerned with the relationships between identity, space, and place. The authors define identity-related terms and highlight the principal ways in which space is conceptualized in MOS. They then examine three categories of empirical and theoretical studies linking organized space and processes of identity and identification: workspaces designed to enable highly interactive modes of working; homes, where work is increasingly taking up residence; and spaces that facilitate identity change in ways unanticipated by managements. The authors then make suggestions for future research and conclude by highlighting the powerful dynamic reciprocal connections between space and individual and organizational identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. T past twenty years have seen a transformation of workspaces across the industrialized world. This radical change to the design of work buildings has been based on claims that architecture can help to realize organizational strategies by supporting ‘new ways of working’ involving flexible interaction that crosses organizational boundaries, facilitating adaptability, creativity, and innovation (Duffy, ). Such designs represent a spatial blueprint for the ‘network organization’, which as Castells (: ) has claimed, is capable of continuous innovation because it is structured in a ‘variable geometry’ with a culture that is ephemeral, flickering, and kaleidoscopic. They apply to a wide range of workplaces and workers, including offices (e.g. Dale and Burrell, , ; Hirst and Humphreys, ; Kingma, ), co-working spaces (Garrett et al., ), universities
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(Baldry and Hallier, ), corporate campuses (Kerr and Robinson, ), and the university students who are the workers of the future (Hancock and Spicer, ). New workplaces look and feel strikingly different: most are constructed from reinforced glass, and have open plan offices and big atria. At first glance, they are legible—the layout can be comprehended quickly—but while it is often easier to tell what is what, it can be harder to discern who is who. Individual offices and physical walls are scarce, but seem to have been partially replaced by headphones. Simultaneously, as workplaces appear more striking, aided by increasingly ubiquitous digital devices, work is dispersing across spaces and times, such as homes, cafés, and the commute. An illustration of the spatial diffusion of work is the facilities organization WeWork, which provides flexible office space and business support for entrepreneurs who are ‘always working or always semi-working’ (https://www.wework.com). Alongside changes to the material workplace, it is clear that the spatial and temporal boundaries between work and non-work are being redrawn. As the geographer Doreen Massey () argues, space is a product of relations, including those that establish boundaries. In Gupta and Ferguson’s (: ) terms, space is formed through ‘a shared historical process that differentiates the world as it connects it’. We are at a particularly interesting point in this historical process, with rapid mutual reconstitution of differentiated and connected spaces, and with them, the identities of organizations and individuals. Prior to this extensive shift in workspace design, space was mostly an implicit concern in management and organization studies (MOS). Notable exceptions which inspired later research are Gieryn’s () review of place in sociology, Berg and Kreiner’s () analysis of corporate architecture as symbolic resources that express the identities of organizations, and Yanow’s () comparison of managerially ‘authored meanings’ of built space with those actually constructed by employees and other relevant audiences (cf. Brown and Humphreys, ; Halford and Leonard, ). The spatial reconfiguration outlined above has subsequently inspired a large body of research on the implications of space for organizing and work (cf. reviews by Taylor and Spicer, and Weinfurtner and Seidl, ). Indeed, in their authoritative book, Dale and Burrell (: xii) state that ‘the explicit enlistment of the material spaces of organisation as a managerial tool is an important development in the restructuring of power, corporate culture and employee identities’. In this chapter, we consider the literature on space/place in relation to the ‘vast, heterogeneous and fragmented’ (Brown, : ) literature on identities in (and occasionally of) organizations (He and Brown, ). Considerable literature suggests that identity, the sense of who we are and how we want to appear to others, is a fluid dynamic construction, which relates ‘to the (conscious) struggle to respond to the question “who am I?” ’ (Brown, , ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ). These processes of identity construction have been explored by scholars under the banner of identity work, which Watson (: ) describes as ‘the mutually constitutive processes whereby people strive to shape a relatively coherent and distinctive notion of personal self identity and struggle to come to terms with and, within limits, to influence the various social-identities which pertain to them in the various milieu in which they live their lives’ (italics original). We agree with Brown (: ) that ‘overwhelmingly’ research has focused on identities as ‘socially constructed through situated practices of language use’, for which space/place is one significant discursive resource. In our exploration of the relationships between identity and space/place, however, we draw also on Dale and Burrell (: ; emphasis original),
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who maintain that the social actor is ‘a spatial and embodied actor, not just . . . a discursive construction’. That is, ‘real’ people inhabit ‘actual’ space, and issues of spatiality and embodiment are at least equally important in the constitution of identities in organizations. We next review some of the major theoretical perspectives on space, and (where possible) indicate how identity is conceptualized in each. We then examine the relationship between space and identity in three overlapping categories of space: workspaces designed for new ways of working; homes, where work is increasingly taking up residence; and spaces notable for facilitating identity change, categorized as liminal, free, or resisting spaces.
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.................................................................................................................................. While identity scholarship has partially converged on a set of conceptual definitions, there are few direct equivalents in the literature on organizational space; this literature is fragmented and based on diverse theories of space which offer different understandings of the spatial and embodied actor (Weinfurtner and Seidl, ). The following is a nonexhaustive summary of the key authors and concepts associated with space/place in MOS, deriving from geography, sociology, and anthropology, and where they exist, identityrelated conceptualizations. We begin with Lefebvre, whose work has been highly influential in MOS. Writing from a Marxian perspective, Lefebvre () established that space is simultaneously material and social, and produced through and productive of embodied social relations. The core of his argument (: ) is that space is produced through the interaction of three analytic dimensions: the material environment, designed to realize capitalism’s requirements; everyday routines of embodied action; and the meanings that inhabitants attribute to the spaces they occupy. While Lefebvre does not allude to identity he underscores the role of the body in the production of space. Thus, the embodied practices and understandings that construct space are also ‘definitions of selfhood internalized within the body’ (Simonsen, : ).¹ Organizational scholars have used Lefebvre’s spatial ‘triad’ to analyse ‘new’ offices (e.g. Dale and Burrell, ; Kingma, ), the incursion of work into homes (Wapshott and Mallett, ), and the stabilizing influence of older, emblematic work buildings (Siebert et al., ) which can also be reinterpreted to express changing organizational identities (Liu and Grey, ). Similarly, while Lefebvre does not engage explicitly with gendered identities, several studies have extended his framework to account for the gendered and performative qualities of space (Hirst and Schwabenland, ; Tyler and Cohen, ; Wasserman and Frenkel, ). Wasserman and Frenkel () for instance define ‘spatial work’ as the spatial and embodied identity work performed by organization members which constructs and challenges gender and class distinctions. Less studied so far is Lefebvre’s () analysis of spatiotemporal rhythms (an exception is Nash, ). These studies consider struggles between the domination of space, grounded in capitalist processes, and how users attempt to reappropriate it. A second stream of research, deriving from humanistic geography and developed in environmental psychology, conceptualizes the relationship between place and identity as place identity (Auburn and Barnes, ; Cresswell, ; Gieryn, ; Manzo, ). Place is defined as ‘a meaningful segment of space’ (Cresswell, : ) distinguished by
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its specific location, material form, and the subjective meanings, individual or shared, that are attributed to it. The emphasis is on the phenomenological study of being-in-the-world and on the situated meanings people attribute to places and to themselves, with particular emphasis on dwelling and home. These themes are reflected in MOS research taking this position, such as studies of community lifeboating (Grey and O’Toole, ), temporary dwelling places in hair salons (Shortt, ), and regional entrepreneurship (Larson and Pearson, ; Rooney et al., ). Central to research on place is an emphasis on (usually positive) spatial meanings, and some studies argue for a conceptual distinction between space and place on this basis.² Several interconnected streams of spatial research proceed from the assumption made in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that agency is ‘the hybrid accomplishment of many actors with varying ontologies’ (Wilhoit, : ). An eminent proponent is Massey () who sets an agenda for a ‘process-relational geography’, in which space and material objects have agency and humans only become actors in association with them (see also Sergot and Saives’ appraisal of Massey’s work for MOS). Spaces are not bounded or defined solely by what lies within them, but are also constituted by all the elsewheres with which they relate. Echoing Brown’s () definition of identity, space is ‘never finished . . . [but] a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, : ). Thus, ‘identities/entities, the relations between ‘them’, and the spatiality which is part of them, are all co-constitutive’ (Massey, : ). Research within MOS using this perspective has been developed in the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) stream of research (reviewed by Wilhoit, ) and has also focused on flexworkers (Richardson and McKenna, ), spatial modernization in the public sector (Hirst and Humphreys, ), and the absence of children from MOS (Kavanagh, ). Similar to Lefebvrian studies, space in this understanding is active, power-infused, and politicized, but rather than assuming a class struggle, regards politics as unfolding from the interrelations between a multiplicity of human and non-human actors. The three perspectives summarized above represent comprehensive theories of space/ place, but there are also conceptualizations of specific spatial types, with particular configurations or which have particular effects. Heterotopias are ‘counter-sites’ in which diverse spaces within a culture are ‘simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’ (Foucault and Miskowiec, : ). A space that is heterotopic jumbles together things that we would normally regard as incompatible; such unsettling juxtapositions force us into sensemaking activity, make acts of resistance possible, and allow transgression and the making of other forms of identity. Kornberger and Clegg (: ) draw out the identity implications of the concept, defining heterotopias as spaces ‘in which we can play different roles, be what one normally wouldn’t be, be many persons, swap genders’. The quirky workspaces that are emblematic of Silicon tech corporations are examples of heterotopias; but so too are the homes of many workers where work has arrived, as we discuss later. The concept of liminal spaces derives from van Gennep’s () theory of rites of passage, whose purpose is the transformation of identity. Liminal spaces are characterized by ‘anti-structure’, whereby liminars are freed from former constraint or no longer protected by it, and in this denuded state can enter into communitas, a social bond in which social hierarchies and differences are less relevant (Turner, : ). Modern industrial space has few properly liminal spaces set aside specifically for ritual purposes; rather, they are liminal-like or liminoid (Turner,
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), found in ignored, unseen areas at the interstices and margins. In their recent review of liminality in MOS, Söderlund and Borg () identify ‘place’ as a key theme in the literature. We return to them later when we examine how liminal spaces bring about their transformative effects. Clearly, there are many approaches to place and space in MOS. There are, for example, studies based on Deleuze (Kornberger and Clegg, ; Thanem, ), institutional theory (Lawrence and Dover, ), and geographical non-representational theory (Beyes and Steyeart, ; Kerr and Robinson, ; Våland and Georg, ). While the frameworks have different emphases, they all foreground the idea that identity is constituted by spatially embedded and embodied social action. Consequently, a significant part of our understanding of our identity ‘remains ineffable, residing in our bodies, perpetually escaping our ability to articulate it fully in words’ (Harquail and King, : ). Accordingly, studies of organizational space often reach for this elusive embodied knowledge using qualitative or ethnographic methods, including innovative approaches such as material semiotics (Yanow, ) and sensual methodology (Warren, ). We now explore the relationship between space and identity in three overlapping categories which have significance for identity: workspaces redesigned to expedite new ways of working; homes, where work is increasingly taking up residence; and less managed spaces notable for facilitating identity change, categorized as liminal, free, or resisting spaces.
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.................................................................................................................................. Workspace designs aiming to support ‘new ways of working’ based on spontaneous, networked interaction originated in the Netherlands with the architect and consultant Veldhoen (Kingma, ) and were subsequently popularized, especially by the influential architect Francis Duffy () and associated consultancy firm DEGW (Dale and Burrell, : –). New ways of working are based on strong assumptions about how organizational flexibility is fostered. As Duffy (: ) argues in his book, The New Office, ‘unremitting teamwork’ can only be enabled by removing physical constraints and allowing staff the freedom to choose where and when they wish to work. These presuppositions about the fundamental importance of networked interaction have become widely accepted management beliefs: for example, Kornberger and Clegg (: ) quote a chief executive who states that good ideas are ‘rarely created when you’re sitting at your desk alone and tense’. Workspace designs for supporting new ways of working share several features. Most or all employees sit in open plan offices and there is a redistribution of space away from individual allocations to collective areas, often in the form of large atria containing areas designed specifically for particular activities, such as meeting, eating, or playing. Reinforced glass is the preferred construction material; this provides natural light and visibility, it makes the building easily ‘legible’, and can simultaneously induce a powerful aesthetic experience (with ‘wow factor’) and an oppressive, high surveillance environment. Many workplaces are ‘aestheticized’ (Warren, ) by the incorporation of artefacts from
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non-work domains of social life, such as leisure, consumption, and home. Hot-desking or ‘non-territorial’ environments, where employees do not have a fixed workstation but use any available desk which they must clear at the end of their work session, aim to support further unplanned interaction as well as making cost-efficient use of potentially expensive office space. Kornberger and Clegg (, ) argue that buildings can be ‘generative’—previously unimagined functions can emerge from spatial form if that form is ambiguous and fosters ‘positive power’, allowing movement and flow, and freeing employees to play with and reinvent their identities. Ambiguity can be fashioned by complicating inside/outside and internal boundaries to create ‘folds’ marking ‘the point where one state of being shifts into another to develop “spatial zones of becoming” ’ (Kornberger and Clegg, : ). Although Kornberger and Clegg are not referring explicitly to new offices, there are parallels with the ‘generative’ architecture they describe, with glass construction complicating external and internal boundaries, diverse spaces for mingling, and with pool tables (etc.) providing heterotopic surprises that startle employees out of rote practices. Commenting specifically on reshaped workspaces, Dale and Burrell (, ) use Lefebvre’s conceptualization to argue that they are conceived spaces whose rich symbolism and apparent freedom of movement and interaction aim to ‘ “capture hearts and minds”; that is, to encourage individuals to identify themselves with the organisation’ (Dale and Burrell, : ; emphasis original). Even the most liberating and inspiring designs are meant to orchestrate more of employees’ spatial and embodied identities, enveloping them in an organizational community with a shared identity that is energized and upbeat, thus ensuring cohesion even when employees are more spatially dispersed (Dale and Burrell, ). Concomitantly, they aim to project to their stakeholders an image of the organization as modern, transparent, and representing a decisive break with past bureaucracy (Hirst and Humphreys, ; Våland and Georg, ). Empirical studies suggest a complex relationship between the organizational identities communicated by ‘new’ workspaces and how employees incorporate these meanings into their self-conceptions. Senior managers in Hirst and Humphreys’ () study of a UK local authority claimed that their cutting-edge building was consonant with their desired identities as persons to be reckoned with—active, flexible, and forward-thinking—and they adopted energetic networking practices with enthusiasm. Younger staff in Kingma’s () study, too, regard the modern, glass buildings they worked in as communicating an ‘improved’ organizational identity that reflected back on them, and took advantage of the greater freedom it permitted over their time and place of work. Younger academics working in the spectacular, Frank Gehry designed University of Technology Sydney Business School valued its ability to attract and amaze external audiences, but felt pressurized to live up to the standard of performance that the building communicated (Berti et al., ). Issues of occupational identity also arise in Baldry and Barnes’ () study of university academics moving into open plan offices, the main outcome of which was an exodus of both academics and their materials except when required on campus. More negative responses are observed in relation to artefacts imported from outside work—aiming to surprise and coax employees into redefining their individual and collective selves. Baldry and Hallier’s () study of workplaces aiming to cultivate people who
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have, and are, ‘fun’ at work, distinguishes two forms, tailored to class distinctions: ‘fun’ for knowledge workers supports them to produce good ideas with pool tables, large TV screens, and a fridge full of beer; whereas ‘fun’ for employees doing boring service jobs employs plastic palms and the sound of breaking waves to create a cheerful esprit de corps and encourage smiling, laughing, and flirting for work purposes. Baldry and Hallier (: ) show that this provokes stringent ‘reality testing’ that assesses the genuineness and personal worth of such heterotopic juxtapositions. They conclude that ‘fun’ artefacts do not strengthen organizational identification, but instead are likely to lead to employees ‘faking’ the forms of identity they think managers desire, while hiding their authentic recreational identity. Several studies have considered the implications of the temporary ownership of space inherent in hot-desking environments. ‘Clean desk’ policies forbid employees from personalizing their desk areas, and this leads to ‘identity threats’ because employees cannot express their distinctiveness (Elsbach, ). Byron and Laurence (: ) show that using personal artefacts to convey individuality at work ‘appears to help employees feel more comfort with and connected to their organization and its members’. That is, hotdesking militates against positive identification with organizations. It also disrupts useful work routines and relationships, and promotes ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman, ) and polite indifference to those nearby (Hirst, ). Employees resist the imperative to move around by repeatedly using the same desk, termed ‘squatting’ (Elsbach, ) or ‘settling’ (Hirst, ). Millward et al. (: ), however, suggest that hot-desking does not alienate employees but shifts their focus of identification from their immediate workgroup towards the organization, though, these employees formed settled ‘neighbourhoods’. In Kingma’s () recent study of a ‘new’ office, a strict office etiquette prohibits behaviours such as not complying with the clear desk policy, regularly using the same desk, and finally (homing in on those inclined to make excuses for their rule-breaking) ‘searching for explanation and solutions outside one’s own scope of behaviour’ (Kingma, : ). The rules governing how this space is used, specifically anticipating resistant behaviours, signal a high degree of managerial determination to push hot-desking through. The examples of ‘fun’ aestheticization discussed above suggest a slant in relation to gender as well as class—with beer and laddishness for knowledge workers, and the implied passivity of the artificial beach for service workers. Recent research into gendered identity work shows that femininity has to be carefully managed, even in workspaces that appear gender-neutral. In contrast with many men who occupy the workspace unselfconsciously and expansively, spilling over into their neighbours’ space, women’s occupation of space is typically more tentative, aiming to appear competent, welcoming, and able to balance work and home life (Tyler and Cohen, ) and attentive to their presentation of status and sexuality (Hirst and Schwabenland, ). In a rich ethnography of the new Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wasserman and Frenkel () show how the building was designed to ‘brand’ Israel as a Western, progressive country, using restrained, minimal design that was extrapolated into a dress and comportment code for its human components. This implicitly privileged men of European origin (the diplomats) over women, who risked being seen as ‘unprofessional and overly local’ (Wasserman and Frenkel, : ). While most senior women met and exceeded these requirements, lower status women resisted with colourful office adornments, expressing a homely ‘maternal aesthetics’ (Wasserman and Frenkel, : ). Emotionally and aesthetically understated identities expressing a ‘global’ outlook are favoured by this space, at the same time that local-ness, homeliness, and motherhood are not.
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.................................................................................................................................. Work has moved into the homes of many workers for at least part of the working week. Workspaces are now commonly hybrid, combining physical and digital spaces (Halford, ) and employees are increasingly teleworkers engaged in ‘flexible and distributed working arrangements’ (Thatcher and Zhu, : ). Consideration of the implications of moving work into home needs to take into account the richness and complexity of home itself (Mallett, ). Manzo’s () critique of the common-sense image of home argues that it is its historical separation from the workplace that has led to the endowment of ‘home’ with meanings of comfort, belonging, stability, rest, and protection—everything that the workplace is not. The conventional (but increasingly atypical) Western family is central to this understanding: it ‘represents a particularly powerful disciplinary institution in which space and power unite to form a normalizing gaze we innocuously call “the home” ’ (Di Domenico and Fleming, : ). Moving work into a home from which it has been absent therefore represents the confluence of different cultural environments, forcing us to manage tensions between our public identities as employees and private, intimate identities as family members or friends, or as ourselves when living alone (Richardson and McKenna, ; Tietze and Musson, ; Wapshott and Mallett, ). Given the alternative identities likely to be present at home and their associated temptations and distractions, it is unsurprising that managements would fear that working from home could reduce employees’ identification with the organization. Writing from a managerial perspective, Thatcher and Zhu () reasoned that organizations could potentially lose their hold over employees’ identities because shifting work into home disrupts the processes by which employees identify with the organization, leading to an uncertain situation whereby they must either re-establish their work identity or develop a new sense of self. Empirical research on the home–work nexus since the early s shows that such managerial anxieties have not been realized. Studies of managerial and professional workers indicate that (contrary to the suspicion that they would exploit newfound freedom to work less hard by privileging non-work identities) home-workers ‘directed their energies at forging a new working identity that was convincing to both themselves and others’ (Brocklehurst, : ; Halford ; Richardson and McKenna, ). Workers in Brocklehurst’s study sought to maintain the separation between their home and work selves by recreating spatiotemporal work routines, such as donning office dress, creating dedicated office spaces, and adhering to normal working hours when working at home. However, they lacked a clear vocabulary to describe their new work selves, preferring ‘mobile worker’ over ‘home-worker’, with its connotations of femininity and unpaid homebased labour. Later studies by Tietze and her colleagues which included not only the employees who had moved work into home but also their co-residents (in this case, family members) as research participants, indicate the extent to which work and home activities may become fragmented and interleaved. The employee at home is paradoxically both present and
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absent; although they are there, they may be unavailable to family members. Tietze and Musson (: ) recount a father who, when encountering his children, treats them ‘professionally, that means with some courtesy, but briefly’. Tietze and Musson () argue that the success or otherwise of the shift of work into the home is tied directly to identity issues, which in turn vary with specific circumstances such as the age of the child(ren) and the constitution of the family. Their conclusion is that home-working can enhance identities as parent and employee, or it can diminish both, or the work identity can lose its hold as opportunities for future, more meaningful identities come into view. A recent article by Koslowski et al. () analyses the role of boundary objects (digital artefacts, household objects such as beds, kitchen tables, and the bodies of the homeworkers) in the negotiation of work and home spheres of activity. Boundary objects by definition are those objects that connect distinct domains; in this study, the domestic space and the objects do not perform the work of separation on behalf of the human actors, because their meanings and functions are multivalent and ambiguous. Koslowski et al. (: ) conclude that the overriding tendency is for workers ‘to create and legitimate the home-worker’s identity as a professional’, for instance by limiting interruptions from children, or working on emails while in bed with one’s partner. This form of identity work involves navigating between work and home identities on a moment-by-moment basis, and is challenging and tiring. While, as Richardson and McKenna () argue, work is not simply colonizing the home, through the accumulation of small decisions and adjustments, work is creeping further into the home, into the bedroom and indeed the bed, and in doing so reconstructing our own identities and those of children, family members, co-residents, and dependants.
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.................................................................................................................................. A wealth of studies consider spaces that enable, facilitate, or indeed compel identity change in ways that are not necessarily congruent with organizational intentions. These studies use concepts of liminality (Daskalaki et al., ; Kociatkewicz and Kostera, ; Lucas, ; Shortt, ), free spaces (Rao and Dutta, ), and resisting spaces (Courpasson et al., ) to show how specific spaces/times can escape control by managers or other authorities, with a range of identity outcomes ranging from a sense of respite from the organizational frontstage to mutiny. Liminal spaces offer respite from having to ‘keep up’ one’s official organizational identity or persona. In their anthropology of empty spaces, Kociatkewicz and Kostera () wander about in the bowels of corporate buildings (basements, back staircases, and blocked-off corridors), encountering few other people but plenty of grime, dust, dampness and junk. From the researchers’ perspective, these are ‘places to which no meaning is ascribed’ (Kociatkewicz and Kostera, : ), and hence, there is a sense of release of identity: who are you in a place with no meaning? What script is there for you to follow? The workmen the researchers encounter in a basement (whose spatial identities as low status or marginal workers are, presumably, crisply defined) assume they are just lost.
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The emptiness is accompanied by a feeling of subtle liberation or ‘meditative freedom’ (Kociatkewicz and Kostera, : ). The lifts, stairwells, toilets, and cupboards that Shortt () analyses are similarly ubiquitous and unnoticed. Workers in hair salons use these spaces for temporary respite from the intense emotional and aesthetic labour of the floor, and indeed from the backstage of the staff room where jocularity is also obligatory. By dwelling temporarily in these places ‘a more autonomous non-corporate identity can be created and permitted to emerge’ (Shortt : ). Liminality can arise when norms are suspended or absent, as the above studies show, but liminal spaces can also be created when multiple sets of norms are co-present. Research on translocal work, where employees work in more than one location, shows how repeated boundary-crossings complicate identities by inflecting them with multiple norms (Daskalaki et al., ; Lucas, ). This engenders a form of permanent liminality in which ‘one is never fully emplaced or fixed, and one is never just “I” but also “an-other” ’ (Daskalaki et al., : ). Rigid identity categorizations cease to be relevant—refugee, migrant, cosmopolitan, or more generally ‘other’, and the self remains suspended betwixt and between. Lucas’ (: ) nomadic work-life journeying similarly gave rise to a liminal space enabling ‘non-status and un-anchored identity’ but also the freedom to ‘reshape and re-order [one’s] sense of self ’. Costas’ () study of international elites also demonstrates the complexity and ‘stickiness’ of what is often assumed to be frictionless movement. Opportunities for transformation or risks of confusion reside in the complexities of space generated by movement, which renders the individual as a border zone. Contrasting with the sense of individual release or confusion implied by these studies, Courpasson et al. (: ) analyse collective ‘resisting places’ where ‘individuals can develop oppositional identities’. Managers who considered themselves to be committed employees resisted certain initiatives by organizing meetings in places outside the reach of hierarchical control, such as basements, cafés, or homes, which through repeated, intense, and purposeful interactions became construed as valuable yet illicit. Rao and Dutta’s (: ) historical analysis of the timing of mutinies among the Bengal Native Army suggests that free spaces ‘insulated from the control of elites in organizations’ emerged during or immediately after religious festivals. Festivals allowed large numbers to associate, whip up emotion, and trigger collective identities. Drawing on the work of Turner, Rao and Dutta () argue that the creation of communitas in festivals occasions the legitimate performance of illicit behaviour, including derision and challenge to superiors. Thanem’s () poignant study of homeless people coping with an urban redevelopment that aimed to displace them shows how their identity work was synonymous with spatial tactics which constructed the city as a nomadic space. The anti-structure (Turner, ) that defines liminal spaces may be benign or empowering, or it may be dangerous. In a compelling illustration of the danger of liminal spaces, Prasad () describes his repeated crossings of Qalandiya, a militarized border between Israel and the occupied territory of the West Bank, and shows how, for him, this space brought about permanent identity change. Entering Palestinian territory is easy, but the return journey into Israel is subject to extreme security measures whereby incomers are squeezed through a narrow tunnel under constant threat of violence. Prasad experienced this as a liminal space, ‘neither wholly here nor wholly there’ (: ). There, he shared the experience of extreme physical confinement with Palestinians and heard stories of atrocities committed against them and their family members. Instead of a blurring of
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identity positions as Daskalaki et al. () found, in this fraught space, there can be no shilly-shallying: there is only a dichotomous choice between sharply demarcated categories. Prasad chose to reconstruct his identity through affiliation with the disenfranchised: as he remarks, ‘Qalandiya was redefining who I was – informing both the ontologies that I was constituted by and the ideologies for which I stood’ (: ).
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.................................................................................................................................. We started this chapter with Dale and Burrell’s () insight that the use of space as a managerial tool marks a shift in how organizational power is exercised and identities are constituted. We have considered this shift in the context of workspaces that aim to push and pull us towards networking, constructing identities that are in Castells’ terms multifaceted, flexible, and kaleidoscopic, and at the same time incorporate a sense of togetherness and cohesion. We have considered the spaces at work and home where we think the effects of this restructuring are most significant, as well as the spaces where people can partially escape or gain respite from these authority structures. Workspace designs aiming to support new ways of working are based on assumptions that people can use space fluidly, requiring little in the way of routines, and are aligned with the need to keep costs down while presenting an impressive or credible external appearance (e.g. Hirst and Humphreys, ; Kingma, ). But the tenacity with which employees ‘hang on’ to spatial routines that no longer ‘fit’ their new workspaces suggests that a satisfying and viable identity needs some stability based on shared spatial habits, in particular places, and nearby particular others and objects. As Lefebvre () presciently wrote, the exchange value of modern space dominates its use value. The mismatch between how workspaces are notionally ‘meant’ to be used and how they are actually used suggests a need to look through the other end of the telescope, so to speak, and begin not with the workspace but the work people do (that produces it). Auburn and Barnes (: ) write that ‘[t]he meaning of places . . . is never fixed but only accomplished in and for the social engagement at hand’. We advocate ethnographic studies of workspaces that begin with the work people do, what they see as their purposes, which other people, objects, and spaces they need to fulfil them, the challenges they encounter and the workarounds they devise. There may be a generational shift in relation to acceptance of place- and time-independent ways of working and we think that this too is worthy of further investigation. While research in workplaces has clearly highlighted a degree of reluctance and footdragging, the kaleidoscopic and fluid identity sought and predicted in new workspace designs is most evident in recent research on work at home (e.g. Koslowski et al., ). Early studies of home-working that showed employees recreating office routines, with chunks of time and space solidly allocated to one domain or the other, now seem almost quaint. For example, digital artefacts that were scarce until recently are now omnipresent, portable, sophisticated, and alluring. Housing is unaffordable for many workers, especially young workers, and their domestic space is limited with no ‘spare’ rooms available for conversion to home offices.
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The divisions between work and home identities are now granular, assisted by these domestic spaces and objects that are multifunctional and thus always amenable to negotiation. Wapshott and Mallett (: ) suggest that even though conventional work-home demarcations have collapsed, ‘some form of boundary will almost certainly exist, some relationship between space and time, between being “at work” and “at home” ’. In other studies, however, a boundary is harder to discern, and work seems to take priority (Koslowski et al., ; Tietze and Musson, ). A great deal of identity work is devoted to earning and maintaining the trust of managers and work colleagues in return for the ‘gift’ of not having to travel and attend in person, and the ability to dovetail work and home tasks. The identity implications appear complex. Foucault and Miskowiec (: ) insist that because our lives are still governed by inviolable oppositions between private and public, leisure and work, and sacred and profane, contemporary space has not been desanctified. Until recently, our professional identity work centred on work and the workplace whereas our personal identity work centred on the home. The steady creep of work into the home means that this separation and the ‘inviolable’ opposition it defends is under threat, and perhaps that sacred and profane too are being redefined. Studies of working at home make clear that work is done in the context of a life. We see this as a prompt to engage with Watson’s (: ) insight that we can only understand people’s identities and the role of work in people’s lives if we consider them first as ‘whole individual identities’ made from but not reducible to many components deriving from work and nonwork. In particular, and as the studies we have reviewed indicate, work–home relationships are thrown into relief when work is combined with parenting. Children’s lives will probably continue to be structured by temporal and spatial routines before and during school, placing some limits on work ‘creep’. However, we know little about the consequences for children if their parents for instance devote more time to working at home and interacting with them as ‘professionals’. The implications of organizing for children are one of the unexplored spaces of organizational research, as Kavanagh () points out, and we think further interdisciplinary research centred on the home, including children, is merited. Also worthwhile are studies of people who live alone and who may find it still more difficult to resist the encroachment of work. Both the workplace and the home are now stringently managed spaces for many workers. Nevertheless, there remain spaces outside managerial reach or interest where people can engage in alternative kinds of identity work. Such spaces, from an organizational point of view, are often regarded as worthless, old-fashioned, only functional for storage, as mere connections between more valued other areas, or as dumps. Indeed, they might not be what we would recognize as ‘a space’ at all because they are created by nomadic border-crossings, or, like Qalandiya (Prasad, ) they may appear to be tightly ‘managed’, recognizing, of course, that ‘space can never be closed, there will always be loose ends, always relations with the beyond’ (Massey, : ). In their review of liminal spaces, Söderlund and Borg (: ) state that their effects are marginal, merely ‘[affording] the individual with some room for thought and peace of mind’. We agree, but suspect that their implications are more profound. Sveningsson and Alvesson () distinguish between two kinds of identity work: outward-facing, concerned with how we present ourselves to others, and inwardfacing. Inward self-identity refers to something ‘deeper’ and less accessible than (outward) identity, which is of ‘a somewhat more linguistic and social nature’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ). In highly visible corporate workplaces, and indeed at home, we see a
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lot of impression management devoted to embodied outward-facing identity work. Studies of liminal, free, and resisting spaces suggest that inward-facing identity work is both subtle and necessary, enabling convalescence, re-finding oneself, and also generative of creativity by enabling an inner step that is a precursor for working back out towards the external. This deeper, simplified, stripped-down state may also be the form of the individual that participates in communitas, which studies show can be transformative. We think this form of identity work is worthy of further exploration, especially in an era of considerable visibility and personal exposure, both externally imposed and self-imposed.
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.................................................................................................................................. Our exploration of the intersection between the literatures on identity, space, and place has highlighted the centrality of space and place in identity construction, and shown how workspaces, homes, and diverse other spaces are mutually constitutive. Our review of current and past research demonstrates that there is a powerful interaction between the management of workspaces and organizational and individual identity. We argue that this interaction is in dynamic equilibrium and is a key factor in resistance to managerial attempts to control identities, both in the conventional office and in new places of work such as the home. It appears that the proliferation of such new workplaces and spaces is likely to create new processes in both inward- and outward-facing identity construction. The implications of these, often technological and information-driven changes to the dynamic relationship between workplaces and identities are potentially far-reaching and worthy of further research. This could be directed to both inform and investigate space designers (architects, ergonomists, facilities consultants) whose decisions when designing, modifying, and changing organizational structures have such radical effects on identities.
N . Lefebvre’s writing can be enigmatic and we recommend any newcomer struggling to make sense of his work to read Unwin’s () insightful critique. . Although within the geographical literature there are arguments pro and con for making a distinction between space and place, based on the idea that place is meaningful whereas space is not, the terms have mainly been used synonymously in MOS, and most MOS studies of ‘space’ foreground spatial meanings. Making a strong conceptual distinction between space and place in MOS therefore risks further fragmenting the literature.
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Abstract This chapter reflects on identity construction as a political process in organizational theory. The authors provide a reassessment of the literature, arguing that such identity perspectives have developed around three pairs of (potentially) antagonistic notions, namely, structure/ agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. First, they show how the pendulum has swung from studies that emphasize the power of structure in disciplining organizational participants’ identities, towards contributions that focus on agency in the reproduction or subversion of the dominant social order. Second, they argue that the attention of identity scholars, when investigating identity construction, has fluctuated between the power of language and the power of materiality. Third, they highlight that the initial view, which argues that elites exercise power over shopfloor employees by disciplining their identities, has been superseded by more nuanced approaches that take into account a much greater variety of stakeholders and recognize that individuals can be both subject to power and active subjects of it. The concluding section proposes several research avenues that aim to inspire organizational scholars interested in identity construction in relation to power relations.
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.................................................................................................................................. A growing number of studies discuss identity construction as a political process in organizational theory. Simply put, existing studies on this matter share a common idea that identity—broadly defined as how people make sense of themselves in relation to others (Brown, )—has become a central locus of power in contemporary organizations. This idea has developed in parallel with the rapid diffusion, starting in the s, of a so-called ‘post-bureaucratic’ managerial ideology (Heckscher and Donnellon, ) that encourages
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managers to consider that organizational participants’ identification with corporate values constitutes a key means of improving the firm’s performance (Peters and Waterman, ). Identity scholars interested in power relationships reflect on this managerial trend by investigating how identity is controlled in organizational settings—in particular, through a variety of technologies of power that aim to reinforce people’s identification with the managerial regime—and also how organizational participants experience, and potentially resist, such attempts at identity control (Bardon et al., ). Studies that investigate power issues relating to identity are sometimes referred to as taking a critical perspective on identity (Alvesson et al., ; Bardon et al., ). Alvesson et al. (: ) argue that the critical perspective on identity includes all studies that apprehend ‘identity as a powerful way to understand contemporary relations of control and resistance’. They distinguish this critical perspective from both the interpretive perspective on identity, which primarily ‘seeks enhanced understanding of human cultural experiences, or how we communicate to generate and transform meaning’, and the functionalist perspective, which ‘is interested in how identity and identification may hold an important key to a variety of managerial outcomes and thus the potential to improve organizational effectiveness’ (Alvesson et al., : ). The critical perspective on identity specifically focuses on how identity construction is linked to power relationships, and aims to critique how identity is used as a privileged means of disciplining organizational participants in contemporary capitalist regimes. In practice, the distinction between the interpretive and critical identity perspectives is not clear-cut, as some identity studies approach control and resistance as the sense-giving/sense-making dynamics by which human experiences are shaped and transformed (Brown, ). We provide a re-reading of this critical literature on identity, arguing that this perspective has developed around three pairs of (potentially) antagonistic notions, namely, structure/agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. First, we show how the pendulum has swung away from studies that emphasize the power of structure to discipline organizational participants’ identities and towards those that focus on the power of agency to reproduce or subvert the dominant social order. Second, we argue that the focus of identity scholars has oscillated, when investigating identity construction, between study of the power of language and the power of materiality. Third, we highlight how the initial view, that elites exercise power over shopfloor employees by disciplining their identities, has been superseded by more nuanced approaches that take into account a much greater variety of stakeholders, and which recognize that individuals can be both subject to power and active subjects of it. The concluding section proposes research avenues linked with these three themes.
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.................................................................................................................................. The ‘agency/structure’ debate, which broadly refers to ‘questions about the nature of the link between “human activity and its social contexts” ’ (Reed, : ), is of central importance in the development of the discussion about the relationships between identity
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and power (see Bardon and Josserand, ; Knights and Willmott, ; Thomas, ; Willmott, ). Indeed, the notion of identity has gained importance in the critical literature since the s due to the dissatisfaction of some scholars (e.g. Knights and Willmott, ; Willmott, ) with the structuralist notion of identity assumed by labour process theorists (Braverman, ), a leading critical stream in organizational studies at that time. Strongly influenced by Michel Foucault’s writings, these scholars regret that labour process theorists postulate rather than investigate the relationships between power and identity by unreflexively embracing a post-Marxist conception, which suggests individuals are simply the ‘personification of economic categories’ (Marx, as cited in Willmott, : ). They argue that such a perspective is not only deterministic—in that it postulates that one’s identity is straightforwardly determined by one’s structural position in the labour process—but also subscribes to an essentialist view of individuals typical of the ‘bourgeois’ humanism that labour process theorists denounce (Knights and Willmott, ; Willmott, ). Foucault’s disciples recommend abandoning this structuralist ideological posture to re-problematize and empirically investigate the relationships between identity and power in capitalist regimes. They argue that this effort is particularly crucial for identifying what was/is happening in organizational settings with the emergence of a ‘corporate culturalism’ (Willmott, ) in Western companies. Indeed, the rapid diffusion of this postbureaucratic managerial ideology has turned identity into a central battlefield in organizational settings. Rather than having a basis in the traditional ‘command and control’ mechanisms, this new form of management rests on consent rather than coercion, since it attempts to improve individual participation by aligning selves with corporate interests (Sewell and Barker, ). Consequently, they conclude, critical scholars should pay particular attention to the relationships between identity and power if they want to articulate sound critical accounts of contemporary capitalist societies. Poststructuralist scholars have deployed their theoretical and empirical efforts in response to these issues (e.g. Collinson, ; Knights and Willmott, ). Theoretically, they subscribe to Foucault’s (radical) constructivism in order to elaborate an original conceptualization of the relationships between power and identity. In such a (radical) constructivist view, discourses have the power literally to bring things into being, including ourselves; individual identity—understood as the way in which people make sense of themselves in relation to others—is thus literally ‘produced’ by various discourses to which they have been exposed. This theorization has the advantage of not being deterministic since it recognizes that many bases of identification—such as ethnicity, gender, family, and status, among others—are involved in processes of identity construction. In this respect, this perspective can be described as poststructuralist because it goes beyond the structuralist approach that considers identity to be determined by one’s structural position in the labour process. It is also distanced from the entitative view of identity adopted by labour process theorists, emphasizing that identity is a precarious, fluid, and constantly evolving social construct rather than an ontologically fixed entity moulded by society. Empirically, poststructuralist scholars focus their attention on the power of managerial discourses to shape organizational participants’ identities. In particular, empirical efforts concentrate on investigation of how post-bureaucratic corporate discourses seek to discipline organizational participants’ identities in line with corporate interests. In this way, customer-
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orientation initiatives (du Gay, ), management by objectives, mentoring programmes (Covaleski et al., ), self-management teams (Barker, ), evaluation systems (Townley, ), and career and promotion systems (Grey, ) have all been addressed as technologies of power that target identity. These technologies of power operate following a process of double individualization: they introduce individualized systems of socialization, appraisal, and monitoring that delimit, partition, and hierarchize the environment in ways that isolate organizational participants from each other and often put them in competition with one another (Townley, ). Simultaneously, they convey a discourse that promotes an individualistic ethos by urging organizational participants to become enterprising subjects, i.e. individuals who carry responsibility for their own success and who can only count on themselves if they want to become ‘someone’ (du Gay, ). These post-bureaucratic corporate initiatives create a sense of insecurity among organizational participants, while offering them the (apparent) possibility of anchoring their identity by fostering their commitment to work (Knights and Morgan, ). Poststructuralist studies have been criticized for neither theoretically explaining nor empirically investigating how organizational participants can resist such corporate attempts to regulate their identity. Critics argue that the non-essentialist concept of identity adopted by poststructuralists—following which selves are fully constituted by the discourses with which they are confronted during their lifetime—makes it impossible to understand how individuals can ‘play, resist, ignore, subvert (etc.)’ such discourses (Newton, : ). Indeed, they emphasize that it is necessary to make the minimal ontological assumption of the existence of a ‘free will’ in order to rehabilitate the figure of an active agent who is able to ‘manoeuvre’ with discourse (Newton, : ). Three lines of argument have been developed to answer this criticism. First, several poststructuralist scholars make ontological claims, arguing that individuals are ‘smart animals’ capable of ‘creative thoughts’ (Barratt, : ), that there are ‘limits to the appropriation of discourses’ (May, : ), and even that Foucault himself embraced a realist critique of ontology by recognizing a ‘basic stratum of biology’ where human agency would be located (Al-Amoudi, : ). However, these ontological claims are at odds with Foucault’s self-proclaimed radical constructionism and anti-essentialism (Bardon and Josserand, ). Second, other scholars maintain that selves can resist a given discourse if they are already tied to a stronger basis of identification that is incompatible with this discourse, since everybody requires a minimal sense of selfconsistency (Alvesson and Wilmott, , following Giddens, ). Still, critics argue that this interpretation consists in ‘psycholog[izing] the self ’ (Newton, : ) and thus constitutes a quasi-ontological statement that contradicts the non-essentialist position. Third, Bardon and Josserand () provide a Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thought, arguing that ‘problematizing’ discourses that are presented as ‘true’ are the founding act by which individuals can constitute themselves as active and ‘free’ agents. Put simply, they emphasize that selves are not per se ontologically ‘free’, but they can become so when they problematize ‘truth’ as moral agents of their own actions rather than accepting ‘truth’ as passive and disciplined agents. These theoretical debates lead poststructuralist scholars to document empirically ‘the more or less intentional effects of social practices upon processes of identity construction and reconstruction’ (Alvesson and Willmott, : ) by investigating the ‘identity work’
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(Watson, ) conducted by organizational participants. Overall, these studies show that ‘discourses can be reflectively ignored, rejected, adhered to and translated by individuals’ (Gendron and Spira, : ). In particular, organizational participants are exposed to contextual local combinations (Kuhn, ) of various discourses—potentially antagonistic (Clarke et al., ) and ambiguous (McCabe, )—that offer them room to creatively author themselves (Carroll and Levy, ; O’Doherty and Willmott, ). Rather than being merely ‘conformist selves’ (Collinson, ), straightforwardly manufactured by discourses, organizational participants actively incorporate into their self-identity aspects of the socially available discursive notions of the ‘personas’ (du Gay, ) or ‘social identities’—understood as ‘notions of who or what any individual might be’ (Watson, : , original emphasis)—that are promoted in capitalist regimes, including those related to enterprising masculinity (e.g. Brown and Coupland, ), elitism (e.g. Thornborrow and Brown, ), customer-orientation (e.g. du Gay, ), and careerism (e.g. Grey, ). Organizational participants can thus ‘pitch themselves in opposition to identity positions offered to them in organizations’ (Thomas, : ) through many informal and mundane demonstrations, such as cynicism (Fleming and Spicer, ), scepticism (Fleming and Sewell ), humour (Hodgson, ), and other forms of resistance involving the crafting of alternative identity narratives (see Collinson, ; Fleming and Spicer, ; Knights and McCabe, ). Resistance to identity pressures is also an occasion for organizational participants to assert their own values and preferences; for example, managers who resist corporate decisions calling upon them to privilege effectiveness over ethics because they want to establish themselves as moral beings (Bardon et al., ). However, although these individual and mostly minor forms of resistance can help organizational participants ‘to withdraw and to hold back something of themselves’ (Casey, : ), they often do not have the power to challenge and transform social relations and can function as a ‘safety valve’ that preserves rather than challenges the status quo (Fleming and Spicer, ). This leads some observers to urge identity scholars to pay attention to more overt and collective forms of resistance that are able to subvert the existing power structure (Bardon et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Poststructuralist studies have long focused on identity construction as a language game that is tentatively disciplined by corporate discourses, rather than on material forms of power (Bardon et al., ). In this way, poststructuralist scholars pay particular attention to how organizational participants’ identities are subject to attempts to transform them within specific discursive regimes. Scholars have focused on a variety of discourses, including those related to enterprise (Doolin, ), leadership (Sveningsson and Larsson, ), masculinity (Brown and Coupland, ), quality management (Bolton and Houlihan, ), consumption (du Gay, ), careerism (Grey, ), participation (Musson and Duberley, ), excellence (Butler and Spoelstra, ), ethics and efficiency (Bardon et al., ) and sport (Johansson et al., ), among others. Organizational members are exposed to and engage with these disciplinary discourses through a
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variety of media, including texts (e.g. corporate documents: Kelly et al., ; self-help books: Cullen, ; and autobiography: Watson, ), etc.; verbal utterances (Brown, ); management gurus’ live performances (Jackson, ), dialogue (Beech, ), and collective meetings (Kärreman and Alvesson, ); and by participating in diverse corporate initiatives that encapsulate a variety of talk, texts, symbols, and other signifiers (Knights and McCabe, ). The disciplinary power of discourses over the identities of organizational participants has been investigated in a variety of ways. Studies document in detail how corporate discourses constitute unobtrusive forms of control, attempting to influence how organizational participants attribute meaning to themselves and to their environment (Kelly et al., ; Townley, ). Other research analyses how organizational participants conduct identity work when they are confronted with a new discourse that radically breaks with a previously existing discursive regime (Boussebaa and Brown, ; Knights and McCabe, ). For instance, Knights and McCabe (: ) investigate how organizational participants working in an automotive company characterized by an ‘autocratic’ mode of management experience the introduction of a discourse on teamwork that encourages them to become enterprising, flexible, and collaborative team members. Other studies show how organizational participants construct themselves by dealing with contradictory, antagonistic, or tension-provoking discourses (Clarke et al., ; Gotsi et al., ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). For example, Bardon et al. () investigate how middle managers draw on potentially tension-provoking corporate discourses, inviting them to be ‘effective’ and ‘ethical’ in their identity work to construct themselves as competent managers who make decisions that are both moral and effective. These poststructuralist identity studies have been criticized for neglecting materiality in their analysis (Reed, , ; Thompson and Ackroyd, ). In particular, labour process theorists argue that poststructuralists have paid too much attention to the power of discourse in disciplining organizational participants’ identities, and neglected the structural material conditions that discipline individuals at work (Thompson and Ackroyd, ). Newton () emphasizes that the dichotomy between discourse and materiality is not so clear-cut, since material elements can only be apprehended discursively, but concurs with Reed (), who argues that there is a quasi-exclusive focus on ‘talk’ and ‘texts’ in poststructuralist identity studies that has marginalized non-discursive elements. Following this, Reed (: ) argues that such analysis ‘tends to idealize meaning and to marginalize the non-semantic aspects of economic and political reality in that it is ontologically insensitive to material structuring and its influence on social action’. In summary, critics consider this over-attention to the linguistic aspects of power to be ‘theoretically unsatisfying and politically naïve’ (Dean, : ) because it indicates that poststructuralist studies neglect the importance of structural inequality and material imperatives to disciplining individuals’ ways of being and acting (see also Thompson and Ackroyd, ; Willmott, ). Others call for distance from the Foucauldian radical social-constructivism that underpins most poststructuralist identity studies, while urging the adoption of a critical realist perspective which, they maintain, constitutes a privileged posture from which to investigate the role of materiality in constituting ‘reality’, including organizational participants’ identities (Al-Amoudi, ; Reed, ; for a critic, see Bardon and Josserand, ).
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Still others argue that Foucauldian radical constructionism does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of materiality from the analysis, as demonstrated by Foucault () himself in Discipline and Punish, in which he describes the specific material arrangements through which the panopticon (self)-disciplines individuals by maximizing their utility and docility (Bardon et al., ; Bardon and Josserand, ). Following this, they argue that the main problem resides in how Foucault’s thinking has been appropriated by his organizational disciples, particularly in their exclusively linguistic understanding of the term ‘discourse’. For instance, Bergström and Knights (: ) define discourse as ‘instances of talk, text and conversations that take place within organizational “boundaries” ’. Bardon et al. () insist that discourse includes for Foucault all elements—linguistic and material alike—that express something and thus influence the field of possibilities. They argue that material elements can be investigated within a Foucauldian framework—not for what they are, but for what they do. These reflections have led identity scholars to attend to the power of materiality in disciplining organizational participants’ identities (Bardon et al., ; Paring et al., ). Identity studies have thus begun to document the power of objects/artefacts, bodies/ corporeality, or sites/space/place—the ‘commonly cited material elements’, following Ashcraft et al. (: )—in identity construction. Objects/artefacts, due to their symbolic properties (Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz, ), have been mainly approached as ‘additional semiotics’ that supplement language in signifying or promoting a given identity (Ybema et al., : ). Identity artefacts include all physical objects offered to or used by organizational participants to signal (to themselves or to others) a particular identity position. For instance, Thornborrow and Brown (: ) show how paratroopers use ‘distinctive items of dress, insignia and equipment’ to construct themselves as professional elites belonging to an exclusive group. Kuhn (), Land and Taylor (), and Fleming (, ) all discuss how certain companies encourage organizational participants to wear their preferred clothes, freely display their tattoos, or personalize their workstations with personal belongings, promoting a ‘just be yourself ’ ideology. Fleming and Spicer () emphasize how wearing a ‘McShit’ tee-shirt under one’s McDonald’s uniform constitutes an undercover form of resistance. Spicer and Böhm () argue that placing hundreds of company stickers on a single car can be used to ridicule the company. These findings show how material artefacts are used to promote or depreciate one’s specific identity and signify one’s identification or distinctiveness vis-à-vis a given group, or one’s conformity or resistance to a given discourse. Identity scholars have also come to investigate how corporeality is involved in disciplining organizational participants’ identities. Several studies show how athletic bodies are promoted in organizational settings (Kelly et al., ) and used by organizational participants to construct themselves as ambitious, autonomous, and successful professionals (Johansson et al., ), whereas non-conforming bodies—such as those of obese people— are stigmatized and negatively regarded as embodying a (morally) wrong identity (MikMeyer, ). Other studies show that the (re)production of a positively valued masculine identity is sustained by various disciplinary bodily exercises, including shaving or cutting one’s hair (Kachtan and Wasserman, ), working out, and monitoring one’s bodily statistics (Coupland, ). As Mik-Meyer et al. (: , emphasis in original) put it, ‘the bodies of workers [ . . . ] are never merely physical; they are composed of social,
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psychological and biological elements, which together make up embodied attributes, characteristics and practices’. The importance of the body in disciplining identity is particularly discussed in industries and occupations where physical attributes play a central role, including police officers (Courpasson and Monties, ) and rugby players (Brown and Coupland, ), but is also occasionally investigated in other contexts, such as Michel’s () study of investment bankers. These studies show that the body is not a docile object disciplined by external identity expectations and requirements, but also ‘a resource through which a sense of self-identity is constructed and maintained against institutional reforms affecting their preferred selves’ (Courpasson and Monties, : ). Due to Foucault’s considerable influence on identity scholars, and particularly that of his analysis of Bentham’s panopticon (Foucault, ), space and places have long been recognized as involved in disciplining organizational participants’ identities. However, very few studies have focused explicitly on this topic until recently (Grey and O’Toole, ). Alvesson and Robertson’s (: ) contribution concerns how prestigious office locations and ‘lavish hotels’ used as meeting venues signify an elite identity in consulting firms. Kuhn (), Land and Taylor (), and Fleming (, ) also discuss how shiny, trendily designed offices are used to promote a creative and relaxed corporate culture in organizational settings. Grey and O’Toole () introduce the concept of ‘place identity’ to account for the relationship between identity and place in organizations. Their key insight is to draw attention to the fact that organizational participants attach specific meanings to places which play a role in their identity construction. Specifically, they show how places constitute identity resources that are productive of a sense of rootedness, coherence, and distinctiveness for organizational participants.
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.................................................................................................................................. Although poststructuralist identity scholars call for the re-problematizing of the relationship between identity and power, the earliest empirical studies from this perspective tend to perpetuate the idea of ‘the employee as a managed identity worker who is enjoined to incorporate the new managerial discourses into narratives of self-identity’ (Alvesson et al., : , original emphasis). These studies focus exclusively on how post-bureaucratic corporate initiatives attempt to subordinate shopfloor employees’ identities to managerial regimes, and thus position them as being subjected to managerialist identity pressures. Some of these studies insist that shopfloor employees are not passive subjects, but rather that their identification with corporate discourses can transform them into active subjects of their own regulation—in effect, becoming individuals who not only discipline themselves according to corporate expectations but also play an active role in disciplining others. For instance, Barker () argues that self-managing teams transform shopfloor employees into managerial agents who not only feel personally responsible for their team success but also control and exert pressure on their peers. These studies show that shopfloor employees are not only subjected to but can also be active subjects of identity regulation in organizational settings (Alvesson and Willmott, ). Despite these developments, human beings— managers and employees alike—are oddly absent from these studies, giving the impression
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that managerial discourses act quasi-autonomously in transforming shopfloor employees into corporate clones who straightforwardly identify with managerial expectations. Later studies tend to complicate this picture by showing that managers not only exercise identity pressure on lower-level employees but can also be subjected to identity pressures themselves. For instance, Jackson () describes how management gurus shape managers’ definitions of themselves by encouraging them to identify with specific managerial figures that they present as role models. Several studies focus particularly on middle managers and front-line managers (Musson and Duberley, ; Thomas and Linstead, ) showing that they occupy ‘equivocal positions’ in organizational settings (Willmott, : ), characterized by ambiguities, uncertainties, tensions, and contradictions. This can lead managers to adopt very different identity positions in organizational settings (Sims, ). For instance, Musson and Duberley (: ) show that supervisors working for manufacturing companies experience the same discourse promoting participation in very different ways—some approaching it as an opportunity, others as a threat, and still others as irrelevant—due to the basis of the identification that they privilege ‘between the “us” of the shop floor and the “them” of white-collar staff and management’. Identity tensions can also arise because front-line and middle managers are subjected to leadership discourses that accentuate the positive while facing a more mundane daily grind, including responsibilities for low-level administrative tasks. This can lead them to define themselves as ‘janitors’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, : ) or, conversely, to ascribe positive identities to themselves, such as ‘project leaders’ or ‘entrepreneurs’ (Brocklehurst et al., ). The growing interest in managers is related to the particularly intense identity struggles they experience (Clarke et al., ) due to their ‘in-between’ position or ‘situation of discursive confusion and ontological insecurity’ (Down and Reveley, : ), but also to the increasing pressure they face to construct themselves and be recognized by others as ‘good’ or ‘ethical’ professionals (Bardon et al., ). Identity scholars have also dedicated their attention to the professional elites, including investment bankers (Alvesson and Robertson, ), accountants (Gendron and Spira, ; Grey, ), and management consultants (Alvesson and Robertson, ; Costas and Fleming, ; Kärreman and Alvesson, ). The latter have received the most attention for several reasons: first, they are seen as prototypes for the new knowledge workers; thus is the study of the disciplinary mechanisms to which they are subjected revealing of the contemporary ‘zeitgeist’ (du Gay, ). Moreover, consulting firms dedicate significant resources to disciplining consultants’ identities so that they reflect the companies’ values to their clients (Alvesson and Robertson, ). This disciplining is further intended to signal the expert quality of the consultants the firm employs, to make them accept long working hours, to take on more responsibilities, and to cope with frequent stressful situations (Alvesson and Robertson, ; Covaleski et al., ). Finally, consultants are agents of enterprise (Sturdy and Wright, ) who actively contribute to identity regulation in organizational settings, both by embodying enterprising qualities and by promoting and implementing these initiatives in companies (Abrahamson, ). Identity studies show that management consultants can experience intense identity struggles. On the one hand, they are considered as ‘elites’ and ‘ideal’ workers (autonomous, flexible, hard-working, meeting tough client expectations), while on the other, they often exhibit distance from and cynicism about the very management principles they are
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supposed to promote and personify (Kärreman and Alvesson, ; Whittle, ). Moreover, they experience contradictions between their supposedly autonomous and highly qualified status and the repetitive (and potentially boring) nature of their work, resulting in an ‘arrested identity’ (Costas and Kärreman, ). Finally, as their demanding jobs leave little room for the enactment of alternative identities (Meriläinen et al., ), they must maintain an illusion of being more than merely ‘workers’ through off-work fantasies (Muhr and Kirkegaard, ), potentially leading to ‘self-alienation’ for those who become aware that ‘the boundary between the narrated imaginary of authenticity and corporate defined identity is difficult to sustain’ (Costas and Fleming, : ). In addition, a wide variety of atypical subjects have also attracted the attention of identity scholars interested in power. Among them, we find people as different as British paratroopers (Thornborrow and Brown, ), Moroccan and Turkish Muslim businesswomen living in the Netherlands (Essers and Benschop, ), gay and lesbian professionals working in the highly normative context of audit firms (Stenger and Roulet, ), meat inspectors in animal slaughterhouses (Hamilton and McCabe, ), and prisoners in the ‘ “toughest” prison in Finland’ (Brown and Toyoki, : ), to name just a few. Together, these studies form an interesting gallery of portraits that are useful for documenting the relationship between identity construction and power relationships, not least because these organizational participants constitute extreme cases, making identity regulation and responses to identity pressures easier to analyse. Finally, it is interesting to note that identity scholars show self-reflexivity through discussions of how academics’ identities are also subjected to power. Existing studies investigate how academic identity is formed and transformed under identity pressures, showing a growth of managerialism in business schools (Clarke and Knights, ; Learmonth and Humphreys, ). These identity pressures, which are materialized by increasing normative pressures, accountability, and control, plus the promotion of a neoliberal culture of ‘excellence’ (Butler and Spoelstra, ), act to transform academics into people who are individualistic, careerist, and enterprising. Of course, such managerial pressures can lead people to increase their commitment to scholarly activities, but can also create identity tensions and insecurities among academics uncomfortable with these discourses (Clarke and Knights, ; Knights and Clarke, ). These studies provide a complex picture of organizational participants as being both subjected to and active subjects in identity regulation in organizational settings, a view that may seem unduly pessimistic, as every individual is regarded (potentially) as an agent of enterprise who is actively reproducing normative enterprise pressure.
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.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we have reflected on how identity construction processes have been discussed as political processes in organizational theory. We have shown that the debates focus on three potentially antagonistic dualities: structure/agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. In conclusion, we discuss one key research avenue that we find particularly promising for further investigation of each of these themes.
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Structure/agency. First, we encourage identity scholars to document further how biopower—broadly defined as the form of power that targets life itself (Foucault, a)—both structures identity regulation and generates new agentic forms of identity construction in organizational settings. Biopower is a notion first introduced by Foucault (a) to refer to all technologies of power—including statistics, laws, or health policies— and following which governments attempt to control the biological life of a population; in effect, its birth rate, public health, heredity, mortality, and so on. Foucault’s followers in organizational theory freely build on this notion to argue that biocratic corporate initiatives attempting to enrol all aspects of organizational participants’ lives in work, such as liberation management (Fleming, ) and other ‘lifestyle’ forms of management (Kuhn, ), are spreading in organizational settings. Studies show that, for instance, organizational participants are encouraged to express themselves freely (including their disagreements with corporate policies, their sexual orientation, and their political beliefs), personalize their offices in their own image, have fun at work, and use their personal networks and hobbies for developing business (Fleming, ; Fleming and Sturdy, ; Land and Taylor, ). So far, scholars have concentrated their efforts on depicting how this ‘existential empowerment’ (Moisander et al., ) is discursively promoted in organizational settings. Much less is known about the specific disciplinary mechanisms by which these biocratic corporate initiatives align ‘authentic’ selves with corporate interests. We thus encourage identity scholars to further document and to analyse how biocratic corporate initiatives regulate organizational participants’ identities, as well as studying organizational participants’ identity work in relation to these corporate exhortations. Indeed, one might expect that novel forms of agency, and in particular resistance, emerge in work contexts where being ‘authentic’ is officially promoted by managerial discourses. Language/materiality. Linguistic formations, artefacts, bodies, and places have so far been approached as enabling and constraining sites for identity construction. However, they have been studied in relative isolation, meaning that we still know very little about how interconnected linguistic and material elements inform identity regulation in organizational settings and organizational participants’ identity work. We urge identity scholars to conduct studies that shed light on the linkages and dynamics between these identity resources in a systemic way, and to look for new concepts and theoretical frameworks. Bardon et al. () call for the mobilization of the Foucauldian concept of apparatus, defined as the ‘thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures and scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault, b: ). Others propose original concepts. Våland and Georg (: ), for example, introduce the notion of ‘spacing identity’, defined as ‘how identity is constituted through organizational practices taking place within, enabled by and constitutive of particular constellations of the social, material and spatial’. Identity scholars could also draw inspiration from other theoretical frameworks (e.g. Paring et al., ; Symon and Pritchard, ), including actor-network theory (Latour, ) and socio-material perspectives on notions such as ‘entanglement’ (Orlikowski, ), ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, ), and ‘imbrication’ (Leonardi, ). Elites/shopfloor employees. We have shown that studies depict how power relationships inform the identity construction of a variety of organizational participants, including
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middle and front-line managers, shopfloor employees, and external consultants. However, we still know very little about the identity pressures to which CEOs are subjected, and how they conduct their identity work. This is unfortunate as mainstream studies widely recognize that their decisions strongly influence the performance, organizational forms, and, more generally, companies’ destinies (Finkelstein and Hambrick, ). In particular, it has been shown that CEOs inject a lot of themselves—understood as their experiences, preferences, and dispositions—into making strategic choices (see Agle et al., ; Delgado-García et al., ). However, extant studies say little about how CEOs’ identities are disciplined throughout their career or by means of their relationships with organizational participants, shareholders, and other external stakeholders (for example, media or financial actors). Future studies might also investigate the societal discourses that promote definitions of what a CEO should be, in a context where the image of the CEO is fast evolving (Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as new leaders, for instance), and the disciplining effects of these discourses on both CEOs and wannabe CEOs (middle managers, young entrepreneurs, and business students).
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.................................................................................................................................. In this chapter, we have sought to reflect on how identity construction is discussed as a political process in organizational theory. We have suggested that discussions about power over and around identities are articulated using three antagonistic dualities: structure/ agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. For each, we have identified research avenues that scholars may find useful when further exploring identity construction in relation to power relationships. Identities are formed within relations of power, and it is to these that we must always be attentive.
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‘ ’ Moving Forward Through Theoretical Fragmentation, Not Integration ......................................................................................................................
Abstract Recent critiques of organizational institutionalism have pointed to its increasing loss of focus and coherence. Yet, this criticism has not affected ongoing efforts to integrate insights from the literature on identity and organizations into institutional theory. In this chapter the author argues that these attempts at increased theoretical integration are unlikely to be productive, as long as institutional theory continues to be treated as one coherent theoretical perspective. Through an analysis of four fundamental shifts in the (implicit) theorization of actor-hood since the late s, the author identifies five alternative institutional theories that currently coexist within organizational institutionalism. It is only when we accept this internal fragmentation of institutional theory that it becomes possible to relate different theories of identity to it more congruently.
I: T ‘I’ I T: A M-L C?
.................................................................................................................................. S its first formulations four decades ago, new or neo-institutional theory has gradually become the dominant paradigm in organization and management theory. As can be expected, with this increased dominance has come increased critical scrutiny, both from within the institutional theory community itself, and from outside. Internally, institutional theory has been critiqued for, amongst other things, lacking practical relevance (Dover and Lawrence, ); for becoming overstretched beyond its original core purpose and losing focus and coherence in the process (Suddaby, ); and for co-opting social theories that
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are incommensurable with its onto-epistemic underpinnings (Lok, ). External critiques have focused on, amongst other things, institutional theory’s unreflexive reproduction of the individual (agency)/institution (structure) dualism (Willmott, ); on its misappropriation of critical perspectives (Willmott, ); and its tendency towards ‘over-reach, myopia, tautology, pseudo-progress and re-inventing the wheel’ (Alvesson and Spicer, : ). If we took all of these critiques as valid, institutional theory should indeed be in the middle of what Alvesson and Spicer () consider a serious ‘mid-life crisis’. Yet, if institutional theory is currently going through such a mid-life crisis, it must be one that still resides in the unconscious—thoroughly repressed and denied—as the ‘juggernaut’ continues to roll on, ‘fueled by the unshakable conviction that its basic [ . . . ] framework must be retained while anticipating a possibly endless journey’ (Willmott, : ). Indeed, my review of institutional theory’s treatment of the concept of ‘identity’, does not suggest any sense of ‘crisis’ at all. For example, Glynn (: ) acknowledges that it is a ‘theoretical challenge’ to untangle the ‘rich, complex, and varied’ relationships between identity and institutionalization, but, nevertheless, sees ‘much promise’ in the intersection of the research streams on organizational identity and institutionalism. Besharov and Brickson () argue that there is a need and opportunity to ‘integrate’ various perspectives on organizational identity and institutions to open up ‘new directions for research’. To this same end, Phillips et al. (: ) offer the promise of a ‘comprehensive, multi-level theory of organizational identity and institutions’ based on what they frame as the evolutionary progress of institutional theory’s development. Clearly, Alvesson and Spicer’s () ‘mid-life crisis’ is not (yet?) salient to the institutional theorists who are meant to be experiencing one, at least not in the intersectional research space of identity and organizational institutionalism. Instead of engaging in any significant soul searching, the current theoretical focus appears to be squarely on the promise that increased theoretical integration is presumed to hold. Yet, for those who have attempted to scratch beneath the surface of this supposed promise, one experience would have to be very common: considerable confusion.
T C C C L I I T
.................................................................................................................................. The current theoretical complexity and conceptual confusion in the literature on identity and institutions is evident in three main ways. First, the approach to identity in institutional theory has been based on a number of incompatible theories of identity that currently coexist side-by-side. Second, these different perspectives have been applied to a large and steadily increasing number of identity-related constructs, producing significant conceptual complexity, and resulting in a lack of definitional clarity. Third, there is significant causal ambiguity in the theoretical linkages between identity and institutions. Below, I discuss
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each of these developments, before discussing their implications for the prospect of realizing the holy grail of ‘multi-level theoretical integration’.
Different Theories of Identity in Institutional Theory Three theoretical approaches have been most influential in institutional theory since it began taking an interest in ‘identity’ about two decades ago: (i) Social Identity Theory (SIT), (ii) Sheldon Stryker’s (Role) Identity Theory (RIT), and (iii) Identity Work Theory (IWT).¹ In institutional theory, SIT is regularly referred to explicitly (e.g. Rao et al., ), but, arguably, has been most influential more indirectly through its significant influence on the organizational identity literature. RIT has been particularly influential in the work of Kraatz and Block (), and, more recently, in Wry and York (). Finally, IWT has significantly influenced some of my own work together with Doug Creed and Rich DeJordy (e.g. Creed et al., ; Lok, ), as well as, for example, studies by Bevort and Suddaby (), and Leung et al. (). Table . presents a rudimentary overview of these three source theories of identity, and their typical use in institutional theory. This comparison should make it immediately clear that the theories are very different. Yet, they are all used by institutional theorists, either explicitly or implicitly, as a basis for theorizing the relations between identity and institutional processes in various ways. Moreover, there are several other theoretical perspectives that have been deployed in institutional theory in relation to identity (e.g. Creed et al., ; Oakes et al., ), and most of the time identity is used in a self-evident, taken-for-granted way without any reference to an underlying theory of identity at all. At a minimum, this is bound to cause considerable confusion when one is interested in some form of theoretical integration. Indeed, such integration may not be possible, or even advisable, given the incompatibility of these different source theories of identity.
Different Identity-Constructs in Institutional Theory Given the significant differences in the theories discussed above, it is not surprising that the number of identity-related theoretical constructs that have been introduced into institutional theory has been considerable. For example, institutional theorists have invoked, amongst others, organizational identity (e.g. Glynn, ); professional identity (e.g. Suddaby and Greenwood, ); collective identity (Wry et al., ); social identity (e.g. Creed et al., ); role identity (e.g. Kraatz and Block, ); institutional identity (e.g. Heise et al., ); narrative identity (e.g. Creed et al., ); identity work (e.g. Lok, ); and identification (e.g. Lok et al., ). In addition to this conceptual complexity, ‘identity’ is not often clearly defined, and, when it is, definitions can vary significantly. This obviously makes it extremely difficult to ascertain what ‘identity’ actually means in institutional theory—it clearly has multiple meanings. Insofar as theorization of the relation(s) between identity and institutions partially depends on how identity is defined and conceptualized, this lack of definitional and conceptual clarity is not a trivial matter. The result is considerable confusion; confusion that is not easily resolved through theoretical integration, considering the number of concepts and approaches that are involved.
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Table 45.1 Theories of identity in institutional theory: a comparative overview Social Identity Theory (SIT) Role Identity Theory (RIT)
Identity Work Theory (IWT)
Definition of Self-concept based on identity group categorization relevant to a particular situation
A cognitive schema whose meaning lies in expectations for behaviour reflecting the role on the basis of which the identity is formed
Narrative of the self as the precarious product of continuous internally and externally oriented discursive activity
Original research focus
Explaining individual role choice behaviour
Explaining how identity is narratively accomplished in dynamic relation to discourse
Main drivers Self-enhancement and/or of uncertainty reduction identification
Self-esteem
Ontological security
Main identity Change in perceived change relevance of a particular triggers in-group/out-group categorization and/or differences in perceived relative group status
Identity is unstable and fluid Change in interaction situation and/or change in by definition role and/or change in social network affecting salience hierarchy
Emphasis on Low power
Medium
High
Original level Persons in relation to of analysis group category
Persons in relation to role
Persons in relation to discourse
Common levels of analysis in institutional theory
Organization in relation to institutional pluralism
Persons in relation to institutional contradiction
Explaining intergroup behaviour
Profession/organization/ movement
The Causal Ambiguity of Identity in Institutional Theory Glynn () points out that identity has been theorized as both outcome and antecedent of institutionalization, and also as an integral mechanism in the process by which institutions are established, maintained, and transformed over time. She highlights also the ‘vast frontier of relational possibilities awaiting researchers’ (Glynn, : ) who are interested in exploring additional ways in which the relations between identity and institutions are theorized. For example, identity can be considered an institution in and of itself, and/or a source of resistance to institutions, and/or ‘filter’ for organizational responses to institutional pressures (Besharov and Brickson, ). Although I personally welcome this theoretical creativity and diversity, the main problem with this state of affairs in institutional theory is that there is a significant risk of
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confirming one of Alvesson and Spicer’s () most stinging criticisms: that institutional theory can be tautological. The reason for this is that all possible antecedents to, outcomes of, and (organizational) responses to, institutional processes can be explained retrospectively based on identity arguments. Thus, the concept of identity in institutional theory is at risk of being overextended to provide the basic, self-evident, and taken-for-granted explanatory mechanism for all types of (de)institutionalization processes, thereby ending up explaining little.
Implications for the Promise of Increased Theoretical Integration When we consider these factors together—(i) the (implicit) use of incompatible source theories of identity; (ii) conceptual complexity and a lack of definitional clarity; and (iii) considerable causal ambiguity—the theoretical challenge of not only ‘untangling’ (Glynn, ), but subsequently integrating this work into a coherent theory is likely to prove insurmountable. For example, it is generally assumed in institutional theory that identity operates on different ‘levels’. Yet, when we take IWT seriously, there is no inherent reason for invoking or theorizing such ‘levels of analysis’. IWT also tends to theorize identity as a perpetual process of becoming, whereas perspectives that (implicitly) draw on SIT are more likely to theorize identity as a property of a group or organization. Moreover, Stryker () has argued that SIT cannot adequately account for differences in the degree of commitment amongst group members due to its conflation of group and category, and its neglect of the influence of different social networks on individual actors. Yet, even though institutional theorists are clearly interested in such intra-group differences, they still continue to regularly fall back on Albert and Whetten’s () original definition of organizational identity, which is linked to SIT (e.g. Glynn, ). Instead of blaming poor scholarship, I believe there are two systemic reasons why the literature on identity in institutional theory has become confused in the three ways that I have highlighted above. First, the target literature that is often earmarked for integration by institutional theorists is itself subject to conceptual pluriformity, complexity, and, possibly, confusion. For example, Ravasi and Van Rekom () identified no less than twelve different source theories that were in use in the field of organizational identity at the time, and questioned which of these—if any—could be applied in the same way across different levels of analysis. To them, the critical factor was ‘how identity is conceptualized at each level’ (Ravasi and Van Rekom, : ), noting that there were significant differences within the organizational identity literature. A more recent review by Brown (: ) suggests that, more than a decade later, the field is far from settled. Given the conceptual proliferation in the field of identity and organizations, it is understandable that its attempted theoretical integration into institutional theory has not contributed to increased parsimony and conceptual clarity. The second systemic reason is that institutional theory itself can no longer be treated as one coherent theory. Over the past forty years, institutional theorists have developed a number of different conceptualizations of the ‘actor’ in relation to institutions that are fundamentally at odds with each other. Insofar as the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘actorhood’ are directly linked, approaches to identity in institutional theory can be expected to vary
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significantly according to the specific conceptualization of actorhood that is proffered. An additional complicating factor is that institutional theorists are usually not explicit about the particular theory of actorhood they are advancing; institutional theory continues to be presented as a relatively uniform ‘theory’, despite fundamental internal differences. Given this lack of conceptual clarity in both institutional theory and the literature on identity and organizations, any theoretical integration is necessarily fraught with serious problems. Here, I outline a new way of thinking about these issues. Rather than aiming for theoretical integration, I suggest moving in the opposite direction. I argue that institutional theory actually consists of at least five fundamentally different theories of actorhood. Exploding institutional theory into five distinct theories offers a better foundation for relating identity and institutions in more congruent ways.
F A I T A
.................................................................................................................................. Fields like social psychology, or economics, usually explicitly spell out their basic assumptions about human motivations and behaviour. Not so in institutional theory where these have generally remained unarticulated, despite shifting over time. It is only when these assumptions are surfaced more clearly and systematically that we can attain the precision that is required for developing clearer understandings of the relation(s) between identity and institutions. One way to do this is to identify different types of institutional theory based on fundamental differences in their (implicit) theorization of actorhood in relation to institutions.
Institutional Theory Type —The Actor as a Mythicized, Rationalized Subject In their foundational paper Meyer and Rowan (: , italics added) invoked the concept of ‘myth’, conceptualizing institutional rules as ‘as highly rationalized myths that are binding [ . . . ] [and] in some measure beyond the discretion of any individual participant or organization’. Though their theory applied to the organizational level—proposing that organizations in highly institutionalized environments must ceremonially conform to societal myths in order to avoid the costs of illegitimacy—they made clear that this dynamic applied to individuals too: ‘Just as jealousy, anger, altruism, and love are myths that interpret and explain the actions of individuals, the myths of doctors, of accountants, or of the assembly line explain organizational activities’ (Meyer and Rowan, : , italics added). Zucker (: , italics added) also based her foundational contribution in this strong form of social constructionism, arguing that ‘[f]or highly institutionalized acts it is sufficient for one person to tell another that this is how things are done. [ . . . ] [T]he fundamental process is one in which the moral becomes factual’. This image of the socially constructed ‘actor’, who understands her/himself and their relation to the world through societal myths, continues through to Meyer et al. (: , italics added)—who posited that ‘the individual is an institutionalized myth evolving out of
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the rationalized theories of economic, political, and cultural action’—and to Meyer and Jepperson (). The basic idea behind this theory of the actor in Institutional Theory Type was clearly summarized by Meyer (: , italics added): ‘[T]he institutional environment operates [ . . . ] as a cultural or meaning system, penetrating actors far beyond their boundaries, and constructing agency, identity, and activity’. Hence, the ‘I’ of institutional theory according to Institutional Theory Type is to be found in the societal myths through which ‘actorhood’ is constructed and culturally specified as part of a universal process of rationalization; its central theoretical image of the actor can therefore be captured metaphorically as the ‘mythicized, rationalized subject’.
Institutional Theory Type —The Actor as a Structurally Constrained Responder Even though early contributions to the new institutionalism in organization theory in the late s were explicitly based in the social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann (), this theoretical coherence was relatively short-lived. Meyer () has noted that the seminal early contribution of DiMaggio and Powell () marked a subtle but significant shift away from the strong constructionism of earlier contributions. This paper presented a different (implicit) conceptualization of the actor and their relation to the institutional environment.² In DiMaggio and Powell (), managers of organizations compete for political power and institutional legitimacy in fields that are dominated by the state and/or the professions as ultimate arbiters of the rules and norms that govern organizational practice. They draw on Pfeffer and Salancik’s () resource dependence theory as a basis for theorizing an organization’s strategic dependence on other organizations as the reason for becoming isomorphic with the ‘stronger’ party. They also differentiate their theory from Meyer and Rowan () by pointing out that this theory posits the importance of myths and ceremony ‘but does not ask [ . . . ] whose interests they initially serve’ (DiMaggio and Powell, : ). This emphasis on interests and resource-based power differentials in institutional fields as important drivers of institutional dynamics is further highlighted and elaborated in DiMaggio (). The integration of the resource dependence perspective with institutional theory came to full fruition in Oliver (), who theorized a range of possible strategic organizational responses to pressures from the institutional environment. Only two out of fifteen of Oliver’s response tactics—habit and imitation—still had recognizable links back to the new institutionalism of the late s. The remaining response options read like a strategic playbook of a metaphorical young teenager who feels trapped by parental authority: if their authority is particularly strong, the teenager has no choice but to ‘comply’ or ‘pacify’. If she is feeling a bit more confident the teen could opt to ‘bargain’, or avoid parental authority altogether through ‘concealment’ or ‘escape’. The truly confident teen may try to openly defy the rules through ‘challenge’ or ‘attack’, and the particularly skilled ones may even succeed in favourably ‘manipulating’ their parents’ view of what ought to be seen as acceptable. According to this second institutional theory type, the accumulation of (symbolic) resources that are socially valued is what defines the actor’s interests, and the weaker parties learn to accept the hold that the stronger have on this definition, as well as on the
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rules of the game for acquiring them. Yet, within these rules, actors have the ability to develop strategic responses to institutional pressures. Hence, the ‘I’ of Institutional Theory according to this second institutional theory is to be found in a habitus that motivates actors to strategically pursue their interests, but according to rules of a game that are usually controlled by others. In short, the central metaphorical image of the actor in Institutional Theory Type is a ‘structurally constrained responder’.
Institutional Theory Type —The Actor as a Strategic Political Activist Although Fligstein () claimed to base his theory of institutional entrepreneurship on the ‘tenets of institutional theory’, he broke with the idea that people’s position in social structure—grounded in their relative power and resources—determines both what they consider to be their interests, and their ability to attain their ends. Instead, ‘[s]killed social action revolves around finding and maintaining a collective identity of a set of social groups and the effort to shape and meet the interests of those groups’ (Fligstein, : , italics added). Along with this theoretical intervention, institutional theorists began extensively to draw on social movement theory, including highlighting the importance of creating a culturally resonant collective identity as a basis for fuelling institutional change (Rao et al., ). The theoretical core of this type of institutional theory is captured in the ‘General Theory of Strategic Action Fields’ (Fligstein and McAdam, , ). According to this theory, fields are socially constructed arenas within which actors with varying resource endowments vie for advantage. As a result, fields are contentious in nature as ‘challengers’ and ‘incumbents’ jockey for position, based on alternative visions of the field. Fligstein () confirmed the fundamental and intentional nature of this third break within institutional theory: [t]he core of organizational studies since the early s has been to reintroduce interests, actors, power and the problem of change into the center of organizational studies. [ . . . ] [O]ne still sees ritual citing of DiMaggio/Powell and Meyer/Rowan. But the core ideas of these papers could not be farther from those works. The focus on entrepreneurial studies is on how new fields are like social movements. They come into existence during crises. They invoke the concept of institutional entrepreneurs who build the space and create new cultural frames, interests and identities. In doing so, the entrepreneurs build political coalitions to dominate the new order. Indeed, the gist of the past years of organizational research is entirely antithetical to the “old” new institutionalism.
In this alternative theoretical world of incumbents and challengers, the former represent the status quo that is structured in their favour in support of their privileged position in a particular field. Challengers recognize this and develop an alternative vision of the field, strategically waiting for their opportunity to challenge the structure and logic of the system. Hence, the ‘I’ of Institutional Theory according to this third type of institutional theory can be found in a collective identity, either in defence of the status quo, or as vehicles for strategically bringing about institutional change, and thus fundamentally changing the rules of the game. In other words, the central metaphorical image of the actor here is a ‘strategic political activist’.
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Institutional Theory Type —The Actor as an Institutional Bricoleur Unlike Types –, this fourth perspective has not yet been formulated into a formal theory, but two metaphors are central to it: ‘work’ and ‘building blocks’. These metaphors are involved in two key shifts in the (implicit) theorization of actorhood that mark Institutional Theory Type . First, actorhood is deeply constituted in institutions, but actors operate across multiple institutional domains, each with their own organizing principles and rationality (Friedland and Alford, ). In other words, institutional environments are characterized by ‘institutional complexity’ (Greenwood et al., ).³ This complexity may open up a space for divergent agency, particularly where different institutional logics are contradictory or ambiguous (Friedland and Alford, ; Seo and Creed, ). In these agentic spaces actors can creatively use cultural resources as ‘building blocks’ (Thornton et al., ) for constructing new selves that can enable them to resist and conform to powerful institutional forces at the same time (Creed et al., ; Lok, ). Second, actors must not only work to maintain a coherent sense of self through, and for, their practice engagement amidst institutional complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity. Institutions themselves also require active maintenance work. Rather than self-reinforcing, institutions are subject to entropy and decay unless they are maintained through active work (Lawrence and Suddaby, ). For example, Lok and De Rond () show how even in the most strongly socialized settings practice breakdowns are common, requiring active repair work to help maintain the institutional logic that structures routinized practices. The predominant imagery here is one of actors ‘coping’ with (self-)expectations, tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities through various forms of institutional work. Sometimes these tensions are precariously and temporarily resolved through identity work; at other times they require more externally oriented maintenance work; and sometimes they can offer the opportunity for institutional (self-)transformation through the creative use of cultural resources as ‘building blocks’. Hence, the ‘I’ of Institutional Theory according to this fourth type of institutional theory is to be found in a precariously worked self that is both means and outcome of practice engagement across multiple domains of institutional life. In other words, the central metaphorical image of the actor in Institutional Theory Type is the ‘institutional bricoleur’.
Institutional Theory Type —The Actor as a Value Rational, Affected Practitioner The fourth fundamental break in the development of organizational institutionalism over the past four decades is marked by a turn to affect. This break was initiated through an interest in examining the role of emotions in institutional processes as part of institutional theory’s microfoundations (Lok et al., ; Voronov and Vince, ). The idea behind Type Institutional Theory is not just to consider the role of emotions in addition to the cognitive processes that had hitherto been central to institutional theory. Rather, it is to offer an alternative theory of institutional dynamics. For example, Lok et al. (: )
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argue that people’s ‘lived experience’ ought to be studied ‘as of inherent research interest in and of itself ’, because ‘institutions reveal themselves not through the abstract norms, rules, and beliefs that we bestow on them as researchers, but, rather, through the hopes, fears, and fantasies of the people who live them’. The social theoretical foundations of this fifth theory type in organizational institutionalism have been developed by Friedland (, ), although he acknowledges that much work remains: an ‘adequate theorization of the role of emotion in institution [ . . . ] is yet to come’ (Friedland, : ). What is clear though is that Type Institutional Theorists are not satisfied with the theorization of emotions as ‘vehicles’ or ‘instruments’ of institutionalization, akin to, but analytically separate from, cognition. Rather, the emotional specificity of institutions is, for them, constituted through practice engagement, and, reciprocally, practice is itself animated by a ‘regime of feeling [ . . . ] by which we are engaged in a particular way’ (Friedland, : ). The main implication for the theorization of actorhood is that institutions constitute our being though affect: ‘We cleave to institutional ways of doing because of the way they make us feel; indeed we are the way they make us feel’ (Friedland, : ). In other words, the central theoretical image of the actor in Institutional Theory Type is a ‘value rational, affected practitioner’ whose ‘choice’ of practice engagement is based in the affects such engagement affords.
T M C T P I T
.................................................................................................................................. I have purposely deployed metaphorical imagery to accentuate key differences. Moreover, not all of these theories are fully developed, and some degree of overlap is possible. This may suggest to some that the differences that I have highlighted are exaggerated. However, this tendency to ignore or deny internal differences within institutional theory, together with the tendency to force these differences into a narrative of cumulative theoretical progress, is precisely what I believe is part of the problem that has caused today’s state of theoretical confusion in organizational institutionalism. Two key fallacies have helped keep the narrative of cumulative theoretical progress in institutional theory alive. First, the fallacy of conflating the evolution of institutional theory with a progressive trajectory along the structure–agency continuum. And second, the fallacy of suggesting that the insights from different approaches within institutional theory can be integrated into some type of institutional contingency theory.
The Structure–Agency Fallacy The narrative that conflates the evolution of institutional theory with a progressive trajectory along the structure–agency continuum is usually structured as follows: () Early new institutionalism was overly structural and could not adequately explain institutional change because at its centre was a ‘cultural dope’ conceptualization of actorhood; () This
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led to an overcorrection in the literature on institutional entrepreneurship that overemphasized agency because at its centre was a ‘heroic, disembedded agent’; () Institutional theory is now settling for a middle position that acknowledges the importance of both structure and agency, as in, for example, the literature on institutional work. This narrative is intuitively appealing because it implies cumulative theoretical progress, but is false. It is incorrect that Institutional Theory Types and do not allow for agency, and cannot explain institutional change. Indeed, Meyer and Rowan () and Zucker () clearly qualified their propositions as applying to highly institutionalized settings, with the former acknowledging that actors can build their goals and procedures directly into emerging institutions. Moreover, the increased rationalization of society that Type theorists have been primarily interested in is clearly a process of institutional change itself; it is just that this change process is not necessarily actor driven, but, rather, structural in nature. Likewise, although DiMaggio and Powell () theorized a tendency towards isomorphism, their theory is still full of contingencies that qualify this prediction. The likelihood of interestdriven, divergent agency increases when their proposed conditions for isomorphism don’t apply. At the supposed opposite, agentic end of the structure–agency pendulum, Institutional Theory Type clearly acknowledges that an actor’s viewpoint is culturally conditioned, and that fields can move towards (temporary) ‘settlement’ (Fligstein and McAdam, ). Finally, Institutional Theory Types and do not so much occupy a ‘middle position’ on the structure–agency continuum. Rather, by drawing on practice theory they aim to transcend this dualism by arguing that structure and agency are reciprocally related. The consecutive development of the five institutional theory types should, therefore, not be characterized as a progressive evolutionary trajectory along the structure–agency continuum. Rather, each theory type represents fundamentally different conceptualizations of what agency is, how it relates to structure, what motivates it, and what structural effects result from its exercise.
The Contingency Fallacy The second fallacy that has helped keep the narrative of cumulative theoretical progress in institutional theory alive is the idea that the insights from each of the perspectives above can eventually be integrated into some type of contingency theory. For example, one could argue that under certain conditions actors can be highly institutionally conformant, whereas under different conditions those same actors could become institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al., ). The trick towards theoretical progress, therefore, is to take elements from each of the different institutional theory types, and determine under what specific empirical conditions they apply. This would move institutional theory towards an increasingly refined contingency theory of institutional dynamics. Yet, this misses the crucial point that each of the five types of institutional theory presents an alternative, coherent theory of institutional reproduction and change by itself. In other words, it may be possible to develop increasingly refined boundary conditions under which certain institutional dynamics are more or less likely, but only within each institutional theory type, not across them. Each of the theory types that I have discussed can handle the full spectrum of institutional dynamics, from (relative) stasis to entrepreneurial change, because they are fully self-contained. For example, ‘institutional entrepreneurship’
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can be theorized and analysed under each of the five institutional theory types, which would produce different, alternative theories of its conditions of possibility, its prevalence, and its likely effects. The evolution of institutional theory over the past forty years should therefore not be characterized as a series of complementary theoretical additions or extensions that await ‘theoretical integration’. Rather, the consecutive development of the five theory types that I have highlighted has been a series of substitutions or displacements of alternative institutional theories that cannot, and should not, be integrated. It is the fallacious assumption that they must be complementary in some contingent way that has led to their mixed usage over time, contributing to conceptual confusion.
I F T I T
.................................................................................................................................. My detour into the evolution of institutional theory over time, independent of its approach to identity as such, was necessary for two reasons. First, it can help explain the current state of theoretical complexity and conceptual confusion in the literature on identity and institutions. Each of the alternative institutional theory types has a natural affinity with a specific identity theory. This has meant that, as the different institutional theory types have become mixed as part of a fallacious narrative of cumulative theoretical progress under the unified umbrella of ‘institutional theory’, so have their associated identity theories. Secondly, by refining institutional theory into five different theory types, it becomes possible to relate different theories of identity to different theories of institutions in a more congruent way. These more congruent theoretical relations may offer a stronger rationale for using specific identity theories to advance specific institutional theories, and vice versa.
Relating the Five Types of Institutional Theory to Theories of Identity The affinitive relations between different types of institutional theory and theories of identity are summarized in Table .. A clear affinity exists between Institutional Theory Type and SIT. Type Institutional Theory explicitly emphasizes the importance of collective group identity as a necessary condition for successful institutional entrepreneurship, thus offering a direct relation to SIT. Likewise, Institutional Theory Type is partially defined by the centrality of identity work to it, so the identity work perspective (IWT) is clearly the best fit for this theory type. Next, RIT shows a good fit with Institutional Theory Type . This is because RIT emphasizes the importance of role structures and role expectations as determinants of structurally socialized behaviour. It also allows for different individual responses to particular role expectations, and incorporates structural institutional complexity through the notion of role conflict. Kraatz and Block () have argued that this approach can be applied at the organizational level because, like individuals, the organization faces multiple, sometimes contradictory, role expectations too.
Institutional Theory Type 1
Institutional Theory Type 2
Institutional Theory Type 3
Institutional Theory Type 4
Institutional Theory Type 5
Theory of the relation between institutions and actorhood
Actorhood is a historically contingent effect of institutional processes that specify its meaning and agentic scope
Actorhood is constrained by, and strategically responsive to, the institutional environment to different degrees
Actorhood is based in the strategic pursuit of interests as informed by a collective identity in a particular strategic action field
Actorhood is a precarious medium and outcome of the institutional work of coping with contradiction and ambiguity
Actorhood is afforded through becoming subjectively identified with an institutional value through material practice
Core theoretical image of the actor
The mythical, rationalized subject
The structurally constrained responder
The strategic political activist
The institutional bricoleur
The value rational affected, practitioner
Type of social constructionism
Strong
Weak
Weak
Intermediate
Strong
Key contributions
Meyer and Rowan (1977) Zucker (1977)
DiMaggio and Powell (1983) Oliver (1991)
Fligstein (1997) Fligstein and McAdam (2011)
Creed et al. (2010) Lok and De Rond (2013)
Friedland (2014) Friedland (2018)
Most affinitive identity theory
Foucauldian Identity Theory
(Role) Identity Theory
Social Identity Theory
Identity Work
Lacanian Identity Theory
Congruent conceptualization of organizational identity
A claim to a general meaning category enabled and constrained by an increasingly rationalized actorhood
A coalition of role identities that acts as a filter for organizational responses to the environment
A collective identity based around shared interests in a particular strategic action field
A socially constructed category that can be deployed as a resource in personal identity work
A practice-based, internalized value orientation, embedded in an institutional logic
Potential link to OI literature
Whetten and Mackey (2002)
Scott and Lane (2000)
Kjærgaard et al. (2001)
Brown (2017)
Humphreys and Brown (2008)
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Table 45.2 Five types of institutional theory and their relations to theories of identity
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Institutional Theory Types and are more challenging to relate to specific theories of identity for different reasons. Type Institutional Theory has not needed a theory of identity, because it tends to treat identity as equivalent to any other socially constructed category of meaning. Insofar as claims to particular identities appear increasingly prevalent in modern society, such claims are seen to take place against the structural backdrop of the universal construction of a historically specific type of ‘personhood’ that enables such claims (Frank and Meyer, ). This analytical focus on conditions of possibility for particular identity claims, in addition to an emphasis on the rationalization and normalization of a specific, culturally constructed type of ‘selfhood’, shows the closest affinity with a Foucauldian approach to identity, though without its emphasis on technologies of power/knowledge. This affinity is explicitly acknowledged in Meyer and Jepperson (: footnote ). Type Institutional Theory is still in its early stages of development, and is difficult to relate to a specific theory of identity. However, there may be strong potential for incorporating a psychoanalytical approach to identity in the near future. The reason for this is that there are a number of strong parallels between Type Institutional Theory and the Lacanian approach to identity and identification recently introduced into organization studies (e.g. Driver, ; Lok and Willmott, ). For example, Type theory proposes that value rational identification with a ‘substance’ that exceeds any attempt at objectification is the central ‘motor’ of institutionalization, and centrally revolves around an ‘illusio’ (Friedland, ). This shows strong similarities with Lacanian identity theory in which the impossibility of self-completion through fantasmatic identifications plays a central role (Lok and Willmott, ).
Organizational Identity and the Five Types of Institutional Theory Given these fundamental theoretical differences, the conceptualization of ‘organizational identity’ is likely to be different as well if each theory type were to directly engage this concept. As shown in Table ., Type theorists are likely to explore the structural institutional processes that enable and constrain claims to ‘an organizational identity’ as a general cultural category. Type theorists are mindful of the (institutional) role expectations that impinge on an organization; how these affect the organization’s ability to construct its own unique identity (Phillips et al., ; Kraatz and Block, ); and how the latter can act as a filter for responding to institutional pressures (Besharov and Brickson, ). The primary focus of Type theorists is to determine whether the identity category of ‘challenger’ or ‘incumbent’ applies to a particular organization; what other organizations share this status in a particular field; and how a collective identity across them can enable their strategic actions. Type theorists are more likely to zoom in on identity work at the personal level, and assess how organizational identity can be involved in, and effected through, personal identity projects (cf. DeJordy and Creed, ). Finally, Type theorists are most interested in how an organization’s particular value claims are embedded in broader institutional logics, and how organizational practices are affectively oriented through identification with these values. These differences imply that it is analytically useful and important for institutional theorists to acknowledge the fragmentation of institutional theory when they engage the
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literature on identity. Likewise, identity theorists in organization studies who are interested in the potential of institutional theory to offer a more contextual perspective might select the particular institutional theory type that is most congruent with their perspective on identity.
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.................................................................................................................................. The theoretical complexity of both institutional theory and the identities literature has grown significantly over the past few decades. The conceptual confusion in institutional theory has provoked an increasing number of internal and external critiques suggesting that institutional theory ought to be in a state of crisis. Yet such a crisis has not materialized because its imminence is perpetually postponed through the supposed promise that increased theoretical integration offers. Paradoxically, the greater the conceptual confusion, the greater the promised reward of theoretical integration. It is perhaps not surprising then that we are witnessing increasing attempts to integrate institutional theory with the literature on identities, individual and organizational, with the potential for yet greater conceptual confusion as an unintended consequence. In this chapter, I have laid out an argument why these attempts are unlikely to fulfil the promise that motivates them, and why we should move in the opposite direction: theoretical fragmentation. One of the key benefits of differentiating institutional theory into five theory types is that it becomes possible to relate different theories of identity to different institutional theories in more congruent ways. This will not be the only benefit: the purposive explosion of institutional theory into multiple, alternative theories undoubtedly has much more to offer. If only institutional theorists are courageous enough to resist the fantasmatic façade that the promise of imminent theoretical integration continues to offer.
N . I realize that Stryker’s role identity theory is now more commonly known as ‘identity theory’. I also acknowledge that ‘identity work’ is not usually considered a theory as such; it is more akin to a ‘perspective’ or a ‘metaphor’ (Brown, ). Nevertheless, I have chosen SIT, RIT, and IWT as labels for reasons of convenience in order to make their differentiation and comparison in this chapter easier to follow. . This distinction is particularly important given that Zucker (), Meyer and Rowan (), and DiMaggio and Powell () are often lumped together as offering the presumably theoretically coherent foundations for new institutionalism when they actually do not. This confusion may be due in part to Powell and DiMaggio’s own editing decision to include all three contributions in Part I of their famous ‘orange book’. This glossing over important historical differences within institutional theory appears to have become the norm since, particularly in relation to these three papers. . The literature on institutional complexity is broad and varied, and should not be exclusively associated with Type Institutional Theory. Approaches that frame an organization or person as subject to plural, sometimes contradictory external ‘pressures’ or ‘role expectations’ that require a (strategic) response fall under Type Institutional Theory. Approaches that treat institutional complexity as fully internalized, as an integral part of the organization’s or person’s complex, precarious identity, fall under Type Institutional Theory.
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R Albert, S. and Whetten, D. A. (). ‘Organizational Identity’. In L. L. Cummings and B. M. Staw (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. . Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. –. Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (). ‘Neo-Institutional Theory and Organization Studies: A Mid-Life Crisis?’ Organization Studies, (), –. Battilana, J., Leca, B., and Boxenbaum, E. (). ‘How Actors Change Institutions: Towards a Theory of Institutional Entrepreneurship’. Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Besharov, M. L. and Brickson, S. L. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Institutional Forces’. In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Bévort, F. and Suddaby, R. (). ‘Scripting Professional Identities: How Individuals Make Sense of Contradictory Institutional Logics’. Journal of Professions and Organization, (), –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identity Work and Organizational Identification’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., and Lok, J. (). ‘Being the Change: Resolving Institutional Contradiction through Identity Work’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., and Lok, J. (). ‘Myths to Work By: Redemptive Self-Narratives and Generative Agency for Organizational Change’. In P. Tracey, N. Phillips, and M. Lounsbury (eds.), Religion and Organization Theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations . Bingley: Emerald, pp. –. Creed, W. E. D., Scully, M. A., and Austin, J. R. (). ‘Clothes Make the Person? The Tailoring of Legitimating Accounts and the Social Construction of Identity’. Organization Science, (), –. DeJordy, R. and Creed, W. E. D. (). ‘Institutional Pluralism, Inhabitants, and the Construction of Organizational and Personal Identities’. In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. DiMaggio, P. J. (). ‘Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory’. In L. G. Zucker (ed.), Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, pp. –. DiMaggio, P. J. and Powell, W. W. (). ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Collective Rationality and Institutional Isomorphism in Organizational Fields’. American Sociological Review, (), –. Dover, G. and Lawrence, T. B. (). ‘A Gap Year for Institutional Theory: Integrating the Study of Institutional Work and Participatory Action Research’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Driver, M. (). ‘Struggling with Lack: A Lacanian Perspective on Organizational Identity’. Organization Studies, (), –. Fligstein, N. (). ‘Social Skill and Institutional Theory’. American Behavioral Scientist, (), –. Fligstein, N. (). ‘The “Old” New Institutionalism versus the “New” New Institutionalism’. Orgtheory.net. https://orgtheory.wordpress.com////the-old-new-institutionalism-versusthe-new-new-institutionalism/. Fligstein, N. and McAdam, D. (). ‘Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields’. Sociological Theory, (), –. Fligstein, N. and McAdam, D. (). A Theory of Fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, D. J. and Meyer, J. W. (). ‘The Profusion of Individual Roles and Identities in the Postwar Period’. Sociological Theory, (), –.
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Friedland, R. (). ‘Divine Institution: Max Weber’s Value Spheres and Institutional Theory’. In P. Tracey, N. Phillips, and M. Lounsbury (eds.), Religion and Organization Theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations . Bingley: Emerald, pp. –. Friedland, R. (). ‘Moving Institutional Logics Forward: Emotion and Meaningful Material Practice’. Organization Studies, (), –. Friedland, R. and Alford, R. R. (). ‘Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practice, and Institutional Contradiction’. In W. W. Powell, and P. J. DiMaggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. –. Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Beyond Constraint: How Institutions Enable Identities’. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, and R. Suddaby (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: Sage, pp. –. Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Theorizing the Identity-Institution Relationship: Considering Identity as Antecedent to, Consequence of, and Mechanism for, Processes of Institutional Change’. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, and R. E. Meyer (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, nd edition. London: Sage, pp. –. Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeih, F., Micelotta, E. R., and Lounsbury, M. (). ‘Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses’. Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Heise, D. R., MacKinnon, N. J., and Scholl, W. (). ‘Identities, Roles, and Social Institutions: An Affect Control Account of Social Order’. In E. J. Lawler, S. R. Thye and J. Yoon (eds.), Order on the Edge of Chaos: Social Psychology and the Problem of Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Humphreys, M. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility at Credit Line: A Narrative Approach’. Journal of Business Ethics, (), –. Kjærgaard, A., Morsing, M., and Ravasi, D. (). ‘Mediating Identity: A Study of Media Influence on Organizational Identity Construction in a Celebrity Firm’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Kraatz, M. S. and Block, E. S. (). ‘Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism’. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, and R. Suddaby (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: Sage, pp. –. Lawrence, T. and Suddaby, R. (). ‘Institutions and Institutional Work’. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, and W. R. Nord (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organisation Studies, nd edition. London: Sage, pp. –. Leung, A., Zietsma, C., and Peredo, A. M. (). ‘Emergent Identity Work and Institutional Change: The “Quiet” Revolution of Japanese Middle-Class Housewives’. Organization Studies, (), –. Lok, J. (). ‘Institutional Logics as Identity Projects’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Lok, J. (). ‘Why (and How) Institutional Theory Can Be Critical: Addressing the Challenge to Institutional Theory’s Critical Turn’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Lok, J., Creed, W. E. D., DeJordy, R., and Voronov, M. (). ‘Living Institutions: Bringing Emotions into Organizational Institutionalism’ In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, and R. E. Meyer (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, nd edition. London: Sage, pp. –. Lok, J. and De Rond, M. (). ‘On the Plasticity of Institutions: Containing and Restoring Practice Breakdowns at the Cambridge University Boat Club’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Lok, J. and Willmott, H. (). ‘Identities and Identifications in Organizations: Dynamics of Antipathy, Deadlock, and Alliance’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Meyer, J. W. (). ‘World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor’. Annual Review of Sociology, , –. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., and Thomas, G. M. (). ‘Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account’. In G. M. Thomas, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez, and J. Boli (eds.), Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society and the Individual. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. –. Meyer, J. W. and Jepperson, R. L. (). ‘The “Actors” of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency’. Sociological Theory, , –.
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Meyer, J. W. and Rowan, B. (). ‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony’. American Journal of Sociology, (), –. Oakes, L. S., Townley, B., and Cooper, D. J. (). ‘Business Planning as Pedagogy: Language and Control in a Changing Institutional Field’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Oliver, C. (). ‘Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G. R. (). The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Phillips, N., Tracey, P., and Kraatz, M. (). ‘Organizational Identity in Institutional Theory’. In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Rao, H., Monin, P., and Durand, R. (). ‘Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy’. American Journal of Sociology, (), –. Ravasi, D. and Van Rekom, J. (). ‘Key Issues in Organizational Identity and Identification Theory’. Corporate Reputation Review, (), –. Scott, S. G. and Lane, V. R. (). ‘A Stakeholder Approach to Organizational Identity’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Seo, M.-G. and Creed, W. E. D. (). ‘Institutional Contradictions, Praxis, and Institutional Change: A Dialectical Perspective’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Stryker, S. (). ‘Identity Competition: Key to Differential Social Movement Participation?’ In S. Stryker, T. J. Owens, and W. W. Robert (eds.), Self, Identity and Social Movements. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. –. Suddaby, R. (). ‘Challenges for Institutional Theory’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Suddaby, R. and Greenwood, R. (). ‘Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., and Lounsbury, M. (). The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Voronov, M. and Vince, R. (). ‘Integrating Emotions into the Analysis of Institutional Work’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Whetten, D. A. and Mackey, A. (). ‘A Social Actor Conception of Organizational Identity and its Implications for the Study of Organizational Reputation’. Business & Society, (), –. Willmott, H. (). ‘ “Institutional Work” for What? Problems and Prospects of Institutional Theory’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Willmott, H. (). ‘Why Institutional Theory Cannot Be Critical’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Wry, T., Lounsbury, M., and Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Legitimating Nascent Collective Identities: Coordinating Cultural Entrepreneurship’. Organization Science, (), –. Wry, T. and York, J. G. (). ‘An Identity-Based Approach to Social Enterprise’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Zucker, L. G. (). ‘The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence’. American Sociological Review, (), –.
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Towards More Critical Relational Approaches .......................................................................................................................
Abstract Recognition that leadership identities are competing, multiple, contradictory, and complex challenges dominant and uncritical suppositions about identities in leadership studies. Recent research on the production of leadership identities and the importance of looking beyond the individualistic and charismatic leader enables insight into the relational and intersubjective processes through which leadership is performed. Research by critical leadership scholars over the last two decades highlights the significance of interpersonal relationships and the powerful effect that interactions between leaders and led can have on lives and identities at work. Contemporary research on what has become labelled ‘relational leadership’ has the potential to offer more radical approaches, but this has yet to be realized. This chapter, located within feminist psychosocial theorizing, sheds light on leadership identity challenges at a time of considerable economic crisis, social uncertainty, and political repositioning. It further explores the question of whether these relational promises can now be realized in practice such that new forms of leadership and followership identities can be enacted that create workplaces that are more egalitarian and benevolent.
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.................................................................................................................................. T continues to be considerable academic interest in notions of identity. The turn to identity as a central strand of social theorizing has triggered an explosion of studies across the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, social and cultural studies, and psychology (Bauman, ; Collinson, ; Hall, ). This growing interest has been taken up in organizational studies in a number of ways, including explorations at organizational, professional, social, and individual levels (Brown, ; Ford, ). Many traditional studies portray a fixed, essentialist notion of individual identity rather than a socially
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constructed and inherently interrelated approach. In all sorts of contexts and settings, individual identity is depicted as the basis for making choices and arriving at decisions that impact on us. Throughout our lives we refer to ourselves so as to make sense of what we do and how we behave and act. In contemporary Western culture, we are constantly encouraged to examine and interrogate our identities, how we envisage ourselves and how we perform ourselves in relation to gender, nationality, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and embodiment. In this way, contemporary life is peppered with proliferating sites and scenes of identity work, in which the self is regarded as a project that people must continually refer to as a means of making sense of their behaviour and interrelationships. Given the ambiguous definition and absence of shared meaning of leadership (DeRue and Ashford, ), together with a belief within more critical leadership studies that it is performatively produced (Ford et al., ), the notion of leadership as an identity may differ from other more commonly studied social identities (such as gender, race, and age) or specific role identities (such as mother, engineer). What it takes to be a leader (or follower) as well as who is a leader (or follower) in any given context is therefore uncertain, complex, and contextual (Alvesson et al., ; Ford, ; Voronov and Vince, ). Furthermore, social processes play a considerable part in the construction of these identities, which reinforces the importance of social and mutual influence processes in which the identities of both leaders and followers are in flux. Exploring the concept of leadership as identity goes beyond the more typical depictions of identity and its relationship with the self (Ibarra et al., ). Brown (: ) for example argues that ‘There is emerging consensus that identity refers to the meanings that individuals attach reflexively to themselves and developed and sustained through processes of social interaction as they seek to address the questions “who am I?” ’ There is a tendency in such definitions to focus on the individual’s role in assigning this identity to themselves rather than a broader understanding of the organizational and social processes by which others attribute identities to an individual (DeRue and Ashford, ; Ford et al., ). Such research on leadership identity constructions in organizations highlights that not only are the individual’s internalization of identity and the relational recognition of identities of central importance, but ‘so is the context within which patterns of influence form and evolve in the leadership relationship’ (DeRue and Ashford, : ). Thus, construction of a leadership identity entails a complex process of ongoing and dynamic identity work at individual, interrelational, and collective levels. DeRue and Ashford () refer to a leadership identity as comprising the three elements of individual internalization (of either leader or follower identity as part of their self-concept), relational recognition (by both leaders and followers in the relationship), and collective endorsement (as members of a specific social group of leaders or followers). Furthermore, in exploring questions of structure and agency in identity work more generally, Brown (: ) argues that most researchers recognize that identities are neither just chosen nor assigned to individuals, ‘but are instead the effects of identity work that occurs in the interstices between domination and resistance’. Such considerations alert us to the importance of power and the inevitability of asymmetrical power relations in organizational hierarchies between leaders and followers (Ford, ; Ibarra et al., ). The discourse of leadership/followership and leadership identity within the
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workplace can, therefore, operate as a way of creating, reinforcing, and even legitimizing hierarchy and discriminatory practices (Ford, ). The very enactment of a leadership identity is not therefore a neutral activity. As Ford et al. (: ) have described: The becoming of the leader involves the psyche, the memory, interactions between selves and texts, interactions with others, interactions between different aspects of the self, the local context, the geography, the culture. Leadership comes to the subject (who will be a leader) laden with the heroes of millennia of story-telling. It has a history.
Two contrasting strands to explore leadership identities have emerged in the literature; one dominant and mainstream and a second, more critical. The first of these approaches focuses on the omnipotent and individual leader with a static and enduring identity who influences others in the organization in a unidirectional way (DeRue and Ashford, ). This dominant imposition of a specific identity implicitly contains within it an amenable follower who is not studied. This traditional and popular literature aims to increase the effectiveness of the leader through workings on the self, such that their leadership potential can be realized. Within this vast bulk of research on leadership there is an implicit theory of leadership identity that is never (or only rarely) articulated. This is in contrast to critical accounts of the construction of leadership identities which consider them to be social and inherently relational processes that are dynamic, multiple, complex, and frequently contradictory (Ford, ; Sinclair, ). Such accounts challenge dominant suppositions about leadership identities and recognize the existence of the other in the relational encounter. In what follows, I seek to explore this implicit theory of leadership identity through more critical theorizing. A critical lens on the production of leadership identities goes beyond the individualistic and charismatic leader and enables insight into the relational and intersubjective processes through which leadership is performed. Research by critical leadership scholars over the last two decades recognizes the significance of interpersonal relationships and the powerful effect that interactions between leaders and led can have on lives and identities at work. Daily experiences, relationships and interrelationships, and individual biographies are overlooked in the vast majority of research on leaders, which ignores how leadership and indeed work in general, involves such intersubjective encounters (Ford et al., ). In contrast, I will explore leadership identities from a perspective that understands individuals bring their selves, psyches, life histories, idiosyncrasies, and ways of talking and thinking and acting, to these workplace relationships. This is particularly important because leadership research ignores these aspects of the self, encouraging leaders to bring uninformed assumptions uncritically to the workplace, encouraging the emergence of leader identities that require them to become awe-inspiring and super-human beings whose impact on others is justified by their positions as leaders. There is, I contend, a need to foster leaders whose identities are part of, rather than dominant over, the collective subjectivities of workplaces. Contemporary research on what has become labelled as ‘relational leadership’ (Uhl-Bien and Ospina, ) has the potential to offer scope for more radical approaches, but this potential has yet to be realized and the lack of clarity as to the contribution of this body of research is thwarting progress. This chapter, located within feminist psychosocial theorizing, sheds light on leadership identity challenges at a time of considerable economic crisis,
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social uncertainty, and political repositioning. It further explores the question of whether these relational promises can now be realized in practice such that new forms of leadership and followership identities can be enacted that create workplaces that are more egalitarian and benevolent. The chapter is structured in four main sections. First, it presents a necessarily selective review of more critical writing on identity and leadership that provides an overview of recent debates. Second, the writings on followers in leadership are explored and the third section seeks to take forward new ways of conceptualizing, researching, and practising relational leadership identities through drawing on a psychosocial case study illustration from a wider empirical study of leadership and identity. Finally, conclusions to the chapter seek to explore the enactment of new forms of relational leadership identities that challenge dominant accounts and call for mutual recognition of leader and other identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. Despite advances in qualitative and locally situated studies in the last decade or so, research on leaders and leadership is still dominated by quantitative studies which are largely uncritical and based in a narrow, positivist perspective. We know from the vast literature on leadership that traditional approaches continue to privilege the leader within hierarchical representations (Ford et al., : ). They take for granted that leadership exists, that it can be improved and that its main purpose is to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of organizations (Carroll et al., ). The tasks and the roles that the leader is required to undertake are frequently prescribed through competency and behavioural frameworks and they include the development of a self that is so much colonized by the model of leadership required by the organization that there is no distinction between the self and the leader. Where leadership was once depicted as a series of tasks, roles, or characteristics, it is now an identity. The degree of prescription of enacted leadership identities requires leaders to assume a particular model of the leader such that the very identity of this individual is consumed by this normative identity that the organization stipulates (Ford ; Ford et al., ). Such normative identities as promulgated through the skills and behavioural-driven models of organization become, for putative leaders, the assumed identity they need to practice, learn, and assimilate if they are to be successful. Such leader identities provide a means of self-regulation and self-monitoring, in which leaders are ‘cultivated’ to become ‘autonomous, self-regulating, proactive individuals’ (du Gay, : ; see also Rose, ). Descriptions of the leader identity required tend to focus on charismatic, inspirational visionaries who ‘instil pride, respect and trust’ in followers (Van Knippenberg and Sitkin, : ). Organizations, through defining the leadership practices and behaviours expected of their leaders, provide a discourse that constrains, influences, and manipulates managers’ identity construction. Furthermore, management consultants and indeed academics, trainers, and educators seek to define and fix what constitutes ‘leadership’ on the organization’s behalf and thereby collude in the presentation of a core identity for leaders. This view presumes a central, unitary identity, a coherent view of the self against which it is possible
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to gauge whether an individual’s actions are authentic or hypocritical, and their consequences good or bad. Furthermore, it embeds an assumed homogeneity to leadership, and serves to continue to mask the dominance of masculine and heteronormative hegemony (Ford, ). Inventories and psychometric instruments such as competency profiles and associated -degree assessment tools specify the behaviours that support the production of this identity, an identity that the individual can ‘manufacture’ or ‘adopt’ to fit the profile created by the hegemonic discourse of leadership in an organization. Only a narrow range of identities are permitted within which people are allowed to perform at work (Ford and Harding, ). Such a prescribed identity for the leader shepherds followers into a narrow range of responsive behaviours such that the ‘others’ to the leadership relationship are prevented from adopting alternative subject positions. Both leaders and their putative followers are controlled by the rigid framework of permissible leadership identities; and yet, there is no evidence that leaders have any influence over these others. As we argue elsewhere (Ford and Harding : ): the power that circulates in leadership theory is a power over those who become called leaders. It confers on them that identity and requires that they conform to the norms and practices that govern that subject position. But, leadership theory is so divorced from practice, that is, from material encounters between people in workplaces, that it cannot advise leaders on how to govern followers. All it does is provide empty promises about the leader’s ability to fill up the follower with their own charisma, authenticity, goodness or abilities.
Critical studies of leadership identities expose prescriptive practices as disciplinary, exclusionary, and highly conservative. Critical leadership scholarship seeks to illuminate the more dispersed, flexible, subject positions that encourage a shared and relational leadership dynamic between leaders and others. Recent, qualitatively informed, contextually specific and critical studies of leadership draw from interdisciplinary studies and theoretical perspectives to generate research that tells us something about the subjective, the personal, and the interpersonal. It explores ideas and beliefs, about how people talk and dream about leadership and the stories and narratives that they construct in their talk and dreaming. Critical leadership identity studies focus on plurality, ambiguity, complexity, and heterogeneity rather than homogeneous and one-dimensional forms. These present new opportunities to understand and experience leadership and identity from within much richer, contextual empirical settings (Ford, ). Critical leadership identity studies are located within strands of organizational identity theory (Brown ; Ford, ) that understand identities as multiple and contextual, and requiring active work in their constitution and maintenance (Alvesson, ; Ibarra et al., ). It requires a ‘struggle for securing a sense of self ’ (Alvesson, : ) through identity work. In this eschewing of the fixed identity of the unified, humanist subject (Alvesson et al., ; Watson, ; Ybema et al., ), the self is regarded as fluid and malleable (Kreiner et al., ); fleeting and fragmentary, multiple and contextual (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Ford, ); and constantly negotiated and renegotiated (Ashforth, ). In sum, the theory of leadership identity work developed in critical accounts understands that subjects are located within complex, multi-layered webs of discourses that are
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interpreted in multiple and conflicting ways. Each subject emerges within and through the related discourses and has commonalities with all others, but at the same time an individual’s complex and individualized, contextual interpretations of and responses to those discourses renders her/him unique and distinct (Fraher and Gabriel, ; Watson, ). What emerges from more critical accounts is that if we wish to understand leader identities, we need to be mindful of the context in which the research occurs and to listen to the stories of leaders and followers but also to study their interactions, and the discourses and roles they are constructed by and resist (Sveningsson and Alvesson, ). Much critical empirical research into identities and identity work in leadership studies draws from ethnographic and/or in-depth interview approaches that provide considerable insight into the contexts, complexities, and processes of identity construction in the workplace. Such critical and reflexive approaches to the study of leadership and identity pay attention to situations, events, institutions, ideas, social practices and processes that may be defining, controlling, and constraining the identities of leaders and others (Ford, ). There is an emerging research agenda that aims not only to adopt a culturally sensitive and locally-based interpretive approach, that takes account of individuals’ experiences, identities, power relations, and intersubjectivities (Nicholson and Carroll, ); but also, one that allows for the presence of a range of masculine and feminine workplace behaviours (Ford, , ). Greater awareness of the various discourses and subject positions that constitute leaders’ and followers’ identities enables consideration of the multiple constraints that inhibit thoughts and actions and highlights oppressive discourses and subject positions that should be eradicated (Schedlitzki et al., ; Sveningsson and Larsson, ). A feminist psychosocial and relational approach offers a theoretical basis for analysing the subject positions of leaders and followers in the workplace. This approach is even more significant as we witness a turn to more collective, relational forms of leadership, as recent literature attests.
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.................................................................................................................................. Leadership theory and practice has focused primarily on the individual leader, with considerable attention paid to their styles, behaviours, competencies and mind-sets, as well as how they look, what they believe, and who they are. Followers and others in the leadership encounter feature mostly only as indicators of leader influence and effectiveness, with their participation in research being limited to rating their leaders (Alvesson, ; Bligh, ; Ciulla, ; Ford and Collinson, ; Jackson and Parry, ). Some writers (see, for example, Hollander, ) suggest this gives sufficient insight into followers, while exponents of more recent relational approaches to leadership argue that followers are central to their thinking (Crevani et al., ; Cunliffe and Erikson, ; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, ; Uhl-Bien and Ospina, ). In response, we suggest that the follower in these approaches is explored predominantly as a reflection of the leader’s abilities; the persons who are the followers remain faceless and unidentified. That is, in most approaches
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to leadership, followers remain formally recognized only as part of the leadership project, in relationships whose asymmetrical power dynamics are ignored (Ford and Harding, ). In order to understand leadership identities, we need also to understand the identities of followers. A few studies have given some consideration to follower identities. In the s Burns advocated a values-based and shared model between leaders and followers in which leaders and followers morally elevate each other. In recognizing the higher-order needs of followers, leaders develop ‘a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents’ (Burns, : ). Kelley () developed one of the first explicit theories of followership through introducing the concept of exemplary followers who are active, independent, and critical thinkers. These followers, he argued, tend to have strong values and to be the courageous conscience of the organization. The moral responsibility of leaders and followers was further highlighted in Challeff ’s () writings, with leaders and followers having complementary roles in which they serve a common purpose. Meindl (), meanwhile, advanced the case for a radical, follower-centred approach to leadership studies. He criticized the ‘romance of leadership’ that focuses on a decontextualized, heroic, inspirational leader who single-handedly saves a failing company or moves a successful organization to ever greater levels of accomplishment (Ford, ). Meindl’s challenge to leader-centric perspectives raises important questions about more explicitly considering the role of the follower in the ‘construction’ of leadership (Bligh et al., : ) (to which we would add the need to understand the effect of the construct ‘leadership’ on organizational subjects). This nascent follower-centred approach to leadership (Shamir et al., ) recognizes the interdependence of leadership and active followership, located within a symbiotic relationship between leader and followers held together by trust and loyalty and rooted in the leader’s commitment to ethical standards. By , there were sufficient discussions of followers to allow Bligh and Kohles (, cited in Bligh, ) to review the literature and report that articles on followers fall into three broad categories: (i) follower attributes that are pertinent to the leadership process, including such constructs as perceptions, identity, affect, motivations, and values; (ii) leader–follower relations including the active role played by followers in the leadership dynamic; and (iii) follower outcomes of leadership behaviour, including performance, creativity, or other dependent variables and effects that leaders have on followers. In response, critical leadership thinkers warn of a tendency amongst theorists of followers/ship to either replace leader-centrism with follower-centrism or to keep the dualism in place but give primacy to followers (Collinson, ). They argue that the emergent field of followers/ship studies mimics leader-centric studies in homogenizing its subjects, so reducing subjects to organizational ciphers that are somehow less than human (Ford et al., ). Critical thinkers accuse dominant approaches to the study of both leadership and followership of ignoring context, complexities, multiple and shifting identities, and, most of all, power dynamics (Alvesson, ; Collinson, ; Ford et al., ). In sum, there is a vast body of literature on leadership that has largely ignored followers and others in the leadership relationship, save as reporters on the abilities of the leader. Indeed, the aggrandizement of leaders and leadership thinking in organizations has the effect of locating non-leaders in subordinate or follower positions (Alvesson, ). An
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emergent body of literature on followers/ship recognizes the active role of the follower in working with the leader, but it has inherited leadership theories’ uncritical stance, notably in ignoring context, identities, and power (Ford and Harding, ). Little is known about the role of identity in relational aspects of leadership. DeRue and Ashford () provide a conceptual map that explicates how leadership identity construction occurs through social processes. This highlights the dynamic processes of mutual influence in which local context and social interaction between individuals construct shifting leader and follower identities. Leader identities are constructed not just by the leader projecting a certain image of leadership but also by the process of recognition through which followers accept such an identity and this positions their identity as a follower. My particular interest is in what occurs in the specific local context between the leader and others. This arises from psychosocial theories’ concern with how identities and selves are constituted within and through relational encounters, a body of theory much of which is influenced by Hegel’s account of how self-hood emerges through agonistic encounters with an ‘other’ that grants recognition. There is limited literature that analyses this relational encounter and how, within the space of that meeting, one party becomes the ‘leader’ and the other the ‘follower’ (Ford and Harding, ). In what follows, I illustrate the ways in which the relational intersubjective theories of Jessica Benjamin () can be applied to the study of relational leadership identities in the workplace. A specific case of one follower and her experiences with several leaders within a UK public sector organization is explored (for a more in-depth account of this research, see Ford, ). The next section briefly outlines the psychosocial location of this study of relational leadership identities. This builds upon theories of recognition and psychosocial interpretations through illuminating not only how leadership identities constrain permissible identities but also how new, more radical relational thinking can diminish the neglect of workers who feel uncomfortable with hegemonic norms of leadership identities and enable them to feel more fulfilled. This illustrates how future research could take up the frame of rethinking relational leadership identities.
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.................................................................................................................................. Drawing on Object Relations Theory and the work of Melanie Klein, Hollway () argues a case for psychosocial analyses as a means of thinking about identity that is both relational and dynamic (see also Hollway and Jefferson, ). In relation to my research in critical leadership studies, a psychosocial approach seeks understanding and meaning of the unconscious psychological influences on leaders and followers’ behaviour and hence their purposeful identity as leaders and others. The intention is not to create finite truths for all leaders as the premise of a socially constructed subject makes it impossible to encapsulate the diversity of lived experience. However, it seeks to gain meaning and understanding
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of the lived experience of each psychosocial subject so as to account for differences between individuals in terms of how they make sense of information, or of what Hollway and Jefferson (: ) describe as ‘the discourses or systems of meaning within which they may be positioned’. Braidotti (: ) underscores the impact of psychoanalysis on the subject to argue that it is the unconscious self that undoes the stability of the unitary subject by constantly changing and redefining her foundations and by the paradoxes, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies that instil instability at the core of the self. Whatever semblance of unity there may be in our identity ‘it is embodied and performed as a choreography of many levels into one socially operational self ’ (Braidotti, : ). Psychosocial analysis, therefore, offers additional resources with which to understand relational leadership identities that are not available through discourse theory. Lupton and Barclay (cited in Alsop et al., : ) propose that ‘one area which discourse theory has tended to overlook is an understanding of the inner world of the subject and the importance of emotional states, mutuality and intimate relations between people’. It is this ‘inner’ world that is also worthy of exploration. A psychosocial approach, drawing on Jessica Benjamin’s theories of the emergence of selves within relational encounters, enables consideration of the multifaceted and complex patterns of identities and leadership. Benjamin argues that all encounters with others bring with them the potential for relationships of domination and subordination, and such relationships are fundamental to workplace encounters for, being hierarchical structures, they are inescapably places in which relationships of domination and submission play out. Indeed, the very terms ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ signify a hierarchy in which one is dominant and the other, the subordinate, has to bend her will to that of the superior. Benjamin’s account is embedded within Object Relations theories that place relationships at the heart of what it is to be human. Object Relations—as relational forms of psychoanalytic thinking—starts from the perspective that rather than being monads, the subject can exist only through interactions with others (Benjamin, : ). Her account is of an intersubjective dynamic in which the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right, who is different and yet alike and is capable of sharing similar mental experiences. The intersubjective encounter is important for Benjamin because it ‘reorients the conception of the psychic world from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject’ (Benjamin, : ). Intersubjectivity describes the existence of a relationship between self and other. It asserts that we are both separate and interrelated beings and that it is through reflexive recognition (Benjamin, : ) by the other that we know ourselves. It is both through the confirming response of others as well as how we find ourselves that is important—and this is why psychosocial theory can speak for interpretations of organizational life. It enables the recognition of interrelationships and reciprocity between individuals, groups, and organizations. Benjamin () stresses the significance of this mutuality of recognition—that is, the need to recognize as well as be recognized by the other. This interrelationship is central—to see others as both like us and yet different from us, and to see the interaction and impact of the recognition on our sense of self (or indeed multiple selves). Yet within this, she identifies what she perceives as ‘the paradox of recognition’ (Benjamin, : ), which
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requires that the individual must finally acknowledge the other as existing for him- or herself and not just for that individual. The process of differentiation entails the flow of recognition from subject to subject, ‘from self to other and back’ (Benjamin, : ). This movement is both contradictory and paradoxical, and it is through deepening our understanding of this paradox that the picture of human development can be broadened to include both the separation as well as the meeting of minds. Intersubjective theory positions the relationship between self and other as a constant exchange of influence with a dynamic tension between sameness and difference. The focus is not so much on the linear movement from oneness to separateness, but on the ‘paradoxical balance between them’ (Benjamin, : ). Benjamin perceives the continued dominance of the dualistic view of self and other has been perpetuated for two reasons. First, the experience of paradox and ambiguity can be seen as painful, and something to be avoided. It is much easier to live with the notion of dominance, of separation and linear relationships. Secondly, it may relate to a fear of the notion of dependency on others which can be a threat to independence and a perceived compromise of the self if the other is recognized. She argues that this is not sustainable, and it is through this inability to endure the tension of paradox that leads to domination. Domination starts out with the endeavour to deny dependency and yet, she contends, no one can completely disentangle herself from some dependency on others, nor from the need for recognition. This concept of recognition requires the opportunity to act and to have an impact on the other in order for the self to establish its existence. In an organizational setting, individuals at work require the existence of another, so that there is someone who recognizes her. Benjamin describes the dialectic of control in which if I completely control the other, then the other ceases to exist, and if the other completely controls me, then I cease to exist. Our own independent existence requires the recognition of the other, in the construction and maintenance of a tension between what Benjamin (: ) refers to as ‘the contradictory impulses of both asserting the self and recognising the other’. This is important in studies of organizations generally and specifically to explorations of concepts of relational leadership identities in workplaces. A lack of recognition of the self as a subject denies the contradictory desires for freedom and interdependence, for wanting to be both subordinated and free to leave at the same time. In order for the leader to understand her leadership role, she needs to both assert herself and recognize the other. If she fails to do this, then the outcome (according to Benjamin, ) is domination. Mutual recognition is central— wherein the subject accepts the premise that others are separate but nonetheless share like feelings and intentions. The subject is compensated for her/his loss of sovereignty by the pleasure of sharing, the communication with another subject. However, she warns of the paradox of recognition in which the need for acknowledgement by another can lead us to becoming once more dependent on this other, which could lead to struggles for control. Connecting such a necessity for recognition in relational leadership identities, there needs to be exploration of whether both parties’ identities can flourish in struggles for recognition. To understand the struggle for identity within relational leadership encounters, I provide a short vignette drawn from a much wider study of leadership in a local government organization in England. The illustration below of the working life story of one manager recounts very clearly the experience of her interactions with contrasting types of leaders. I draw from this intense narrative study (influenced by McAdams et al., ) of
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Jane (a pseudonym), whom I interviewed while she was participating in a leadership development programme. Her working life story is particularly relevant for reframing the relational dynamics of leadership because she divides it into two starkly contrasting periods, a past time when she worked with someone she saw as an excellent, ‘romantic’ leader, and a present time when she suffers under what she sees as distant, poor, macho, and almost ‘absent’ leadership. In exploring Jane’s account, I am guided by Benjamin’s writings on how the desire for recognition works within both the psyche and the social. It is relevant for rethinking the relational leadership identity dynamic that takes place within a context where organizations bestow power upon leaders but deny it to followers. The analysis leads me to argue that both romantic and absent leaders deny Jane recognition and self-hood. However, she is not passive in this: she brings her own desires to the relational leadership dynamic, as explored below.
Jane’s Account Jane has worked for the same local government organization for the last thirty years, primarily within the human resource development function. Although she originally trained as a teacher with the intention of working with younger students, she was placed in a high school teaching post owing to her graduate status. After a year, she resigned from this job, intending to secure a permanent teaching post in a middle school for the following term. However, this coincided with an economic recession and a decision was taken to cut back on teachers, so she remained unemployed. After a three-year period in the local university library in which there were limited career opportunities, she successfully applied for a post within the careers service in the Council where she worked for a couple of years until job cutbacks were introduced which culminated in her section being closed down. Through redeployment policies within the Council, Jane was moved into a staff development role within the human resource function, where she spent the next twenty years. During this time in her developmental role, she describes two very different experiences— both lasting about a decade—in which she worked for an enlightened and enthusiastic leader for the first ten years, followed by a series of very poor leaders who either overlooked her contribution completely or belittled what she had to offer. Both of these experiences (of one engaging and charming leader followed by a series of destructive, macho, and ineffective leaders) left her isolated and dejected, denied recognition and abandoned to her marginalized destiny in the organizational hierarchy.
Analysis Drawing from Benjamin’s relational theories of recognition, three major themes emerged from Jane’s story. These were (i) being led by a charismatic leader; (ii) being led by macho, distant, and uncaring leaders; and (iii) Jane as an object. Jane contrasts a hellish present with a heavenly past in which she was recognized by a magnetic and inspirational leader; her colleagues then were ‘soul-mates’. She was subsequently abandoned by this charismatic leader and left as a miserable follower, susceptible to the whims of more senior leaders in the hierarchy. Today she works in a leadership vacuum. She depicts the organization’s
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current senior leaders, ‘them up there’, as macho, self-interested, hierarchical, and status conscious. A whole tier of managers has been added to the hierarchy above her and she has been marginalized and silenced. Organizational leaders, she asserts, gain sadistic pleasure not so much in the direct enjoyment of her emotional turmoil but in the knowledge of power over her. Yet, she shows no agency—she remains in her post, talking about the possibility of looking for a job elsewhere, but not making the necessary moves. The refusal of senior managers in the organization to recognize and value Jane, and even to acknowledge her existence is further exacerbated by her own acceptance of her continuing willingness to offer recognition without expecting it in turn, a complete self-denial. One aspect of her submission to organizational whims is that she is motivated by fear of separation and abandonment (Benjamin, ). Jane’s earlier career insecurities could be related back to her impulsive resignation from her first teaching post and subsequent period of unemployment that have undermined her ability to move from the Council. She is unwilling to relinquish the perceived sense of security that continued employment by the Council provides. The more she becomes attached to her current situation, the more she perceives anything else to be a threat to her (fragile) identity. Her sense of a coherent identity over the last decade has been knocked, for which she blames poor management, and she no longer has the energy and drive to feel committed to the work she is undertaking. Yet her identity suffered also in her relationship with the charismatic leader who also denied her both recognition and a secure identity. Despite the satisfaction she claims during this time, her dependency on this inspirational leader prevents her from recognizing her own sense of self. In her hero-worshipping of this leader, she loses her own self. Whilst she describes her relationship with him as one of equals, in this we see perhaps the ideal (ized) leader/follower relationship as expounded in relational leadership theory (see for example the many perspectives presented in the edited collection by Uhl-Bien and Ospina, ). Jane’s idealization/idolization of this leader and her acknowledgement that she had no agency when working with him (as she says, ‘he took over my mind’) illuminate tensions in the leader/follower relationship. A consequence of her experiences of both charismatic and destructive leaders is that Jane, and others placed in the ‘follower’ subject position in organizational life, participate in their own suppression; they repress their sociability and their social agency and remain subjugated followers to the organizational leaders.
Discussion Benjamin’s work offers insight into ways people are complicit in their own submission. What is significant is that both the romantic, inspirational leader and the absent leader refuse the follower recognition and offer a subordinated and unsatisfactory sense of self. The inspirational leader dominates and subsumes the follower such that her only identity is that of follower to the inspirational leader. The follower’s own identity disappears beneath her desire for submission. The absent leader ignores her so completely that she is deprived of recognition and identity. Followers are not passive in this relationship and at times are both complicit in their loss of identity, even joyful in the state of adulation of the inspirational leader, as well as frustrated at any loss of voice or denial of recognition in the face of absent leadership.
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This leads to a call for further research that radically reframes relational leader/follower identity thinking through active and mutual recognition in which each party acknowledges that they are fallible human beings who each has a duty of care for the other. Through this we need to develop a theory of the constitution of the relational identities of leader and follower within the space of the meeting of two subjects, rather than contemporary relational approaches that instigate a desire for submission in which the struggle to maintain the self no longer has to be made. This requires that we explore how leaders and others find ways to remain in a relationship of independence and interdependence albeit one based on inequality and power asymmetry such that both parties survive with their preferred identities intact rather than the compliant and subordinated identity by followers to leaders.
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter demonstrates that there is a dominant identity discourse regarding what it is to be a ‘leader’ that is manipulative, exploitative, and potentially damaging and that leaders—whether ideal(ized) or not—can cause considerable harm in the workplace. An alternative approach challenges the problems of mainstream theorizing through the powerful psychosocial and relational lens of Benjamin’s theories of intersubjectivity and recognition. It illuminates the interdependencies and relational identities between leader and led; the power and powerlessness within such relations and the damage that occurs when leading and following are practised without concern for follower identities. A radical rethinking of relational leadership identity theorizing is called for—one that transcends the positive experiences hitherto encompassed within this tradition. Moving beyond the positive projection of relational leadership thinking enables exploration of the murkier aspects of domination and subordination that remain unspoken and under-examined in organizational life. Benjamin’s psychosocial relational theorizing offers potential for understanding experiences of being subservient while at work. It challenges not only the prescriptive and static identities that are apparent in mainstream accounts but also problematizes dominant interpretations of relational leadership identities and provides another critical lens through which the subtleties that make working lives so fraught are entrenched in contemporary presumptions of how to lead and follow. It also offers considerable opportunity to explore ways in which leadership identity thinking could be re-aligned to take account of the significance of the mutuality of recognition. Critical research in the field of relational leadership identities needs to build on such relational theorizing of mutual recognition and develop an approach that enables us to understand identities rather than impose them on leaders and others in the workplace.
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Abstract A growing body of research indicates that the entrepreneur’s identity is core to our understanding of entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. Identity has gained in popularity over the course of the last decade, as entrepreneurship scholars have realized that the richness of the concept, its embeddedness in social and symbolic universes, and its strong theoretical roots in psychology and sociology promote theory building. This chapter reviews key works in entrepreneurship that draw on the identity concept, thereby creating a much-needed map of current research—which also offers several promising ideas for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. A increasing number of studies indicate that the entrepreneur’s or founder’s identity1 is core to our understanding of entrepreneurial processes and outcomes (e.g. Fauchart and Gruber, ; Grimes, ; Murnieks and Mosakowski, ; Shepherd and Haynie, ). ‘Identity’ has gained in popularity over the course of the last decade, as entrepreneurship scholars have realized that the richness of the concept, its embeddedness in social and symbolic universes (Davis, ), and its strong theoretical roots in psychology and sociology (Hogg et al., ; Tajfel and Turner, ) promote theory building. In particular, it has been observed that, in the case of emerging organizations, the influence of the founder’s identity on initial entrepreneurial activities may be relatively strong (Fauchart and Gruber, ; Whetten and Mackey, ). Yet, the widening popularity of the identity concept has not only helped to advance our knowledge of entrepreneurship, but also has given rise to some problems—in particular, ad hoc applications of the concept that largely ignore key tenets of the underlying theories. In the following, we discuss the identities of founders from both social and role identity perspectives, and how they affect entrepreneurship, before discussing identity formation
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and identity management. We thereby establish a much needed map of research in this vibrant and growing area of research. Furthermore, based on our review, we offer several interesting ideas for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. Scholars in both psychology and sociology have long argued that human beings have a basic need to define ‘who they are’ and how they relate to others (Hogg et al., ; Mead, ; Stryker, ; Tajfel, ).2 The richness of the identity perspective, and its appeal to entrepreneurship researchers, derives in part from the fact that it encourages understanding of people as individuals who stand in relation to social others in social settings and, thus, neither focuses solely on the person nor on the context. For instance, Gioia (: ) defined identity as ‘a general, if individualized, framework for understanding oneself that is formed and sustained via social interaction’. Identity theories appeal to entrepreneurship researchers because they hold out the promise that they can be used to analyse a founder’s identity (self-meanings) in order to make predictions about entrepreneurial behaviour (Hogg et al., ; Stets and Burke, ; Tajfel and Turner, ). The positive feedback that a founder can obtain by achieving congruence with his or her identity allows scholars to establish a theoretical link between the founder’s identity and his or her actions and behaviours in new firm creation and, thus, to predict venturing actions and behaviours based on an understanding of the founder’s identity. From a research perspective, it is therefore important for researchers to develop a solid understanding of founder identities and, in particular, the content of the meanings different identities carry.
S I T R I T E S
.................................................................................................................................. Over the course of several decades, scholars in psychology and sociology have developed a number of identity theories, with Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Role Identity Theory3 being among the most prominent (Stets and Burke, ).4 SIT (Tajfel, ; Tajfel and Turner, ) has its origins in work on social psychology. Recent work on entrepreneurship has sought to apply SIT (Alsos et al., ; Brändle et al., ; Fauchart and Gruber ; Obschonka et al., ; Powell and Baker, , ; Sieger et al., ), and in so doing extend the scope of entrepreneurship studies from traditional types of founders (as, for instance, discussed by Schumpeter, ) to founders whose focus is social and sustainable entrepreneurship (Fauchart and Gruber, ). Role identity theory originates from a sociological tradition that suggests an individual’s understanding of his/her role and role-related behaviours derives from observations of others performing the role, and the meanings and expectations linked to it that establish standards which guide actions and behaviours (Stets and Burke, ; Stryker, ).
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Table 47.1 Social identities of entrepreneurs (adapted from Gruber and MacMillan, 2017, and based on Fauchart and Gruber, 2011) Level of inclusiveness of the self-concept
Social identity
Key features
Darwinian founders
• adhere to traditional business logic • want to pursue their private, economic selfinterest, and derive self-worth by behaving and acting in ways that are congruent with a professional ‘business-school’ approach to management • view the competition as their primary frame of reference in the social space
Focus: the ‘self ’
• adhere to a community logic that is derived from common (shared) norms, beliefs, and trust • want to support and be supported by their community, and derive self-worth primarily from being able to offer products/services that help to advance their social community • view the community as their primary frame of reference in the social space
Focus: ‘Personal’ others (community)
• pursue a missionary logic that embodies a strong sense of responsibility for the world • want to advance a cause, and derive self-worth from being able to behave and act in a manner that allows them to pursue their political vision and establish a better world • view society-at-large as their primary frame of reference in the social space
Focus: ‘Impersonal’ others (society-atlarge)
Communitarian founders
Missionary founders
Missionaries:
Communitarians Darwinians Private Self-interest
Missionaries: Communitarians: Community, Personal Others Darwinians
Missionaries: Society-at-Large, Impersonal Others Communitarians
Darwinians
One well-established typology (see Table .) distinguishes between three primary types of founder social identities (the ‘Darwinian’, the ‘Communitarian’, and the ‘Missionary’) as well as hybrid forms that combine features of two or more of these types (Fauchart and Gruber, ). The three primary types are systematically different in that they represent distinct loci of founders’ self-definitions, spanning the complete range of self-definitions in the social space: from the ‘I’ (self ), to the ‘personal We’ (personal others) and the ‘impersonal We’ (impersonal others). Darwinian entrepreneurs can be thought of as adopting the most restricted level of self-categorization, viewing themselves as unique entities, distinct from other individuals, who pursue private economic goals and adhere to conventional business logics. Communitarian entrepreneurs consider themselves in the sense of a ‘personal We’, that is, with respect to individuals who form a proximal social group (i.e. the community).
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Missionary entrepreneurs have the most inclusive self-categorization. They put the ‘impersonal We’ at the locus of their self-definition in the social space and pursue meanings in entrepreneurship that are aligned with and seek to advance goals of society at large. Showing important parallels with long-standing philosophical discourse on ‘what it means to be a human being’ (Beitz, ; Taylor, ), this typology has gained traction with entrepreneurship scholars (Alsos et al., ; Brändle et al., ; Powell and Baker, ; Sieger et al., ). The role identities of founders have been less systematically investigated. Nonetheless, by drawing on a taxonomy of key activities in entrepreneurial ventures by Gartner et al. (), Melissa Cardon and her colleagues () have been able to differentiate three entrepreneurial role identities: inventor, founder, and developer—and, by implication, hybrid role identities that derive from them. Social identity and role identity perspectives provide complementary explanations of entrepreneurial behaviour (Fauchart and Gruber, ; Gruber and MacMillan, ; Powell and Baker, , ). The way in which these perspectives complement each other is, however, not always considered in a systematic manner, leaving significant room for future research to advance our understanding of the interplay of founder social and role identities (Gruber and MacMillan, ). By applying a social identity perspective, scholars can illuminate fundamental differences between those founders who establish firms with their economic self-interest in mind, and others who embark on their entrepreneurial endeavours because of concern for known or for unknown others (Fauchart and Gruber, ). Combining a role identity perspective with founders’ social identities, scholars can investigate differences in the actions of Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary founders due to different role-related meanings and expectations (see Figure .). For example, it might be expected that entrepreneurs with an inventor role identity behave in different ways when creating a missionary venture than founders with a developer identity. In particular, the inventor role identity is likely to mean that the venture values research while de-emphasizing Darwinian
Social Identity
Communitarian
Missionary
(Faudhart and Gruber, 2011)
Role Identity (Cardon et al, 2009)
Expected Entrepreneurial Behaviours
inventor role identity founder role identity developer role identity Darwinian behaviours, variation within the Darwinian type according to specific role identity
inventor role identity founder role identity developer role identity Communitarian behaviours, variation within the Communitarian type according to specific role identity
inventor role identity founder role identity developer role identity Missionary behaviours, variation within the Missionary type according to specific role identity
. Expected entrepreneurial behaviours arising from the interplay between the founder’s social identity and role identities
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commercialization activities. While research in this vein is still scant, Powell and Baker () show how different founder role identities play out among founders with communitarian or missionary social identities. Two points are particularly noteworthy in light of these observations. First, the underlying argument that an individual’s role identity shapes behavioural variation within the social group categorization established by her or his social identity is already evident in early sociological writings (Durkheim ; Stets and Burke, ). Second, by viewing social and role identities in this systematic way, scholars can also grasp tensions among social- and role-identity-related meanings in a more parsimonious manner. Research in both the social and role identity traditions has established important links between a founder’s identity and firm-related behaviours and actions (Alsos et al., ; Cardon et al., ; Fauchart and Gruber, ; Gruber and MacMillan, ; Mathias and Williams, ; Powell and Baker, , ). It is critical to note that the value of social identity theory and role identity theory for understanding entrepreneurial behaviour lies in these theories’ ability to shed light on and uncover fundamental worldviews and convictions and not simply surface-level features that might change quickly (Pan et al., ). The social identity of the founder (Darwinian, Communitarian, Missionary) influences whether the founder predominantly engages in causal (e.g. assumes that entrepreneurs are driven by the ends they want to achieve) or effectual behaviour (e.g. assumes that entrepreneurs are driven by the means they possess) (Alsos et al., ). Research also tells us that the founder’s social identity influences whether the founder creates for-profit or social ventures (Fauchart and Gruber, ) and, thus, is able to shed light on one of the most fundamental decisions in new firm creation. The founder’s social identity also shapes key features of the firm, the markets served, and the resources employed (Fauchart and Gruber, ). In addition, work adopting a role identity lens indicates that founders’ identities influence how they attend to different opportunities and how they differ in their opportunity considerations and choices (Mathias and Williams, ). Powell and Baker () show how founders’ social and role identities in combination shape their strategic responses to adversity. In sum, the literature offers important insights not only on founders’ identities but also how their identities affect their entrepreneurship. By employing identity theory, scholars are thus in a position to advance understanding of the enterprising individual as well as heterogeneity in entrepreneurial processes and outcomes.
I F
.................................................................................................................................. We now focus on understanding how a founder identity forms. In this respect, the existing literature provides two important lines of work: one on the antecedents of founder identity; and another on the processes of identity formation.
Prior Identities The founder’s prior identities are likely to play a key role in the shaping of a founder identity for several reasons. First, social identities motivate an individual to embrace and
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value specific norms of behaviours that tend to carry across multiple contexts (e.g. Burke, ). This means that they constrain the range of possible identities to which an individual can aspire (Cardon et al., ; Farmer et al., ; Fauchart and Gruber, ; Madsen et al., ). The role of prior identities in the shaping of founder identity has been studied in the context of the entrepreneurship of women (e.g. Essers and Benschop, ; Greene and Brush, ), minorities (e.g. Morris and Schindehutte, ), and homosexuals (Schindehutte et al., ). For example, the degree to which individuals identify with an ethnic group or sexual minority has been found to affect the type of entrepreneur they become and the enterprise they create (Schindehutte et al., ). Second, an individual’s current role identity may set important boundaries on what this person is willing to engage in, and to what extent he or she is willing to adopt meanings from other identities. For instance, Jain et al. (: ) show how academics who engage in start-up creation tend to develop a hybrid identity that comprises ‘a focal academic self and a secondary commercial persona’. Third, an individual’s current social and role identities in part set the context in which an individual socializes. For example, an individual’s social identity (e.g. church member) induces sociality with other members of that group. Research building on the sociopsychological premise that identity is partly shaped by the social environments in which individuals navigate (e.g. Côté and Levine, ) has studied how friends and parents (Falck et al., ), work peers (Obschonka et al., ), and mentors (Rigg and O’Dwyer, ) affect the emergence of a founder identity and ultimately the decision to become an entrepreneur. Also, significant others can introduce an individual to possible selves (Markus and Nurius, ) (such as being an entrepreneur), leading them to form aspirations to be a founder (Falck et al., ; Farmer et al., ). Others are especially influential when they are, or have been, entrepreneurs themselves, or have positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship and encourage the individual to form identity-expectations or aspirations through dialogue and observation pertaining to entrepreneurial behaviour (Nanda and Sorensen, ). For instance, the propensity of science academics to move from employed work to entrepreneurship has been shown to be affected by the norms and values of the group of scientists with which the employee works at university (Obschonka et al., ).
Transition Process Although the deeper level variations among founders’ social identities discussed above (in particular, the Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary types of identities) tend to represent strongly ingrained convictions and values that individuals hold and have developed over longer time spans, also independently of an entrepreneurial activity, their very identity as an entrepreneur, especially in its role-related dimension, may not form instantly but over a period of time, as an individual discovers entrepreneurship as a mechanism to pursue his or her goals. The concept of transition implies that an individual must move from a current state (e.g. being an employee) to a new one (becoming self-employed) by adopting a new identity. This sequence matters because an individual can succeed or fail in forming a positive founder identity that can be incorporated into the self-concept—which, according to the more general literature on role identity, which has generated most of the
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work on transitions, is likely to affect the ability of the individual to effectively adopt the new role or to perform it effectively (Pratt et al., ). In the transition period, the potential founder forms expectations relative to the role. While developing perceptions of the founder role, he or she progressively assesses how it fits his/her current and aspired-to self-identity (Farmer et al., ). Côté (, ) proposes that individuals hold identity capital assets (e.g. personality traits, networks, educational credentials), attached to their various identities, that provide resources to change or build new identities. These identity capital assets allow nascent entrepreneurs to understand and negotiate the opportunities and challenges met in the transition phase (Lewis, ). Not all potential founders will develop strong founder identity aspirations and some initially aspiring entrepreneurs may eventually decide not to engage in entrepreneurship (Farmer et al., ). In this regard, the outcome of the transition process is also affected by the nascent entrepreneur’s efforts in developing a new identity that is sufficiently consonant with his/her other identities (Hoang and Gimeno, ). Yet, it may be misleading to consider that there exists a pre-existing level of congruence that the individual would need to ‘discover’ as he or she collects information on the founder role.
Identity Work Making sense of a prospective identity is a key task for anyone planning to enter a new role or occupation (Ibarra, ; Pratt et al., ). When it comes to the founder role, there exists considerable latitude in crafting the new job (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, ) and identity (Cardon et al., ). A concept that has been used to describe the activities or tasks involved in identity sensemaking is that of identity work (Brown, ). Identity work refers to the agency that individuals exert in forming their identities (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ) or more specifically to ‘the range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’ (Snow and Anderson, : ). In entrepreneurship, these activities have been shown to include storytelling, to make sense of the multitude of factors that shape career transitions (Mallon and Cohen, ) and to understand who one is as a founder (Jones, et al., ); the use of clichés (Down and Warren, ); and various narrative structures, to support the co-construction of one’s founder identity with key stakeholders (Downing, ). Identity work, however, does not take place in a vacuum. Potential founders are exposed to a repertoire of meanings and representations available in their social and cultural environment (e.g. Anderson and Warren, ; Cohen and Musson, ; De Koning and Drakopoulou Dodd, , ; Nicholson and Anderson, ) and to prototypical views of the entrepreneur (Farmer et al., ). Founders, it seems, select those meanings from common social representations of entrepreneurs that best fit with their self-definition as a founder (Cohen and Musson, ). How founders combine elements of this repertoire with their own idiosyncratic inputs, and variation in identity work processes between founders as they construe their new identity, is a current topic for research (Anderson and Warren, ). Similarly, our understanding of the identity work of teams, and how they may fail to negotiate an effective collective entrepreneurial identity, is also at an early stage (Powell and Baker, ). Also of interest for future research is how different patterns of
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identity work translate into distinct entrepreneurial outcomes, most obviously relative ‘success’ and ‘failure’.
I M
.................................................................................................................................. Identity processes operate continuously as the entrepreneur makes decisions, interacts with stakeholders, hires key employees, etc. These interactions constitute episodes where the founder’s identity is enacted. In these processes, identity can be confirmed or challenged by others with whom the founder cooperates. In addition, founders often perform roles and belong to social groups other than in the new enterprise, and their founder identity needs to coexist with other identities and to be rehearsed and refined with experience (Ibarra, ).
Managing Multiple Identities A common source of identity tensions and conflicts lies in the fact that founders, like all people, have multiple identities (e.g. Ashforth and Mael, ). Multiple identities have been studied by researchers interested in female entrepreneurs (Crosina, ; Greene and Brush, ) and artist entrepreneurs (Bass et al., ) for whom the necessity to juggle multiple roles or to reconcile seemingly antithetical identities are often salient. Managing and monitoring multiple identities implies engaging in identity negotiation (e.g. Burke, ; Swann, ). Typical multiple identity strategies engaged in by entrepreneurs are compartmentalization and integration through the development of a meta-identity (Bird et al., ; Burke, ). Which strategy founders adopt depends, at least in part, on the strength of the boundaries between identities (Shepherd and Haynie, ). For instance, a female entrepreneur may compartmentalize her founder and feminist identities when engaging in entrepreneurship, because her feminist identity is not relevant to her entrepreneurial identity, while an environmental activist may integrate his/her activist and founder identities if there are strong synergies between them. How individuals’ compartmentalization/integration identity strategies evolve over time, how they affect entrepreneurial behaviour, and their implications for stakeholder management and outcomes (among many other issues) are matters for further research (cf. Shepherd and Haynie, ; Wry and York, ).
Using Identity Strategically While founder identity may sometimes play a hidden role by shaping behaviours in ways unsuspected by the individual, it can also be displayed and leveraged strategically by founders. In particular, while starting a new venture and engaging in early entrepreneurial activities, founders are confronted with the ability to utilize their founder identity to obtain key resources. Navis and Glynn () propose that effective monitoring of a founder’s entrepreneurial identity is or should be a strategic activity because investors tend to make judgements about the plausibility of a new venture through evaluating founders’ identity
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claims. In this regard, the identity narratives provided by founders are particularly important guides that influence investors’ sensemaking of new venture projects (Navis and Glynn, ), and help to establish ties with external partners and build trust (Phillips et al., ). In the same vein, other research has shown how founders act strategically by conveying a professional identity to certain audiences while representing themselves as an entrepreneur to others (Warren, ) or by pretending to have another type of identity in order to be attractive to particular sets of customers (Fauchart and Gruber, ).
F R
.................................................................................................................................. This review of work on the founder’s identity in entrepreneurship has emphasized a number of aspects (see Figure .): (i) being a ‘founder’ relates both to a social category and to a role; (ii) founder identities are heterogeneous in nature, because they are shaped by the prior identities individuals hold as well as ongoing processes of identity formation; (iii) founder identity affects entrepreneurial behaviours; (iv) taking action involves interactions that can trigger identity verification episodes, identity refinement, rehearsal, and reflection, i.e. identity work. Founder identity is thus an inherently complex and dynamic construct. In addition to the research questions and issues already considered, many others require attention. The questions offered here complement and extend recent suggestions made by Sieger and his colleagues () and by Gruber and MacMillan (). Some quite fundamental issues remain to be fully explored. For example, one important line of research that arises is based on the broad question ‘which identity features are mostly pre-existing, and which ones are learned and acquired throughout the entrepreneurial process?’ Research has highlighted that aspects of a founder identity reveal elements that are deeply ingrained in one’s persona (such as one’s motivation to do good for a community or for society at large), even if they need to be ‘translated’ into meanings Social & role founder identities Identity meanings Identity content
Entrepreneurial behaviours and actions Identity formation Aspirations/identification Role transition Social influences Identity work
Identity management Managing multiple identities Using founder identity strategically
. Overview of founder identity research
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specific to the entrepreneurial situation. In contrast, other aspects are more amenable to processes of becoming (Fauchart and Gruber, ; Gruber and MacMillan, ), and future research should be encouraged to cleanly separate which features of identities and associated motivations are deeply ingrained and which are acquired within a shorter time frame. Another important area of research is the development of entrepreneurial identity and, more specifically, how new founders learn and acquire entrepreneurial identities. For instance, scholars may ask whether necessity entrepreneurs (Dencker and Gruber, ), who have been pushed into an entrepreneurial career, develop entrepreneurial identities and manage identity tensions differently than those who engage in entrepreneurship voluntarily (opportunity entrepreneurs). Other key questions in this realm are: How do the different social contexts in which Darwinians, Communitarians, and Missionaries have formed their distinct founder identities shape their founder identities? Do founders who have retained other occupations while engaging in entrepreneurship face different identity challenges and tensions than founders who have made a full transition to entrepreneurship? For instance, do part-time founders need to behave differently because they have to manage specific identity tensions? Do founders with different social identities experience different identity tensions as they interact with their environment (cf. Gruber and MacMillan, )? Further, entrepreneurship scholars may usefully seek to build on theories and concepts from related areas that have so far received little attention. Relatively modest consideration has been paid to the relationships between founder identity and psychological well-being, although identity aspects have been shown to relate strongly to various psychological outcomes (e.g. Jetten et al., ). While research has begun to investigate the social construction of founder identity, future studies need to further that attempt by exploring neglected influences. For instance, while the role of ‘place’ has been highlighted in research on identity (e.g. Knez, ), we have little knowledge on how a strong place identity can affect a founder identity. For instance, attachment to a place could affect the meanings a founder associates with being an entrepreneur, and this attachment may constrain entrepreneurial choices and actions as well as shape the mission of the new venture (e.g. McKeever et al., ). There is a need for more research on how entrepreneurs cope with stressful events, as their persistence in their entrepreneurship and identities matters. Finally, we suggest that entrepreneurship may be a particularly fruitful setting for studying the interrelation of role and social identities (Gruber and MacMillan, ; Powell and Baker, ). Overall, while it is clear that identity research in entrepreneurship has advanced the field in critical ways, and significant progress has been made, important opportunities remain. We hope that this overview of current research, and our suggestions for future research, will help to advance our understanding of entrepreneurs as enterprising individuals, their firm-related behaviours and actions, and the outcomes they generate on different levels of analysis.
N . We will use both terms interchangeably throughout this chapter. . This section draws partly on Gruber and MacMillan (). . For clarity of exposition, we use the term ‘role’ identity theory, although this theory is often referred to as ‘identity theory’ (cf. Stets and Burke, ).
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. We do not cover ‘personal identity’ theory in this review because, despite the fact that there seems to be shared prototypical traits for entrepreneurs in all cultures (e.g. Yao et al., ), these traits have proven to be weak predictors of entrepreneurial behaviour and actions (e.g. Low and MacMillan, ).
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Abstract This chapter reviews the literature on strategy and identities comparing three perspectives on their nature and mutual relationships. The first ‘entitative’ perspective considers both strategy and identity as elements that organizations, groups, and individuals ‘have’. The second ‘narrative’ perspective treats both strategies and identities as stories. Finally, the third ‘work’ perspective adopts a processual lens and views strategy and identity as constructed in interaction. While the entitative and narrative perspectives are wellestablished, the authors suggest that the most promising avenues for future research lie with the ‘work’ perspective, which offers a more fluid and dynamic vision of the nature of strategy and identity and their interaction. This perspective will also benefit from methodological innovations that can capture naturally occurring interactions.
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.................................................................................................................................. T is increasing interest in the management literature in linkages between the notions of ‘strategy’ and ‘identity’, where identity can be understood at organizational, group, or individual levels (Ashforth and Mael, ; Ashforth et al., ; Oliver, ). Some have suggested that organizational identity is likely to influence competitive strategy in ways that diverge from economic principles (Livengood and Reger, ). Conversely, an organization’s strategy can have implications for individual identification, motivation, and commitment (Ashforth and Mael, ; Huy, ). Some authors have examined ways of aligning strategy and identity (Balmer et al., ; Kjærgaard, ; Ravasi and Phillips, ; Rughase, ). Others have focused on the way in which individuals’ identity narratives may be linked to strategic roles (Laine and Vaara, ; O’Connor, ).
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This chapter¹ reviews the literature on strategy and identities, comparing three perspectives on their nature and mutual relationships. The first ‘entitative’ perspective is dominant in the literature and views both strategy and identity as entities or objects that organizations, groups, or individuals ‘have’. The second perspective adopts a ‘narrative’ lens in which strategies are viewed as stories that organizations tell about their futures, while identity narratives build on the past and tell stories about who we are (Sillince and Simpson, ). Finally, the third so-called ‘work perspective’ adopts a processual lens and views strategy and identity as constructed in interaction. Here, the notion of strategy is replaced by ‘strategizing’ or strategy work, while the notion of identity is replaced by ‘identity work’, implying effort by individuals to influence the way in which identities are constructed. This chapter will review how the literature associated with each perspective deals with: (a) the nature of strategy and identity, (b) levels of analysis, (c) consensus, continuity, and change; (d) methodological considerations. Table . provides a summary of this analysis. The chapter ends with an agenda for future research.
T ‘E’ P S I O
.................................................................................................................................. Since its introduction by Albert and Whetten (), organizational identity’s connection to strategy has attracted attention from researchers and practitioners (Gioia et al., ; Tripsas, ). Of organizational identity’s three foundational qualities—its central, enduring, and distinctive nature—the third is key to understanding the relationship between identity and strategy (Evans, ). ‘Distinctiveness’ from other organizations is eminently a strategic issue, due to its importance for competitive advantage. This section introduces what we call the entitative perspective on strategy and organizational identity. This perspective has its roots in an objectivist vision, in which organizational identity is regarded as a collective, homogeneous construct that unites organizational members and contributes to strategic advantage in a competitive environment (Ashforth and Mael, ; Evans, ; Gioia et al., ; Ravasi and Phillips, ). Though sometimes criticized (Sillince and Simpson, ), this entitative perspective continues to dominate the literature on strategy and organizational identity (Ashforth and Mael, ; Kjærgaard, ; Ravasi and Phillips, ; Rindova et al., ; Tripsas, ).
The Nature of Strategy and Identity Although it is recognized that strategy and identity may be mutually influencing and constrain each other (Anthony and Tripsas, ; Ashforth and Mael, ; Tripsas, ), the entitative perspective tends to view strategy and identity as separable responses to different questions (‘where should we go?’ versus ‘who are we?’) In the entitative perspective, the distinctive core of strategy resides in an organizational identity
Dimension The nature of strategy and identity
Entitative perspective
Narrative perspective
Work perspective
Nature of strategy
Something organizations ‘have’
Nature of identity
Something organizations ‘are’
Nature of strategy– identity relationship
Separate but mutually influencing
Stories about an organization’s present and future Stories about the organization’s past and present Parallel but overlapping narratives
Something organizations ‘do’; ‘strategizing’ Something organizations ‘do’; ‘organizational identity work’ Co-constituted in interaction
Nested
Parallel
Inextricably imbricated in interactions
Degree of consensus
Consensual
Polyphonic and contested
Approaches to continuity and change
Analysis of causal factors in identity and strategy change
Narratives of identity tensions experienced during strategy change
Politically contested in interaction Observations of changing through interactions and activities
Typical methods
Qualitative case studies Quantitative studies
Text analysis One-on-one interviews
Principal limitations
Overdependence on dualisms and top management perspectives
Definition and integration of narratives
Ashforth and Mael, 1996; Corley and Gioia, 2004; Tripsas, 2009
Brown et al., 2005; Vaara and Tienari, 2011; Anteby and Molnár, 2012
Relationships between levels of analysis Consensus, continuity, and change
Methodological considerations
Representative studies
Ethnography Conversation analysis Studies of interactions Construct ephemerality and amorphousness Drori et al., 2009Ybema, 2010Watson, 2016
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Table 48.1 Three perspectives on strategy and identities
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that enables and constrains strategic goals (Evans, ). Strategy and organizational identity appear to be ‘things’ or ‘resources’ that organizations have, which serve managers in implementing change. In this perspective, the strategic discourses of leaders as well as visual and textual artefacts such as architecture, layout, logos, uniforms, annual reports, videos, etc. form the locus of organizational identity (Liu and Grey, ). By targeting identity’s essential attributes, the organization and its strategy are conceived of as concrete realities. The entitative perspective emphasizes the idea that organizations are collective actors in society, and gives prominence to overt ‘claims’ about where they are going and who they are (Gioia et al., ). Often associated with marketing and communication concerns, strategy and identity alignment is based on a repertoire of claims inscribed in observable manifestations. The relationship between strategy and identity is thus inferred as measurable, objectified, and instrumental (Ravasi and Canato, ). Overall, the entitative perspective has generally looked at how strategy may inform or be informed by identity in terms of a relationship between two distinct entities that influence one another in deterministic or reciprocal ways. Thus, strategy ‘and’ identity appear to be anchored in distinct ontological realities. Moreover, these relationships are sustained and diffused by top managers. Organizational identity is thus strategically expressed in explicit managerial attempts at identity control through core values, goals, and mission statements.
Levels of Analysis Researchers in the entitative perspective extend our understanding of the relationships between strategy and identity across four levels of analysis, ranging from the individual to the group to the organization to the industry. Most research has, however, focused on the organizational level and privileges the corporate vision of the strategy–identity relationship (Hoon and Jacobs, ), seen as a global property of organizations (Whetten, ). Strategy and identity research at the organizational level thus suggests that identity claims and beliefs proposed by top managers become adopted, adjusted, and diffused throughout the organization (Gioia et al., ). Some scholars in the entitative perspective have, however, observed that strategy and identity may be interpreted differently throughout the organization. For example, Corley and Gioia () revealed a differential response in the way top and lower managers interpreted organizational identity during and after a corporate spin-off. In another article, Corley (: ) examined identity responses to strategic change, suggesting that ‘higher levels of the hierarchy tended to see identity in light of the organization’s strategy, whereas lower aspects of the hierarchy saw it in relation to the organization’s culture’. Ravasi and Phillips () showed that strategic change in a high-quality audio-video systems producer was more readily embraced by managers and marketers than by other organizational members. Finally, researchers in the entitative perspective have become interested in strategy– identity relationships at the industry level of analysis. The way top managers shape these relationships is not divorced from their perceptions and interactions with their environment. For example, Anthony and Tripsas () contend that a broader organizational identity may allow for better adaptation to a shifting technological environment. Livengood
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and Reger () proposed the notion of ‘identity domain’, defined as a ‘cognitive competitive space’, which corresponds to a consensual view of the competition shared by top managers. In return, such a consensual view reinforces environmental perceptions of a firm’s organizational identity, allowing it to be more competitive in that domain. According to Evans (), the relationships between strategy and identity are largely informed by the way top managers view their competitors. Studying competitive networks and strategic groups in the radio station industry, she showed that cognitive associations with other organizations in the industry affected how strategic change was implemented. Beyond specific levels of analysis, the cross-level dynamics of strategy and identity are currently stimulating scholarly interest. Thus, Ashforth et al. () propose a model for explaining how identity formation is nested or embedded across levels of analysis. Irwin et al. () observed that identities in the recreational vehicles industry are nested in organizational, industry, and strategic group levels. They found that the three levels of identity need to be mobilized to enhance strategic conformity to external pressures, while organization and strategic group identities have greatest importance for strategic differentiation.
Consensus, Continuity, and Change Organizational identity constitutes a means to manage the perpetual tension between consensus, continuity, and change in strategy-making (Kjærgaard, ). In the entitative perspective, diverging identity interpretations are seen as problematic, and conducive to strategic drift (Ashforth and Mael, ; Kjærgaard, ; Pratt and Foreman, ; Ravasi and Phillips, ). The management of collective identity perceptions thus appears to be a way to maintain and restore consensus about an organization’s strategy. In the entitative perspective, scholars generally see strategic change as enabled or constrained by organizational identity. For instance, Rindova et al. () showed that new identity claims can provoke a rupture with an organization’s past, and thus help in legitimizing new strategic orientations. Similarly, Ravasi and Phillips () studied how managers redefine organizational identity to ensure coherence with desired new strategic investments. They showed how the management team used organizational identity as a symbolic resource to guide employees through strategy implementation. Organizational identity has also been studied as a resource to reduce the risk associated with the nonaccomplishment of strategic goals, by providing consensus and continuity in values and objectives, even when certain goals become unattainable (Fumasoli et al., ). Identity redefinition can help bridge conflicting strategic goals, by returning to foundational values that reconcile divergent institutional logics (Christiansen and Lounsbury, ; Kozica et al., ). Identity can also act as a filter through which strategists interpret their environment (Oliver, ). For instance, research has demonstrated how firms tend to gather substantial information about other firms with which they identify, and superficial information about firms with which they do not identify, thus influencing the basis upon which they evaluate their competitive environment and orient their strategic plans (Anand et al., ). As Sillince and Simpson (: ) put it: ‘Identity influences strategy not merely through unconscious habit or conscious heuristic, but because members act according to what
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kind of organization they believe they belong to’. Authors have also explained how organizational identity acts as an important factor in determining issue salience in strategic planning (Bundy et al., ). Here the relation between organizational identity and strategy is a practical one, with identity providing a resource or template for strategy elaboration and deployment. However, the formation and the implementation of a strategic project is not always enabled by identity; organizational identity can also constitute an impediment to strategic change (Kjærgaard, ). Strategic reorientations can be limited when employees resist and negotiate the transformation of their practices and knowledge because of the potential effect on organizational identity (Nag et al., ; Thomas et al., ). Indeed, O’Malley et al. () show that organizational identity can act as a substantial barrier to collaboration in the context of radical innovation.
Methodological Considerations Observed tensions between strategic change and identity formation depend heavily on the assumptions informing the research. It is characteristic of the entitative perspective to suffer from a teleological bias whereby strategy and identity relationships are treated as something principally designed by top managers at the organizational level (Hoon and Jacobs, ). As a result, the entitative perspective on organizational identity and strategy is vested with multiple dualisms and gaps that are inserted a priori such as: inside/outside the organization; individual/collective; management/other members to name a few, and these dualisms henceforth pre-define how the relationship between identity and strategy is studied. The entitative perspective generally focuses on overt identity claims and strategic goals expressed in corporate reports as well as official top management discourses and interviews (Ravasi and Canato, ). While these media certainly provide relevant cues about who the organization is and where it intends to go, they only express the tip of the iceberg, and often project an organizational image dedicated to reinforcing legitimacy for specific audiences (e.g. shareholders). In a way, they are ‘fictions’ of how organizational identity and strategy are produced and reproduced through consensual voices and actions of top managers and employees. Furthermore, there is also a tendency in the entitative perspective to make extensive use of semi-structured interviews (Ravasi and Canato, ). In so doing, this research accords strong importance to top managers’ cognitions and members’ characterizations of the defining traits of their organizations. Often, there is no reflection about the ontological status of these cognitive claims and beliefs. Consequently, there is a possibility of overstating the influence of organizational identity in studies of strategic change. Put differently, organizational strategy and identity are not fixed once and for all, or even for a given period, but they are part of a discursive construction continually evolving through the collective efforts of organizational members in interaction with each other and with external stakeholder groups. Moreover, we fail to discover what actually takes place when organizational identity is strategically played out and narratively constructed in day-to-day organizational life. These questions inform the subsequent two sections of this chapter.
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T ‘N’ P S I O
.................................................................................................................................. The second perspective on strategy and identities views both as a form of ‘narrative’, defined by Vaara et al. (: ) as ‘temporal, discursive constructions that provide a means for individual, social, and organizational sensemaking and sensegiving’ (see also Barry and Elmes, ; Brown and Thompson, ). Note that authors vary in the degree to which they see narrative as demanding completeness in terms of a beginning, a middle, and an end as well as a coherent ‘plot’ linking elements together. Following Boje (), recent definitions tend to view narratives as partial and fragmented (Vaara et al., ). Nevertheless, their temporal and discursive nature is a crucial feature.
The Nature of Strategy and Identity Strategies from a narrative viewpoint are thus seen to be stories that organizations tell about their futures (Barry and Elmes, ; Fenton and Langley, ). Similarly, organizations may also produce identity narratives that express overarching mission and values, building generally from their past (Sillince and Simpson, ). Considered as narratives, strategy and organizational identity flow into each other, since projections of future actions (strategy) will be less credible if they do not somehow build on, or plausibly reconstruct what an organization is, has been, and aspires to be (identity). As the mission and values of a firm are closely related to identity, and since strategy texts often use mission and values as a starting point, strategy and identity narratives (at the top management level at least) are likely to be somewhat conflated. In line with this, several studies focus on texts created by top management teams to capture both strategy and identity narratives. The understanding is that such texts are written in such a way as to resonate with internal and external stakeholders, a process Suddaby et al. () called ‘re-membering’ because of its potential to incite identification or buy-in. Indeed, Barry and Elmes () suggest that appealing strategic narratives combine features of credibility (connecting with identity) with those of defamiliarization, to generate excitement and hope for the future. Other authors have examined how successful strategic narratives created to influence external stakeholders (e.g. venture capitalists) embed the expression of a coherent and desirable organizational identity (Lounsbury and Glynn, ; Martens et al., ; Wry et al., ). For example, Martens et al. () showed that entrepreneurial business plans that constructed the organization as an aspiring leader with a track record were positively received, while those that projected an ambiguous identity were not. Organizational texts are not, however, the only source of narratives about organizational identity. Indeed, Brown () argues that ‘collective identities’ (group or organizational identity) are constituted by the totality of coexisting narratives relevant to those identities, be they articulated in texts, conversations, or other media. This perspective tends to reveal
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greater diversity, polyphony, and dissension than is usually recognized by the entitative perspective (Brown and Thompson, ). For example, Brown et al. () show how employees of a travel agency articulated distinct utilitarian, normative, and hedonist identity narratives. Although these conceptions appear partly shared and coherent with the firm’s strategy, the authors also reveal dissenting views, marginalized by the domination of the firm’s leaders. Given this, one might wonder how organizations can collectively construct overarching strategy and identity narratives when different people have different views. Robichaud et al.’s () theoretical paper on meta-conversation offers one approach to conceptualizing this process, by illustrating how a city manager is able to draw the identities of different groups (citizens, union members, representatives of different departments) into an overarching narrative (the meta-conversation) that includes them in the definition of the city as a macro-actor. Fenton and Langley () relate Robichaud et al.’s notion of metaconversation to Kuhn’s () concept of an ‘authoritative text’ that shapes the trajectory of the firm (i.e. its strategy), based on the negotiation of stakeholders’ consent. The notion of meta-conversation that unifies disparate identities within a larger integrated story has not, however, been strongly developed further despite its potential, and despite its link to strategy through the notion of authoritative text.
Levels of Analysis In contrast to the entitative perspective, a narrative perspective on strategy and identity invites richer linkages with lower levels of analysis because narratives of organizations collected from individuals often reveal group or personal identity concerns as well (Brown et al., ; Humphreys and Brown, ). Specifically, when individuals discuss strategy, they inevitably position themselves and their roles with respect to it. For example, Laine and Vaara () examine the discourses about strategy of three levels of organization members in an engineering firm. Interestingly, all three groups situate themselves as the ‘real’ strategists in opposition to others. In their narratives, top managers draw on strategy discourse to claim control over the organization, middle managers draw on entrepreneurial discourse to express their strategic autonomy, and engineers at the operating level claim to be doing the most important work based on their distinctive expertise and professional identity, dismissing managerial strategizing as trivial. Similarly, Brown et al. () showed how the four members of a video game project team were able to articulate a collective strategy and identity narrative. Yet their personal identity narratives simultaneously revealed the very different ways in which each member positioned their identity in relation to the project, valuing their own role, and undermining others. Other studies that focus on the relationship between strategic narratives and individual identity show how the identities of leaders may be aligned or not with strategy. For example, Beech and Johnson () examine how the evolving identities of different leaders of a firm (e.g. from street-fighter to nurturing leader) disrupted intended strategic narratives. O’Connor () examines the intersection of personal and strategic narratives in an entrepreneurial internet firm, showing how the founder’s personal identity stories came into conflict with generic stories of the organizational context and marketing strategy, resulting in difficulty in sustaining the company.
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Consensus, Continuity, and Change As in all forms of discourse, understanding the source of narratives, the circumstances in which they are generated, and their audience is crucially important in interpreting their meaning. Thus, narrative perspectives illuminate different elements of the strategy–identity nexus depending on these factors. Specifically, narrative studies focusing on top management discourses have tended to emphasize coherence and continuity despite strategic change. For example, Chreim () reveals how identity labels were maintained in the communications of two banking organizations, while the meanings of those labels shifted to accommodate changing strategies. Studying expressions of identity in the newsletter of a cooperative bank, Basque and Langley () further showed how references to the founder and his association with a ‘cooperative’ identity persisted over eighty years despite multiple changes in strategy. Coherence in narratives may also be constructed by ‘forgetting’ elements of past strategy, as Anteby and Molnár () showed in their study of the employee bulletins of an aero-space company. In all these studies, top managers’ control of the particular narratives examined generates a sense of coherence and continuity. This likely reflects a more or less explicit strategic intent oriented towards legitimation, identification, and acceptance of strategic change (Suddaby et al., ). In contrast, when the source of strategy and identity narratives is diversified, a more conflictual picture emerges (Brown and Thompson, ). Fragmentation and dissension are revealed, for example, in Humphreys and Brown’s () study of reactions to a college’s strategic plan promoting acquisition of university status. Members are shown to relate in a wide variety of ways to the college and the plan, ranging from organizational identification to organizational dis-identification, schizo-identification, and organization neutral identification. Studies that draw on multiple sources to capture expressions of strategy and organizational identity may also reveal shifting narratives over time as the locus of activity and dissension is displaced. For example, Vaara and Tienari’s () study of the merger of a financial services group reveals diverse identity narratives as different groups battle out future strategy. These include globalist identity narratives from corporate management aimed at legitimizing the merger, which are countered by nationalist identity narratives by the managers of the four merging banks (from different Nordic countries) aimed at preserving distinctiveness. The local narratives are further countered by a ‘Nordic identity’ narrative that attempts to transcend elements of nationalist storytelling. This is then resisted again by other managers who offer a renewed globalist identity narrative.
Methodological Considerations In contrast to the entitative perspective that develops understandings of strategy and identity by integrating data from diverse sources into a monological account, the narrative perspective focuses on diversity and difference. This approach focuses less on what strategy and identity are, and more on how these notions are constructed through text and talk to make and give sense to others. Thus narrative perspectives use textual data (Basque and Langley, ; Chreim, ; Martens et al., ) or interviews (Brown et al., ; Humphreys and Brown, ; Laine and Vaara, ; Vaara and Tienari, ), where individuals articulate their sensemaking narratives.
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The methodological concerns raised by this approach relate in the first instance to how narratives are defined. As mentioned, scholars have increasingly taken a liberal perspective on this, reaching beyond the complete story with obvious beginning, middle, and end (Boje, ; Vaara et al., ). This renders the approach more open and potentially richer, but it places strong reliance on the interpretive choices and skills of researchers in distilling narrative storylines from a collection of fragments, perhaps strung together rather haphazardly. A second limitation of this approach is that its focus on narratives from disparate sources allows one to identify the fragmentation of expressions of strategy and identity, but it generally falls short of showing how different narratives are collectively brought together in interaction and integrated (or not). While these studies reveal narrative convergence or divergence, we only vaguely glimpse the interactive and political work that organization members engage in to make strategies and expressions of identity ‘organizational’. The next section suggests ways that this process might be illuminated.
T ‘W’ P S I O
.................................................................................................................................. The third perspective throws new light on the dynamic and interactive processes constituting strategy and identity through its focus on ‘work’ (Oliver, ; Phillips and Lawrence, ). According to this perspective, strategy gives way to ‘strategizing’ or strategy work, while the notion of identity is supplanted by the more dynamic notion of ‘identity work’, implying active effort by individuals to influence how identities (individual, collective, or organizational) are constructed. Although it is the most recent and least developed of the three perspectives, we believe it holds considerable promise to transform our understanding of the linkages between strategy and identity in rich and more dynamic ways. Strategy scholars have become more interested in activities associated with the development of strategy or ‘strategizing’ (Johnson et al., ) as part of the field’s broader ‘practice turn’ (Whittington, ). Identity has experienced a similar re-emphasis on process and work. The concept of identity work was originally employed by sociologists Snow and Anderson () to describe the way homeless people attempted to generate personal identities of worth and dignity. Identity work was drawn into the organizational realm by Sveningsson and Alvesson (: ) who defined identity work as ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’. The notions of coherence and distinctiveness found in their definition bring the concept of identity work close to strategy work, which tends to share these same objectives.
The Nature of Strategy and Identity In general, the work perspective considers strategy and identity less as things organizations have, but rather as something they do. Work approaches thus avoid considering identity as
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a ‘thing’ or ‘end state’, but rather as a process of ‘becoming’. While narrative activities may sometimes be included in the broader category of work, this third perspective opens up a variety of non-discursive activities for consideration and analysis. In the work perspective, strategy and identity can be co-constituted through interactions (Oliver, ). To the extent that strategy is devoted to answering the classic of questions: ‘what business are we in?’ and/or ‘how do we/should we compete in those businesses?’, strategy work implicitly or explicitly involves organizational identity work, since the answers to those questions will inevitably contribute to reconstructing who the organization is seen to be. In addition to questions of ‘who are we’, organizational identity includes a collective sense of ‘what we do’ as an organization (Watkiss and Glynn, ), further linking the concept to strategy. As with other forms of work, organizational identity work assumes a processual perspective—evident in Kreiner and Murphy’s (: ) definition of the term as: ‘discursive, cognitive, and behavioral processes that help individuals and collectives engage to create, sustain, share, and/or change organizational identity’ (emphasis added). Organizational identity work renders more explicit the normative, emotional, and political dimensions of defining both identity and strategy (Watson, ), and it can be understood in non-textual ways beyond narrative descriptions. For example, through use of a multimodal technique involving LEGO materials, organizational strategists were prompted to make explicit more tacit identity understandings, with resulting interactions leading to the enactment of organizational identity change (Oliver and Roos, ).
Levels of Analysis While the entitative perspective focuses on ways in which identities may be similar across levels of analysis, and the narrative perspective studies identity narratives as overlapping yet parallel to each other, the work perspective reveals the way in which multiple levels of identity work are intertwined in interactions. Individuals engage in identity work as part of their larger project of ‘selfhood’, when they interact with others in culturally situated ways (Wieland, ). However, individual identity work can also affect identity at collective and organizational levels. For example, Boudreau and colleagues (: ) studied liminal actions by librarians to create a group identity in the face of new technology. Interactions between the identity work of strategists and teams or departments can have consequences for identity on all levels of scale—including the organization (Watson, ). The work perspective focuses on how these interactive struggles play out. For example, individual strategists may attempt to position themselves or their own group in favourable ways during an organization’s strategizing activities, which may in turn impact the identities and strategies of these groups and organizations.
Consensus, Continuity, and Change For strategists in established organizations, identity work often involves negotiation, and can be a site of political contestation. Unlike entitative conceptions, a work perspective on identity does not presuppose consensus. Indeed, organizational identity work can be highly politicized, with senior managers offering differing perspectives that ultimately influence
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strategic direction setting. Voss et al. () argue that differences of opinion concerning organizational identity can negatively impact firm performance, whereas Regnér and Zander () found that they can lead to new knowledge. More than narrative perspectives, work perspectives can fully examine how these interactions occur and how potential differences play out over time. In the context of new organizations, identity and strategy work generally occur in tandem. Unlike established organizations, start-ups do not have a past upon which to draw in establishing organizational identity. The identity of the founder (usually the ‘chief strategist’) tends to be very significant. Kroezen and Huegens () found that organizational identity in microbreweries was developed through processes of founder imprinting and enactment. In their study of a new academic entity, Gioia and colleagues found that organizational identity work involved negotiation of identity claims and performing liminal actions such as ‘trying out behaviours’ and ‘establishing new ways of working’ (Gioia et al., ). At times, strategic decisions appear to drive organizational identity work, as Fachin () found in an emergent technology organization, where participants engaged in ideological, practice, and boundaryrelated identity work. In other moments, organizational identity work appears to drive aspects of strategy. For example, Drori et al. () found that the identity work of an emergent organization drove aspects of the organization’s strategy related to aesthetics. Organizational identity work can involve creating, disrupting, and maintaining organizational identity, with an overemphasis on the latter potentially leading to path dependency and ‘lock-in’ (Kirchner, ). Other scholars in the work perspective have examined ways in which identity can be sustained by drawing on a romanticized past (Ybema, ). Identity sustenance can also involve reinterpretations of former identity claims. During a crisis in the LEGO group, Schultz and Hernes () found that the company was able to reconstruct identity in the present to enable future identity claims. By restoring foundational values in the present, it was able to make better claims for the future. Other forms of maintenance organizational identity work pertain to identity regulation. Managerial practices have been found to regulate identity work in the context of a merger (Langley et al., ), as many organizational members can be highly attached to certain practices impacting the success of the merger as a strategic initiative.
Methodological Considerations A work perspective on identity and strategy presents a number of methodological challenges. The first concerns data collection. Understanding identity work over time calls for intensive observation or ethnography. Conversations and interactions often need to be studied. Adopting a ‘strong process ontology’, Fachin’s () study of identity work in an emergent peer to peer network involved a variety of methodological techniques, including ethnographic observations, video-recorded meetings, and emails. A key challenge relates to the processual nature of organizational identity work—it never really congeals into organizational identity, as it is always ‘becoming’, making it difficult to see in the data. To address this challenge, Fachin and Langley () proposed a ‘withness’ thinking approach, placing the researcher in direct relation with the researched. Such approaches require intensive involvement of the researcher within the processes of identity ‘becoming’, yet they may help advance understanding of identity work at various levels.
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D F R
.................................................................................................................................. We have seen how strategy and identities, and the relationships between them are viewed quite differently depending on the ontological perspective taken (see Table .). We now return to each of the subthemes discussed above to consider directions for future research.
The Nature of Strategy and Identity In terms of the nature of strategy and identity, one might first ask whether the three perspectives considered are complementary or incommensurable. In other words, would there be value in combining them, or are their underlying assumptions so different that they are best developed in parallel? Some scholars have argued that organizational identity should be seen as both an entity and a process (Kreiner and Murphy, ), and that there is thus no incompatibility between speaking about identity as a thing and ‘identity work’ in the same study, since the second can be seen as the mechanism through which the first is transformed. Others adopting a strong processual view (Fachin and Langley, ) would argue that the appearance of identity as an established ‘thing’ is an illusion sustained only through ongoing recursive identity work, and that it is this work that is of greater interest. There may be more compatibility between the ‘narrative’ and ‘work’ perspectives since narrativizing can be viewed as one form of identity work (Anteby and Molnár, ), although other forms also exist (interactions, material practices, etc.). Similar debates centre on the notion of strategy. While the strategy-as-practice perspective has settled on a definition of strategy that focuses on ‘work’ (something people do), and against an entitative conceptions (something organizations ‘have’) (Whittington, ), others have pointed out that strategy work nevertheless produces strategy as a trajectory of organizational-level actions (Kuhn, ). Moreover, strategy work itself may also take narrative forms through talk and text (Brown and Thompson, ; Fenton and Langley, ). In other words, the clear distinctions made in the first part of this chapter may be fuzzier when examined more closely. We think, however, that there is value in these distinctions because they direct attention to different aspects of the phenomena. Moreover, it is clear that more processual ‘work’-based aspects have received less attention, opening up novel research questions. Notably, the work perspective has significant potential for better understanding the political nature of organizational identity and strategy work (Watson, ). This tends to be glossed over completely by the entitative perspective. It is more central for the narrative perspective where the polyphonic nature of narratives is often revealed. Yet studies based in the narrative perspective stop short of focusing on the actual interactions where political strategy and identity work occur. The work perspective opens up this possibility.
Levels of Analysis The multiple ways in which identity at different levels interacts with strategy also merit further study. We have already noted that the identity work of individual strategists can influence
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organizational strategizing processes, but more indirect and multi-level phenomena also merit further examination. For example, what happens when tensions become evident between the identity projects of individual strategists, departments, and/or organizations? How do such identity tensions play out over time during strategizing processes? In addition, how might such strategizing processes recursively impact these identity work projects at all levels of analysis? One particularly illuminating context for studying multi-level identity dynamics is the establishment of new organizations. When firms are starting up, their founders may be the only organizational members, and they are often engaged in personal identity work to establish their legitimacy while at the same time working to construct identities for their emergent organizations. Scholars from the entitative perspective might focus on the extent to which founders attempt to establish organizational identities that are consistent with their personal identities, while balancing the need to generate legitimacy and funding (Lounsbury and Glynn, ; Martens et al., ) with strategic imperatives to be ‘different.’ A narrative perspective might focus on ways in which founders use personal identity stories as a means of attracting interest in their businesses, or the manner in which such stories influence overall strategy narratives. Finally, a work perspective might examine the discursive and nondiscursive ways in which founders interact with stakeholders as they engage in strategizing.
Consensus, Continuity, and Change When they engage in strategizing, organizations face central dilemmas regarding their organizational identity (Gioia et al., ; Kjærgaard, ). They have to reconcile the tension between consensual and divergent identities as well as the tension between continuity and change. The literature could do more to address these tensions directly. For instance, regarding the tension between consensual and divergent identity in strategy-making, the three perspectives tend to construct realities differently. While the entitative perspective emphasizes the consensual aspect of strategy and identity, the narrative and work perspectives see more divergence. However, there is a need to better understand the processes by which strategy and identity come to be shared, or diverge over time, if they do. Studies of the emergence of strategy and identity in nascent organizations might assist with this (Drori et al., ; Fachin, ). When looking at the change–continuity tension, the literature on strategy and identity has tended to focus more on situations of change than on continuity. More research could be done on organizational endurance, focusing on the relative continuity of identity despite recurring episodes of strategic change, something that emerges more clearly from a narrative perspective where longer timelines are studied (Basque and Langley, ; Chreim, ). More specifically, there is a need to explore the interactional and political processes by which organizational continuity or persistence as well as collective memory (Anteby and Molnár, ) unfold over time, even though these may be interspersed with periods of intense strategic change.
Methodological Considerations The data collection methods favoured in the past (notably those mobilized by the entitative and narrative perspectives) have been archival sources or interviews. Both fit with the
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self-referential nature of identity as a positioning versus others, whether shareholders, stakeholders, or researchers. However, to further advance knowledge of the tension between consensual and divergent identity as well as that between continuity and change, we urge scholars of strategy and identity to conduct more ethnographic research that adopts a strong relational (Fachin and Langley, ) or critical approach (Laine and Vaara, ), and that in so doing gets closer to the interactions around strategy and identity that matter to insiders. This could also improve researchers’ reflexivity about what they consider to be strategic and identity matters. Due to the increasing availability of textual and non-textual interactive data, the work perspective appears to offer the most exciting new opportunities. Approaches that embrace material aspects of identity or strategy work, like the object-mediated ‘serious play’ methods used by Oliver and Roos (), or other visual techniques may be useful. Video methods documenting the development of shared understandings of identity and strategy are attracting increased interest (Gylfe et al., ). Finally, online interactions through social media and email may be studied by ‘cyberethnography’ (Robinson and Schulz, ) or ‘netnography’ (Rouleau et al., ). The combination of such innovative techniques for qualitative research offers multiple opportunities for developing further insight into strategy and identity work practices (Abdallah et al., ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. The notions of strategy and identity have a clear family resemblance, the first focusing on what we do, and the second on who we are. There are, however, multiple ways of bringing them together. This chapter has explored the possibilities and offered directions for future research.
N . Authors’ names are alphabetical reflecting equal contributions.
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Ashforth, B. E. and Mael, F. A. (). ‘Oranizational Identity and Strategy as a Context for the Individual’. Advances in Strategic Management, , –. Ashforth, B. E., Rogers, K. M., and Corley, K. G. (). ‘Identity in Organizations: Exploring CrossLevel Dynamics’. Organization Science, (), –. Balmer, J. M. T., Stuart, H., and Greyser, S. A. (). ‘Aligning Identity and Strategy: Corporate Branding at British Airways in the Late th Century’. California Management Review, (), –. Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (). ‘Strategy Retold: Toward a Narrative View of Strategic Discourse’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Basque, J. and Langley, A. (). ‘Invoking Alphonse: The Founder Figure as a Historical Resource for Organizational Identity Work’. Organization Studies, (), –. Beech, N. and Johnson, P. (). ‘Discourses of Disrupted Identities in the Practice of Strategic Change: The Mayor, the Street-Fighter and the Insider-Out’. Journal of Organizational Change Management, (), –. Boje, D. M. (). Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage. Boudreau, M., Serrano, C., and Larson, K. (). ‘IT-Driven Identity Work: Creating a Group Identity in a Digital Environment’. Information and Organization, (), –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘A Narrative Approach to Collective Identities’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Brown, A. D., Humphreys, M., and Gurney, P. M. (). ‘Narrative, Identity and Change: A Case Study of Laskarina Holidays’. Journal of Organizational Change Management, (), –. Brown, A. D., Stacey, P., and Nandhakumar, J. (). ‘Making Sense of Sensemaking Narratives’. Human Relations, (), –. Brown, A. D. and Thompson, E. R. (). ‘A Narrative Approach to Strategy-as-Practice’. Business History, (), –. Bundy, J., Shropshire, C., and Buchholtz, A. K. (). ‘Strategic Cognition and Issue Salience: Toward an Explanation of Firm Responsiveness to Stakeholder Concerns’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Chreim, S. (). ‘The Continuity–Change Duality in Narrative Texts of Organizational Identity’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Christiansen, L. H. and Lounsbury, M. (). ‘Strange Brew: Bridging Logics via Institutional Bricolage and the Reconstitution of Organizational Identity’. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, B, –. Corley, K. G. (). ‘Defined by Our Strategy or Our Culture? Hierarchical Differences in Perceptions of Organizational Identity and Change’. Human Relations, (), –. Corley, K. G. and Gioia, D. A. (). ‘Identity Ambiguity and Change in the Wake of a Corporate Spin-Off ’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Drori, I., Honig, B., and Sheaffer, Z. (). ‘The Life Cycle of an Internet Firm: Scripts, Legitimacy, and Identity’. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, (), –. Evans, S. K. (). ‘Defining Distinctiveness: The Connections between Organizational Identity, Competition, and Strategy in Public Radio Organizations’. International Journal of Business Communication, (), –. Fachin, F. (). Organizational Identity Work in Open Innovation Entrepreneurship. Montreal: HEC Montreal. Fachin, F. and Langley, A. (). ‘Researching Organizational Concepts Processually: The Case of Identity’. In C. Cassell, A. Cunliffe, and G. Grandy (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods: History and Traditions. London: Sage, pp. –. Fenton, C. and Langley, A. (). ‘Strategy as Practice and the Narrative Turn’. Organization Studies, (), –. Fumasoli, T., Pinheiro, R., and Stensaker, B. (). ‘Handling Uncertainty of Strategic Ambitions: The Use of Organizational Identity as a Risk-Reducing Device’. International Journal of Public Administration, (–), –.
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Gioia, D. A., Patvardhan, S. D., Hamilton, A. L., and Corley, K. G. (). ‘Organizational Identity Formation and Change’. Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Gioia, D. A., Price, K. N., Hamilton, A. L., and Thomas, J. B. (). ‘Forging an Identity: An InsiderOutsider Study of Processes Involved in the Formation of Organizational Identity’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Gioia, D. A., Schultz, M., and Corley, K. G. (). ‘Organizational Identity, Image, and Adaptive Instability’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Gylfe, P., Franck, H., Lebaron, C., and Mantere, S. (). ‘Video Methods in Strategy Research: Focusing on Embodied Cognition’. Strategic Management Journal, (), –. Hoon, C. and Jacobs, C. D. (). ‘Beyond belief: Strategic Taboos and Organizational Identity in Strategic Agenda Setting’. Strategic Organization, (), –. Humphreys, M. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Narratives of Organizational Identity and Identification: A Case Study of Hegemony and Resistance’. Organization Studies, (), –. Huy, Q. N. (). ‘How Middle Managers’ Group-Focus Emotions and Social Identities Influence Strategy Implementation’. Strategic Management Journal, (), –. Irwin, J., Lahneman, B., and Parmigiani, A. (). ‘Nested Identities as Cognitive Drivers of Strategy’. Strategic Management Journal, (), –. Johnson, G., Melin, L., and Whittington, R. (). ‘Micro Strategy and Strategizing: Towards an Activity-Based View’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Kirchner, S. (). ‘How Organizations Become Enduring: Disentangling the Organizational Identity Paradox’. In G. Schreyogg and J. Sydow (eds.), Self-Reinforcing Processes in and among Organizations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. –. Kjærgaard, A. L. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Strategy: An Empirical Study of Organizational Identity’s Influence on the Strategy-Making Process’. International Studies of Management and Organization, (), –. Kozica, A. M. F., Gebhardt, C., Müller-Seitz, G., and Kaiser, S. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Paradox: An Analysis of the “Stable State of Instability” of Wikipedia’s Identity’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Kreiner, G. and Murphy, C. (). ‘Organizational Identity Work’. In In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity: –. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kroezen, J. J. and Huegens, P. (). ‘Organizational Identity Formation: Processes of Identity Imprinting and Enactment in the Dutch Microbrewing Landscape’. In M. Schultz, S. Maguire, A. Langley, and H. Tsoukas (eds.), Constructing Identity in and around Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kuhn, T. (). ‘A Communicative Theory of the Firm: Developing an Alternative Perspective on Intra-Organizational Power and Stakeholder Relationships’. Organization Studies, (–), –. Laine, P.-M. and Vaara, E. (). ‘Struggling Over Subjectivity: A Discursive Analysis of Strategic Development in an Engineering Group’. Human Relations, (), –. Langley, A., Golden-Biddle, K., Reay, T., Denis, J.-L., Hébert, Y., Lamothe, L., and Gervais, J. (). ‘Identity Struggles in Merging Organizations: Renegotiating the Sameness–Difference Dialectic’. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, (), –. Liu, Y. and Grey, C. (). ‘History, Gendered Space and Organizational Identity: An Archival Study of a University Building’. Human Relations, (), –. Livengood, R. S. and Reger, R. K. (). ‘That’s Our Turf! Identity Domains and Competitive Dynamics’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Lounsbury, M. and Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship: Stories, Legitimacy, and the Acquisition of Resources’. Strategic Management Journal, (–), –. Martens, M. L., Jennings, J. E., and Jennings, P. D. (). ‘Do the Stories They Tell Get Them the Money They Need? The Role of Entrepreneurial Narratives in Resource Acquisition’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –.
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Nag, R., Corley, K. G., and Gioia, D. A. (). ‘The Intersection of Organizational Identity, Knowledge, and Practice: Attempting Strategic Change via Knowledge Grafting’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. O’Connor, E. (). ‘Storied Business: Typology, Intertextuality, and Traffic in Entrepreneurial Narrative’. Journal of Business Communication, (), –. O’Malley, L., O’Dwyer, M., McNally, R. C., and Murphy, S. (). ‘Identity, Collaboration and Radical Innovation: The Role of Dual Organisation Identification’. Industrial Marketing Management, (), –. Oliver, D. (). ‘Identity Work as a Strategic Practice’. In D. Golsorkhi, L. Rouleau, D. Seidl, and E. Vaara (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Oliver, D. and Roos, J. (). ‘Beyond Text: Constructing Organizational Identity Mulitmodally’. British Journal of Management, (), –. Phillips, N. and Lawrence, T. B. (). ‘The Turn to Work in Organization and Management Theory: Some Implications for Strategic Organization’. Strategic Organization, (), –. Pratt, M. G. and Foreman, P. O. (). ‘Classifying Managerial Responses to Multiple Organizational Identities’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Ravasi, D. and Canato, A. (). ‘How Do I Know Who You Think You Are? A Review of Research Methods on Organizational Identity’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Ravasi, D. and Phillips, N. (). ‘Strategies of Alignment: Organizational Identity Management and Strategic Change at Bang & Olufsen’. Strategic Organization, (), –. Regnér, P. and Zander, U. (). ‘Knowledge and Strategy Creation in Multinational Companies’. Management International Review, (), –. Rindova, V., Dalpiaz, E., and Ravasi, D. (). ‘A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation’. Organization Science, (), –. Robichaud, D., Giroux, H., and Taylor, J. R. (). ‘The Metaconversation: The Recursive Property of Language as a Key to Organizing’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Robinson, L. and Schulz, J. (). ‘New Avenues for Sociological Inquiry: Evolving Forms of Ethnographic Practice’. Sociology, (), –. Rouleau, L., De Rond, M., and Musca, G. (). ‘From the Ethnographic Turn to New Forms of Organizational Ethnography’. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, (), –. Rughase, O. G. (). Identity and Strategy: How Individual Visions Enable the Design of a Market Strategy that Works. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Schultz, M. and Hernes, T. (). ‘A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity’. Organization Science, (), –. Sillince, J. A. A. and Simpson, B. (). ‘The Strategy and Identity Relationship: Towards a Processual Understanding’. Advances in Strategic Management, , –. Snow, D. A. and Anderson, L. (). ‘Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities’. American Journal of Sociology, (), –. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Quinn Trank, C. (). ‘Re-membering: Rhetorical History as Identity Work’. In M. G. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, (), –. Thomas, R., Sargent, L. D., and Hardy, C. (). ‘Managing Organizational Change: Negotiating Meaning and power-Resistance Relations’. Organization Science, (), –. Tripsas, M. (). ‘Technology, Identity, and Inertia through the Lens of “The Digital Photography Company” ’. Organization Science, (), –. Vaara, E., Sonenshein, S., and Boje, D. (). ‘Narratives as Sources of Stability and Change in Organizations: Approaches and Directions for Future Research’. The Academy of Management Annals, (), –.
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Vaara, E. and Tienari, J. (). ‘On the Narrative Construction of Multinational Corporations: An Antenarrative Analysis of Legitimation and Resistance in a Cross-Border Merger’. Organization Science, (), –. Voss, Z. G., Cable, D., M., and Voss, G., B. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Firm Performance: What Happens When Leaders Disagree About “Who We Are?” ’. Organization Science, (), –. Watkiss, L. and Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Materiality and Identity: How Organizational Products, Artifacts, and Practices Instantiate Organizational Identity’. In M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Organizational Identity Work as Valuable Analytical Resources’. In M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. E. Ashforth, and D. Ravasi (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Whetten, D. A. (). ‘Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Whittington, R. (). ‘Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research’. Organization Studies, (), –. Wieland, S. M. B. (). ‘Ideal Selves as Resources for the Situated Practice of Identity’. Management Communication Quarterly, (), –. Wry, T., Lounsbury, M., and Glynn, M. A. (). ‘Legitimating Nascent Collective Identities: Coordinating Cultural Entrepreneurship’. Organization Science, (), –. Ybema, S. (). ‘Talk of Change: Temporal Contrasts and Collective Identities’. Organization Studies, (), –.
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LOOKING FORWARD: THE FUTURE OF IDENTITIES IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH ........................................................................................................................
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Abstract The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organizational, institutional, political, and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixe is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books, and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability, and security through identity. In this chapter, the authors expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity—discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control, and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of boundaries and borders.
I
.................................................................................................................................. W the social sciences generally there is a proliferation of studies of identity. In management and organization studies alone, Thompson Reuters Web of Science reveals more than , peer-reviewed articles published with ‘identity’ or ‘identities’ in their title (Brown, : ). Contemporary searches in this database and others (e.g. ABI/Inform and Web of Science) suggest there are considerably more in the years since Brown’s search was undertaken; an estimate of , peer-reviewed articles on the subject within the management field alone. Moreover, this trend concerning the ‘vexed question of identity’ (du Gay et al., : ) seems hardly to be on the wane considering that here we are contributing one of fifty more pieces in this handbook, which we could say, speaks volumes. It is claimed that ‘identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today’, for what appears to be fundamental to most people is a ‘demand for recognition’ (Fukuyama, : ii). However, as with many authors, Fukuyama does not
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explore let alone interrogate this demand. In organization studies, Sveningsson and Alvesson (: ) describe identity as one of ‘the most popular topics in contemporary organization studies’ but they, like numerous other scholars, also take this for granted. One of the aims of this chapter is to question the prevalent focus upon documenting how identity manifests itself, particularly in strategies of identity work. While this may well be necessary insofar as identity is one of the most pressing concerns for people, it is not sufficient. For this reason, our objective is to deconstruct pervasive assumptions that it is adequate to describe identity antics without interrogating them. While social identity and self-categorization theorists remain attached to views of identity as an outcome of socialization which prepares people for roles in society that sustain social order (Berndt, ; McCall and Simmons, ), most contemporary critical and poststructural scholars have broadly abandoned these functionalist arguments and adopt a social constructionist and/or performative perspective. In so doing, this literature demonstrates how identity has to be worked at (identity work), if individuals are to gain the social recognition and status they seek. However, within this voluminous literature, very few authors in the field seek to interrogate identity (cf. Collinson, ; Knights and Willmott, ) so as to challenge the way that our attachments to identities can have the most horrific of consequences. In short, the literature simply describes identity and its practices rather than reflecting on their potentially lethal effects, when, as Marx would have argued, the point is to change ‘things’ if they are problematic. The remainder of this chapter is organized around three themes: first, we challenge the literature on identity before tracing its failure to interrogate and deconstruct identity so as to reveal its self-defeating features; second, we review the contemporary literature concerning identity work to uncover the multifarious exemplifications of how individuals, organizations, and institutions manage their attachments to identity; and third, identity politics, where we reflect on its positive and negative consequences or what might be seen as the light or non-unitary aspects of power relations by contrast with the dark side of totalizing forms of domination.
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.................................................................................................................................. As a concept, identity has a very long history, extending back to Descartes ([] ) whose famous ‘I think therefore I am’ formulation depicted it as a function of the mind, to Locke ([] ) who believed identity to be derived from self-consciousness in providing a sense of psychological continuity, and to Hume who saw it as a bundle of perceptions (Thiel, ). It was only with Hegel’s theorizing of master–slave relationships, in which he argued that identity was contingent on the recognition of the other (Grier, ; Kojève, ), that more social, rather than individualistic, conceptions emerged. Excluding the Buddhist tradition extending back to the sixth century , Hegel also was one of the earliest thinkers to understand the paradox of identity insofar as recognition by a slave could be discounted by virtue of the slave’s inferior status but recognition by the master was dependent on the slave’s continued subjugation. Consequently, identity is contingent on social equality—a condition that so far has only occurred through idealistic denials of material reality.
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Only in the s, when symbolic interactionism became a prominent focus of social psychology and sociology, did identity begin to attract the sustained attention of social scientists (Blumer, ; Mead, ). The self was understood by Mead as a function of how the individual sees others’ attitudes of her or himself and is, thereby, experienced almost like an ‘object’, mirrored through the expectations of significant others. Obviously, the self, or what eventually began to be called identity, is never just a passive object or ‘me’ of others’ expectations since there is an active ‘I’ that mediates to interpret them in accordance with prior experiences and future desires. Moreover, for Mead, there was also a ‘generalized other’ or what might be seen as society at large with its institutions, organizations, norms, rules, and regulations that provides a context through which the multifarious interpretations involved in the formation of self and identity are made. Identities, however, are never really ‘made’ insofar as they cannot be finished, or complete, for they are based on ‘the unending and recursive perceptions of others’ perceptions of the self ’, while of course ‘the identities of others are constituted through exactly the same processes’ (Knights and Clarke, : ). Within these perpetual cycles, each ‘presentation of the self ’ involves an attempt to claim a specific identity (Goffman, , ), but these endeavours can never be assured, since they are necessarily contingent on the judgement of others. Identities, then, are always precarious, temporary, and subject to diverse sets of accounts, interpretations, perceptions, and expectations that are forever changing. We must also challenge those notions of ‘self ’ that seek to theorize individuals as being separate from social relations in general. Norbert Elias explicates this point, when he rejects the dualism between individual or society, on the basis that it is both artificial and reductionist, since neither can exist without the other, while at the same time each is part of the other, ‘nested’, entangled and always involved in a dynamic figuration, and reconfiguration (Elias, ) which, despite being self-evident, often is ignored. In neglecting this, we simply facilitate individualistic preoccupations with, and attachments to, identity, including those impossible attempts to secure order and stability for ourselves in an uncertain world. Analyses of identity have passed through a range of approaches from behaviourism and functionalism through symbolic interactionism and social constructionism to the more recent contributions of performativity and deconstructionism. We will not give much attention to behaviourists who focused only on how identity was an effect of responding to stimuli (Skinner, ), or psychologists that regard identity as fulfilling an essential need. Nor do we think it of value to follow functionalists who were more concerned with how the identities of individuals were simply an outcome of socialization into the norms of society and their contribution to social order (Parsons, ). As one critic expressed it, ‘meaning is either taken for granted or played down [ . . . ] in contemporary social science and psychological science’ (Blumer, : ) and yet meaning is at the very heart of any sense of identity (Knights and Willmott, ). By contrast, symbolic interactionists challenge the failure of behaviourists and functionalists to theorize the importance of meaning, in the form of signs and symbols, rather than simply presume it to reside either in internal psychological states of mind (e.g. attitudes, needs) or in abstractions such as social order. In understanding meaning to occur through self-conscious processes involving internal and external conversations, where it is continually generated, negotiated, and/or reformulated, symbolic interactionists can better interrogate identity. For we agree that it is through self-conscious learning in interactions with
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others that we gain a sense of identity as seemingly ‘discrete and responsible beings in the world’ (Knights and Willmott, : ). Social constructionists have tended to follow a symbolic interactionist approach in seeing the self as some kind of coherent, non-fragmented whole, whereas poststructuralists recognize that identity is created, developed, sustained, or transformed through its interactive performances albeit, following Foucault (), broadly as an outcome of relationships with specific power/knowledge discourses (Faas, : ). Notwithstanding the Foucauldian ‘death of the Subject’ thesis that would deny humans an autonomous base from which to enact an identity (Foucault, ; Knights and Kerfoot, ), poststructuralists argue that despite multiplicities, contradictions, fragmentations, and instabilities, identity or subjectivity has some kind of core of coherence and continuity that ‘is enunciated as an “I” ’, but this is always grounded in ‘discourses, matrices of meaning, and historical memories’ that enable particular identifications (Brah, : –). However, a multiplicity of identifications has now displaced the notion of a singular identity, reflecting a whole range of diversities in relation to ability, age, class, culture, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, regionality, and nationality to the extent that a discourse on intersectionality was generated or revived to represent it (Crenshawe, ). This reflected the cultural turn in social science (Anthias, ), whereby matters of meaning and identity displaced the prior focus on political economy, eventually resulting in identity politics (Crenshawe, ) as the dominant discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, which we return to later in this chapter. While having a major impact within feminism and diversity studies concerned with discrimination and inequality, intersectionality discourses largely remain focused on identity without interrogating it. A variant of this came with the idea of hybridity, where a racial or ethnic identity coincided with a political one such as the nation state, resulting in a black American identity, for example (Bhabha, ). By contrast, a hyphenated identity would link a person to a specific geographical region of birth that is different from their place of residence, as in the example of a Caribbean-British person, so that there is a perpetual mediation between ‘two disparate cultures and territories’ (Faas, : ). While this distinction is important in understanding the different experiences of those who attach themselves equally to two or more identities and those who perhaps have emigrated from where they originated, it also offers little by way of interrogation. If identity is not to be interrogated then it is suggested that we should abandon it in favour of ‘affinity’, since the crisis of identity only reproduces ‘endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity’ (Haraway, : –). In addition to disavowing any belief in a unitary essence that is often the identity project, this shift to affinity would also divert us from individualistic and competitive pressures to claim an elevated status for the self. In its place would be the collective, communal, and embodied sharing of political and moral values together with concerns for socially beneficial transformations. We wholeheartedly support this but such a move, we argue, demands a more thorough investigation of identity itself, otherwise the use of affinity risks merely changing the terminology without transforming those attachments to stability and preoccupations with security surrounding it. As Hegel argued, one of the paradoxes of identity is that it involves us striving to be ‘different from everyone else’ (Pullen, : ), to be distinctive and unique, whilst at the same time craving recognition, by belonging to groups with which we identify. For ‘identity is about belonging, about what you have in common with some people and what
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differentiates you from others’ (Rutherford, : ). Insofar as it relates to how individuals identify with a particular community, identification is seen as distinct from identity (Skeggs, ). However, this is little more than a focus on the verbal or active notion since identification or identity often manifests itself through an attachment to ‘a particular doctrine, set of ideas, factions, gender, race, organization, culture, nation, etc.’ (Knights and Clarke, : ), which through various exercises of power can elevate, denigrate, include, exclude, subjugate, or liberate a range of subjectivities. Such identifications are simply temporary focuses of attachment since they are ‘never fully and finally made; [rather] they are incessantly constituted’ (Butler, : ). As such our identities tend to be confirmed, denied, and underwritten according to singular rather than diverse assumptions of what might constitute security and ‘belonging’ in a context that is as diverse as it is prejudiced, as ‘plural as it is xenophobic’ (Hall, : ). The attempts we make to secure ourselves are precisely why it is self-defeating, because it is the very act of pursuit that renders it ‘a constantly retreating phantom, [where] the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead’ (Watts, : ). The more we earnestly chase security, the more it slips out of reach, and yet this most fundamental understanding is often absent within studies of identity in the MOS literature (Knights and Clarke, ). Working on our identities seduces us with the promise that we can secure what can never be secured.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a recent article, Brown declares that many scholars have ‘delighted in’ the ‘significant metaphor’ of “identity work” and the ‘experience of individual agency that it foregrounds’ (: ). By contrast, we ‘problematise, challenge, and treat with ambivalence, ideas of excessive individualism’ (Knights and Clarke, : ) that are pervasive in contemporary texts on identity and identity work. In this regard, we highlight the self-defeating aspects of identity work that may encourage expectations for, or even an entitlement to, the somewhat ‘narcissistic need for self-fulfillment’ (Lasch, : ). In subscribing to this mantra (Costea et al., ) we risk becoming ensnared in a self-perpetuating, vicious spiral of fixation with ourselves. The management and organization studies literature has tended uncritically to reinforce an ethics of individualistic success, whereby identity work, or ‘a story we tell about ourselves’ (Mishler, ), may simply serve as a means to climb the greasy pole. The harder we work on our identities, the closer we get to securing what we earnestly desire, or so the rhetoric goes. Moreover, individualized associations with contemporary working life (career, income, bonuses, elite positions, success) represent a taken-for-granted Holy Grail, displacing any attempts to constitute, bond, and embody ourselves in ways that prevent us being separated off from one another. It is this failure to embrace a multiplicity of interdependencies (Elias, ), or affinities, that can leave us isolated, anxious, and oblivious as to how anyone outside of a small elite will ever experience the (transient) sense of elation concerning achievement/success (Knights and Clarke, ). What is more invidious perhaps, is how individualized social relations often leave most of society to interpret their personal lack of success as a failure to realize their
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potential (Bauman, : ; Costea et al., ; Newton, ; Sennett and Cobb, ). Thus, just as we become invested in Scrooge’s ultimate rehabilitation and redemption in A Christmas Carol, we become enraptured by promises of what might be achieved, in a future yet-to-come. Through individual career projects (Clarke and Knights, ; Grey, ), we feel similarly obliged, even compelled, to continue ‘working’ on our potential selves (Land and Taylor, ). Since individuals and society are forever entangled within a contingent world (Becker, ), there should be little doubt that autonomously ‘authoring’ (Brown, ) our own identities is unrealizable. Such representations, however, are not uncommon, for the concept of identity is so often portrayed or theorized in this illusory manner, rather than perceived as the contested, fragmentary, contradictory, and contingent phenomenon that it is in practice. Yet numerous articles merely describe, rather than interrogate the centrality of identity, and fall into the trap of conflating attempts at, with the guarantee of, securing particular identities. Snow and Anderson (: ) use the term ‘identity work’ to describe ‘the range of activities individuals engage in to create, present and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept’. Another example by Brown (: ) states that identities are ‘most often regarded as temporary “fixes” concocted by individuals to impose a degree of coherence in the face of assorted vulnerabilities’. Apart from both authors presuming or exaggerating the levels of intentionality on the part of individuals, Snow and Anderson assume unproblematically that it is possible for individuals to ‘create’ and ‘sustain’ identities in a completely unfettered manner, while Brown could give more weight to the fundamental premise that identities cannot simply be concocted, since they are always contingent on the ‘other’. Despite recognizing how identity is situated within ‘complex social interactions with others who may agree, but are more likely to seek to negotiate or even contest our preferred versions of who we are’ (Brown, : ), he persists in viewing ‘identity work’ as intentional. It would make more sense to highlight how identity is always ontingent, and often an unintended outcome of activities that are predictable only in their precariousness. Our focus here is primarily with the negative effects and potentially lethal consequences of attachments to identity, and how these become exacerbated when its centrality is automatically taken-for-granted, as in everyday life and in much of the literature. Pullen and Rhodes (: ) warn that identity work is no more than a form of excessive ‘productive narcissism’ to ‘maintain’ an individual’s ‘idealized self-image’, which can only serve to engender ‘heightened insecurity, escalating personal demands, intensifying pressures on identity, and acute competition’. Before turning to the exploration of these specific ideas, we acknowledge Brown’s question, as to whether identity work ‘leads to an amoral understanding of identities’ (Brown, : ). However, we would go further, by asking if it is the field of studies relating to identity work (and to a certain extent also identity), that have rendered these processes amoral, because identity scholars have given so little attention to examining critically their conditions and consequences. Setting aside these criticisms of the identity work literature, there are other dangers in succumbing to its enticements, for the rise of neoliberalism has ensured that both careers and rewards have become increasingly individualized (Morgan, ). Accordingly, the responsibility for both success and failure is ours alone (Costea et al., ). This is usually aligned to the elevation of the values associated with ‘meritocracy’, together with its organizational apparatus (e.g. appraisal, rankings, targets, bonuses, talent management, etc.), that Young
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([] ) was at pains to discredit. This failure to read Young’s thesis as it was intended, but instead to see it as legitimizing a new form of meritocratic elitism, can be seen with hindsight, to have contributed to creating the conditions of resentment that have inspired an identity politics of the New Right in Western democracies, which we discuss in the final section of this chapter. It is unsurprising that identity work is so pervasive, because our lives and labour are organized around political processes that reflect, reinforce, or transform social relations and the identities of those engaged in them. Work and organization can be likened to a pinball machine where balls are ‘careering around’, crashing into one another with some fortuitously winning, and others losing points as the game proceeds (Knights and Murray, ). What is at stake in this metaphorical pinball game is our sense of self, because anxiety or doubt about our own expertise or competence can easily become a threat to identity through feelings of personal inadequacy and even ‘shame’ (Schwartz, : ). This sense of not living up to the impossible burdens of identity (work), originating in both the misreading of meritocracy and exacerbated by neoliberal demands, can quickly lead to stress and problems of mental health (Pilgrim, ). Relatedly, these issues are not helped alleviated by the proliferation of a self-help literature that often serves only to reflect and reinforce the stigma of failure. According to the UK Institute of Directors (IOD), businesses are woefully ill equipped to deal with increasing mental health issues, stress, depression, and anxiety that, combined, are the largest reason for workplace absences (Chapman, ). Interestingly, but perhaps predictably, the IOD does not reflect on how the workplace may well contribute significantly to the problem, but simply passes it back to the individual who may be suffering. Of course, when it begins to affect the business because of absenteeism, concerns are aroused because ‘bottom line’ implications are something to take seriously. In short, it is counterproductive if employees are too ill to be productive, so organizations may choose to take remedial action under the auspices of providing ‘help’ from a benevolent position. The framing of these interventions typically individualizes mental health problems, so they almost always represent private and personal troubles rather than public issues (WrightMills, ); a classic case of deflecting the source of stress away from the organization onto the employee/victim, who is blamed for their limited resilience and ability to cope. The organization then projects itself as caring by ‘helping’ employees to cope with the troubles that, in large part, may have resulted from their conditions of work. The pathologizing process of mental illness involves the stigmatization of those who become ill, reconfiguring their identities as insufficiently robust or resilient (Newton, ), thereby eschewing any organizational responsibility for setting impossible sales targets, publications, and other forms of output. The format of well-being initiatives in the workplace are various, including: yoga; stress-management seminars; counselling; timemanagement workshops; mindfulness; coaching; snooze-friendly policies; and emotional intelligence training, all with the intention of making employees ‘feel better and perform better’ (Forbes Coaches Council, ). This focus on the symptom, rather than the disease, is the equivalent of ‘putting a sticking plaster on a cancerous wound’ (Clarke and Knights, : ). Where remedial action disguised as a ‘well-being’ initiative fails to provide a cure, the situation may become fatal. Part of the problem is how common-sense macho language circulating within (Sinclair, ), and outside institutions, tends to treat vulnerability negatively, branding employees
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as weak, or having lost control. One consequence of such intense and masculine-inspired identity work is how it can readily obfuscate the gravity of the situation, and morph easily into tragedy, such as Karojisatsu, or work-induced suicide. In the UK, suicide is now the leading cause of death for men up to age (Office of National Statistics, ), and recently the UK government appointed its first ever minister responsible for suicide prevention.¹ Moreover, this issue is not just located within private sector, profit-consumed corporations, but also the public sector and its demands for success involving excessive workloads. Illustrative of this is the case of Malcolm Anderson, an academic working at Cardiff University, who threw himself from the roof of the business school in February due to pressure of work. It is perhaps not without irony that those tasked with teaching students about management and organizational practices should also be subject to the same work intensification and managerial control practices they might analyse critically in their classes. Moreover, it has been revealed that over a long period of time Anderson had asked repeatedly for help, so even when employees become vocal, and protest at impossible workloads, in practice their well-being may not be treated as a priority. Relatedly, studies have shown that many professionals, such as doctors (Gawande, ; Marsh ), dentists (Henning et al., ), vets (Clarke and Knights, ), and academics (Knights and Clarke, ), attempt to counter risks of failure and other identity threats by pursuing perfection in their practices. The (unrealizable) desire for perfection is seductive, for it promises to render workers beyond reproach and immune from future punitive action, and thus secure. The pursuit of perfection is an example of identity work par excellence, intended to prevent unravelling, and defend anxieties about ‘who we are’, but it is also illusory. If we consider the Japanese phenomenon of Karōshi, or death resulting from overwork, rather than suicide, we can see only too well how striving for perfection holds the potential to be ‘both a benefit and a burden, life fulfilling and life threatening’ (Hyde, : ). While the term Karōshi originated in Japan, its practice is not confined to the East. In their book Dead Man Working, Cederström and Fleming () chart both the oppressive and relentless nature of pursuing identity through contemporary work, together with its physical and mental repercussions. One such illustration is the story of Moritz Erhardt who secured a highly competitive place as an intern at Merrill Lynch, where working through the night was regarded widely as a naturalized (masculine) ‘rite de passage’. After three days of ‘pulling an all-nighter’ with no sleep at all, the -year-old was later found dead at his flat. Among his possessions, the following quote from Marilyn Monroe was found, ‘I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful’, indicating how a desire for the ‘perfect’ identity can become so normalized that the preservation of life itself is forgotten. This normalization of the centrality of work is evidenced through observations about Amazon, an organization which along with other employers (Deliveroo, Uber, TGI Fridays), has come under fire for its exploitation of staff. Amazon workers are subjected to highly scrutinized, slave-like conditions, linked to a constant imperative to beat the clock (Cadwalladr, ; Panorama, ). Other workers, and members of what has come to be known as the ‘precariat’, or the ‘gig economy’, are also in danger of risking their health in ways that we have already outlined, but with the additional burden and risk factors associated with unpredictable (zero) working hours, with no paid leave or pension (Burgess et al., ). So far, our focus has been on how organizations may (un)wittingly invoke potentially deadly practices at work, partly enabled by employees’ desires to mitigate insecurities, and
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confirm positive identities. In the remainder of this chapter, we explore how the literature on identity can be seen as reinforcing, rather than challenging, a preoccupation with identity, thereby contributing to its harmful effects on individuals and organizations, as the following examination of identity politics illustrates.
I P: T O H
.................................................................................................................................. Despite its seemingly neutral seductive promise of stability, identity can be defined only through the relationship with its ‘constitutive outside’; its ‘capacity to exclude’, that which it is not (Hall, : –). Since it is also predicated on a hierarchically defined order, identity can never be other than an act of power (Derrida, ). Following Foucault (), this understanding of power departs from conventional views of it as the property of persons or groups seeking to control others (Knights, ); rather, power is positive and productive in the sense of inviting us to be both collaboratively and cooperatively creative. However, the effects of power can also be negative when exercised as a means of control and domination. Since identity politics has traditionally been about struggles on the part of oppressed groups against their discrimination, it often emerges from negative coercion and control while reflecting positive collaborative forms of resistance to these conditions. This resistance has usually taken the form of class conflict relating to the economic or wage exploitation of labour (Thanem, : ) and has a tendency to be associated with masculine forms of aggression on the shopfloor (Knights and Collinson, ), whereas contemporary identity politics is more nuanced in being sensitive to age, animal, disability, environmental, ethnic, gender, racial, and sexual sensibilities. On the other hand, identity politics has grown dramatically in recent years in relation to ‘progressive’ struggles against discrimination and disadvantage through, for example, anti-ableist, anti-racist, feminist, and LGBT social movements. Some of these such as the ‘me-too’ campaign are headline news in exposing the sexually abusive behaviour of men, particularly of those in senior or high-profile situations in the workplace. As a consequence, numerous campaigns have been waged against sexism and sexual predatory behaviour in Hollywood and in US politics, as well as gender discrimination and violations of the Equal Pay Act in the UK media. Ironically, as part of the darker side of identity politics, ‘me-too’ has now been colonized by the hash-tag, ‘him-too’, in an attempt to exonerate male victims who claim to have been ‘falsely’ accused of sexual abuse as, for example, in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s controversial nomination to the US Supreme Court in . Still, ‘progressive’ identity politics has been incredibly successful² in transforming Western societies to support multiculturalism, gender and sexual liberation, racial and ethnic diversity, and disability provision to the point of enshrining equal human rights in state law. Nevertheless, the dark side of identity politics has a long and more tragic history, for example in slavery during the eighteenth century and the Nazi Holocaust of the s. Indeed, in recent times, there has also been a backlash against the successes of progressive movements in a surge of ‘reactionary’ demands from groups, concerned to redefine
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boundaries by asserting what they claim to be traditional identities relating to nationalism, white supremacy, masculinity, and heterosexuality. This ‘identitarian’ wing (Economist, ) is globally evident in the number of right-wing ‘populist’ political movements as personified by Trump, Le Pen, Erdogan, Farage, Orbán, and Steve Bannon, the latter of whom regards ‘accusations of racism [ . . . ] as a badge of honour’ (Pasha-Robinson, ), thus perhaps inciting racial abuse and violence in various social venues. In UK football, for example, anti-discrimination group ‘Fare’ states that ‘some fans’ are using the “political atmosphere as a cover for their own racism and prejudice”.³ Relatedly, following the UK’s Brexit vote, which was partly predicated on the seductive, yet misleading slogan of ‘taking back control’, everyday hate crimes against ‘immigrants’ have doubled (Quinn, ). For example, in October , David Mesher, a UK male passenger on board a Ryanair aircraft was filmed demanding that Delsie Gayle, a British Caribbean woman, was moved away from the seat near him because of her identity as a ‘foreigner’, lacking whiteness: he was recorded shouting ‘don’t speak to me in a foreign language, you stupid ugly cow’, having previously called her ‘an ugly black bastard’. Despite this illegal racist abuse, and the absurdity of his objecting to a foreign language while himself being on Spanish soil, Ryanair failed to call the police and instead moved the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of the crime to another seat at the back of the aircraft. Indicating that identity lies behind much of this revival of racism, it has been reported how: Those obsessed with identity have set about constructing their own idea of Europe, the purpose of which is no longer to preserve peace but to protect a white, Christian European “civilisation” against other civilisations, primarily Islam. (Ridel, )
It has also been shown how ‘severe “we” and “they” divisions [ . . . ] have been reactivated, [where] one group feeling superior to “others” has [again] become routine’ (Volkan, : ). At the time of writing, a -year-old UK schoolboy was caught on camera in the school playing fields ‘waterboarding’ another pupil, a Syrian refugee, which was then posted on Twitter, with comments claiming that up to this point the school and authorities had done little to ameliorate the bullying. This is borne out by footage showing the boy with his arm in a cast, reportedly having previously sustained a broken wrist in a similar incident. A search through the perpetrator’s Facebook page shows positive comments and affirming remarks made by him, in relation to: Tommy Robinson;⁴ organized far-right movements such as Britain First; and the racist remark made by the UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson about women wearing burkas resembling ‘letterboxes’. Such hatred of the Other at a relatively young age perhaps illustrates an internalization of this pervasive identity politics of hate, leaking out of so many of our institutions, including the government Cabinet. Hate crime has also multiplied in the USA during the campaign and since the election of Donald Trump, reaching an extreme in late when a number of supporters sent packages containing explosive devices to prominent critics of Trump (e.g. Clinton, Obama, De Niro). This intensification of an identity politics of hatred against individuals or groups that are perceived as deviant, because of their ‘difference’, has been rendered almost respectable, or at least more visible since the electoral success of Trump and other political populists. Yet, as we intimated earlier, it may have been provoked by the dominance of neoliberal elites, with their middle-class norms of meritocracy, leaving the comparatively unsuccessful
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feeling deprived and resentful in ways that lead them to seek out targets for their anger. Exacerbated by the long periods of austerity and erosion of income following the global financial crisis of , combined with the polarization of wealth and perhaps self-satisfied complacency among the economically comfortable middle class, this has served only to inflame the politics of hatred. These examples might suggest that identity politics is wholly negative as a breeding ground for prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination but when speaking about ethics, Foucault (: ) argued that ‘not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad’. Not least, it is dangerous because the attachment to one identity is invariably constituted and sustained through deriding or demonizing alternatives, even to the point of physical or verbal violence, as in the hate crimes we referred to. Similarly, because we understand identities as always situated (or entangled) within a specific set of hierarchically arranged power relations, vigilance must be exercised constantly with regard to totalizing forms of domination, and potentially tyrannical and oppressive practices. In terms of identity, this means remaining continually alert to how even the most innocent of identity attachments such as supporting a sports team, a pop group, or a political cause can readily spill over into violence against those stigmatized as the external, or ‘common’ enemy (Herman and Chomsky, ). Historically, of course, nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion have perpetrated the most violent and extreme forms of identity politics through wars and persecution of those with beliefs that are divergent or deviant from the mainstream consensus. However, we are now in the midst of a revival of this regressive politics where there are universal and totalizing demands to assert national supremacy, restore borders, build walls, eradicate the free flowing movement of peoples, and demonize difference as deviance. These have surfaced and gained legitimacy through the masculine inspired, xenophobic populist rhetoric of state political leaders already mentioned, but their venom is duplicated by elected leaders such as Viktor Orbán⁵ in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan⁶ in Turkey, and the Trump of the Tropics—Jair Bolsonaro⁷ in Brazil—or autocrats like Bashar Al-Assad⁸, Xi Jinping⁹, Vladimir Putin¹⁰, Kim Jong Un¹¹, and King Salman¹² as well as other current contenders such as Jimmie Åkesson¹³, Heinz-Christian Strache¹⁴, Geert Wilders¹⁵, and Matteo Salvini¹⁶. These authoritarian and divisive political climates have seemingly given licence to racist and other bigoted prejudice and discrimination sometimes materializing in hate crimes or even murders, particularly in post-Brexit referendum Britain and postelectoral Trump USA. Although triumphant first in the Eastern European states of Hungary and Poland, these far-right movements have deployed identity politics to subvert many Western democracies by normalizing coalitions between neo-Nazis and neoliberal freemarket conservatives. Again, perhaps one of the conditions of possibility for the spread of neo-fascism to the West was the global financial crisis of , which resulted in resentment from large groups of citizens who felt ‘left behind’ and caught up in spirals of ever-increasing poverty. The seductive promise of a better future worked as a catalyst for those seeking a solution to their problems, thus enabling and providing a significant contribution to the regressive and aggressive identity politics of Trump, Brexit, and European neo-fascism. Although we have so far emphasized the dark, or at least the dangerous, side of identity politics, it does not have to be negative, but tends often to be so, when power is brought into the service of our attachment and preoccupation with identity. Consequently, we are not arguing for the eradication of identity even if that were remotely possible, since there are
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many positive and productive social and innovative benefits to be derived from sharing our affinities. Collective and collaborative relations are cultivated and sustained through shared identities and they can clearly have the well-being of peoples, planets, and the ‘natural’ environment as their raison d’être. Only when an attachment to, and preoccupation with these identities becomes paramount, is there a likelihood of destructive means to a cause being justified, by calls for the end to any opposition, or even mere existence of difference, as it morphs into the ‘enemy’ to be eliminated.
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.................................................................................................................................. The dark side of identity politics is one of the most significant consequences of attempts to secure the self through attachments to identity. Historically, it has often resulted in totalitarian violence and oppression. However, such problems are not simply confined to the past for, as we have argued, identity politics is currently ‘enjoying’ a resurgence, as large sections of Western populations are rejecting the liberal establishment that they feel has failed to benefit them economically. Populism has been gathering momentum throughout Europe in the last few decades and is now firmly entrenched in many parts of the USA, where the opportunity to scapegoat, blame, and demonize particular groups has proven seductive. Any constitution of identity is always an act of power (Laclau, : ), because ‘Othering’ is predicated on a hierarchically constructed set of negative stereotypical beliefs (Pickering, ) about those whose identities are not like ours. Confronting our own difference, or Otherness, is the process by which we can come to be excluded from belonging, and this frequently depends on a single feature or aspect of identity, such as religion (e.g. Jews, Muslims), sexuality (e.g. transgender or homosexuals), race (e.g. ‘black’ or ‘coloured’), ethnicity (which includes nationality, religion, culture, and language), perceived country of origin (foreigners or immigrants), status/wealth (the poor), and, of course, our political affiliation. Identity politics can of course focus on the production of more positive effects, for example it can mobilize and ‘create “new social movements,” collective initiatives that are self-reflexive and sharply focused on the expressive actions of collective members’ (Cerulo, : ). We have sought to theorize how the failure to interrogate taken-for-granted understandings, reflects and reinforces rather than challenges how potentially dangerous, destructive, and often self-defeating attachments to identity come to be formed. Since attachments to this, or that, kind of identity might provide a platform for oiling the political machinations of conflict, it is important to recognize how they may be readily co-opted and weaponized, precisely in order to divide, separate, and conquer. The killing fields of identity (politics) are not, however, confined to those with deliberate and murderous intent, for they can be just as destructive for those who are literally dying at work, either through overwork, mental health conditions, suicide, precarity, or any combination of the aforementioned. Phillips and Hardy (: ) claim that it is only possible to appreciate ways of organizing if we come to ‘understand identity’, so surely the task of scholars within this field is to recognize our complicity in sustaining potentially injurious fantasies surrounding both identity and identity work. These include but are not limited to its: unchallenged centrality; self-defeating nature; unfinished and incomplete state; dependency on the Other; and
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transactional and disembodied strategy for realizing our potential by giving us a ‘leg up’ the greasy pole. Also, it includes the new forms of self-exploitation, when work intensification through zero hour and self-employed contracts that, although depriving workers of many of their employment rights, seem attractive in providing some flexibility. These have become normalized partly because they provide recipients with the illusion of freedom and thus an identity of autonomy, that is one of the mechanisms through which humanist, neoliberal regimes secure control. This has been another element of the deflection from material and economic relations in contemporary discourse and practice that has shifted the focus from material and economic relations to culture and identity politics. Opportunities for undertaking nuanced and theoretically challenging research in the field of identity could include returning to a focus on collective action, particularly regarding social movements, where there is more emphasis on what can be achieved collaboratively, rather than the tendency, especially in the media, to celebrate individual identities. By the same token, it is important to problematize and analyse, rather than eschew, or simply take for granted the dangers integral to extreme attachments to any kind of identity, since these ubiquitous tendencies can literally lead us into the killing fields, where divisions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ can be lethal. Finally, we need constantly to recognize or remind ourselves of how the desire for identity as a means of gaining stability and security is invariably self-defeating (Watts, ), most relevantly in terms of this chapter, for those at work in organizations. Such awareness could perhaps alleviate some of the damaging consequences invoked by the often insidious meritocratic, neoliberal demands to realize some mythical potential in an idealized future perfect identity.
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At the time of writing Jackie Doyle occupies this ministerial position. It could claim to have been much more effective than class struggles against exploitation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/. Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is a controversial figure associated with far-right extreme populism in the UK. Originally the founder of the English Defence League, Robinson attracts both admiration and criticism, for his ‘incitement’ based on anti-Muslim rhetoric. Viktor Mihály Orbán: a Hungarian far-right politician who has been Prime Minister of Hungary since . Recip Tayyip Erdogan: far-right politician, currently president of Turkey. Described variously as authoritarian and ‘near omnipotent’ Jair Bolsanaro: president of Brazil since January who was elected on an anti-corruption platform, but is now shrouded in allegations of corruption Bashar Al-Assad: President of Syria and renowned dictator Xi Jinping: currently General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Vladimir Putin: President of Russia Kim Jong Un: Supreme Leader of North Korea King Salman: King of Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia Jimmie Akesson: a Swedish politician serving as Leader of the Sweden Democrats since . Heinz-Christian Strache: former vice chancellor of Austria Geert Wilders: Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician, Leader of the Party for Freedom Matteo Salvini: former deputy prime minister of Italy, leader of the far-right League Party.
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Beyond our Fixation on the Organization ......................................................................................................................
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Abstract The lion’s share of research on identification in organizations reflexively continues to focus on the organization itself as the centrepiece of individuals’ work-related identity. In this chapter the authors argue that this focus is misplaced because: () even in relatively stable organizations, individuals tend to identify more strongly or as strongly with proximal targets such as their occupation and workgroups, and with artefacts and practices that are personally meaningful in their own right; and () work environments are becoming more virtual, temporary/project-based, and pluralistic, creating challenges of salience, stability, and authenticity. Given these challenges, the authors argue that individuals are increasingly vesting their identities in a mix of external foci (social identities in the form of roles, networks, projects/gigs, and third places) and internal foci (personal identities in the form of personal brands and protean selves). In making these arguments, the authors emphasize the importance of holding environments for both external and internal foci. The implicit expectation or desire in much of our theorizing is that employees maintain the s’ “organization man” terms of engagement with organizations, even as organizations themselves have abandoned it. (Ashford et al., : )
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.................................................................................................................................. I need to have a situated sense of self—identity—in order to negotiate any given situation. In work contexts, much of the research on identity has focused on the
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individual’s relationship with his or her employer, as individuals were thought to take their cue on who they are (or should be) from their employer. This approach made good sense in a world of stability and long-term organizational tenure. Increasingly, however, individuals face a world of dynamism and shorter-term organizational tenure—if not self-employment. The causes are legion and well-documented, from globalization to technological change, and increased mobility to the erosion of bureaucracy (e.g. Ashford et al., ; Kalleberg, ). The ‘organization man’ that Ashford et al. refer to above has long since packed away his grey-flannel suit. What does this dynamism mean for identities and identifications in work contexts? How are individuals defining themselves if their traditional moorings to organizations are becoming ever more tenuous? We address these questions as follows. Our first section argues that the need for a situated sense of self—even in more stable times—is often satisfied by identifying with more proximal targets in one’s organization (such as one’s team) and with artefacts and practices of one’s organization (such as its products). Our second section focuses on the challenges that virtual, temporary/project-based, and pluralistic environments present for defining the self. Our third section then discusses how individuals are attempting to address these challenges through a mix of external foci in the form of social identities (roles, projects/gigs, networks, and ‘third places’), and internal foci in the form of personal identities (personal brand and protean self). While identification with the traditional understanding of organizations may be imperilled, identification with other foci is alive and well, and likely to thrive.
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.................................................................................................................................. Even in relatively stable organizations, there are good reasons to believe that identification with the organization is not necessarily the paramount locus of identification for organizational members.
Looking Within: Identifying with More Proximal Targets than the Organization At first blush, it seems reasonable that organizational members would identify more strongly with their organization than with more proximal targets such as their workgroup. After all, the organization is the collective home within which the proximal targets are embedded,¹ and constitutes a stand-alone entity recognizable to all its stakeholders, complete with a name, legal standing, and reputation. However, research suggests otherwise; namely, that individuals tend to identify more strongly or as strongly with their occupation (e.g. Bartels et al., ), workgroup (e.g. Riketta and Van Dick, ), and supervisor (e.g. Sluss et al., ), among other proximal targets, than with their organization. Why is this so? Various arguments have been offered (e.g. Ashforth et al., ; Riketta and Van Dick, ; Vough, ), but they boil down to the basic fact that organizational
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life is lived locally. An organization may employ thousands of people and have divisions in several countries, but to the individual member, her day is focused on doing a specific job, often in a specific locale, while interacting with specific people. She is more likely to forge valued social connections and to have a meaningful impact at the local level. In short, the more proximal the target of identification, the richer the experience. To be sure, the individual undoubtedly has an intellectual understanding of the wider organization, but its salience often pales against the more visceral experience of living locally. There are exceptions, of course: the organization per se is more likely to be chronically salient when it is particularly unique, of very high status, under constant threat, quite small, or owned/ managed by the individual (Ashforth et al., ). But even then, the localized experience shares the spotlight with the organization; it is not rendered moot. Why does this matter? The reflex of scholars to focus on identification with the organization rather than with more relevant proximal targets means that their models are likely to be mis-specified (Ashforth, ). That is, given the moderate to strong correlations between nested levels of self in organizations (e.g. Johnson et al., ), the models are likely to attribute variance to the organizational level of self that may actually belong to unmeasured, more proximal levels. For example, a production worker may identify highly with her team, with all the beneficial consequences that entails; but if only her identification with her employer is assessed, then these consequences will be attributed to that particular identification. The team, along with other proximal targets, remains an unsung hero of identification dynamics.
Beyond Social Targets: Identifying with Artefacts and Practices In addition to identifying strongly with proximal social targets, individuals may also identify strongly with more diverse, ‘non-social’ targets within the organization. Past emphasis on social targets may be partly attributable to the widespread use of the social identity perspective (Haslam and Ellemers, ) when theorizing about identification in organizations (Ashforth, ). However, ‘non-social’ elements of organizations such as products, projects, processes, and structures—in short, artefacts and practices (Rafaeli and Pratt, )—may be no less self-defining and yet have remained under-explored as potential identification targets in organizations (Bubenzer, ).² It is important to note that we are referring to identification with artefacts and practices not merely because they are symbolic of one’s membership in the organization (i.e. a manifestation of organizational identity), but also because they are valued in and of themselves as a reflection of one’s efforts, self-perceptions, and aspirations. Evidence suggests that artefacts and practices may indeed act as identity referents (Watkiss and Glynn, ). Such organizational elements with self-definitional implications that have been studied include physical environments (Elsbach, ), technologies (Tripsas, ), innovations (Bubenzer and Foreman, ), and organizational practices (Nag et al., ). It is thus surprising that, with few exceptions (e.g. Bubenzer, ), little work has examined how individuals come to identify with such artefacts and practices. At the same time, it has long been suggested that the theoretical foundations underpinning organizational identification may be equally applicable to other identification targets,
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including non-social objects. As Pratt (: ) mused, ‘it is not clear that identifying with individuals is any different, in theory, than identifying with things that are not individuals’. One reason that a person may be able to identify with artefacts and practices is that she identifies not with the ‘objective’ characteristics of a target, but with the beliefs or image she holds of them (Pratt, ). Hence, any image she holds of social or non-social organizational elements could conceivably serve as an identification target. Another reason for such identification, developed in consumer research, is self-object attachment (Ball and Tasaki, ), or the notion of extending the self via possessions (Belk, ). It is not hard to imagine architects viewing a building they designed as an extension of themselves, or craftsmen vesting their sense of self in their ‘homers’ (i.e. artefacts created for personal use; Anteby, ). Additionally, research suggests that workplaces (Pierce et al., ), ideas (Baer and Brown, ), and other objects over which individuals feel a sense of psychological ownership (‘this is mine’), come to be integrated into the self-concept. Finally, just as teams and individuals are more proximal and therefore visceral targets of identification than the organization, so too are many artefacts and practices.
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.................................................................................................................................. As job hopping becomes more frequent and organizational tenure continues to wane (Bidwell et al., ), alternative work arrangements—ranging from freelance professionals to on-call service employees, and from gig workers to seasonal workers—are on the rise (Spreitzer et al., ). The net effect is that individuals’ expectations of long tenure are diminishing and it is becoming less normative for individuals to identify with a given employer (Ashford et al., ). We discuss three important trends related to alternative work arrangements: () virtual environments; () temporary/project-based environments (including the ‘gig economy’); and () pluralistic employment environments. In addition to these trends, self-employment is also rising (Meager, ), meaning that proportionately more of the workforce does not have an employer with which to identify. We recognize that individuals often choose to work in such situations, and thus may be less inclined to withhold identification from a given organization than individuals who lack choice, may not be seeking to identify with an organization in the first place, and may have compensatory identifications (as discussed later) (Rock and Pratt, ; Spreitzer et al., ).
Virtual Environments: The Challenge of Salience For much of the twentieth century, work was often relegated to a centralized building during specific hours as a simple necessity: there was no other way to get things done. But, as in many areas of life, technology and particularly the internet has upended convention, in this case by enabling individuals to work remotely—whether at home, on the road, or in
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satellite offices, neighbourhood work centres, coffee shops, or client sites. Many employees enjoy the option of remote work because it provides greater flexibility for juggling work and non-work roles, greater autonomy, and reduced commutes; many employers enjoy the option precisely because many employees enjoy it and it can lead to cost savings and enhanced performance (Allen et al., ; Gajendran et al., ). And yet, despite these advantages, remote work can jeopardize organizational identification. The physical and social isolation often associated with remote work may make it difficult for the individual to derive and sustain a strong sense of the organization as an entity worthy of identification (Thatcher and Zhu, ). As an employee working in a satellite office put it, ‘It’s almost as if the head office doesn’t exist. You almost belong to your project rather than the head office’ (Marks and Lockyer, : ). Further, the isolation may make it difficult for the members of the organization who are co-located to derive and sustain a strong sense of the remote individual as a respect-worthy colleague (Allen et al., ). As one remote individual commented, ‘Being the go-to person is the biggest sign of respect— you’re just less likely to be that person when you’re not around every day’ (Bartel et al., : ). In both cases, the driving dynamic is a lack of salience—that is, ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (Bartel et al., ). Absent salience, organizational identification is less likely to take root or be sustained. Moreover, in cases where individuals work off-site in virtual teams, satellite offices, or neighbourhood work centres, identification with these entities may essentially displace identification with the organization (Marks and Lockyer, ). The threat to organizational identification can be at least partly mitigated by inoculating individuals through face-to-face socialization prior to engaging in remote work, by providing ‘booster shots’ through periodic on-site meetings, by instituting substitutes for the organization proper (e.g. company blogs, coffee mugs and apparel with the company logo), by training individuals in information and communication technologies, by providing ongoing social support via virtual managers and virtual teams, and by individuals representing the organization to outsiders (e.g. Fay and Kline, ; Rock and Pratt, ; Wiesenfeld et al., ). However, while these manoeuvres may help compensate for a lack of salience, they are unlikely to compensate fully for the loss.
Temporary/Project-Based Environments: The Challenge of Stability Scholars have long-noted the daunting challenges that contingent workers face, including the difficulty of forging a sense of identification with their employer (Padavic, ). Contingent work includes ‘any job in which an individual does not have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment or one in which the minimum hours worked can vary in a nonsystematic way’ (Polivka and Nardone, : ), including contractors, workers hired through temp agencies, freelancers, and on-call or day labour (Matusik and Hill, ). The rise of the gig economy is further swelling the ranks of contingent workers. While the specific employment arrangements vary, ‘those in the gig economy participate in spot labor markets except that “gig workers” typically land their jobs through online platforms and may never meet their “employer” ’ (Barley et al., : ). Additionally, organizations themselves may be deliberately temporary, created to accomplish a complex but finite project. Classic examples include movie sets, construction
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sites, and one-off events (e.g. conference, sports match). Once found in only a few industries, temporary organizations are now evident in many, ranging from advertising to consulting, software development to biotechnology (Bakker, ). The challenge to organizational identification that these temporary and project-based environments create is that of stability (Barley et al., ). Given psychological motives for self-continuity and belonging (Brickson, ; Cooper and Thatcher, ), the instability and resulting insecurity of contingent work makes it difficult for individuals to vest their sense of self in a given organization. While contingent work does encompass high-skilled occupations, the preponderance of contingent work is low-skilled, and individuals often perceive that they have little choice about working on a contingent basis (Spreitzer et al., ). Further, those who are hired out by temporary employment agencies often report only transactional contracts with their agency, which do little to create a long-term sense of security (e.g. O’Leary-Kelly et al., ). The resulting sense of powerlessness from temporary/ project-based environments is likely to exacerbate the sense of insecurity. Indeed, the presence of contingent workers may undermine the trust of other workers in the organization by implicitly threatening their job security (von Hippel and Kalokerinos, ). Moreover, individuals engaged in temporary/project work are often viewed by the organization footing the bill neither as true insiders nor true outsiders (e.g. Smith and Neuwirth, ). This marginality may exacerbate insecurity by fostering a sense of liminality—of being neither a ‘real’ member nor a non-member—further fraying the individual’s psychological tether to the organization (Barley and Kunda, ): ‘As a contractor, I’m temporarily tied to the goals of all these different groups. I have my own personal goals, but less of a sense of, you know, belonging and community’ (Kunda et al., : ). The sense of liminality often applies even to ‘permatemps’—that is, ‘temporary workers who work in single positions for a long period of time’ (Smith and Neuwirth, : )—who are nonetheless denied ‘insider’ status and perks. Indeed, contingent workers are often stigmatized within their organization, exacerbating their social-psychological distance from their employer (Boyce et al., ). Qualitative studies are replete with stories of contingent workers being isolated socially, mistrusted, marked with different badges or accommodations, overworked, and denied training opportunities (e.g. Padavic, ).
Pluralistic Employment Environments: The Challenge of Authenticity People hold multiple jobs for various reasons, such as earning extra money, exploring aptitudes, personal enjoyment, and enhancing skills and options (e.g. Sliter and Boyd, ). Regardless of the specific reasons, multiple jobholders are motivated to make sense of their choices in a manner that reflects who they view themselves to be or to be becoming (e.g. Demetry, ). This is the challenge of authenticity, discerning a ‘true’ self among the multiplicity of implied selves (Caza et al., ). This sensemaking is complicated by the fact that individuals are often normatively expected to commit wholeheartedly to a single choice rather than to hold various jobs and that a single choice implies a single organization at any one time. Caza et al. (: ) studied ‘plural careerists’, individuals who ‘have more than one central work identity that they are intentionally pursuing’. They found that while multiple jobholders focused on authenticity within their specific work roles, they also focused on
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‘authenticity to a more general work self enacted through those roles’ (: ), revolving around specific skills, an overarching purpose, or a personal brand. For example, one person, who was simultaneously a business owner, clinician, and teacher, felt her central identity was that of a nurturer, as that was the common thread that linked her three roles. In short, multiplicity tends to shift one’s focus away from a single organization as a defining element of self and towards the synergies or complementarities among one’s various jobs. We recognize, however, that not all job combinations provide equal opportunities for an all-encompassing authentic ‘core’ self to emerge. Someone who identifies as an artist, for example, may conclude that taking a commercial graphic design job would be selling out because the prospect of creating art solely for profit runs counter to his ethics. In sum, the challenges of salience, stability, and authenticity engendered by virtual, temporary/project-based, and pluralistic environments, respectively, render conventional organizational identification more precarious. This begs the question: in the face of these challenges, with what, then, might individuals instead identify?
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.................................................................................................................................. The net effect of these trends toward virtuality, temporary/project-based work, and pluralism—along with the rise in self-employment—is that individuals are increasingly expected and, indeed, required to take charge of their careers and forge their own identities (Smith, ). With organizations becoming less viable as identification foci, we foresee a shift towards other external foci in the form of social identities (roles, projects/gigs, networks, and ‘third places’), and towards internal foci in the form of personal identities (personal brand and protean self ).
External Foci of Identification Roles. We argued earlier that individuals tend to identify more strongly or as strongly with proximal targets in their organization than with the organization itself. One of the most salient of these proximal targets is the role for which one was hired. A role bundles diverse knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences, predispositions, and so on into a ‘job’, ‘occupation’, ‘expertise’, or other socially recognizable set of desirable attributes. As a highly salient set of desirable attributes, individuals are predisposed towards identifying with their role (Ashforth, ). This is likely to be particularly true in the face of trends toward self-employment, virtuality, and temporary/project-based work as individuals have more scope to craft their role as they see fit, and the role becomes the major means by which an individual is both self-defined and known to others (e.g. Demetry, ). Bechky () describes the challenge in film projects to assemble diverse people, who often do not know each other well, into a swiftly functioning temporary organization. She found that roles were the glue, as individuals relied on their knowledge of roles and their interdependencies to coordinate activity. An assistant camera operator remarked:
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. , . , When I get on a show, if I need something moved, I know to go to transpo; the medics, the food, the systems are in place to take care of every need. And they are the same from show to show. They are like jump rope rhythms, passed off from child to child. (Bechky, : )
However, Bechky cautions that much negotiation is still required regarding how the generalized roles are to be specifically enacted in a given local context. This insight applies more generally to self-employment, virtuality, and temporary/project-based work where roles are necessarily more fluid and idiosyncratic. For example, Petriglieri et al. () describe how some MBA students envisioned their future self to be a ‘leader’ or ‘manager’, able to apply their talents to diverse employment settings. Further, and most likely in cases of self-employment, individuals may embrace multiple roles to more fully address the task at hand and enhance their marketability. Reilly (: ), for example, notes how ‘content creators’ such as writers, stand-up comedians, and singer-songwriters frequently combine roles. In cases of pluralistic environments, Caza et al. () describe how plural careerists were able ultimately to harmonize their multiple roles so that each expressed both a valued aspect of their selves and a more general work self. Our point is that role identification is not zero-sum; an individual can identify with multiple roles. Projects/gigs. Along with the specific role that one may play in a project/gig, one may identify with the project/gig itself. On one hand, because such foci are temporary, individuals may be less inclined to invest themselves in the foci and more inclined to ‘ride out’ their involvement until the next project/gig arises. On the other hand, such foci often constitute a highly immersive experience where the present is so demanding or engaging that the uncertain future fades in salience. The project/gig becomes one’s work world, with the situated identification that may entail. For example, Hall (, in Ashforth, : ) wrote about his experience as an acting dean of a business school: ‘the interim period does not feel interim or temporary. It feels (and is) very real’, as if it had ‘virtual permanence’. Similarly, Waskul () found that some summer camp counsellors identified strongly with their gig although they knew it would end in nine short weeks. Moreover, following our earlier point about synergies and complementarities among multiple jobs, the cumulative portfolio of completed projects/gigs may become a viable source of identity construction (‘I am what I’ve done’). While the temporary character of projects/gigs may thus lead to a situated identification with a given project/gig, the cumulative portfolio may also suggest a more rooted, ‘deep structure identification’ (Rousseau, : ). Networks. An individual’s network is their web of connections to others. Networks form for various reasons, from friendship to shared goals to advice (Kilduff and Brass, ). While some scholars have begun to link identity and identification to networks (Tasselli et al., ; cf. communities of practice, Wenger, ), this has been a surprisingly neglected area of research (Ashforth, ). What does it mean to identify with a network? It means that an individual looks to his or her network of work-related ties to derive a sense of self. Network identification is much like any form of social identification in that one internalizes the perceived essence of the collective as a reflection of oneself. However, because networks tend to snake across groups, have porous and blurry boundaries, and are somewhat idiosyncratic to the individual (i.e. ‘my network of business contacts’), the identity derived from an individual’s network also tends to be somewhat idiosyncratic (i.e. ‘what my network means for me’).
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We anticipate that as self-employment, temporary/project-based environments, and pluralistic employment environments continue to grow, individuals will increasingly look to cultivate networks and look to them for at least part of their sense of self—and their social validation (Barley and Kunda, ). This is because careers are becoming increasingly boundaryless (e.g. spanning multiple organizations and/or industries; Arthur and Rousseau, ) and self-directed (Briscoe et al., ), in turn rendering individuals less able to look to a given static entity for self-definition and social validation. Because networks often transcend geography, industry, organization, role, and other conventional ways of aggregating individuals, and because they are not only somewhat idiosyncratic to the individual but often highly elastic—able to expand and morph as needed—they can function as surprisingly durable bases for identification. Returning to Bechky’s () study of film projects, she found that individuals relied heavily on their contacts and reputation to secure work in movies, music videos, and commercials. Storey et al. () describe how freelance media workers saw making and maintaining social contacts as an integral part of their work. Kunda et al. () report that contractors assembled networks from friends and acquaintances, other contractors, clients, staffing agencies, and professional associations. Collectively, ‘they served to shield contractors from the isolation, insecurities, and costs of participating as lone individuals in a market for expertise’ (Kunda et al., : ). Further, the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn provides limitless opportunities to build one’s network outside of existing social ties (Papacharissi, ). As social networks grow and more easily traverse the digital-analogue boundary, we expect individuals’ reliance on them to grow in tandem—in turn shaping their identities. Third places. The literature on place identity indicates that individuals often become cognitively, affectively, and behaviourally attached to specific locales that connote positive memories, meanings, and so on—forging a symbolic kinship between themselves and the locale (Scannell and Gifford, ). In the case of self-employed and virtual workers, one particularly important set of places are ‘third places’, defined by Oldenburg (: ) as ‘the core settings of informal public life’—whereas first and second places refer to home and work. Given the trends mentioned earlier, individuals are increasingly working in third places such as cafés and co-working spaces (i.e. ‘shared spaces where individuals do their own work but in the presence of others with the express purpose of being part of a community’: Garrett et al., : ). Even though they lack a specific physical locale, we would add online communities to the list of third places because the kinds of workers discussed in this chapter—especially those who obtain work via online labour platforms— often connect via such communities (e.g. Wood et al., ). Third places represent workspaces of choice, rather than conventional workspaces where those present work interdependently for a single employer. The micro-culture of third places and their associated daily routines may provide a comforting structure of sorts as well as a community of like-minded individuals. Garrett et al. () document the psychological ownership and sense of collective identity that existed in a particular coworking space. Remarked one member, ‘To me now it feels like a club. It feels like we are our own team, even though the only tie that binds us is that we’re all members of this [space]’ (Garrett et al., : ). As with projects/gigs and roles that are only temporary, individuals may come to identify with third places that are used only temporarily. The
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immersive experience of the third place creates a psychologically compelling reality that may elicit identification. As alluded to earlier, identification with third places may essentially displace or substitute for identification with employing organizations (Marks and Lockyer, ).
Internal Foci of Identification As organizations wane as a premier source of work-based identity, individuals are likely to increasingly focus on their personal identity—on that which defines them as more or less unique persons (Selenko et al., ). As a self-employed consultant put it, ‘[When I was employed,] my identity was the organization. Now it’s me’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). For example, Padavic () found that many contingent workers address the identity threat occasioned by their work by viewing themselves as hard workers, persevering in the face of adversity. It is precisely because they were in ‘precarious employment’ (Kalleberg, ) situations that they could eke out pride in their resilience. The irony, of course, is that the behaviours associated with the identity of ‘hard worker’ supported the very system that marginalized them. We focus here on two manifestations of personal identity that have particular resonance with self-employment and virtual, temporary/project-based, and pluralistic environments: personal brand and protean self. Personal brand. Given the rise in self-employment and virtual and temporary/projectbased environments, individuals are increasingly focused on their ‘personal brand’ (Lair et al., ). Personal branding is the practice of creating an image of one’s unique and desirable qualities. If one’s personal identity is inward-oriented (‘who am I as a worker?’), one’s personal brand is outward-oriented (‘who, as a worker, do I want to present myself as being?’). Personal branding is the commodification of identity in that one packages a ‘simple, clear and consistent’ (Shepherd, : ) saleable self for consumption in the marketplace (Lair et al., ). Wee and Brooks () argue that personal branding has emerged in the context of ‘enterprise culture’, which promotes self-reliance and boldness as virtues. When done well, personal branding helps to promote reflexivity, or the earnest assessment of one’s own strengths and weaknesses. It is important to realize, then, that personal branding can be more than just an impression-management device. Identity and image are two sides of the same coin, with identity cueing image and vice versa. However, because one’s personal brand is tailored for the marketplace, it may vary at least somewhat from one’s personal identity, potentially creating internal conflict over authenticity (Shepherd, ). Further, because the marketplace often has many ‘buyers’, individuals may present variations of their brand, and because the marketplace is dynamic, individuals may have to frequently update their brand—potentially exacerbating the conflict over authenticity. Finally, given the prominence of social media, individuals have to be aware of their internet presence and how that may affect their personal brand. The danger in all of this is that one’s personal brand may become increasingly unmoored from one’s personal identity. Storey et al. (), however, note an upside: by thinking of themselves as selling a business service rather than their personal identities, freelance media workers were able to insulate their identities from rejections in the marketplace.
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Protean self. We noted the rise in boundaryless and self-directed careers. Such careers have been able to flourish, in part, because of the omnipresence of the internet and the proliferation of location-agnostic employment opportunities that have risen from it, such as freelance writing or performing a task online under the auspices of an online platform such as Upwork. By definition, such careers offer little in the way of scripts or role models. This is the domain of the protean self. A protean self is highly adaptable (cf. identity fluidity, Caza et al., ; cf. enterprising self, Storey et al., ). With the personal identity—or the quest to develop one— functioning as a compass, the individual chooses steps that both respond to the current landscape and lead him or her on a desired journey (if not to a desired destination) (Hall, ; Lifton, ). As Ibarra and Obodaru (: ) put it, ‘stories of personal growth are increasingly taking the place of more traditional markers of adulthood for claiming adult identities’. The path is often idiosyncratic and circuitous, with ‘success’ assessed subjectively rather than objectively. In addition to personal growth, core tenets often include questioning, proactivity, and a willingness to experiment and take risks. One of Caza et al.’s (: ) plural careerists remarked, ‘I don’t know what my work will look like in ten years, or even five years. And that is okay because I am open to where my passions take me’. Wolf (: ) interviewed managers who had experienced at least one significant career change, and found they articulated stories that involved ‘discovering conflict in expectations’ (e.g. ‘This is not what I want’), ‘exploring [their] values and capabilities’ (e.g. ‘What do I really want and what am I good at?’), ‘committing to [their] own path’ (e.g. ‘I found what I want to do and will adjust my career accordingly’), and ‘defending [their] own path’ (e.g. ‘Am I on the right path?’).
Importance of Holding Environments Organizations often provide an ongoing sense of social validation and psychological security, if only from one’s association with their reliable trappings—their physical structures, morning commute, work routines, steady pay cheques, dress codes, approving colleagues, and so on (cf. critical management, Thomas, ). In contrast, Petriglieri et al. () note that ‘independent workers’ (e.g. consultants, executive coaches, writers) lack these trappings, and the stable future often associated with employers, upon which identities may be predicated. In response, Petriglieri et al. found that these workers fostered idiosyncratic ‘holding environments’ (cf. Kahn, ) that provided ongoing support for their efforts to craft and maintain salutary identities. Holding environments consisted of four elements: () personal routines, which focused attention on one’s work self (e.g. ‘I always get dressed for the office. I don’t sit around in my jammies or my exercise gear’, Petriglieri et al., : ); () physical spaces, which evoked one’s work self (e.g. ‘[The studio] is a separate space where you’re tapping into your making self or your creative self . . . There’s not a day that I come in here that I’m not aware of who I am, what I’m in, what I’m doing, what I want to say’, Petriglieri et al., : ); () significant people, who reassured and emboldened one’s work self (e.g. ‘my husband . . . he’s like, “You’re doing awesome, tell me what you’ve done” . . . He just picks me up when I’m feeling down’, Petriglieri et al., : ); and () a broader purpose, which elevated one’s work self (e.g. ‘[I have a purpose that] I will organize myself and my work and my life around’, Petriglieri et al., : ). More broadly, these holding environments enabled the independent
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workers to view the struggles and emotional tensions that accompany such precarious work as sources of energy and growth. Petriglieri et al. imply that a blend of these four elements is needed, as personal routines and physical spaces focus the work self, whereas significant people and broader purpose inspire the work self. The authors provocatively argue that, unlike the psychological-safety oriented holding environments typically found in organizations (Kahn, ), alternative holding environments provide a ‘tolerable and generative precariousness that . . . creates potential for growth’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Given the increasing need of individuals to cultivate their own careers and identities, we suspect that cultivating a personal holding environment is becoming just as important— whether one invests oneself in the external foci of roles, projects/gigs, networks, or third places, or the internal foci of personal brand or protean self, or any combination thereof.
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.................................................................................................................................. Philosophers have long suggested that one’s ‘being’, or what we refer to as identity, can be related to two central categories of human reality: ‘having’ and ‘doing’ (Sartre, ). Traditional organizations have been conducive to deriving one’s identity primarily from ‘having’: perceiving oneself as having a stable relationship with the organization. With work environments becoming more virtual, temporary/project-based, and pluralistic, ‘having’ is giving way to ‘doing’ as a basis for identity. Fluid and idiosyncratic roles and networks, shortterm projects/gigs, personal identities and brands, and protean selves suggest that identity is increasingly about ‘doing’—about enacting a sense of self that is necessarily more dynamic if not turbulent. As Petriglieri et al. (: ) wrote of independent workers, ‘More so than being at work, they become their work, or more precisely they become in their work’. As such, identity becomes less about organizational structure and more about individualized processes, less about organization as a noun and more about organizing as a verb, and less about deep structure identification and more about situated identification. And if ‘having’ is more the domain of social identity theory (Haslam and Ellemers, ), with its emphasis on membership, then ‘doing’ is more the domain of identity theory (Burke and Stets, ), with its emphasis on roles, and of identity work (Brown, ), with its emphasis on creating and recreating oneself. To be sure, ‘having’ in the form of identification not only with the organization but with more proximal targets in the organization and with artefacts and practices of the organization, will always have an important place at the table. But the implied stability of ‘having’ will likely become decreasingly relevant to tomorrow’s workers.
N . Two partial exceptions are one’s occupation and network, as these tend to transcend organizational boundaries. . In classifying artefacts and practices as ‘non-social’, we recognize that they are attributed meaning through social construction processes (Rafaeli and Pratt, ). Our point is only that they are not composed of social elements (e.g. individuals, groups).
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Fragile Humans? ......................................................................................................................
Abstract Recent growth in interest in identities is linked to societal changes, including an unprecedented degree of freedom in the industrialized West (Bauman, ; Ritzer, ; Sennett, ). Choice suggests autonomy but it also burdens us with responsibility and anxiety. The aim of this chapter is to explore how the ‘capitalistic’ conception of freedom associated with agile identities affects life at work. Agility implies that individuals are able, indeed are deemed responsible for becoming—or failing to become—the ‘right’ type of employee/organization member. The notion of ‘agile identity’ proposed here, with its emphasis on the fragile obverse of the agility coin and its reminder that identity is not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but is fundamentally embodied, allows these tensions to be explored critically. The authors problematize the nature of current demands for agility at work, and invite reflection on issues of power and resistance. They ask, ‘How can the exploitative ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, surreptitiously operating through overtly benign and humanistic mantras such as “liberation management”, effectively be resisted?’ They suggest that the notion of identity—with its ambiguous and fluid character—has become the ideological prop of the new spirit of capitalism. Thus, scholars need to be vigilant in how they ‘talk’ about identity in scholarly debates and strive to articulate concepts that help understand the workplace while also supporting critique. ‘Agile identity’ is the authors’ contribution to these efforts.
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.................................................................................................................................. I in identities has grown exponentially in recent years, fuelled by a burgeoning literature and by the development of alternative—if not necessarily mutually exclusive— approaches (Brown, ). The concept of identity has acquired the status of ‘master signifier’ (Alvesson et al., ) and permeates scholarly debates in organization studies. Wider societal changes are often cited as a key factor underpinning the fortunes of the
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notion of ‘identity’ and its associated construct ‘identity work’ (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Snow and Anderson, ; Watson, ; Ybema et al., ). Both are regarded as symptomatic of the temporary, fluid, and porous qualities of our times (Bauman, ; Coupland and Brown, ). In a postmodern world characterized by globalization, instability, dynamism, and fragmentation, traditional institutions suffer from an inevitable loss of legitimacy: their regulatory power on individual lives is palpably waning. Eminent commentators on postmodernity share the view that an unprecedented degree of freedom is now available to people living in the industrialized West (Bauman, ; Ritzer, ; Sennett, ). This putative freedom has implications for individuals’ aspirations, wishes, and desires as choice permeates all facets of everyday life, from what we buy to our experience of the workplace, from our leisure activities through to our political and religious beliefs. While our ‘modern’ predecessors aspired to security, stability, and order, we find ourselves engaged in a constant struggle to construct liquidly modern selves (Bauman, ) in a consumerist society that is replete with choice (Ritzer, ). Choice, states Gabriel (: –), is ‘the bedrock of contemporary identity projects . . . Remove identity and choice becomes empty, remove choice and identity is reduced to destiny’. Choice, however, brings its own challenges. While it entails the positive exercise of individual freedom and autonomy on the one hand, it comes on the other with an inevitable burden of risk, responsibility, and existential anxiety: What if our choices, including our identity, are ‘wrong’?
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.................................................................................................................................. Identity ‘remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’ (Berger and Luckmann, : ). Our intent here is to focus on the relationships between freedom, choice, and identity in the context of work organizations. More specifically, we explore how individuals cope with the struggle to successfully exercise existential (that is, identity) choices at work and construct for themselves an understanding ‘of who they were, are and desire to become’ (Brown, : ). Contemporary work organizations place increasingly contradictory and often ambiguous demands on employees (Burchell et al., ; Gee, ). Growing emphasis on the importance of sharing values and demonstrating loyalty sits at odds with diminishing opportunities for stable, secure, and permanent employment, as a relentless quest for efficiency and flexibility dominates organizational strategic choices (Cederström and Fleming, ; Gabriel, ). In a work context characterized by change, where employers seek to downsize, outsource, and offshore whenever possible, employees struggle to maintain a coherent sense of who they are and wish to be through continuous reinventions of the self (Clarke et al., ; Fleming and Spicer, ; Gill, ): their identity projects are never-ending works-in-progress. To capture the liquid nature of these ongoing identity organizing processes, we employ the term ‘agility’—a notion that evokes aspects of freedom, movement, flexibility, and adaptability, but hints also at a darker ‘fragile’ counterpart in a web of hidden and, as yet, little recognized processes of power and control. Agility is commonly understood as the ability to change one’s position—physical or otherwise—to be able to do something or to be suitable for and receptive to a specified treatment. It encompasses both self-determination
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and more passive adaptation, pro-activity and re-activity. As a blanket proxy for (a combination of) nimbleness, suppleness, litheness, flexibility, and responsiveness, agility has been widely used in organization studies and managerial literature to characterize and qualify an organization’s—or an individual’s—orientation towards change and complexity (see Singh et al., for a review). In our conceptualization, agility denotes the ability of individual subjects to fashion their own identity at work as temporally embedded social actors that are informed by the past while retaining the ability to imagine the future and contextualize the present (Emirbayer and Mische, ). Agility qualifies—indeed defines— human agency as an orientation to act purposefully in the here and now while, at the same time, taking into consideration constraints and possibilities. As agility relates to agency, the adjective ‘agile’ can be equally applied to agentic processes of identity construction and to their resultant products, that is, always in-progress identities. In both cases, the explicit use of the qualifier ‘agile’ for identity and identity work in the workplace allows us to ‘gain crucial analytical leverage for charting varying degrees of manoeuvrability, inventiveness, and reflective choice shown by social actors in relation to the constraining and enabling contexts of action’ (Emirbayer and Mische, : ). In a world that demands ‘intensified reflexivity’ individuals are regarded as ‘clever people’ who routinely engage with and act upon information and knowledge ‘in the course of their everyday action’ (Giddens, : ). As ‘intelligent strategist[s]’ (Toyoki and Brown, : ), they are generally able to ‘agentially play’ (Newton, : ) with discursive, embodied, and material resources in the constant (re)negotiation of their selves as demanded and enabled by the dynamics of postmodern organizational life (Brown, ; Gergen, ). Work organizations provide sites for individuals’ construction of identities (Alvesson et al., ), but these identity choices occur within situated contexts characterized by power and discursive relations (Clegg et al., ). Research on identity construction in organizations has focused on issues of agency and its limits (e.g. Alvesson and Willmott, ; Fleming and Spicer, ; Grey, ). Specific processes of disciplinary power and employee resistance have been investigated (e.g. Fournier, ; Thornborrow and Brown, ). Further, the notion of identity threat (Petriglieri, ) has been used to explore ‘the inherently unstable and ambiguous nature of work identities, and explain how these may be appropriated in processes of identity work’ (Brown and Coupland, : ) by those who are subject to such threats. What is still poorly recognized—and what our notion of agile identity encompasses and articulates explicitly—is what Emirbayer and Mische (: ) call the ‘double constitution of agency and structure: temporal-relational contexts support particular agentic orientations, which in turn constitute different structuring relationships of actors toward their environments’. More specifically, we argue that identity projects in contemporary work organizations are ideologically shaped by a dominant, ‘one-sided conception of agency’ that privileges ‘goal-seeking and purposivity’ (Emirbayer and Mische, : ). This universalistic perspective reduces complex individuals to the role of atomized agents pursuing their self-interest through the application of linear economic rationality to ‘free’ choice. The variation of freedom upon which identity projects rest in today’s workplace is that underpinning neoliberal economic doctrine—and this ideological complexion affects life and work in a number of potentially dystopian ways. Agile identities are a symptom of the structural changes affecting contemporary Western societies. It is the form of identity demanded of individuals plunged into a world where a
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‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, ) is colonizing everyday life far beyond the realm of work and employment, the factory and the office, and where economic rationality—as opposed to ‘reason’—has increasingly become the organizing principle for society (Hardt and Negri, ). According to Boltanski and Chiapello (), sometime around the mid-s, and in line with the libertarian and ‘romantic’ cultural ethos of the period, Western capitalism moved away from the established, hierarchical Fordist work structures—that is, the period between the s and the s characterized by emphasis on rationality as personified by salaried managers and bureaucratic organizations. It evolved, instead, towards neo-managerialism, a new network-based form of organization predicated on employees’ initiative and autonomy. The neoliberal freedom putatively enjoyed in the West by employees and employers alike is substantially different from other potentially available conceptions of freedom. In his insightful analysis, Gabriel (: ) highlights its unique quality as distinctive from any ‘theological and philosophical discourses of free will, political conceptions of freedom of speech, association, selfdetermination and so forth and the intellectual value of freedom of inquiry’. Contemporary capitalist, neoliberal freedom privileges a consumerist approach that prioritizes free markets and private property in all spheres of life. Consumption as a habit of mind ‘pervades our consciousness’ (Ritzer, : ) and affects the ways we think of ourselves in the past, present, and future. Such discourses shape our ongoing identity projects in life generally and in work organizations more particularly and are the foundation of agile identities. Technology is a major feature of the ongoing changes in the structures of work (Sennett, ). In the contexts of modern working conditions, e.g. teamwork, telework, and technology-enabled distance work, work capitalizes on unity and multiplicity, continuity and fragmentation that exist within the self. With increasing emphasis on the need for organizations to be adaptive and nimble, expectations are also increasing for individual workers to be able to change accordingly (Belova, ). Thus, an agile identity is both a demand and an experience. It is a demand placed by modern work conditions, whereby socially driven and fragmented selves arise from the individual experience of modern economies and from contemporary work systems (Belova, ; Boltanski and Chiapello, ; Gergen, ). It is experienced as a powerful ideology that renders alternative ways to ‘be’ invalid or at least less valuable. What makes an individual employable in contemporary organizations is ‘being mobile, enthusiastic, versatile, having potential to be autonomous, not prescriptive and tolerant’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, : ). An unemployable person is by contrast ‘unadaptable, does not inspire confidence, authoritarian, rigid, intolerant, immobile, local, rooted, attached, status (has one) security (prefers)’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, : ). Scholars have already highlighted how the capitalistic freedom at the root of our proposed notion of agile identity in work organizations has a controlling function (Bauman, ) and is instrumental in creating disciplined as well as self-disciplined employees (Alvesson and Robertson, ; Clarke et al., ). Agility implies that, given appropriate guides and prompts, individuals at work are able, indeed responsible for becoming—or failing to become—the right type of employee (e.g. Grey, ). As a concept, it emphasizes explicitly how the positive features of existential choice and autonomy in the workplace (that is, the freedom to fashion an acceptable work identity for ourselves, bolstered by contemporary managerial practices and discourses) need to be balanced against our individual responsibility to become and, above all, remain successfully ‘employable’ over time, indeed, at all times. Independent of the vagaries of the work
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environment at large and of the localized challenges posed by our employer organizations, we are all charged with the task of existing in ‘a state of constant readiness’ (Southwood, : )—to continuously perfect our agile selves. This ontological condition has become so taken-for-granted as to go virtually unchallenged, as we tend to think of ‘agility’ as a necessary fact of life and even, for some a winning personal quality. From a critical standpoint, however, the very notion of agility and the sense of inescapable motion imposed by the need constantly to refashion our work identities, evokes a sense of deepseated instability and lack of security. The obverse of agility at work resides in an unprecedented feeling of precarity, a constellation of insecurities that combines traditional social and economic concerns for determined reasons—such as, for example, job security— with a new existentialist, ontological anxiety which lacks a precise object and is, therefore, especially unsettling (Collinson, ; Virno, ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Boltanski and Chiapello () have denounced forcefully the dangers of uncritically subscribing to the putative freedom inherent in the ideology of the new spirit of capitalism. In their view, such freedom comes at the cost of both material and psychological security for employees and is a harbinger of a more successful, pernicious, and subtle form of exploitation. Cederström and Fleming’s (: ) characterization of a ‘dead man working’ captures in impressionistic fashion the existential plight of individuals caught in the juggernaut of work as a ‘continuous way of life, rather than just something we do amongst other things’. Southwood () provides a troubling personal account of ‘non-stop inertia’, the ‘kind of frenetic activity’ associated with the ‘constant precariousness and restless mobility’ experienced by an increasing number of workers (: ). Others have pointed out the ‘fake’ nature of neoliberal freedom. For example, Sennett () has argued that our bureaucratized and commercialized world is laying siege to, and fundamentally undermining, our freedom to work well—in his own words, the freedom ‘of a job well done’. In his exploration of the ‘high-tech way of life’ with its promises of a new era of work organization and humane working environments, Kunda () has emphasized the ways in which management continues to shape communities of work and the experience of workers, controls employees’ autonomy, and exploits their engagement and commitment. In a similar vein, Casey () has explored how current changes in the world of work affect everyday life, the ways we relate to one another and, interestingly, to the physical world, with significant consequences for self-identity. A trait common among commentators and critics of contemporary capitalism and its associated forms of work organization is the attention paid to language and discursive practices as pivotal in both the establishment and the maintenance of an ideology that promotes employees’ exploitation and alienation. According to Boltanski (), any ideology needs to be integrated into ‘discursive forms’ to gain purchase and justify engagement and participation on the part of those who are subject to it. The ‘new spirit of capitalism’ that currently dominates Western societies (Boltanski and Chiapello, ) is associated with, indeed constituted through, a specific type of managerial discourse that became widespread in the early s and has become popularized under the label
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‘liberation management’ (Peters, ). Other labels for this phenomenon include, from more critical perspectives, the ‘just be yourself ’ corporate philosophy (Fleming and Sturdy, ) and the ‘lifestyle approach’ to labour management (Kuhn, ). At a superficial level, liberation management is concerned with enhancing employees’ engagement and participation by rejecting hierarchical forms of organization, promoting flexibility, and encouraging managers, employees, and customers alike to break traditional barriers and operate together in a fuzzy, slightly anarchic, and free-wheeling fashion—a modus operandi closer to the experience of everyday life. This provides, so the theory goes, a win-win situation as it creates a productive work environment that benefits individual workers—now free from the straitlaces of bureaucratic control and empowered to exercise lifestyle choices—and work organizations alike. Recent developments in HRM have witnessed a change in direction, with work escaping from the traditional boundaries of the workplace—the physical factories and office blocks that confined employees under managerial surveillance in traditional bureaucratic organizations—and spilling out into the autonomous private sphere of individual workers (Fleming, ; Semler, ). While apparently promoting choice, freedom, and empowerment at the level of the individual employee, the mantra of liberation management (Peters, ) and its associated managerial practices are especially insidious. They have become progressively institutionalized into ‘a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe’ (Marcuse, : ). ‘Unfreedom’ is the inevitable consequence of such a ‘one-dimensional society’ where oppositions and alternatives are systematically integrated or absorbed into a dominant, oppressive structure under the guise of affluence and liberty (Marcuse, ). Within the context of work organizations, the call of liberation management—with its associated demands for agile identities—risks promoting ‘biocracy’ (Cederström and Fleming, ; Fleming, ), a new regime of control that, while professing a seemingly humanized mode of work, de facto contributes to furthering corporate exploitation and regulation. The notion of biocracy draws from Foucault’s critique of the Western neoliberal ideology of ‘biopower’, which ‘involves extending the economic model of supply and demand and investment-cost-profit so as to make it a model of social relations and existence itself, a form of relationship of the individual to himself, time, those around him, the group and the family’ (Foucault, : –). Individuals at work are increasingly exposed to something more dangerous and difficult to resist than self-alienation: they are exposed to ‘a deeply troubling inconvenience of being yourself ’ (Cederström and Fleming, : –), of being authentic (Fleming, ). Not only do employers ‘seek to exploit aspects of individual’s “personal” spheres, which may be valuable in work’ (Maravelias, : ) but, as precarious workers experiencing existential vulnerability, we are ‘saddled with an additional duty: to hide these feelings’ (Southwood, : ), feigning enthusiasm and commitment while suppressing resentment and anxiety. Hochschild’s () notion of emotional labour and Virno’s () concept of virtuosity capture some of the performative elements that are associated with the contemporary work environment and which are subsumed into our agile identities. Agile identities, therefore, potentially constitute enactments of new forms of control such as biocracy that are emerging in work contexts where the boundaries between capital and ‘life’ have imploded (Fleming, ; Hardt and Negri, ) leaving individuals subject to stress, precarity, and disempowerment.
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.................................................................................................................................. Agile identities are formed in response to particular demands to ‘be’ discursively, embodied and emotionally active in the interests of work organizations, where agility is understood as the ability to ‘choose’ to be flexible and adaptable. This ideal is never fully accomplished as we continuously seek confirmation of legitimate membership of institutions (Knights and Clarke, : ), processes that are constantly evaluated and measured both by organizational practices and ourselves. Organizations are able to colonize selves through coercive, reward-based, career incentives, lures or traps providing recognition of the self as continuously improving (Roberts, : ), while the Enlightenment ideal of an autonomous self fuels the myth that identity can effectively be secured through climbing the hierarchies of fortune. In this section, we consider some examples of contexts and practices where this contradiction is apparent and where ‘biocracy’ is surreptitiously mobilized. These are also contexts and practices where contemporary scholarship, is, perhaps inadvertently, contributing to the maintenance and reproduction of this new form of control and its underlying ideology of neoliberal freedom, by empirically demonstrating and legitimizing agility as a taken-for-granted feature of contemporary work organizations (Brown, ; Sveningsson and Alvesson, ).
Selection Work practices today, for example in the US retail sector, display a tendency to hire a temporary contingent and expendable workforce (Smith and Neuwirth, ). Employees are sought ‘ready-made’; that is already looking ‘good’ and sounding ‘right’, already cognizant of the cultural meanings of the specific brand they are asked to embody and its associated lifestyle (Williams and Connell, ). This is a version of ‘biocracy’, a manifestation of the corporate demand to take life to work and of a blurring of the boundaries between previously distinct spheres. US law recognizes and defends employers’ rights to demand workers’ aesthetic conformity to their brand image (Avery and Crain, , cited in Williams and Connell, ). Though low-waged, workers in this sector represent a type of hybrid worker-consumer who identifies with a particular brand and is given the opportunity to bring their notionally ‘authentic’ self (Fleming, ) to work. The employment relationship, however, is often short-lived: disillusionment typically sets in due to poor pay and difficult working conditions resulting in high turnover. That said, there appears to be a ready supply of willing replacements. Indeed Besen’s () study of wellto-do teenagers working in coffee shops found that they considered these low paid jobs as part of their social life and wore their uniforms at times outside of work. Such porousness does not appear to be experienced as a ‘deeply troubling inconvenience of being yourself ’ (Cederström and Fleming, : –), but rather constitutes a harnessing of the personal sphere for work arenas and a physical, embodied, performance of work identity within a personal sphere. In addition to the selection of the ‘ready-made’ employee, employers in the main hire recruits with appropriate dispositions and invest in ‘makeovers’ of appearance, gestures,
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and mannerisms to ensure fit. In Witz et al.’s study of hotel recruitment (), employees were selected as having potential but then had to work on themselves and engage in a labour of aesthetics, which included, for example, a ten-day induction programme, extensive grooming, and deportment training (e.g. how to wear the uniform, makeovers etc.). These employees were transformed into aesthetic labourers in the sense that raw material (in this case, humans as a resource, a factor of production) was transformed into an artefact of labour: work was who these recruits were, not just something they did. This constitutes another example of the exercise of biopower. We argue that, on the part of the new employee, this transformation from raw human material to aesthetic labourer is a fleeting, agile, identity-move into a valorized position judged according to the canons of a dominant consumeristic approach that extends to self-evaluation (Ritzer, ). On the part of the employer, it constitutes a mode of subtle exploitation that entails the reconfiguration of workers’ personal identity attributes in the interests of the organization couched in terms of an opportunity for self-improvement and self-expression. In a study of recruitment processes in a call centre, Sunray, Fleming and Sturdy () found that, under the guise of promoting choice and freedom to employees, diversity was constructed as particular variants of sexuality, consumerism, and playfulness rather than around alternative features such as occupational skills, familial roles, politics, and community (Fleming and Sturdy, : ). Despite the rhetoric of a laissez-faire approach to selfexpression in the organization, there was no room for the non-fun, non-‘different’ person. Indeed, the managerial discourse of ‘just be yourself ’ permeating the call centre actively contributed to the de facto maintenance of a system of oppression that spilled beyond the boundaries of the organization into the employees’ personal-emotional sphere. Fun and adherence were, in fact, mandatory through controlled and managed events and activities. This also evoked self-disciplinary control as private identities were made visible and accountable, so individual success and failure were attributable to the ‘type’ of person the employee was. Call centre technology and disciplinary performance assessment enabled judgements to be made about the degree to which the recruits embraced the Sunray programme. To quote one of the participants in the study, a manager in the organization, ‘there is one Sunray attitude but people can still be themselves’ (Fleming and Sturdy, : ). This statement reveals a fundamental contradiction. The call to ‘just be yourself ’ functions as neo-normative control: if an employee’s performance is failing, the fault lies with who they are—that is, with a person’s own values, personality, or identity—rather than with their actions or with managerial inability to gain sufficient commitment to corporate norms (Fleming and Sturdy, : ). Existential empowerment can be regarded as a form of control through the resistance it evokes—resisting yourself sits uneasily and promotes routines of agile performances of self-identity regulation. However, identity is inherently precarious because of its dependence on the social confirmation of others. When others fail to provide the necessary social confirmations to hold it in place the self is experienced as fragile and vulnerable (Knights and Clarke, : ).
Performance Appraisal Enhanced status in work organizations is transient and dependent on continual affirmations from others (Knights and Willmott, ). In contemporary organizations, we treat
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identity as a resource for securing higher, better, positions than those currently occupied (Thornborrow and Brown, ). However, when managerialist voices invite us to work on our identities to enhance our careers, we should recognize that this preoccupation with our ‘selves’ and injunctions to work on them for organizational purposes is a form of manipulation. The managerial discourse of liberation, choice, and diversity is designed to persuade us to find meaning in, and effectively justify, our subjugation. There are material consequences associated with managerial directives aimed at identity adjustment. For example, in Nath’s () study of Indian call centres, voice or accent alteration was linked to performance scores and to subsequent potential earnings. Employees’ willing compliance with this disempowering measurement practice is illustrated by one of the participants who stated: ‘I think I handle my job very well if they don’t get to know I’m an Indian’ (Nath, : ). Correcting, masking, or making-up identities functions to aestheticize labour: in this instance, using Western pseudonyms and location masking to obscure the perceived stigma of nationality and race, judged on the basis of accent. Nath (: ) argues that demands for such performances are connected to attempts to invalidate social, economic, and racial characteristics, and the stigmatization of employees’ national identities. We ask: is attending to these organizational requirements and demands a sign of agility? One useful way to consider how, in contemporary organizations, emotional, or more wholly, aesthetic labour has consequences for identity¹ is through an examination of similar work contexts. In her early study of emotional labour Hochschild () studied airline crews and argued that the commodification of emotion work could lead to burn out and to the loss of one’s ‘true self ’. More recently, Bolton and Boyd () revisited Hochschild’s () work on emotions and argued instead that airline crews are skilled emotion managers, while nevertheless able to resist and modify customer and management expectations. This is despite it being evident that bureaucratization of the rules governing organizational emotionality is how organizations establish norms of conduct concerning how only certain emotions should be expressed. Furthermore, organizations prefer members to internalize company values so their emotion management performances become supposedly ‘sincere’ (Bolton and Boyd, : ). Finally, this continues to be reinforced through selective recruitment programmes and intensive training to inculcate employees into the values of the company. Airline crews, like other organizational actors, are asked to assume a particular identity that helps them perform their role more efficiently, in this case by assuming the status of a servant in relation to the customer (Bolton and Boyd, : ). Hochschild () called this identity transmutation ‘emotional labour’ and emphasized its associated risks of a personal loss of the ‘true self ’. When revisited by Bolton and Boyd (), the same transmutation was labelled as ‘pecuniary’ or ‘prescriptive’ emotion management, and the emphasis shifted to the skills displayed by the crew in its performance. This, in our view, provides an example of how contemporary scholars have empirically demonstrated ‘agility’ while, at the same time, taking for granted its neoliberal ideological basis. This is expressed through the notion of the agentic, calculative crew member who refashions his/her identity apparently at will and in pursuit of personal advancement. In other words, scholarly discourse on identity in the workplace has subsumed and incorporated to a significant extent agility as an inevitable feature of contemporary work organizations, and in doing so has inadvertently contributed to the
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establishment of a new form of control. In Hochschild’s interpretation (), cabin crew experiencing feelings of emotional dissonance at work could resist managerial control pressures by compartmentalizing and acting out a ‘fake’ identity—that is, the identity of the ideal employee—while still preserving their ‘true’ one. This line of argument, however, runs the risk of perpetuating a false ‘real-self$fake-self dichotomy’ (Tracy and Trethewey, ) that does not recognize emotions as socially constructed (Denzin, ; Harré and Gillett, ) and legitimizes ‘the validation of the self through career success, material accumulation, and the confirmation of “significant others” ’ (Collinson, : ). In Bolton and Boyd’s () explanation the anger, exhaustion, and frustration experienced by the cabin crew did not indicate an invasion of the self—as suggested by Hochschild’s () notion of the commodification of emotion work with its negative consequences of burn out and identity loss—but were manifestations of normal contradictions and oppositions involved in the emotional labour process. Our concern is that, despite an apparent change, organization scholarship has become progressively imbued by a pervasive, a-critical acceptance of the ‘natural’ requirement posed by postmodern organizations’ demand/opportunity for identities and identity work to be ‘agile’. As ‘the self becomes a product of the organization’ (Tracy and Trethewey, : ), individual employees— animated by a ‘specious sense of freedom’ (Fleming and Spicer, : )—are deemed responsible for fitting the ideal mould by agentically exercising ‘agility’. In the meantime, we argue, attention is directed away from mounting a more effective critique to the dominant exploitative ideology of neoliberal freedom and its insidious workings through workplace power structures and dynamics.
Embodied Agility Identity is often presented as an almost exclusively linguistic phenomenon, and as a selfconscious and disembodied process. This is despite some understanding that one of the most important signifiers of identity is the body itself (Ainsworth and Hardy, ) and despite recent calls for consideration to be given in future studies to embodied identity (Corlett et al., ). We explore and assemble several aspects of ‘identity’ through the body, including age, gender, aesthetic appearance, height, colour of skin, approximate weight, style of dress, and endless other features (Knights and Clarke, : ). With regard to furthering our argument around agility, masculine ideals are predicated on control, conquest, and competitive success that accompany belief in self-mastery (Knights and Kerfoot, ). Gender is significant in that women are subsumed by collective identities (sexualized, reproductive bodies) in a manner which does not apply to men and that may constrain equality in recruitment and promotion (Knights and Clarke, ). That is, their ability to be agile, though expected, is curtailed. In the neoliberal version of individual responsibility, the new post-industrial world is one distinguished by self-reflexivity, the ability to think and reflect and change things (Giddens, ; McDowell, : ). In our discussion of agility, we argue that this applies to our identities as well as to social and physical mobility. Adkins () has suggested that these apparent opportunities for remaking life are strongly gendered as gender identities seem to be resistant to reflexive thinking. Men appear to a certain extent to be freed from the social (through this ability to be agile), whereas women are trapped in the social: ‘Theories of reflexive
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modernization run the risk of reinstating the disembodied subject of masculinist thought’ (Adkins, : ). Drawing on the earlier example of hybrid worker-consumers who are recruited for their ability to identify with particular brands, in looking for workers who embody social class privileges, retail stores are mining and exploiting the product of social hierarchies (Williams and Connell, ). In practice, there is a high degree of segregation in retail jobs, a sorting on the basis of race, gender, and class; those few individuals who do not match the demographics are held accountable by customers and co-workers for deviating from the norm (Williams, ). More importantly, segregation is not only imposed by the employer, but accepted by individuals who hold themselves responsible for notional failings. The focus on aesthetic labour encourages workers to experience culpability rather than charging their employers with discriminatory employment practices; workers censure themselves for not ‘fitting’ the aesthetic requirement of the job (Williams and Connell, : ). This, we argue, is premised on the understanding that we can and should all be agile and failure is understood as a fault of the individual. Agility as the preferred mode of identification has implications for the embodied employee. Considerations of the worker as an embodied subject (of all employment not just when targeted by the employer or discussed by participants) risks unsettling assumptions about how work identities are investigated (Wolkowitz, : ). Studying embodiment from the perspective of the embodied worker will not only recognize the limits of the plasticity of the body but the socially judged nature of that experience. A hierarchy is understood to exist which reinforces privilege and is vested in an ability and willingness to be agile.
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.................................................................................................................................. Work organizations in Western societies are increasingly permeated by an ideology infused with neoliberalism, a new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, ) that demands, indeed commands, agility. Agility as an individual quality manifested in flexible, adaptable behaviour and in a preoccupation with being in a state of constant readiness has become a taken-for-granted standard against which we measure ourselves in the workplace and construct our identities. Besides being a demand upon us, agility has become our everyday experience of the workplace—the criterion for judging our performance and ourselves (Collinson, ). The never-ending project of becoming ‘agile’ selves at work, however, operates as a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it appeals to our postmodern sense of autonomy, to our ambition for independence, and to our fundamental desire to express ourselves—who we are and wish to become—at will. As agile strategic agents, we can exercise individual autonomy instead of being passive—or, at best, resisting—subjects to the forms of bureaucratic management and control that dominated traditional modern organizations. Empowerment comes hand-in-hand with the constant refashioning of our work identity necessary to be successful in a corporate world imbued with the language of choice and diversity, to be masters of our destiny in the workplace. From a more troublesome perspective, the mythical alliance between freedom, choice, and identity (Gabriel, ) underpinning the postmodern concept of agility engenders a permanent sense of instability, insecurity, and precarity—a feeling of being always on the
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move without ever being at ease. Like Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen, we are always on the run to stand still, caught in the trap of ‘non-stop inertia’ (Southwood, ). This unrelenting effort potentially exerts a significant psychological and physical toll. It is not so much that we claim that psychological discomfort is experienced when ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves clash (Tracy and Trethewey, : ): rather that discourses of power construct and constrain all identities except the organizationally desirable versions, which invoke considerable emotional and aesthetic labour (Hochschild, ; Witz et al., ) and, often, virtuoso (Virno, ) performances. The compounded effect of competitive pressures— that is, organizational and corporate demands for agility—and of our own sense of obligation/responsibility pushes us to ‘flex’ who we are at work without being allowed to acknowledge explicitly such activity as an act of compliance. Organizations no longer need to harness the ‘insides’ of members, or even pretend that they exist. They can in contemporary times demand a flex to required ways of being, as flexibility (or as we are calling it ‘agility’) is valorized and not being agile is regarded as lacking. The ultimate risk is for work and our identity in the workplace to become meaningless, a loss of sense and self that is more disempowering than traditional alienation. As critical scholars interested in work and organizations, we should challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of dominant capitalist ideologies, reject a ‘one-dimensional society’ (Marcuse, ) where criticisms are absorbed and normalized, and question at a fundamental level ‘why’ we consent to something that is potentially disempowering and existentially unsettling. The notion of ‘agile identity’ proposed here, with its emphasis on the fragile obverse of the agility coin and its reminder that identity is not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but is fundamentally embodied, allows us to explore these tensions critically. Not only does it emphasize the problematic nature of current demands for agility at work, but it invites us to reflect on deeper issues of power and resistance. How can the exploitative ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, surreptitiously operating through overtly benign and humanistic mantras such as ‘liberation management’, effectively be resisted? The risk for scholarship is, as the example discussed earlier suggests, to become subsumed into this ideology by unintentionally and unreflexively accepting its own arguments and explanations. Organizational scholars are in danger of taking for granted the notion that ‘agile’ identities are constitutive of our postmodern world. In so doing, they contribute to the normalization of the discourse of choice, flexibility, and diversity that underpins an oppressive system of relations at work, legitimizing control and obedience and paradoxically acting as an instrument of ‘unfreedom’ (Marcuse, ). Identity is a conceptually complicated, embodied, set of ideas that has long required interrogation (Casey, ; Cerulo, ; Giddens, ; Howard, ; Snow and Anderson, ). Given the ongoing transformation in the structures of work organizations in Western societies, we suggest that the notion of identity—with its ambiguous and fluid character— has become the ideological prop of the new spirit of capitalism in the same way as the concept of class was in managerial capitalism. ‘The best defence against this kind of domination is to establish an ethical struggle against the ideological logic of replacing one fantasy with another’ (Ekman, : ), replacing failed projects with new ones with optimism that this will be ‘the one’ to secure our present and future sense of self (Knights and Clarke, : ). If that is so, we need to be vigilant in how we ‘talk’ about identity in scholarly debates (Tracy and Trethewey, ), and we should make sure to articulate concepts that help understand the workplace while also supporting critique. ‘Agile identity’ is our contribution to these efforts.
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N . Our working definition of aesthetic labour is based on Witz et al. (: ) who suggest that it comprises: ‘the mobilization, development and commodification of embodied dispositions (Bourdieu ) . . . through recruitment, selection and training, transforming them into skills that will produce a style of service, distinct modes of worker embodiment are made up in such a way to embody the aesthetics of the organization’.
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Affect as a Pre-Individual Approach to Identity at Work ......................................................................................................................
Abstract Research on identity at work tends to take the individual as unit of analysis. This chapter explores how we might address identity beyond the person—not merely as a social practice led by conscious humans, but as a semi-conscious bodily encounter that activates the individual. Drawing on affect theory, the author makes the case for a pre-individual approach to identity, abridged as ‘senses of self ’. Instead of a social construction that is primarily human, social, and intersubjective, identity becomes a sociomaterial production that is posthuman, social and material, and transpersonal. After conceptualizing this shift, the author shows how it can help us rework current formulations of identity at work, such as the ‘glass slipper’ of occupational identity. Ultimately, the author argues that a preindividual unit of analysis is crucial to better understanding late-capitalist operations of identity. By replacing the fantasy of bounded individuals who compose themselves with the figure of the Sleepwalker, the senses-of-self approach can cultivate a molecular politics of identity, attuned to bodily vulnerability.
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.................................................................................................................................. R on identity at work tends to begin with, and boil down to, the individual. Broadly speaking, persons are the basic unit of analysis, even when the focal interest scales up to a collective (e.g. Miscenko and Day, ). We study identity work, or individuals engaged in self-making (Brown, ); identity regulation, or organizational attempts to shape subjectivity (Alvesson and Willmott, ); and identification, or personal affiliation with social clusters (Ashforth et al., ). We treat group selves, like organizational identity, as a set of people negotiating who ‘we’ are (He and Brown, ). Across such research, three assumptions pertinent to this chapter can be readily discerned. First, identity is a human show in which people are figured as lead actors and
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targets, subjects and objects. Second, identity is a social construction. Although material aspects of selfhood have drawn interest, most scholars continue to align identity with the realm of ideation, symbol, and meaning. Third, identity is intersubjective, or cognitively and communicatively negotiated between distinct persons. In sum, identity is widely viewed as the social process and product of individuals constructing selves amongst themselves. The individual is no easy given, however. If nothing else, poststructuralist analysis took that option off the table by investigating discursive practices of subjectivation that constitute the person as such. These days, there is widespread agreement that selves can be fluid, fragmented, contradictory, and precarious. And yet, the more profound implication of poststructuralist analysis—its challenge to the very notion that persons precede and author identity (Butler, )—seems rarely to stick. Beleaguered but bandaged, the individual lives on in identity theory and method. Even when we conceptualize selves as practices, we keep asking individuals to show and tell their identities. How might we address identity beyond the person—not merely as a social practice steered by conscious humans (this we already do), but as a semi-conscious bodily encounter that produces the individual? This is the question that animates this chapter. Drawing on developments in affect theory, I make the case for a pre-individual approach to identity that I call ‘senses of self ’. This approach foregrounds how forces and intensities sparked as bodies come into contact—in a word, affect—constitute identifiable entities. In this view, identity is a sociomaterial production instead of a social construction. Identity is not so much crafted as it happens. It is felt through the senses; it leaves tangible traces; it accumulates and circulates materially. Identity as we like to think of it—human, social, and intersubjective—becomes posthuman, social and material, and transpersonal. The first half of the chapter conceptualizes this turn toward the pre-individual and why identity scholarship might want to take it. The second half attempts to demonstrate how. Specifically, I explore how a senses-of-self approach helps to rework my own formulation of occupational identity, namely, the ‘glass slipper’ (Ashcraft, ). The ultimate argument of the chapter is that, if we seek to understand identity amid late capitalist relations, we need a different unit of analysis. Increasingly, identity operates affectively—off the radar of the alert self—such that selves come upon us unawares as much as we claim to possess them (Sampson, ). Under these circumstances, it is all the more pressing to ask how affect calls bodies into relations from which identity emerges. The unit of analysis becomes bodily encounter instead of the individual. Rejecting the persistent fantasy of bounded persons who compose themselves, a pre-individual approach can cultivate an overdue politics of bodily vulnerability.
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.................................................................................................................................. It is no simple shift to leave an accustomed focus on the individual and enter the alien terrain of the pre-individual. Even recent studies of affect in the context of identity at work tend to fall back on the intact individual (e.g. Katila et al., ; Kenny, ). To ease our
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transition toward the alternative approach I condense as ‘senses of self ’, I begin by briefly characterizing affect as it implicates the individual, then elaborate how pre-individual analysis challenges the study of identity at work. Finally, I consider the utility of taking this turn.
Affect and the Individual What today is called ‘affect’ is an ancient concern (Brennan, ), whose latest renewal as an intellectual interest hails largely from cultural studies (Gregg and Seigworth, ). There, scholars agree that affect defies definition and can only be defined by this avoidance of capture. Hence, affect entails ‘an energetics that does not necessarily emerge at the level of signification’ (Rice, : ); ‘a non-conscious experience of intensity’ that ‘cannot be fully realized in language’ (Shouse, : note ); ‘pre-individual forces that escape and exceed the human body’, or ‘a transpersonal capacity taking place before thought kicks in’ (Beyes and Steyaert, : ); and ‘forces of encounter’ including ‘all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed’ (Seigworth and Gregg, : ). From these hazy descriptions, we can start to discern that affect entails forces and intensities spawned as bodies come into contact. Such forces cut across bodies, such that the identity of anybody emerges from their felt relation. Anxiety radiates from a tapping foot, a slip of paper held by shaking hands. Nearby bodies absorb the motion; these varied reactions are in turn digested; and the ongoing flow of sensation, at once social and material, stimulates how and who we become. As this suggests, affect is the capacity to move and be moved (Massumi, ). We reference it as a noun for linguistic stability, but ‘it’ is always a verb—a moving current of energy that affects what happens next. In this way, affect is sometimes distinguished from emotion (Shouse, ): the former is about feeling as it happens, whereas emotion filters events into feelings. Emotion is the possession of bounded individuals, whereas affect possesses bodies in a way that negates their separation and affirms their suggestibility. In short, emotion is personal and interpersonal, whereas affect is pre-personal and transpersonal. We often speak of hiding or disclosing our emotions, which assumes discrete people with their own feelings. When we are affected, however, we are undone as separate individuals; we are permeable, absorbent bodies emerging as selves in relation to the surround. Affect suggests precisely this: I feel, therefore ‘I’ am. Imagine this exchange at a professional conference reception: A white participant mistakes a brown participant for a service worker. The former offhandedly asks for a beverage, and the latter, startled, stammers that they too are a conference attendee, a colleague. After a few more awkward turns, both move on. We could speculate how each feels about the incident, but affect guides us to different questions: How do bodies snap to attention as raced and classed, caught up in relations that are common yet intimate to this scene and moment? What material cues and impulses give rise to the drink order? How long will its recall lash the offending body with a guilty cringe, which eventually recedes into a failure to relax unless enclosed in sameness? How does micro-aggression hit the body, another gut punch to meet with professional cool amid a racing, sinking heart? How do subtle injuries accrue and linger as perpetual states of alert or simmering rage? How do race, professional, and labour identities happen together; and how is their entanglement felt?
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In this scenario, white person and person of colour are not given as individuals who arrive at the reception fully formed and self-contained. Rather, the encounter between bodies contributes to their becoming, or evolving composition, as raced persons. Racialization is a sensate phenomenon, an energetic pulse that activates individuals bound in unequal relations that take familiar and variable forms. It is in this way that affect points identity scholars to the ‘pre-individual’, that is, the prepersonal and transpersonal bodily relations from which apparent individuals continually arise: senses—as in sensations—of self are generated by bodily encounter. Here, ‘sense’ is more about feeling than making. Sensemaking, as we usually define it, depends on sensing as a necessary precursor and presence. Put simply, senses of self are sensible (i.e. they make sense, and become meaningful) because they are sense-able (e.g. they are felt, or registered on sensory receptors, as bodies come into contact). It follows that identity is not only a social construction. How can it be primarily social when the social is always also material?
Senses of Self: Bodily Encounter as an Alternative Unit of Identity Analysis What does a turn toward pre-individual relations ask of identity inquiry? Answered bluntly, people can no longer be the de facto starting point, the basic unit of analysis. The pre-individual calls attention to affective flows that give rise to evident individuals. This means starting with bodies, and specifically encounter among bodies, rather than with people. As illustrated by the conference reception episode, affect is a shifting current ignited by, and passed through, bodily contact. Such currents precede and exceed conscious selves yet contribute to their ongoing constitution. Specific to human bodies, affect strikes physiology first and never fully succumbs to the symbolic order (Brennan, ). For instance, as soon as we label the reception incident a ‘micro-aggression’, its felt textures slip away. Scholars variously refer to the elusive nature of affect as non- or not-yet conscious, non- or morethan-representational (e.g. Beyes and Steyaert, ). Such terms do not reference a subterranean psyche or other underlying cause; they simply refer to circulating energies that manifest materially yet resist expression. A pithy way to say this is that affect sneaks in through a side entrance rather than knocking at the front door. Or, it permeates bodies at the level of particle rather than whole. Affect strikes at the molecular level of corporeal faculties, like nervous and chemical receptors, rather than at the molar or entity level, like the person or self (Sampson, ). In the reception example, person of colour and white person lose co-authorship and are composed by their bodily encounter. ‘Their’ respective racial identities are effects of affect. Racial identity, in this view, is a bodily residue that keeps getting stirred up. Pre-individual analysis thus redefines identity as persisting forces and intensities that punctuate bodies into entities, activate recognizable selves, and leave sociomaterial traces— in a phrase, senses of self. In so doing, the pre-individual reframes the body as distinct from the person. Human bodies are not already whole, separate systems that belong to their namesakes. Rather, the individual as a steady state of being demarcated by identity is an effect in perpetual becoming (thus, pre-personal). Note that the ‘pre’ here does not mean before in some linear, causal way; it means that affect enables and instigates selves in an
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ongoing, simultaneous way. Affect exposes the body as a vulnerable system, imminent and porous far beyond the usual acknowledgement that people are affected by their surroundings. The idea is not that bodies become infected with others’ energy like a virus that replicates the same. It is that bodies are profoundly affected—indeed, constituted—as they absorb, reverberate with, respond to, and become in relation to what is happening around and through them (thus, transpersonal). Pre-individual analysis goes beyond the claim that human bodies are susceptible, however. It also maintains that the body is not exclusively human or even creaturely, because affect moves through contact among bodies of all sorts. As Stewart (: ) says, affect entails ‘a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact’; it is ‘not about one person’s feelings becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water’. If constitutive bodily contact includes non-human bodies, the prospect of posthuman identity studies begins to emerge. Consider the identity work performed by the ‘aesthetics’—at times intentional and often not—of an engineering office, a bureaucratic waiting room, a vibrant shop or austere gallery. Consider the identity regulation perpetrated by built environments with furniture, colour, and temperature controls geared towards some strain of masculinity. Identity surges in the adrenalin pump of an engine revving under your grip, or nerves stretched thin from hours listening to babies cry and changing dirty nappies. The materiality of non-human and human bodies is no mere tool; it is not just inert or passive substance used by conscious actors to make selves. Stuff participates in activating identities in ways that exceed human will, knowledge, and control. To acknowledge that many kinds of bodies are involved in identity formation is not to slide down the slippery slope of equivalence. Clearly, bodies offer varied affordances, but their actual respective capacities are known in relation, through contact. Indeed, this is how affect animates identifiable entities, like persons and objects: Anybody takes on distinctive identity by affecting and being affected by other bodies. Affect, then, evokes a thoroughly relational ontology of self. This reworking of the body brings human subjectivity to modesty. The person as actor is made possible through constant receptivity to other bodies. Senses of self, including the sense that ‘I’ am an individual—a stable, coherent, and agentic figure—are forged continuously in sensate connection with others. Accordingly, pre-individual analysis asserts a somnambulist subjectivity, wherein human awareness and action are half-awake, dozing, gripped by a sensation of self-governance that is, ironically, transpersonal (Sampson, ). Specific to identity, this sleepwalking subject is convinced of their ‘self-possession’, or selfauthoring capacity, even as the body is possessed by selves. Indeed, the dream of selfpossession is one such possession of the body. Or, phrased more gently, selves happen to bodies, as much or more than they are made by people. Pre-individual identity analysis therefore extends poststructuralist efforts to decentre and fragment the human subject. However, rather than examine the discursive constitution of subjectivity in representational practices, pre-individual analysis examines the affective constitution of subjectivity, or ontological forces and intensities that constitute subjects yet outrun their representation by addressing the body off the radar of the self. This, then, is the fundamental challenge affect poses to identity research: a comprehensive refusal of the bounded individual, certainly as a given, but also as (a) a more or less
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viable conscious actor, (b) the author of personal identity, (c) the atom of collective identity, (d) a primarily symbolic formation that is the main object of identity work and regulation, and (e) a suitable methodological hub. Affect replaces the individual with preindividual inquiry into how bodily encounter generates senses of self. What intrigues affect scholars are those operations of feeling around the edges of awareness that galvanize selves, perceptions of coherent wholes with identities. Here, identity is not so much the social construction of people by people as it is the sociomaterial production of people, as if they are distinct from other bodies because they master their own selves.
Porous Bodies, Sleepwalking Subjects: A Molecular Politics of Identity Still, given how daunting it may seem to study identity without an intact individual, why bother to do so? For many affect scholars, the challenge is worth accepting because preindividual analysis can access overlooked operations of power that are enduring and intensifying. Affect suggests an ‘imperative of (re)imagining the terrain of politics “itself ” ’ (Pelligrini and Puar, : ). If the body is a truly open system, then ‘the currency that connects our bodies and fuses us into communities is not a rationally elected choice, but a felt compulsion . . . an effect of a matrix of moving lines of force, travelling through us and leaving power in their wake’ (Schaefer, ). My introductory claim that identity is a sensory occurrence circles back with greater force here. In the conference incident, politics unfurl as racial and occupational identities are produced together in real time. And yet, this is not an identity politics wrapped up in who. It does not automatically prioritize human actors and treat their voices and choices as aligned with social identifications and group interests. Instead, it is an ontological politics of what is becoming real: What relational potentials are in bloom, and what is contributing to the emergence of these relations (Mol, )? As Stewart (: –) observes, ‘Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things’, where ‘identities take place’. What is becoming all too real in the reception episode is race and its alignment with (de)valued work. Zoom in to notice all the bodies contributing to this production: the lighting and spatial configurations of the hotel ballroom; the circulation of alcohol and appetizers; the artefacts and gestures that add up to an atmosphere where professionalism is white until proven otherwise; the physical signs of service, ranging from habitual readings of skin tone to compulsory postures of deference to uniforms that riff off the tuxedo. Many things are happening as all these bodies come into contact, and one is a not-so-conscious relational reflex that strengthens with every exercise: the whiteness of knowledge professions, the brownness of service labour. The ‘colour’ of work. A different mode of critique comes into view (Ashcraft, ). Much critical scholarship on identity at work points to ideological controls whereby people consent to oppressive systems. A great deal of poststructuralist inquiry interrogates discursive disciplines of the self. While much is left in shadow by this broad brush, it is safe to say that both orientations more often than not have stressed molar identity formations and the leading role of human social processes, like representation, in orchestrating power. Power functions on molecular material fronts of identity too. For example, a long history of queer, race, and feminist scholarship illuminates how othering transpires through the
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affective constitution of bodies (e.g. Butler, ; Chen, ; Cvetkovich, ; Fanon, ; Probyn, ; Sedgwick, ). To this lineage, recent studies of advanced capitalism add emerging and escalating reasons to undertake pre-individual analysis. Some say we live in a time of affective intensification, when affect weighs ever more heavily in claims of identity and truth (Dean, ). Witness the rampant preoccupation with optics and branding, or what Stephen Colbert coined ‘truthiness’, wherein what something looks and feels like stands in for what it is. Similarly, much writing on late capitalist dynamics observes how contemporary socio-technical assemblages—such as the internet, social media, big data, and the disintegration and polarization of news—facilitate the strength and spread of affect in new forms and degrees. Several scholars thus call attention to the rising importance of affective economies (Ahmed, ). Sampson (: –) warns of ‘an affective atmosphere composed of sub-representative currents flowing between a porous self and other relations’, which ‘opens up the potential for corporate and political powers to tap into a tendency toward imitation-suggestibility by measuring, priming, and manipulating the collective mood’. Likewise, Clough (: ) casts the ‘market-driven circulation of affect’ as a historical shift in progress, the target of which ‘is not the production of subjects whose behaviors express internalized social norms’ but, instead, ‘a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, and potentialities, assembled . . . in bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data)’. In sum, there is abiding reason and mounting temporal urgency to conduct preindividual identity analysis. Affect has long played a role and is increasingly potent. Even as we keep looking to the individual for identity answers, the principal mode of control in this historical moment follows the logic of Foucault’s biopolitics, going around the person to strike directly at ‘the molecular level of bodies’ (Clough : ). Responding to this condition, a pre-individual approach to identity at work can revitalize a politics of identity—specifically, of bodily vulnerability—at once old and new. Next, I offer a preliminary demonstration of how we might go about studying senses of self.
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.................................................................................................................................. To explore what pre-individual identity analysis could look like, I revisit a model of occupational identity—the ‘glass slipper’ (Ashcraft, )—that directly addresses our conference reception scenario. The glass slipper captures how certain lines of work come to be associated with certain bodies, such that the metaphorical shoe seems ‘naturally’ to fit. Work–body alignments come to operate like a reflex and carry enormous consequences for people and occupations alike. Below, I consider how the original formulation of the glass slipper retains an individual unit of analysis even as it appears to emphasize practice. Like much identity research, it privileges the social over material and human over non-human, accentuating intersubjectivity and obscuring bodily porosity. To bring the negated terms back into view, I then draw on Sara Ahmed’s () conception of affective economies to rework the glass slipper in
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line with the senses-of-self approach proposed above. Finally, I try my hand at enacting the politics of bodily vulnerability that a pre-individual rendition of the glass slipper could induce. It might help to regard what follows as a series of warm-up exercises in preparation for a heavier lift.
Occupational Identity as Social Construction: People Make Meaning with Material Consequence The glass slipper in brief. The original case for the glass slipper (Ashcraft, ) begins by asking why we treat organizations, but not occupations, as entities that take on identities. Amid abundant literature on collective organizational selves, little research treats occupations as such. Studies of occupational identity highlight practitioner (dis)identification instead (e.g. Pratt et al., ), as if organizations teem with possible selves, whereas occupations have clear-cut natures established by factors like degree of complexity and knowledge abstraction. Can we really take these factors for granted? How do they become self-evident? The glass slipper answers that symbolic alignments between occupations and bodies are what serve up, by standing in for, ‘obvious’ proof. Decades of occupational segregation research confirm that the nature and worth of work is known by the company it keeps. Hence, the most reliable way to professionalize is to align work with white men and masculinities, while the surest road to downgrade occupational value is by association with women, feminization, and/or racialized others (e.g. Kirkham and Loft, ). We know that many people find identity in work, but the reverse is also true: occupations derive identity from affiliated people. So how does this happen? According to the glass slipper model, work–body alignments arise through social construction, or the ongoing contestation of meaning. Specifically, occupational identity forms through discursive struggle over two entangled questions: What is this line of work, and who does it? The representational battle is waged across many sites and practices by an array of participants, including variously invested constituents and even bystanders. It can be strategic as well as organic, more intense in some periods than others. But to some extent, occupations are socially constructed in light of practitioners all the time. This is a high-stakes struggle, for those representations that find footing will radiate material effects. The glass slipper metaphor encapsulates the tangible character of meanings that come to hold sway. Basically, a glass slipper is both the conditioned message that ‘this occupation is the natural province of these sorts of people’ and the material configurations and (dis)advantages that follow this symbolic attachment. Moreover, ‘these sorts of people’ is a highly specific, situated construction—not about gender or race in some abstract way (like women’s work), but about multiple and intersecting embodied social identities. For example, the glass slipper of US commercial aviation slips most easily onto those who appear white, male, heterosexually potent, even fatherly, authoritative, educated, technically proficient, and professional. This symbolic attachment is no accident. It was strategically invented in the late s to mid-s, a period when popular images of pilots varied widely, from brash daredevils and distinguished war heroes to dainty high-society ‘ladybirds’. In an effort to persuade a doubting public that airline flying was safe, constituents of the budding airline industry collaborated to make the pilot over as an elite
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professional. They did so by expressly linking him to the virile image of a military officer with scientific credentials. Quickly, this attachment became institutionalized to such an extent that the one woman pilot employed by the airlines was driven out, and to suicide. No other women, or men of colour, accessed the commercial cockpit for over three decades. Airline pilots and the occupation itself gained extraordinary benefit from this constitutive exclusion (for more, see Ashcraft and Mumby ). What’s the matter with the glass slipper? Pre-individual reflections. On its face, the original version of the glass slipper may seem to reject the individual as unit of analysis. It goes to great lengths, after all, to emphasize (a) the identity of occupations themselves, not that of individual practitioners, (b) as born of representational practice, not personal cognition. Nevertheless, discursive struggle is conceived as a social practice steered by conscious persons. It includes a wider range of human participants than we usually consider, but make no mistake: ‘Participants’ equals individuals, or groups thereof, and the struggle for meaning is an intersubjective endeavour. Materiality is certainly involved here, but to a limited extent. For instance, the glass slipper recognizes human bodies, or at least social constructions of them, as integral to identity. On closer inspection, the glass slipper is most interested in bodies as passive texts for, not active participants in, discursive struggle. Oddly, despite explicit emphasis on the fact that social identities are embodied, the battle over representing bodies remains disembodied, as if the act of social construction is not of the sensate world and, thus, invariably material too. Another gesture towards materiality comes in the use of a glass slipper, which evokes something at once artificial and actual, fabricated through the wand-waving magic of representation, then making real waves in the world. However, notice—right there—how loyalty to the social is preserved. Work–body alignment is up for symbolic grabs, and material configurations follow to sustain whatever meaning wins the contest (see Ashcraft, : –). In short, materiality is largely reduced to the impact of meaning. It may exert some influence, but mainly as an exigency or constraint that opens and shuts windows of opportunity. For the most part, meaning calls the shots, with materiality as its henchman. In these ways, the glass slipper retains the social-material split and dubs social construction primary. People making intersubjective meaning are the lead actors, while materiality of various kinds is left to play supporting roles, like stage, trigger, limit, effect, and enforcer. Guided by the pre-individual, we might question any approach to identity that forces this choice: side with either social construction or material influence. Both sides accomplish their aim—namely, strengthening or weakening the relative muscle of representation—by denying the materiality of meaning. We can refuse the choice, and affect can help. A pre-individual approach to occupational identity would begin by acknowledging that a glass slipper arises from, and never above, the sensate world. Discursive struggle does not make an occupational scene come to life; it is already of the living scene it longs to affect. Social practice like representation does not occur in some remote immaterial lab; it is a material activity, emanating from shifting streams of force and intensity in which many bodies, not only human, participate. Moreover, these affective streams constitute all the bodies that are mingling to make an occupational scene, through transpersonal relations. We will get to non-human bodies in a moment, but we can begin by granting that human bodies are deeply affected as they inhabit, and become inhabited by, lines of work. They are not only, or even primarily,
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fodder for representing occupational identity. Human forms are continually constituted as discrete persons with different agencies—habits, bearings, means, ideologies, dexterities and injuries, races and genders—in significant part by the forces and intensities of daily occupation in which they find themselves (as in, find their selves). True to their name, occupations occupy. Put more directly, occupational identity is not made by people. It happens to and through bodies and leaves bodily traces, as hinted by the colloquial phrase, ‘occupational hazard’. Occupational identity possesses bodies, as much we like to think of it as something we control and possess. In other words, occupational identity arises affectively. Work–body alignments are more felt than articulated, more reflex than reflection. So how can we study the glass slipper like this: as a sociomaterial production instead of a social construction?
Occupational Identity as Sociomaterial Production: Senses of Self Materialize in Affective Economies Tell: conceptual development. Ahmed’s (, ) conception of affective economies provides a helpful starting place.¹ She begins with the question of how associations between things become ‘sticky’, or come to stick together and around. The most compelling alignments, she says, are rarely made explicit. Logics may arise on their behalf, but truly robust associations gain momentum and vigour precisely from avoiding articulation even as they are sharply, materially felt. How does this work? The short answer is that adherence becomes a kind of coherence. Various signs and bodies, human and non-human, start to cling together; and these clumps form the appearance or effect of a group. Ahmed refers to such a cluster as a metonymic slide, wherein figures that stand in for each other huddle together and travel around, while the constant gliding between them ‘constructs a relation of resemblance’. If one or two appear, their affiliates are also cued, as if glued to their heels. Individual and collective identities are activated, and animate the bodies in their path. For example, signs such as terrorist, fundamentalism, radical, Islam, Arab, primitive, and so forth bunch together, along with brown skin, a flag (quoting off) of ISIS, fonts, accents, and modes of headdress or facial hair linked to the Middle East. In the constant, circulating slippage among these signs and bodies, forces and intensities of fear and hate create identifiable raced persons and galvanize white nationalist identity under perpetual threat of ‘their’ invasion. Ahmed explains that this capacity to persuade through felt, rather than reasoned, association is what makes metonymic slides more potent than any logic rising to their defence. Claims can be contested, but how to refute what feels true? Metonymic slides illustrate pre-individual identity analysis, in that they form pre-personal and transpersonal bodily relations from which apparent individuals, collectivities, and their identities arise. Ahmed is clear that affect is doing the work here; it is the magnetic force that pulls signs and bodies into relation. Indeed, it is what she calls the non-residence of affect— the circulation or passing around of associations (that do not actually reside in anyone or thing)—from which metonymic slides draw strength. Affect here is an adhesive. Through constant movement and friction, it yields a material tackiness of meaning that is sense-able. Specifically, metonymic slides assemble and gather energy through bodily encounter. Human bodies are often not conscious, or only vaguely aware, of such contact, but it
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nonetheless creates impressions, by which Ahmed means more than a vague sense of things. She also means material impact that leaves real marks, such as physiological eruptions when confronted with bodies marked menacing, or accumulating anxiety borne on a flag. She cautions that these impressions do not reside in individuals, as we tend to think. They are social and material, and exceed human bodies. This is how metonymic slides are readily activated by historical reference, or leaning back upon links that can be summoned because material traces of their circulation linger on (e.g. neo-Nazi associational chains). Indeed, these sociomaterial slides cannot hang together unless repeated over time and place. Affect generates stickiness through persistent contact, which enables the ‘transference of affect’ from one figure in a metonymic slide to the next, and to new figures pulled in by the force field (Ahmed, : ). Associational stickiness, then, is all about the materiality of meaning. Neither meaning nor material, as if separable, could ever amount to anything without moving together. Importantly for Ahmed, this movement is economic, or operates like an economy, in that metonymic slides generate and accumulate value through exchange. In particular, affect intensifies through the circulation of charged objects that touch and trigger as they change hands and places. Feeling spreads and grows through disseminated contact with affectively saturated commodities. For Ahmed, then, affective economy is an analogy. Extending Ahmed’s account into the domain of identity at work, I argue that affective economies of occupation yield actual economic value. Work becomes ‘this, not that’ through metonymic slides, those powerfully implicit associations between signs and bodies. The metonymic slides of occupation connect (and detach) figures in relations of resemblance (and differentiation), yielding identifiable persons and collectives that pick up steam as they travel. Through repetitive material exchange, these forces and intensities of identity—or senses of self—translate into tangible value (or devaluation) for the occupation and its practitioners. The glass slipper is a brand reflex that generates economic value through affective adherence. Show: empirical illustration. To demonstrate, we can return to the example of commercial aviation featured in the original formulation of the glass slipper (Ashcraft ). There, a symbolic attachment between airline flying and a particular kind of male body was first socially constructed, then materialized in embodied performances, followed by other institutionalizations. Interestingly, the original version mentions a crew uniform as one prop in this symbolic makeover—a seemingly minor point worth elaborating. By now a well-worn commodity, the airline pilot uniform came about as an integral part of the strategic campaign to persuade the public that flying was a safe and dependable mode of transport, and that pilots were knowledgeable, reliable professionals (see Ashcraft and Mumby, ). The uniform was an affective technology, designed to comfort public anxiety with manly competence and authority. Airline constituents modelled the new uniform around that of a naval commander—a dark, trim officer’s suit with epaulettes of rank and a decorated captain’s cap. The ensemble made its way into circulation and endures with little change to this day. Yes, human participants pinned their identity hopes to a historically primed uniform. However, what this object-body could actually do, and how it would bump up against other bodies in its path, was beyond their grasp. The uniform was no mere tool for human
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deployment; it could participate, or fail to cooperate. The uniform must take on a life—an identifiability—of its own. To their delight, it did manage to bring an affective economy roaring to life. It successfully evoked associations from past and parallel scenes (e.g. military and transport masculinity) to bring felt certainty to the floundering scene of commercial aviation. Soaked in the affective residue of prior circulations, the uniform was ready to adhere to new figures with only minor adjustments. But it had to be inhabited and exchanged continually for this new version to leave the impressions that made it stick, together and around—impressions repeated over time and place, such as pilots swelling inside the uniform with authoritative pride, passengers who ‘relax and enjoy the flight’ upon sight of the uniform, airline employees who show it deference, Hollywood glorifications of it, members of Congress seduced by union lobbyists dressed up in it, young boys yearning to wear it, young girls learning to swoon at its imagination. These and affiliated inhabitations gain intensity through circulation. Signs and bodies lean back, get magnetized, slide back and forth, move around, and attract new associates: airline pilot, elite officer, clean-cut, cool, calm, commanding, professional, discipline, authority, dignity, respect, knowledge, white, technical and sexual prowess, fatherly, tall and handsome, strong and silent, the epitome of manly. The metonymic slide thereby attaches to, and remakes, the pilot’s body and surrounding bodies, forming the effect of a collective by association, an identifiable occupation. By accumulating affect, the uniform accumulates value—not only in the sense of energy and momentum, as Ahmed would have it, but also identity-based economic value, or brand. The object-body captures, and carries into circulation, not only an occupational identity, but a mode of feeling about it, through semi-conscious sensory encounters that become a warrant for aviation safety and the ‘obvious’ status of the flying trade. Airlines and the pilot union banked on this outcome when they cooperated to put pilots in uniform. The makeover ‘set you up separate and distinct with high qualifications and high in the economic set up of this country. That is worth plenty’, said the founder of the pilot union in an early address to pilots (as cited in Hopkins, : –). Upon inspection, however, an affective commodity cannot act alone. It becomes an identifiable entity only through relation. Many body-partners helped the pilot uniform succeed, and vice versa, like the complicit comportment of human bodies within it, the intercom that amplified its authority with mystery and invisibility, the guarded cockpit with flashing bells and whistles, the leather ‘nav(igation) kit’ for technical manuals, the ‘runways’ for uniformed swagger afforded by airport platforms and regulations, and other institutional supports. Not to mention the nearby foil found in the feminized uniform of the ‘stewardess’, compelled to perform the emotional services of wife-mother-sexual-object in the cabin while father is off managing the technical business of the cockpit.² Affective economies of occupation are relational indeed. The circulation of anybody requires the participation of a sociomaterial village, comprised of human and non-human inhabitants and their countless hybrids. It is in this sense that occupational identity is not made by people but through senses of self: semi-conscious, transpersonal bodily encounters that collide with, as well as constitute, human will and effort. For those who doubt what sort of politics could attend this preindividual approach, I conclude with an ordinary example that is admittedly partial and tentative but, hopefully, provocative.
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As It Happens: The Glass Slipper as a Politics of Bodily Vulnerability The scene unfolds in a fine Italian restaurant in Denver, Colorado. It is nationally ranked yet quasi-accessible, for the professional class, anyway. I am hosting a retirement event in honour of two colleagues. I want every detail to feel right, smooth, special. The wine team— yes, a whole team—is impressive. They have already helped me choose two delicious bottles, and it is time for a third. She approaches me, bends down, leans toward my ear. A few things register at a low level, somewhere around the edges: she is much shorter and younger than me, with ambiguous racial identity (to my white eye) and a gentle, generous smile. I ignore that she is wearing the same vaguely masculine apron as the rest of the team, distinguishing her from the largely female serving staff—a clear material signal that she serves a different function. Somehow my buzzing sensors bypass that nuance in favour of other, more habituated cues, which bounce off a metonymic slide in full swing: sommelier, refined gentleman, erect and elegant posture, tall and lean, ‘proper’ speech, impeccably dressed and mannered, white (in this region), exquisite taste, metrosexual masculinity, showy with knowledge of wine . . . I hear her ask discreetly, ‘Maam, would you care to order another bottle for the table? I’d be happy to assist’. She is holding out the list. Without hesitation, I turn and make confident eye contact: ‘Oh, actually, I’ve been working with the sommelier team; can you ask one of them to come over?’ She is stepping back, almost bowing, and her smile falters slightly. Her body braces for another next time, while her head nods agreeably. As if to say No, Maam. You misunderstand, Maam. Yes, Maam, here we go again. What she says out loud, with gracious caution, is: ‘Actually, I can help you if that’s OK with you—I am an experienced member of the sommelier team, but I can also get one of the others if you’d prefer’. A perceptible flinch, but no break in the professional composure. Hot shame flushes my face; my pulse spikes. With a sick dawning, I know that I just passed to her what I have felt a thousand times. Now I am the perpetrator in my own damn theory. I know the sharp sting, how to let it roll off like butter. Watching her is looking in the mirror. I am thrown, guilty: No-no-no-no-no, I didn’t mean that, I wouldn’t do that, forgive me, relieve me, make me feel better, about this sexism that courses through me and flashes out like the bark of a dog. I know better, but the body cannot always do better. The seasoned feminist leaks chauvinist impulse, and I am not the only one. Focus. This is not the time to kick or redeem yourself. Stay attuned to how identity is happening, because that glass slipper is still unfolding before our eyes. And if you take this time to worry over the identity implications for you—Oh no, does she think I am sexist, am I sexist?—then you continue the unequal relation: asking her to take care of you, to soothe you with assurance, when you were the latest vessel of her exclusion and subordination. No, this time, the glass slipper is not about you. Of course the body channels sexism, racism, and many other isms, in those senses of self whereby it knows, and misrecognizes, identity. We can only aspire to be less effective conduits. But it is not too late to feel identity differently, and better, in this very voltage of encounter. In what happens next. Look her in the eye and say, with warmth and selfdeprecation, ‘I cannot believe I just did that. I am sorry, for this and all the other times you
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are obligated to be courteous about crimes against your body. Yes, please help me choose that wine, and know that I know you have worked twice as hard for this expertise because of moments just like this’. She laughs and thanks me, her body relaxing. Or did she have to. A third bottle arrives at the table, and it is gorgeous. The glass slipper arrives again, and leaves fresh marks. It happens to me; it happens through me.
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter has been ‘occupied’ with formulating and demonstrating a shift in the unit of identity analysis: from the individual to the pre-individual. The proposed approach— senses of self—reframes identity as the affective constitution of apparent individuals who construct selves amongst themselves. Focus shifts from presumed persons to bodily encounters, those felt relations that affect how and who we become yet elude the radar of the self. Identity in this view is not primarily human, social, and intersubjective; it is also posthuman, sociomaterial, and transpersonal. It happens to and passes through porous bodies of many kinds. Pre-individual analysis significantly expands the usual range of ways we address the person in studies of identity at work. To Alvesson’s () seven common images of the individual, for example, we can add an eighth: the Sleepwalker (convenient, since all the others begin with ‘s’ too). This somnambulist is not just one more image, though. It is a hybrid figure, at once human and non-human, that calls the individual into question, upending the very notion of self-possession. Acting under the influence of relational currents it cannot yet discern, the Sleepwalker betrays how bodily receptivity to ordinary encounter awakens our most basic and precious senses of self. We tested the waters of a molecular politics of identity that might accompany preindividual analysis by exploring a mundane incident with a sommelier, encountered in the course of writing this chapter. By slowing down to notice how occupational identity happens—how the glass slipper comes upon us in the moment—a metonymic slide comes into view, along with multiple bodies colliding (colluding?) to keep it in production: human bodies in varied relations to labour and pleasure marked by costume, glass-andfermented beverage bodies, bodies of knowledge and taste, text bodies and table bodies, mood-lit bodies, full-bodied wine coursing through lit human bodies. The narrative ‘I’ gradually discerns herself as a vulnerable body, at once semi-conscious subject, conduit, and object. With budding awareness, she tries to check herself—as in, put the self in check—to differently empower the body. For if bodies are becoming together, potentials to become otherwise abound, even when things seem overdetermined. This is the beauty, possibility, and terror of sleepwalking: Anything could happen when identity is no longer about me and you, us and them. Ultimately, I have argued that identity has long worked affectively, and increasingly so. In these times in which we find ourselves, we need more conceptions of identity that refuse to
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‘split the order of signification from the orders of the flesh’ (Brennan, : ). These orders operate together, and with intensifying urgency. Maybe the Sleepwalker can show us how.
N . For an extended discussion of how affect theory can contribute to productive revisions of occupational identity and branding, see Kuhn et al. (). . In the context of the UK, for example, the figure of the ‘steward’ provided a different foil (Mills ).
R Ahmed, S. (). ‘Affective Economies’. Social Text, (), –. Ahmed, S. (). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alvesson, M. (). ‘Self-Doubters, Strugglers, Storytellers, Surfers, and Others: Images of SelfIdentities in Organization Studies’. Human Relations, (), –. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (). ‘Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Ashcraft, K. L. (). ‘The Glass Slipper: “Incorporating” Occupational Identity in Management Studies’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Ashcraft, K. L. (). ‘ “Submission” to the Rule of Excellence: Ordinary Affect and Precarious Resistance in the Labour of Organization and Management Studies’. Organization, (), –. Ashcraft, K. L. and Mumby, D. K. (). Reworking Gender: A Feminist Communicology of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ashforth, B. E., Harrison, S. H., and Corley, K. G. (). ‘Identification in Organizations: An Examination of Four Fundamental Questions’. Journal of Management, (), –. Beyes, T. and Steyaert, C. (). ‘Spacing Organization: Non-Representational Theory and Performing Organizational Space’. Organization, (), –. Brennan, T. (). The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Butler, J. (). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (). Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Chen, M. Y. (). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. (). ‘Introduction’. In P. T. Clough and J. Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. –. Cvetkovich, A. (). Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, J. (). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fanon, F. (). Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (eds.) (). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. He, H. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Organizational Identity and Organizational Identification: A Review of the Literature and Suggestions for Future Research’. Group & Organization Management, (), –.
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Hopkins, G. E. (). The Airline Pilots: A Study in Elite Unionization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katila, S., Laine, P.-M., and Parkkari, P. (). ‘Sociomateriality and Affect in Institutional Work: Constructing the Identity of Start-Up Entrepreneurs’. Journal of Management Inquiry, (), –. Kenny, K. (). ‘ “Someone Big and Important”: Identification and Affect in an International Development Organization’. Organization Studies, (), –. Kirkham, L. M. and Loft, A. (). ‘Gender and the Construction of the Professional Accountant’. Accounting, Organizations and Society, (), –. Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K. L., and Cooren, F. (). The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Work and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Routledge. Massumi, B. (). ‘The Autonomy of Affect’. Cultural Critique, (Autumn), –. Mills, A. J. (). ‘Cockpits, Hangars, Boys and Galleys: Corporate Masculinities and the Development of British Airways’. Gender, Work & Organization, , –. Miscenko, D. and Day, D. V. (). ‘Identity and Identification at Work’. Organizational Psychology Review, (), –. Mol, A. (). ‘Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions’. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. –. Pelligrini, A. and Puar, J. (). ‘Affect’. Social Text, (), –. Pratt, M. G., Rockmann, K. W., and Kaufmann, J. B. (). ‘Constructing Professional Identity: The Role of Work and Identity Learning Cycles in the Customization of Identity among Medical Residents’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Probyn, E. (). Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rice, J. E. (). ‘The New “New”: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies’. Quarterly Journal of Speech, (), –. Sampson, T. D. (). Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schaefer, D. O. (). ‘It’s Not What You Think: Affect Theory and Power Take to the Stage’. Guest blog post, Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seigworth, G. J. and Gregg, M. (). ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. In M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. –. Shouse, E. (). ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’. M/C Journal, (). http://www.journal.media-culture. org.au//-shouse.php. Stewart, K. (). Ordinary affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
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Abstract This chapter explores the identity implications for people who inhabit the liquid world of organizations. It draws upon Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity and suggests that traditional conceptions may constrain new ways of thinking about identity and identity tensions in increasingly liquidly modern organizational contexts. The authors focus on literature that discusses identity tensions in the workplace and the responses of individuals as they seek to negotiate and/or manage these tensions. In so doing, the authors draw attention to how the nature of liquid modernity challenges existing conceptions of identity work and raise issues and questions for further research.
I
.................................................................................................................................. A the dawn of the epoch of the capitalist revolution Marx and Engels () noted that it meant the continuous revolutionizing of production, which Schumpeter () later termed creative destruction, producing a context of ‘everlasting uncertainty’ (Dow and Lafferty, ). Today, that uncertainty stretches as far as many young eyes can see: the immediate future looks precarious and itinerant for those that are less advantaged, as they chase what opportunities may be on offer while for those more privileged by higher education an immediate future of debt and a continuation of the student lifestyle beckons (Harris, ). In such conditions, questions of secure identity may be somewhat problematic. The concept of identity addresses fundamental questions such as ‘who am I?’ and ‘how should I act?’ (Coupland and Brown, : ; Alvesson, ; Alvesson et al., ). Identity
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is a central lens that individuals use to make sense of and enact their environments (Barbour and Lammers, ; Lepisto et al., ). The workplace is an evident choice for the study of identity since people spend much of their adult life working in organizations. While performing work, people are necessarily engaged in reproducing and transforming identities (Mallet and Wapshott, ; Wright et al., ). From a discursive perspective, identities are constituted through language use (Ainsworth and Hardy, ; Brown, ; Coupland, ; Fournier, ) and (re)produced in complex social interactions (Brown, ). Researchers argue that people strategically draw upon an array of discursive resources defined as ‘concepts, expressions, or other linguistic devices drawn from practices and texts, that explain action while also providing a horizon for future practice’ (Kuhn, : ) in a bid to author ‘preferred versions’ of their selves (Brown and Coupland, : ). They do so because they are ‘motivated by the desire to construct an identity that is privately and/or publicly evaluated as worthwhile or significant in some way’ (Dutton et al., : ). In this view, workers are ‘far from passive in the face of discursive pressures’ (Watson, : ). Sveningsson and Alvesson (: ), for instance, show how managers actively draw on various available discourses as they seek to create a coherent ‘sense of self ’. Of particular note is that positively construed work identities affirm individuals’ own self-concept to guide action (Ashforth et al., ), promote motivation (Ellemers et al., ), and improve worker well-being (Grant et al., ; Horton et al., ). People actively construct work, professional and/or occupational identities in organizational settings (Van Maanen, ) as they strive to be ‘able to exercise creative potential within the constraints imposed by social structures’ (Coupland et al., : ). By focusing on identity construction in situated social contexts the importance of ‘identity work’ is highlighted. Identity work is the process of ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions [of self-identity] that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Alvesson and Willmott, : ). According to Brown (: ) identity work is a key explanatory concept that emphasizes ‘the experience of agency’ (Gecas, : , emphasis in original). Identity requires individuals to engage in ‘repeated work to be sustained’ (Anteby, : ) since ‘identity is a social product that requires validation and anchoring in the (relatively) stable social world’ (Pagis, : ). Identity work is conceptualized as a coping mechanism that is triggered by changing professional and organizational contexts (Chreim et al., ; Kreiner et al., ; McGivern et al., ; Pratt et al., ; Reay et al., ). Although individuals actively construct versions of workplace identity in a bid to resolve such tensions (Wright et al., ), identity work is also shaped by complex social interactions with others—identity regulation. As such, identities are both disciplined and/or resisted (Alvesson and Willmott, ; Brown et al., ; Thomas and Davies, ; Thornborrow and Brown, ) and the ‘constitution of identity serves as a locus of control for individuals within contemporary organizations’ (Bardon et al., : ). The stable anchor points for constructing one’s identity are, however, being replaced by constantly changing structures, norms, processes, and discourses. With the advent of what Bauman termed ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, ), changes in technology (Zuboff, ), employment relations (Osterman, ), and authority structures (Barker, ) are transforming roles, responsibilities, and interactions in organizations. What it means to work continues to change as accountability systems (Suddaby et al., ), work organization (Muzio and Ackroyd, ), managerial roles (Thomas and Hewitt, ), and technology
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use (Barrett et al., ; Turco, ) evolve. The ongoing dynamics in these rapidly changing, liquid workplaces shape identity and identity work in new ways. In this chapter, we discuss how the nature of identity is changing under liquid modern conditions and consider the implications of these changing conditions for individuals in their attempts to manage their workplace identities. We then outline directions for future research.
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.................................................................................................................................. The presentation of self in everyday life takes place in many arenas, on many stages, with different audiences (Goffman, ). Notions of identity stability (that is, stable views of who we are) and identity coherence, understood as ‘unified versions of self ’, are becoming decoupled as life becomes more liquid. In pre-modern society, identity was a performance invariably scrutinized by lifelong companions as life was lived in the gaze of the close community. With the advent of modernity and its mobility, as bodies became more able to move from spaces in which they were known to spaces in which they were not, the performative elements of identity became more central. One could project, to audiences unaware of one’s past identity, the presentation of being something other than that which one had been known to have been in the sight of the limited audiences of pre-modern communities. Still, identity for most people was anchored in spatial proximities of family and work life: the modern person was expected to create a career and a career was largely an organizational artefact, as Weber () elaborated. Modern man was organizational man (Whyte, ) and many modern women hardly expected a career in the organization; to do so would have been in breach of both norms and in some cases, regulations.¹ The zenith of modern organizations had already passed by when Bennett () wrote about The Death of the Organization Man. The rise of a bureaucratic managerial class was a phenomenon of the high period of modernity, in the post-Second World War world, especially in America. As Bennett notes, corporations hired middle managers at an unprecedented rate through the s and s, with the pattern shifting dramatically after the emergence of neoliberalism in the s. At roughly the same time that public sectors were being urged to abandon bureaucracy and adopt private sector efficiencies, the decline of bureaucratic corporations was being charted by Davis (), who noted that the number of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between and . These corporations were, as he says, once an integral part of building the middle class, offering millions of people a strong and stable identity based on lifetime employment, a stable career path, health insurance and retirement pensions—the civil benefits of welldesigned bureaucracies—the latter two especially important in a non-social democratic society with minimal citizenship rights, such as the United States. Many famous corporate names from the past have become bankrupt and those that survive mostly employ a lot less people than was the case. Davis () argues this decline in corporate jobs is a root cause of contemporary income inequality as well-paid jobs in career bureaucracies with clear routes to promotion were eviscerated. By the late s modernity was fading and with it dreams of a career as an organization man or even, towards the latter end of this period of modernity, woman (Kanter, ). One consequence is that identity now is no longer so
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publicly constrained by past performativity: audiences change as jobs change and opportunities for new identity projections present themselves. For those professionals that remained within an organizational world, albeit one that was changing with a rapidity scarcely imaginable in the s, there are opportunities and ‘occasions when the many diverse, competing resources available to individuals, are so intense that contrasting perspectives are incorporated into accounts of the self ’ (Clarke et al., : ). For example, professionals such as doctors working in the National Health Service (NHS) are becoming ‘hybrid workers’, simultaneously professionals, bureaucrats, and enterprising entrepreneurial subjects creatively using budgeted resources (cf. Bardon et al., ). Indeed, contemporary organizations that flourished in the liquid times of postmodernity increasingly became ‘hybrid settings’ that presented significant opportunities for individuals’ creativity in performing their ongoing sense of self. Doctors became managers; academics were urged to be entrepreneurs and some entrepreneurs even became celebrities. This has broader implications for organizations because ‘[w]hen work identities are highly valued, strong, salient and held in common by numerous colleagues in close proximity [such as prototypical professionals—doctors and lawyers], management becomes in varying ways problematic’ (Van Maanen, : ). Management thrives on plastic identity, on malleability that was often projected as being in conflict with the established professions, once cast in an image that was one of resistance to fads and fashions (Abrahamson and Fairchild, ; Ramsay, ) centred instead on a stable and enduring professional identity that valued ethics and vocation (du Gay, ; Perrow, ). In liquid times, however, established conceptions melted somewhat: even the professions do not remain immune. As organizations became ever more fluid and liquid, the old corporations of modernity ceased to be citadels guarding careers for middle managers; the nature of professional work was also undergoing rapid change. The professionals of dominant sociological imagination (Parsons, ), were becoming managed in professional service firms that were attuned to the liquid corporate life in which they flourished; one of mergers, acquisitions, floats for the lawyers, of city-building briefs for the architects, of more and more technologized medicine for the clinicians. These professions were organized into corporate forms that were a part of the overall fluidity and liquidity of organizational identity (Gioia et al., ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Bauman describes the metaphor of liquid modernity as an ‘era of deregulation, individualization, frailty of human bonds, of fluidity of solidarities and of seduction replacing normative regulation’ (Bauman quoted in Jacobsen and Tester, : ). For Bauman, we live in a ‘society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman, : ). For individuals negotiating liquid modernity the identity of the worker becomes a site of struggle in which ‘many and varied fragmentary discourses and practices seek to interpellate the subject’ (Bardon et al., : ). This is because work that had been equated with a lifelong career, in the sense of an unfolding, linear progression of working, often in the same or very similar organizations, has had its meaning liquefied (e.g. O’Mahony and
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Bechky, ). Liquefying modernity has eroded the relations associated with being employees, such that the deployment of both employment contracts and capital has become more fluid, less secure, and more unstable. Individual identities become a major arena for struggle since organizations in which investments in people are easily liquidated, with no long-term implications, constitute ever more liquid ways of organizing. In these contexts, entrepreneurial subjects may propel themselves from being local identities to cosmopolitan personalities, thus setting new norms of identity for others to struggle to emulate or exceed. There are ethical, political, identity, and organizational consequences of increasing liquidity. People in liquidly modern organizations are forever reassembling their identity as the liquid state changes. Ethically, this means that ethics and ethics discourses become resources that individuals use to create, and project, selected identities internally and externally. Ethics becomes a commodity and ethical boundaries can be liquidly negotiated (Kornberger and Brown, ). The focus shifts to a person’s public image rather than their moral commitment (Clegg and Baumeler, ), and public image is constantly constructed and reconstructed through a multiplicity of stories including through a range of social media platforms. Moreover, the preoccupation with one’s own identity and public image makes one insensitive to others’ suffering (Bauman and Donskis, ) thus further isolating people. Politically, power too becomes liquid. There is a shift towards synoptical power where ‘the many will be watching the few watching them, and constantly adjust their self accordingly: that is how the authentic self becomes viscous, made up in mirrored imagery of the sense of the appropriate self seen in the significant others transferred to the surface of one’s subjectivity’ (Clegg and Baumeler, : ). For Bauman, domination is about multiplying options while simultaneously increasing the opacity and ambiguity of choices. This ‘domination-through-uncertainty’ leads to a ‘state of ambient insecurity, anxiety and fear’ (Bauman and Haugaard, : ). As Clegg and Baumeler (: ) argue, in liquid modernity ‘domination focuses on the possibility of keeping one’s own actions unbound, uncertain and unpredictable while stripping those dominated of their ability to control their moves’. In terms of identity, liquidity is marked by the immediateness of the self in the moment. Identity work focuses on the self-management of one’s identity vis-à-vis a range of other actors encountered in different contexts. As Clegg and Baumeler (: ) argue, liquidity ‘marks an extreme privatization of ideologies of work adapted to local circumstances’. Such a liquid, multiple, and shifting identity has a number of implications which we discuss further below. Organizationally, there is little in the way of central control that is steering events (Bauman, , ). Deregulation, individualization, weakened human bonds, increased fluidity of solidarities, and the drift from normative regulation to seduction are all key features of the liquid condition identified by Bauman (Jacobsen and Tester, : ). Leadership becomes increasingly transactional as the art of the deal merges with algorithms to deliver it, whether for housing, transport, or dinner. Organizations prohibit long-term planning and offer precarious, open-ended contracts where workers have to constantly prove they deserve to remain part of the organization (Bauman and Haugaard, ). As Bauman explains, ‘ “[b]eing loved” is never earned in full, it remains forever conditional, and the condition is the constant supply of ever new proofs of one’s ability to perform, to succeed, to be again and again “one up” on the others. The job is never finished . . . there is
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no time to rest on laurels, laurels wilt and fade in no time, successes tend to be forgotten the moment after being scored, life in the company is an infinite string of emergencies’ (Bauman and Haugaard, : ).
S I W C O C
.................................................................................................................................. Individuals can be more or less successful in managing identity tensions. Identity dilemmas can be resolved in one way through identity adaptation since, ‘people seek to salvage their sense of self by resolving tensions and restoring consistency’ (Beech et al., : ). Pratt et al. () focus on how junior doctors ‘customize’ their identities as they struggle to enact desired professional identities (e.g. surgeon). Ibarra () theorizes that junior professionals—consultants and investment bankers—adapt to new roles as they transition to enacting professional practice by experimenting with ‘provisional selves’. Hackley and Kover () suggest that advertising professionals constantly negotiate their identities in order to align their self-concepts with external groups and institutions. Recent research argues that it is normal for organizations and their members to face competing demands (e.g. Jarzabkowski et al., ) that may spark a range of reactions, both constructive and destructive (Schad et al., ). Amidst evermore complex environments people have been theorized as seeking to ‘balance stability and change’ (Kreiner et al., : ) through identity work. In these contexts, yesterday’s secure identity may not be so serviceable for tomorrow; that is, contemporary careers require individuals to reinvent themselves several times which ‘creates opportunities to exercise more agency in crafting one’s work’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Here, conceptualizations of ‘identity elasticity’ (e.g. Kreiner et al., ) are particularly useful in understanding how workers cope with the everchanging nature of contemporary organizations. This perspective challenges dichotomous understandings of identity as ‘either/or’, ‘fluid/stable’, and ‘fragmented/coherent’. In this view, navigating ongoing tensions (i.e. identity work) involves ‘both/and’; that is, simultaneously stretching while holding together social constructions of identity. Ongoing and persistent tensions ‘undergird the social construction of identity’ (Kreiner et al., : ). For example, professional workers struggle to balance their multiple and often antagonistic identities of being simultaneously professional/unprofessional, emotional/unemotional, and/or moral (Clarke et al., ). As Berger et al. (: ) point out ‘[o]n one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory, liable to ongoing change. On the other hand, a subjective realm of identity is the individual’s foothold in reality. Something that is constantly changing is supposed to be ens realissimum. Consequently, it should not be a surprise that modern man is afflicted with a permanent identity crisis’.
Strategies of Coherence Amid the tensions caused by changing work environments, a considerable body of literature on identity work has argued that identity work strategies (e.g. Ibarra, ; Ibarra and
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Barbulescu, ; Pratt et al., ; Wei, ) and tactics (e.g. Beech et al., ; Kreiner et al., ; McInnes and Corlett, ) enable professionals to ‘affirm’ positive, albeit provisional (Ibarra, ) or transitional (Pratt et al., ) identities. An overarching identity work strategy discussed in the literature is identity reconciliation work. In their study of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) ministers, Creed et al. (: ) argue that the lived experience of institutional contradictions and marginalization—which they suggest are ‘tensions that bespeak a deeper contradiction’—are resolved through doing identity reconciliation by aligning with and appropriating available discourses that resolve personal experiences of contradiction and marginalization. In particular, as actors attempt to re-establish a coherent sense of self they may deny or reject institutional contradictions through processes of identity reconciliation. The resolution of tensions is seen to secure identity claims and is a crucial motivator for individuals’ identity work (Alvesson, ; Brown, ). Individuals strive to maximize satisfaction and minimize frustrations when constructing their identities and are ‘motivated to construct identities characterized by feelings of self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging, efficacy, and meaning’ (Vignoles et al., : ). Identity emerges in ‘specific moments of identification that provoke awareness of the self ’ (Pagis, : ) and it is these moments that create a sense of stability and coherence to a person’s self-image and/or workplace identity that delimit individuals’ choices, decision-making, and scope for agency.
Strategies of Fragmentation More recently researchers have begun to question the resolution oriented and selfaffirmatory nature of identity work, arguing that considerable exposure to ongoing identity struggles may lead to a fragmented performance expressing insecurity, critical and selfdepreciative aspects of identity (Beech et al., ; Ybema et al., ). Sociologists argue that identity needs to be anchored in the social world (Berger et al., ; Pagis, ) because ‘identity cannot be validated in a vacuum, and significant others play a leading role in the process of validation’ (Pagis, : ). Traditionally, identity was grounded, literally. One grew up, lived, worked and died in communities, to which one was, for good or ill, emotionally attached, through pursuits such as observing religious and seasonal rituals. In the first throes of industrialism people were thrown together into new communities of urban density where the social bonds were likely to be those of work and, as industrial society developed, supporting sports teams and sharing some minimal schooling. Significant others moved through the various scenes of everyday life; as industrial society developed, they did so neither in concert nor coherently. Old rhythms of life were lost. As life becomes lived in liquid times in more temporary forms of organizing, in projects where teams cohere then disappear, before another team and another project fill the void, the opportunity for less than coherent or concerted signals enlarges. Unlike life in bureaucracies where forms of career lock-step might be expected, such that one never works inscrutably to others, in more liquid organizational conditions of projects and temporary organizations, one moves in and out of different foci in different projects, embedded in different arenas rather than one organization. Multiple, shifting, and often contradictory notions of self in the workplace are more likely to flourish in these conditions (Alvesson et al., ). For example, Wright et al. () demonstrate that sustainability specialists
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enact different identities in diverse work situations such as ‘green change agent’, the ‘rational manager’, and the ‘committed activist’. More recently, Caza et al. () argue that individuals with multiple work identities start by segregating these, as suggested by Wright et al. (), eventually aggregating these identities by creating a permeable link between them. Usually, empirical studies of identity work suggest that such ‘identity struggles are transitory’ (Beech et al., : ) and identity work is seen as a mechanism for coming to terms with everyday uncertainty and instability. According to these studies, identity work enables individuals to come to terms with the tensions they face; i.e. as a mechanism that enables the creation of a temporal identity stability. However, under conditions of liquid modernity, this conceptualization of identity work is increasingly restrained and questioned.
Strategies for Managing Identity Tensions in the Context of Liquid Modernity In most of the literature on identity, identity work has been viewed as self-affirming, as actors seek to actively preserve a sense of ‘authentic self ’ (e.g. Costas and Fleming, ) or ‘serve as trials for possible [new] identities’ (Ibarra, : ). However, notions of authenticity are challenged by the changes associated with liquid modernity such that identity construction becomes even more contextually specific and time-bound. For example, seasonally employed tax preparers in the US—who are not Certified Public Accountants—adopt a professional identity through their interactions with clients (Galperin, ). These studies challenge long-held assumptions that workplace identities are tied to the organizations for which we work and shed new light on how identities are being constructed in a changing world of work (Barley et al., ). The pre-eminence of individualization of identity in a liquidly modern world in particular, makes the maintenance of a coherent workplace identity vital yet highly problematic (Bendle, ). In other words, the problem of identity in liquid modernity revolves around ‘which identity to choose and how to keep alert and vigilant so that another choice can be made in case the previously chosen identity is withdrawn from the market or stripped of its seductive powers’ (Bauman, : ). Fragmentation thus creates an unprecedented sense of insecurity by emphasizing ‘an inherent contradiction between valuing of identity as something so fundamental that it is crucial to personal well-being and collective action, and a theorization of “identity” that sees it as something constructed, fluid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary’ (Bendle, : –). In terms of the impact on identity, increasing liquidity is marked by an enhanced awareness of the immediateness of the self in the moment. Solid social relations grounded in an organizational career are no longer the anchor for identity and identity work. Instead, ‘people have to turn to their own resources to decide what they value, to organize their priorities and to make sense of their lives’ (Heelas, : ). Not surprisingly, identity tensions become manifest for workers who are subject to hybridized and liquid organizational realities. Pagis () describes these tensions as a ‘self-made identity paradox’: people strive to self-define their identities, in a constantly changing social context. The result is that individuals ‘remain chronically disembedded, on the move, searching out and choosing their flexible identities as they go from the vast array of options available, all the
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while feeling incomplete, insecure and unfulfilled’ (Atkinson, : ). While this signals greater freedom and flexibility for people to adjust their identities making them much less dependent on social structures and expectations, at the same time, it creates a constant insecurity and a state of precariousness not experienced previously (Atkinson, ; Beech et al., ). As Brown (: ) points out, organizational participants face existential, social, economic, and psychological insecurities with the consequence that identities are ‘situational, sociologically and psychologically complex, rarely consistent and generally fluid’. So how do organizational participants manage tensions associated with these insecure and fluid identities? In an increasingly liquidly modern world, uncertainty abounds, requiring workers ‘to abandon loyalties without regret and to peruse opportunities according to their current availability’ (Clegg and Baumeler, : ). The liquid state is characterized by ‘increased ambiguity and uncertainty at the level of individuals’ (Power et al., : ). In terms of identity, liquidity is marked by the immediateness of the self in the moment such that ‘[o]ne symptom of individualism in liquid modernity is the search for “identity” ’ (Ybema et al., : ). In developing this line of thinking ‘[b]ecoming liquid means taking on the identity assumed to be desired, required, or needed in the here-and-now of presence’ (Clegg and Baumeler, : ), which has implications for identity to be flexible and adaptable at short notice. In such conditions, modern selves have to be perpetually constructing and reconstructing their projections of self, forever reassembling the pieces of their own identity, refining themselves day after day (Bauman, ). As Petriglieri et al. () note, the advent of liquid modernity has brought more identity options and more frequent identity changes to workplaces. They point out that such circumstances present people ‘with a remarkable opportunity to become autonomous, unique, and fulfilled, but the pressure to be all those things can be daunting’ (Baumeister, : ). Inadequacy in this new liquidity involves an inability to acquire the desired image to which one aspires such that workplace identity may have become a matter of choice, with choice being a matter of improvisational ability and access to the resources available to sustain it. Yet, ‘how people experience and deal with those opportunities and pressures remains relatively unexplored’ (Petriglieri et al., : ). Gedalof (: ) suggests a ‘nomadic’ model of identity as means of imagining how things could be in an ‘imagined community’ (complexity of culture) and importantly, as a way of respecting multiplicity of identity. In a liquid world where jobs and careers are shortlived and people change their workplace several times, there are no stable, defined, and distinct communities; instead, identities stretch to accommodate different places, relationships, and interests becoming like lines without a start and an end. In this conceptualization nomadic identity could be one based on change as a defining characteristic. Gedalof (: ) suggests the nomadic subject would be always ‘only passing through’. For Grimshaw and Sears’ (: ) ‘global nomads’ the management of multiple selves is an important aspect of identity that may also lead to a ‘confused sense of identity’. Such confused states of identity are further exacerbated by the increased virtual reality of work environments. Identity is no longer merely a face-to-face matter; individuals have digital persona whose virtual projections they have to manage as much as they have to manage their embodied selves in situated of everyday interactions. Such projections are especially important in a world where jobs are found online, often by specialist HR brokers matching digitally expressed criteria for project participants to portfolios projecting
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capabilities, competencies and careers in virtual spaces, temporary projects and self-managed practices. The opportunities for slippage escalate as the presentations of self multiply and cracks in the façades of personae accumulate. Webb (: ) suggests that the virtual world is an ‘inherent series of paradoxical tensions’ because while ‘virtual environments help constitute identity’ through an image (avatar) and textual narrative they also make differentiations problematic. This is because participants appear to resemble each other as ‘avatars’ making differentiating one entity from another difficult. Moreover, the increasing use of digital forms of communication such as emails and apps enabling collaboration means that even the slightest error in communication can have consequences for identity: while a face-to-face conversation may be recalled (and denied) it has little materiality compared to a digital trace that flourishes virtually. Identity can be undone by careless words or by forwarding messages that compromise opportunities to create and build identity. We suggest that conceptualizations of identity work that stress reconciling contradictions and tensions in a bid to ‘affirm’ workplace identities do not account for the complex challenges individuals face in liquid modernity. In the liquid workplace, identity construction is shaped by ‘tension between human needs for validation and similarity to others (on the one hand) and a countervailing need for uniqueness and individuation (on the other)’ (Brewer, : ). For example, recent research has demonstrated that individuals construct and enact contradictory identity elements by accommodating paradoxical identity attributes (Ahuja et al., ; Cuganesan, ). These studies show that identity tensions are persistent and interrelated albeit contradictory (Lewis, ). Notably, these studies highlight that opposing tensions need not be resolved but rather are accepted and/ or embraced (e.g. Jarzabkowski et al., ) in processes of identity work (Ahuja et al., ). In a recent study of managers undertaking an MBA, Petriglieri et al. () did not find evidence for the integration of identities reported by other studies. Instead, they emphasize the importance of the pursuit of portable selves as a strategy that ‘binds people to institutions they do not expect to remain members of and reduces conflicts and contradictions within both the self—as between achievement and discovery aims—and the institution—as between instrumental and humanistic ideologies’. According to the authors, portable selves are identities that enable individuals to be ‘both here and there’ (Petriglieri et al., : , emphasis in original). By exploring paradoxical identities in times of liquid modernity, we position identity work as not simply either/or but as much more complex; we suggest that individuals accept paradoxical and ongoing identity tensions that may not be resolved through identity work.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a liquid world the presentation of self becomes an ever more problematic task. The audiences, the arenas, the stages, the dramatis personae, the performances become ever more multiple and with multiplicity the opportunities for identity work to be compromised escalate. In the large organizations of the post-war era, people were managed through their career aspirations. An inability to fit in, to comport oneself in the appropriate way, or to
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simply blend in, especially in terms of politics and gender, was a sufficient reason for a person’s career aspirations and fitness for available opportunities to be questioned and restricted. Whyte () observed executive behaviour that was risk-averse because no single individual was responsible for any decision. Consequently, career progression meant authority and a career for life, as long as one kept one’s nose clean and one’s identity unblemished. In an era characterized by volatility, relentless change, and fuzzy boundaries, distinctions between organizations and their environments as objective determinants seem to be fading into irrelevance as business strategy focuses on creating new environments rather than adapting to existing ones. In these new contexts local practices transform globally available resources and professionals move between projects in a world that is post-organizational in at least two ways: first it is one that deviates from the norms of an organizational society premised on Weberian characteristics such as organizational careers, transforming into a society where experts use organizations as temporary platforms; second, the organization, as a specific entity defined by those activities it envelops, is seemingly decomposing, fragmenting, opening, reforming and deforming, globally. Control, once vested firmly within organizational pyramids, is becoming distributed across a network of actors, including new media and their users. The private sphere of management control as a peak activity enveloped in a tangible and specifically modernist form is dissolving, as are specifically demarcated zones of professional competence. Employees, including professionals, are becoming globally sub-contracted, matrixed, and fragmented. Boundaries, choices, and control are all shifting in the direction of increasing fluidity and plurality. Symptomatic of this rise is the fluid flexible office with no fixed places, where one decamps wherever, armed only with a laptop. At its furthest extreme there are space leasers, such as WeWork,² founded in New York in , which now leases space on a large scale in major global cities. ‘The basic deal is simple enough: you can either pay to put your laptop wherever there is space, or stump up a little more for a more dependable desk or entire office—and, in either case, take advantage of the fact that, with operations in countries, WeWork offers the chance to traverse the planet and temporarily set up shop in no end of locations’ (Harris, ). Harris () has noted the ‘blurring of work and leisure, and the fading-out of any meaningful notion of home’ especially ‘among rising numbers of networked homeworkers—translators, CV writers, IT contractors, data inputters—whose lives are often a very modern mixture of supposed flexibility, and dayto-day insecurity’ that characterizes the new fluidity and liquidity of working life. WeWork is expanding into WeLive,³ already active in New York and Washington, which offers the same fluidity as Airbnb in ‘a range of tiny studio flats and slightly bigger dwellings, built around communal areas, kitchens and laundrettes—in the same building as WeWork office space’ (Harris, ). Many of the jobs in the future are likely to be created and filled by digital nomads. Digital nomads are young people armed with a laptop and connected to Wi-Fi who can move around globally doing their work wherever the fancy takes them—usually to warmer places that are less expensive to live in, with good beaches and surfing, such as Portugal (Bloom, ). To do so they can use internet-based services such as Roam.⁴ Roam offers flexible ‘co-working and co-living’ spaces for $ plus a week, enabling digital nomads to wander the world, mixing living and working.
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Lisbon is the capital of cool in digital terms in Europe. Some nomads housesit for a few months and then move on to another opportunity to do it again, elsewhere, or perhaps using Airbnb. Compared to the organization man, commuting from his suburb to the office on a daily basis, presenting the same version of their self to commuters, co-workers, neighbours, and family alike, today’s digital nomads, as the furthest extreme of virtual work and identity, have far fewer cues from co-presence. They can, literally, remake their identities on the move. And should they indulge in processes of procreation, it need not tie the liquid professional and their offspring down: It is a token of the surreal future some people want to push us towards that WeWork may have the beginnings of an answer to that question, albeit for the few people who can afford it. The company has recently spawned an educational offshoot called WeGrow⁵ (so far focused on a private elementary school in New York) that teaches kids a range of skills including mindfulness and “conscious entrepreneurship”. But the idea is apparently to put WeGrow schools in WeWork properties across the world, so digital nomads can carry their disorientated offspring from place to place and ensure they have just as flimsy an idea of home as their parents do. (Harris, )
As Harris concludes, rhetorically, ‘you may well read this stuff and wonder: whose utopia is this?’
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter suggests that in an era in which workplaces are changing rapidly, opportunities to research new forms of identity work are significant. Our focus is on how identity work can be conceptualized in an increasingly liquid era characterized by volatility, relentless change, and fuzzy boundaries. At the most liquid extreme, digital nomads present a plurality of identities virtually that enable them to live life on the move, shifting from assignment to assignment, city to city, never staying anywhere long enough to put down roots and create an identity in the conventional way; through a career, a tax file number, a settled abode, and the looking glass self (Cooley, ) that their co-workers see. Established notions of identity in management theory, such as the idea that employees will strive to produce a ‘reflected best-self ’ (Roberts et al., ) as a stable identity seem incongruously out of date. Managing the self digitally, through projected identities, not only destabilizes existing notions of the career but also throws the notion of identity work as a search for stability into question. As Marx and Engels () realized so presciently, the fate of our times is a future of ‘everlasting uncertainty’, one of melting solidities, liquid possibilities, shifting identities, and fragmented forms of life (Dow and Lafferty, ). Organizations as we have known them may well not survive as disassembling institutions peel off action from being the object of organization to transactions brokered digitally, through algorithms, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, tendencies that provide innumerable opportunities for further research into the increasingly liquid condition of identity, modernity, and social ordering.
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N . http://www.striking-women.org/module/women-and-work/post-world-war-ii--. . https://www.theguardian.com/money//mar//wegeneration-work-rest-and-play-together-inadam-neumanns-empire. . https://www.gq.com/story/inside-welive. . https://www.nytimes.com////magazine/when-youre-a-digital-nomad-the-world-is-youroffice.html. . http://wegrow.com/- a conscious entrepreneurial approach to education.
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Lepisto, D., Crosina, E., and Pratt, M. (). ‘Identity Work Within and Beyond the Professions: Towards a Theoretical Integration and Extension’. In A. Costa e Silva and M. Aparicio (eds.), International Handbook of Professional Identities. Rosemead, CA: Scientific & Academic Publishing, pp. –. Lewis, M. (). ‘Exploring Paradox: Toward a More Comprehensive Guide’. Academy of Management Review, , –. McGivern, G., Currie, G., Ferlie, E., Fitzgerald, L., and Waring, J. (). ‘Hybrid ManagerProfessionals’ Identity Work: The Maintenance and Hybridization of Medical Professionalism in Managerial Contexts’. Public Administration, (), –. McInnes, P. and Corlett, S. (). ‘Conversational Identity Work in Everyday Interaction’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, , –. Mallet, O. and Wapshott, R. (). ‘Mediating Ambiguity: Narrative Identity and Knowledge Workers’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, , –. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (). The Manifesto of the Communist Party. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf Muzio, D. and Ackroyd, S. (). ‘On the Consequences of Defensive Professionalism: Recent Changes in the Legal Labour Process’. Journal of Law and Society, , –. O’Mahony, S. and Bechky, B. (). ‘Stretchwork: Managing the Career Progression Paradox in External Labor Markets’. Academy of Management Journal, , –. Osterman, P. (). Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market—How It Has Changed and What to Do About It. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pagis, M. (). ‘Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self-Made Identity Paradox’. Sociological Forum, , –. Parsons, T. (). ‘The Professions and Social Structure’. Social Forces, , –. Perrow, C. (). Complex Organizations: A Critical Perspective. New York: McGraw-Hill. Petriglieri, G., Petriglieri, J. L., and Wood, J. D. (). ‘Fast Tracks and Inner Journeys: Crafting Portable Selves for Contemporary Careers’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Power, M., Scheytt, T., Soin, K., and Sahlin, K. (). ‘Reputational Risk as a Logic of Organizing in Late Modernity’. Organization Studies, (–), –. Pratt, M., Rockmann, K., and Kaufmann, J. (). ‘Constructing Professional Identity: The Role of Work and Identity Learning Cycles in the Customization of Identity Among Medical Residents’. Academy of Management Journal, , –. Ramsay, H. (). ‘Managing Sceptically: A Critique of Organizational Fashion’. In S. Clegg and G. Palmer (eds.), The Politics of Management Knowledge. London: Sage, pp. –. Reay, T., Goodrick, E., Waldorff, S., and Casebeer, A. (). ‘Getting Leopards to Change Their Spots: Co-Creating a New Professional Role Identity’. Academy of Management Journal, (), –. Roberts, L., Dutton, J., Spreitzer, G., Heaphy, E. D., and Quinn, R. E. (). ‘Composing the Reflected Best-Self Portrait: Building Pathways for Becoming Extraordinary in Organizations’. Academy of Management Review, , –. Schad, J., Lewis, M. W., Raisch, S., and Smith, W. K. (). ‘Paradox Research in Management Science: The First Years and the Next Years’. Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Schumpeter, J. (). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge. Suddaby, R., Gendron, Y., and Lam, H. (). ‘The Organizational Context of Professionalism in Accounting’. Accounting, Organizations and Society, , –. Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (). ‘Managing Managerial Identities: Organizational Fragmentation, Discourse and Identity Struggle’. Human Relations, , –. Thomas, P. and Hewitt, J. (). ‘Managerial Organization and Professional Autonomy: A Discourse-Based Conceptualization’. Organization Studies, , –. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (). ‘Theorizing the Micro-Politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services’. Organization Studies, , –.
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Thornborrow, T. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘ “Being Regimented”: Aspiration, Discipline and Identity Work in the British Parachute Regiment’. Organization Studies, , –. Turco, C. (). The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Maanen, J. (). ‘Identity Work and Control in Occupational Communities’. In S. Sitkin, L. Cardinal, and K. Bijlsman-Frankema (eds.), Organizational Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. –. Vignoles, V. L., Regalia, C., Manzi, C., Golledge, J., and Scabini, E. (). ‘Beyond Self-Esteem: Influence of Multiple Motives on Identity Construction’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, , –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, , –. Webb, S. (). ‘Avatarculture: Narrative, Power and Identity in Virtual World Environments’. Information, Communication & Society, , –. Weber, M. (). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wei, J. (). ‘Dealing with Reality: Market Demands, Artistic Integrity, and Identity Work in Reality Television Production’. Poetics, , –. Whyte, W. (). The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wright, C., Nyberg, D., and Grant, D. (). ‘ “Hippies on the Third Floor”: Climate Change, Narrative Identity and the Micro-Politics of Corporate Environmentalism’. Organization Studies, (), –. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A., Ellis, N., and Sabelis, I. (). ‘Articulating Identities’. Human Relations, , –. Zuboff, S. (). In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Power and Work. New York: Basic Books.
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? Musings on Where Identity Research Has Been and Where It Might Go ......................................................................................................................
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Abstract Identity dynamics in organizations have been associated with critical organizing processes and outcomes, especially those that centre on attachment and conflict/cooperation. As such, a deeper understanding of identity dynamics may help us better understand how organizations function (and malfunction), and ideally help us make organizations better places to work. This chapter briefly reviews where identity research has been and where it is now. The bulk of the chapter suggests three paths or ways to move forward in our research: () moving towards fuller (versus relatively ‘empty’) conceptualizations of identity; () moving towards wholes versus parts in identity dynamics; and () moving towards viewing ‘identity in ensemble’ rather than ‘identity as star’. Each movement suggests a richer and deeper understanding of identity, providing the requisite variety necessary to better tackle core organizational problems.
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.................................................................................................................................. I practitioners paid any attention to writing in organizational studies, they would do well to pay attention to identity in organizations and all of its related forms. Identity dynamics in organizations—whether viewed as identification, as an identity type (e.g. moral or creative), or as a process—have been linked with some of the most critical processes and desired outcomes in organizational studies. To illustrate, identity has been posited to be central to conflict and cooperation, leadership, motivation, justice, creativity, attachment (to new, existing and former organizations) and turnover, control, as well as in-role and
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extra-role performance. Identity dynamics have also been linked to how we engage in sensemaking, how meaningful (or not) we find our work, and even to propensities to commit white-collar crimes! Indeed, looking at how scholars have written about identity in organizations, it would appear that there are few, if any, aspects of organizing that are not touched—often profoundly—by how an individual defines ‘who I am’. It is, perhaps, not surprising then that a focus of much research has been to understand how identity dynamics work, and ultimately, how they can be managed. The title of this chapter began as a ‘tongue in cheek’ reaction to just how much research on identity in organizations has tied it to core organizational processes. It also harkens back to some scepticism that I began to voice nearly two decades ago (Pratt and Foreman, a) of the dangers of over-using identity to explain everything. To be clear, I am not arguing that identity is inconsequential. In light of the world as it is today, including the fractious and polarizing nature of American politics, the turmoil over Brexit, and the rise of nationalism globally, it is hard—and especially hard for an identity scholar—not to see how identity seems implicated in so many things. Just listening to the news, one might expect that if identity does not have the potential to save the world, it at least has the potential to seriously mess it up (Sen, ). So identity does matter. It just does not always matter in the ways we often portray it: as the often lone, and heroic, character in the stories we tell. For this chapter, I have decided to take on the challenge of what might we need to know about identity in the future to help organizations, large or small, corporate or not, run better. I do not necessarily equate ‘run better’ with more profitable. Indeed, much of the focus of this chapter will be on how identity is involved in both creating and managing long-standing conflicts. Although managing such conflicts may translate into more profitability, it may not. However, I am sure it would often make an organization a better place to work for. Thus, in addition to discussing our understanding of identity, I also infuse a bit of philosophical pragmatism to yoke understanding with practice (see also Watson, ). The chapter is a combination of ‘lessons learned’ by someone who has worked in this area for more than twenty years, and musings about what I think we still need to learn. I begin by providing a quick overview of ‘where we have been’ by focusing on two historic strengths of identity research in organizations: understanding attachment and conflict. The bulk of this chapter discusses ‘where we might go’ in the future. These musings take the form of three paths or movements: () moving towards fuller (versus relatively ‘empty’) conceptualizations of identity; () moving towards wholes versus parts in identity dynamics; and () moving towards viewing ‘identity in ensemble’ rather than ‘identity as star’.
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.................................................................................................................................. Although identity has been conceptualized in many disciplines and in many theories, its early roots in organizational theory are most often tied to Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) from psychology and Identity Theory (IT) from
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sociology.¹ Numerous reviews have chronicled the basic tenets of these theories and compared their similarities and differences (e.g. Hogg et al., ; Stets and Burke, ). From these two theories, and others, have come at least two central concerns that are fundamental to organizing: attachment and conflict/cooperation.
Organizational Attachment and Identification Attachment involves how individuals connect to others in a collective such as through group membership or roles. These attachments help the individual navigate his or her social position both within and between (e.g. closeness or distance to a group prototype, ingroup–outgroup, role–counterrole such as leader and follower) collectives. Central to attachment is the degree to which memberships or roles are viewed as self-defining, which is often conceptualized in terms of identification.² Organizational identification, in particular, has joined organizational commitment and person–organization fit as one the major explanations for how individuals relate to their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, identification’s development as a construct has mirrored that of other attachment-related constructs, especially that of organizational commitment.³ For example, as organizational commitment developed, it split into different types (e.g. affective, normative, and continuance), became associated with different foci, and was linked ultimately with a variety of organizational outcomes. Given the centrality of employee job performance to organizational success, commitment has attempted—with varying degrees of success—to explain such behaviour (Riketta, ). Similarly, as identification in organizations developed, it split into different types (e.g. deidentification, disidentification, ambivalent identification), and became associated with different foci (e.g. occupations) and logics (Vough, ). As with commitment, there has been a shift from explaining the identification itself to understanding how it explains other dynamics (e.g. Blader et al., ). This shift is not unique to attachmentbased constructs or processes, rather it seems to be a common transition in the life cycle of a construct or process (see the shift in creativity research from viewing it as an outcome to its role in explaining downstream dynamics). Identification is currently being used to explain a wide variety of organizational outcomes; this includes numerous attempts to use it to predict employee in-role and extra-role job performance (Riketta, ). As with commitment, it has achieved these linkages with varying degrees of success. Research in this area continues to refine how identification works in organizations. For example, some colleagues and I recently discovered that the relationship between identification and performance is not as direct as some have thought: At first glance, the relationship between employee identification and work performance behaviors appears to be straightforward: attachment to the organization should motivate individuals to exert themselves on the job (Ashforth and Mael, ; Dutton et al., ; Pratt, ; Van Knippenberg, ). However, this relationship is not always found (Hekman et al., a); and when it is, the relationship has been found to be relatively weak (Riketta, ), or not in the predicted direction (Gunz and Gunz, ; Hekman et al., b; Michel and Jehn, ; Schaubroeck et al., ). Indeed, meta-analytic evidence regarding organizational identification (no professional identification meta-analysis has been done yet) only shows a modest correlation between organizational identification and in-role performance (weighted and corrected meta-analytic r = .). (Hekman et al., : )
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What we found is that although identification does contribute to job performance, it does so as an un-channelled motivation to help improve the organization. Put another way, it motivates someone to help the organization, but does not specify how one will help. Consequently, even though one is motivated to help an organization, one’s helping actions may or may not actually be productive. To illustrate, I work at Boston College, which is a Research I university⁴ (not a college, despite the name) that has a religious heritage. Pretend I have one colleague that feels strongly identified with Boston College due to its religious values and another colleague who highly identifies with its research activities. Both positively identify, but how they enact this identification in terms of job performance may differ. One might engage in lots of extra-role activities such as service projects while the other may write more research articles. It is likely that the latter colleague would be viewed as having a higher job performance despite both having strong organizational identification. Thus, the inconsistent links between identification and performance may be because identification does not specify whether one will help the organization in a way that is viewed as productive.
Identity and Conflict/Cooperation A second, related concern of identity scholars is conflict and cooperation: although not inevitable, attachment to one group may be associated with conflict (or cooperation) with other groups. Tajfel and Turner’s () classic formulation of social identity and social categorization is framed as a theory of intergroup conflict, and is viewed as an alternative to realistic conflict theory. In the latter, conflict occurs due to the existence of ‘real’ intergroup differences regarding their interests, and it is the presence of conflict that hinders cooperation and produces identification with a group. Tajfel and Turner (), drawing on research from the minimal group paradigm, show convincingly that identification with an in-group can occur even when individuals are randomly assigned to groups, and that discriminatory behaviour towards an out-group can result. Thus, the presence of identification within a group may produce intergroup conflict. Conflicts are also central to theories of roles (e.g. role conflict), and are important to Identity Theory as well. As noted by Stets and Burke (: ), ‘Each role is related to, but set apart from, counterroles, often the interests compete, so that proper role performance can only be achieved through negotiation’. The contribution of identity in conflicts within organizational contexts is central to research on diversity, relational demography, and ‘fault lines’ (see Pratt, for a review). There also has been work on conflictual identity-dynamics in mergers and acquisitions (e.g. van Knippenberg et al., ). More recently, my colleagues and I (Fiol et al., ; Pratt et al., ) have used identity to help explain long-term, difficult, and seemingly ‘intractable’ conflicts between organizational (e.g. labour versus management) and occupational (e.g. physicians versus administrators) groups. Intractable conflicts are long-standing conflicts between two or more parties that are very difficult (but not impossible) to resolve (Crocker et al., ); that is, they are ‘protracted and social conflicts that resist resolution’ (Fiol et al., : ). Although often discussed by scholars studying international conflicts such as that between Israel and Palestine (e.g. Bar-Tal, ), intractable conflicts also occur in organizations. For example,
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ongoing and stubborn conflicts exist between physicians and administrators in hospitals (Pratt et. al., ), musicians and managers in symphony orchestras (Glynn, ), and between management and labour (Fisher, ). Whereas research on identification, diversity, and demography are well-established, research on intractable conflicts in organizations is relatively new and emerging; thus, I will provide some background. There are many characteristics attributed to intractable conflicts beyond their longstanding nature: they are chronically salient to members (Bar-Tal, ); they evoke strong emotions (e.g. Coleman, ); they involve perceptions by both parties that their goals are oppositional and cannot be reconciled (Bar-Tal, : ); they are complex and dynamic (Northrup, ) in that they come to incorporate an increasing number of issues over time; and they involve the desire of one party to harm the other (Northrup, ). Intractable conflicts also involve identity in the form of polarizing stereotypes and zerosum, monolithic conceptualizations of the identity of the other party (Azar, ; Coleman, ). My colleagues and I have argued that in intractable conflicts, mutual disidentification occurs; that is, each side views part of ‘who we are’ as ‘not being the other party’. Identity is necessary for intractable conflicts as it helps provide its ‘staying power’. When two parties mutually disidentify, anything that helps one party is viewed as a loss for the other—even if a given benefit would ostensibly help both parties. It is for this reason the two major parties in the US legislative branch find it difficult to cooperate even on passing bills where there is bipartisan support. Thus, there appear to be few opportunities to find a common ground that could pull the parties out of conflict. Mutual disidentification makes conflict episodes persist, even to the point where the two sides in the conflict are invested in keeping it going. Taking a step back, knowing that identity is involved in these conflicts provides insight and connectedness to the various ‘characteristics’ ascribed to intractable conflicts— characteristics that might otherwise seem unrelated. As noted, knowing about mutual disidentification helps us to better understand why these conflicts persist. Knowing the power of identity threat (Petriglieri, ) gives insights into why they involve cognitive simplifications and powerful emotions, why they are chronically salient and seemingly allencompassing to other areas of life, and why they involve each side hurting and wanting to hurt the other. Indeed, when two parties are so closely intertwined via identity, it is difficult to imagine how one party can move without bruising the other. Each perceived hurt leads to a desire to retaliate; and so the conflict cycle continues. Given its central role in constituting intractable conflicts, it perhaps is not a surprise that managing identity dynamics seems to be critical to their resolution, or at least their management. For example, ARIA—one of the predominant models of managing intractable conflict in the peace studies literature—invokes identity. As noted by Rothman and Olson (: , emphasis theirs): The ARIA framework aims at breaking down the barrier of identity through a four-phased process of surfacing Antagonism, digging out underlying values, needs, and their Resonance within and between sides, leading to Invention of creative solutions, and Action to implement them, including possibly, negotiation planning or functional problem-solving.
More recently, Fiol and colleagues have developed a model (Fiol et al., )—that we later revised (Pratt et al., )—which discusses how the management of intractable conflicts must begin with decoupling the identities of the parties involved (breaking down mutual
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disidentification by strengthening the unique elements of each identity); making the identities secure by fostering mutual respect; and strengthening dual identities which involves keeping the identities of both parties and introducing a superordinate identity. Only after these identity management practices are done can the two parties begin to think about joint goals or projects. The inclusion of identity makes the management or resolution of intractable conflicts different from resource-based conflicts that are often solved by the creation of integrative solutions such as superordinate goals (e.g. Bazerman and Neale, ). They are also distinct from conflicts that are based on ‘differences’—such as differences in team members’ views about tasks, processes, relationships (e.g. Jehn, )—that are also managed via an integrative solution, such as the creation of a sense of shared fate. Although an integrative solution such as a shared identity is eventually helpful in managing intractable conflicts, it only comes after managing other identity dynamics. In fact, starting with an integrative solution is likely to backfire. This is due to the centrality of mutual disidentification in these conflicts. Until parties can disentangle their identities, integrative solutions will not work, and intergroup cooperation will not come to pass. Thus, the inclusion of identity is integral to understanding not only how to manage intractable conflicts, but also to understanding why they must be managed differently than other conflicts.⁵ Treatments of conflict or cooperation often differ from those of identification in at least two significant ways. First, identification is often treated as a ‘noun’ or a state rather than a process (Pratt, ; cf. Alvesson et al., ).⁶ Conflict, whether within or between groups and roles, weighs more heavily on process or processes (e.g. identity negotiation, managing diversity). Research on diversity that posits the necessity of creating a superordinate identity, for example, begins to discuss identity management and change. This processual trend is even more explicit in research on intractable identity conflicts that centre on the processes of identity decoupling, identity strengthening, and ultimately on processes that provide a bridge between oppositional identities. Second, identity conflict research often implies more than one identity within or across individuals and groups; moreover, the grist for these conflicts often (but not always) involves the content of these identities.⁷ With regard to multiplicity, identity conflict is often predicated on the existence of multiple and oppositional identities across different entities (e.g. individuals or groups) or within the same entity. With regard to content, intergroup conflicts often involve recognition of and opposition against simplifying stereotypes. Content is even more critical in intractable identity conflicts (Pratt et al., ) because knowledge of the other group’s identity characteristics is key as they help form ‘who you are not’.
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.................................................................................................................................. Work on identity as it involves attachment and conflict is instructive regarding the field as a whole. Although not necessarily focusing on conflict, per se, much work on identity involves two of the hallmarks of (intractable) identity conflict research: a focus on
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identity content and process. In this book, there is a section on ‘identity kinds and types’ which highlights identity content, and two sections, ‘issues in and processes of identity construction’ and ‘identities in organizational processes and outcomes’, that focus on process views of identity. Work on attachment is also instructive. Interestingly, there is much less space devoted to identification in this volume, although it has been and continues to be a major focus of identity-related work in organizations (cf. Atewologun et al. () and Ashforth et al. ()). Viewed in this way, the chapters provide a snapshot of where our field is today: focusing on identification, identity types, and identity processes. But where might we go in the future? I suggest three paths or movements to consider.
Moving Towards Viewing an Identity as ‘Fuller’ (Less Empty) Overall, I believe the movement to looking at different ‘types’ of identity has been important because it highlights an issue often lost when doing identification research: that the ‘content’ of identity matters. The beauty of identification, especially from a SIT/SCT perspective, is that in some ways the ‘content’ of the identity does not have to matter. A minimal group paradigm suggests that even being randomly assigned to group ‘A’ may have an impact on how I treat members of group ‘B’. But identities in organizations stem from conditions that greatly differ from a minimal group. People are neither randomly selected into organizations nor are they randomly assigned to groups within them. Although some identity dynamics may come about because of impersonal categorizations, people in organizations often get to know each other, such that relationships become personalized. Moreover, even these seemingly impersonal categorizations—whether of self or other—are not empty buckets. Take for instance the demographic identity of being ‘male’. Although the category name has stayed the same, what it means to be male in corporate organizations in the United States in is not the same as what it meant in . Changes in content can be slow or relatively fast. One could argue that the #MeToo movement has precipitated relatively rapid change in the male category in the past few years. In a similar vein, our measurements of identification are often content-free (see endnote ): they measure the degree of attachment with a group, but all groups are viewed equally. Thus, to measure occupational identification rather than organizational identification, you simply need to change a few words on the scale. Viewed in this way, identification is to identity as some scholars have viewed the relationship between meaningfulness and meaning of work. Meaningfulness refers to ‘how much meaning’ one finds in one’s work, and meaning refers to the content of work (Rosso et al., ). Building from this distinction, identification is often more concerned with ‘how much’ attachment someone has with an organization, and less on what the basis of that attachment is. Returning to the example of identification with Boston College, two individuals can be equally identified, but one because of its religious mission, and the other for its research productivity. These differences could lead to differences in the perception of identity threats or scandals, and be associated with very different organizationally-relevant behaviours (Hekman et al., ). As noted, the movement towards identity types and kinds is a step towards recognizing that a given identity is important because of its content. Similarly, diversity research notes that identities can have different ‘properties’ as well. Some identities, for example, are more
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‘visible’ than others (e.g. gender versus sexual orientation). But even visible identities have important differences. Age, for example, works differently from race. I will always get older, but it would involve a dramatic intervention to change my race. And even seemingly stable properties are not static (e.g. the fluidity of gender). If we continue to look at identity types and properties, all within historical and organizational contexts, we are looking at identities as fuller. Identities are also fuller when we view them in relation to the ‘other’. Identities are not only relational (that there is an ‘other’), but depict the nature of the relationship itself: how I see myself vis-à-vis another. Thus, fuller identities are identities-in-context, and identities-as and in-relationship. To summarize, personal, social, and even role identities are ‘filled up’ with histories, values, and other meanings (cf. Alvesson, et al., ). They are temporal, spatial, and situational (Brown, ). We ignore the ‘fullness’ of identities at our peril. Although one could argue that viewing identities as ‘fuller’ versus ‘emptier’ reifies identities as things—whether neurologically, socially, or discursively constructed—I see it as just one way to view identities (e.g. just as light can be viewed as particle and wave, identity can be viewed both as thing/construct and process). Moreover, even viewed as ‘fuller’, I am not arguing that identities are static. Identity content, for example, may shift and change over time and space, and in the presence of others (see Mead’s () notion of the power of others’ expectations). I further believe that exploring the ‘guts’ of a given identity may give critical insights into those studying identity and other organizational processes. Simply put, having a fuller view of identity should provide important insights into what effects an identity may have on individuals, groups, organizations, and other collectives. For example, in research on intractable conflicts, I have noted that integrative solutions—even if they would benefit all parties—fail to produce cooperation. On the face of it, this seems irrational. But this resistance is likely due to the fact that the identities in intractable conflicts have become morally-infused. When identities contain moral values, they often operate outside of conscious awareness; with the net result being that my identity is ‘right’ and yours is ‘wrong’. When identity conflicts are moral conflicts, they are very resistant to any rational arguments (Haidt, ). Given that it is possible that any identity can come to take on a moral element, this would suggest that identity conflicts even among individuals or groups with similar categories may have very different outcomes. For example, conflicts between a Democratic supervisor and a Republican subordinate would be very different if their political identities were morally-charged than if they were not (e.g. I am just a Democrat or Republican because my parents were).
Moving from Parts to Wholes Beyond identification and identity types, a given individual may have many identities, as well as many types of identification logics (Vough, ). Indeed the existence of identity plurality is posited in most (if not all) theories of identity. Research also suggests that organizations are a context where multiple identities may be at play. Yet many studies of identity in organizations often consider only one identity at a time. Fortunately, recent organizational scholarship is examining multiple identities theoretically and empirically. Moving beyond notions of identity salience ‘hierarchies’ central to identity theory, scholars
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such as Lakshmi Ramarjan have viewed multiple identities in terms of networks and configurations (Ramarjan, ). Work in the area of intersectionality further notes how identities, statuses, and/or categories can have joint effects on individuals. Taken together, each perspective speaks to broader notions that (a) individuals have multiple answers to the question, ‘who am I?’; and (b) that individuals live with and manage these various identities. I have long argued for the importance of looking at multiple identities within an individual (and also within collectives—see Pratt and Foreman, b). Having proposed at least four ways for dealing with multiple identities (deletion, compartmentalization, aggregation, and integration), I have been dissatisfied that these all concern managing parts, while not addressing the issue of the holism between and across identities. I have recently shifted my attention towards how these multiple identities relate to each other, specifically in terms of a ‘self ’ (Pratt, ; Pratt and Kraatz, ). As have others in our field (Brown, ; Hatch and Schultz, ), I borrow from Mead () who viewed the self as the ‘whole’ or the ‘gestalt’ that is formed from an individual’s identities. Like identity, the self is also a process: a momentary accomplishment as that can shift over time from context to context, or from organization to organization as expectations placed upon an individual change.⁸ Why should we be thinking about how our different identity parts fit together? First, at a very general level, the debate regarding the coherence versus fragmentation of identity is one of the major controversies in theories of identity (Brown, ). Second, if a given identity is expressed differently depending on the other identities activated with it, then to better understand identity dynamics in organizations, we need to pay more attention to how individuals deal with identity plurality. Third, looking at how we deal with parts and wholes will provide unique insights into current organizational theorizing as well as organizational practices. To illustrate, I am currently working on a project where an organization is trying to foster authenticity by encouraging employees to ‘bring their whole self to work’. In line with research on diversity, however, my colleagues and I found that some minority leaders definitely do not want to ‘bring their whole self to work’ because they feel that some parts of who they are will not be accepted. This type of response tells me a couple of things about how authenticity plays out in organizations. First, it suggests that minorities in this organization are not thinking of their ‘self ’—at least as some unitary conceptualization about who they are; rather, they are thinking about bringing distinct multiple identities to work. Thus, if there is thinking about the self by these employees, it is a modular self with pieces (identities) that can be detached, hidden, or ‘left at home’ while at work. Second, it brings up the issue of power (Alvesson and Wilmott, ). As one minority leader noted, bringing your ‘whole self ’ is a luxury for the white male leaders who run the organization because it is likely that their multiple identities would be viewed as more ‘acceptable’. So is a self more likely to be enacted when individuals are psychologically safe? Or do different organizational conditions make ‘selfidentity’ dynamics become expressed differently? Taking a step back, is the very notion of authenticity problematic (Brown, )? What does authenticity even mean when someone has multiple identities? One could argue that you can only be authentic to a self since being authentic to one identity may be viewed as inauthentic in relation to another identity. Alternatively, you might argue that a self is too complex and too dynamic to easily serve as a guide for authenticity; thus, we may only be able to be authentic to a single identity at a given point in time.⁹
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Moving from Identity as ‘Star’ to Identity as ‘Ensemble Member’ A final trajectory or movement has to deal with how we view identity in relation to other dynamics in organizations. As noted, early work on identification focused primarily on what identification was, and how it was unique compared to similar constructs. It was the ‘star’ of the show. As fields evolve and mature, one way that research in these areas grows is to associate the construct with new variables (see also ‘the rise of the ampersand’ arguments—e.g. Ashforth et al., )—as well as new contexts. But even here, identity and identification are often still viewed in heroic fashion, often being the main predictor of whatever follows the ampersand. We see a similar trend with identity construction processes. Research on identity work has focused primarily on understanding the triggers, motives, processes, and tactics underlying that work; I have written such papers myself and with colleagues (Lepisto et al., ). However, over time I have gained a greater appreciation for seeing identity as part of a larger ensemble of dynamics that are at play in organizations. Let me illustrate with an extended example. In a single case study of a protracted, fourteen-year-long, conflict between two hospitals that merged, Stephanie Creary and I found that many issues were at play: issues that eventually were bound together with identity. The two hospitals were quite different. The first was a major research hospital that was resource-rich and successful—so successful that they were outgrowing their ability to provide rooms for their patients. The second was a smaller, comparatively resource-poor community-based hospital that provided basic medical services, often to relatively low-income people. This hospital lacked patients to fill its rooms. Thus, the agreement to join together was around resources and was initially viewed as a ‘win-win’ solution. One hospital needed beds; the other hospital had extra beds. However, even at the start of the merger, people in the smaller hospital felt that they had less power and lower status, with the former relating to control over resources and the latter relating to how much respect one is afforded (see Magee and Galinsky, ). Issues of power and status, however, were latent until a conflict over resources occurred when the larger hospital stopped sending patients to the smaller one. The conflict continued in this way until the CEO of the large hospital decided to refer to both hospitals as being part of one family—essentially making a claim to a common identity. This caused an even greater conflict since neither hospital wanted to be ‘in the family’ with the other. In the end, the conflict was chronically salient and very complex, with identity being one component of it, along with power, resources, and status. Thus, identity was important; but to more fully understand the nature and evolution of this conflict, there was a need to go beyond identity. Identity was also important ultimately for resolving the conflict, but not solely important. To begin, we found that what finally kicked off the resolution process was an external event that shook up the power and status dynamics between the two hospitals. In short, in the wake of a field-reconfiguring event in US healthcare, the passage of the ‘Affordable Care Act’ (aka ‘Obhamacare’), the smaller hospital became a more valued resource and commanded more respect. It was this event that motivated the initial integrative identity solution (‘we are a family’). Although this attempt failed to bring the two hospitals together, it increased the potency of the conflict so much that the two hospitals began a series of identity management practices—similar to those outlined by Fiol and colleagues () but
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with some important differences—to help manage the conflict. In every stage, even identity separation and strengthening, identity work was enacted jointly by both parties. Moreover, the identity ‘solution’ involved creating a common identity; but trade-offs were involved as well. For example, the smaller hospital was able to retain its core identity, but the name of the larger hospital was added to modify the smaller hospital’s name (e.g. Larger’s Smaller Hospital). A closer look at the data, however, suggested that the reason this identity management ‘worked’ was not because the two hospitals kept their identities and shared an identity. Rather, it was because the identity management created a new relational configuration that ceded more status and power to the smaller hospital in exchange for some loss of its autonomy (e.g. the smaller hospital now shared control of a set of resources with the larger hospital, rather than having sole control over their own resources). If Creary and I had focused exclusively on identity, we would have had a reasonable story to tell. In fact, we could have framed our paper as largely validating the identity management process my other colleagues and I had outlined earlier (e.g. Fiol et al., ). However, that would have missed the status, power, and resource issues that were so integrally bound-up in the creation and management of intractable conflicts. More fundamentally, we would have missed the broader point that the influence of identity management practices was not just about identity per se. In the end, identity management worked because it reconfigured where the two hospitals stood (resource-wise and power-wise, respect-wise and statuswise) in relation to the other, and even in relation to other hospitals. This harkens back to one of the fundamental purposes of identity—it helps locate individuals and other entities within a broader collective. But rather than saying that it was in identity that each hospital’s social position was found, it appeared that it was through identity that it happened. I believe that identity rarely ‘acts alone’: organizational behaviour is complex and is characterized by unique blends of various and multi-level organizational dynamics, shifting contingencies, as well as by equifinality. The three other ‘actors’ in our story about intractable conflicts are not strangers to the identity literature: identity has been linked to status (e.g. Elsbach, ), power (a central part of critical management perspectives on identity—e.g. Alvesson and Wilmott, ), and resources (e.g. Dutton et al., ). However, even in these cases, our theorizing tends to pick one relationship at a time (e.g. identity and status). This is better than seeing identity as the only ‘star’ of the show, but can still offer an impoverished view. One could, of course, ask how many dynamics should one look at since no amount of theorizing can be as rich as the experiences and dynamics it attempts to explain (the map is not the territory). The answer would depend on the nature of what one is examining. However, I use the word ‘ensemble’ to denote examining the other dynamics that are ‘playing with’ identity. This means not stopping when one has ‘found’ the role of identity or even ‘identity and_____’. It may also involve looking at the problem or issue that the people you are studying are living with, and viewing the major dynamics (identity or not) that are involved in keeping people stuck, confused, ambivalent, happy, angry, and the like. I further believe things get much more interesting when we begin to look at patterns and combinations of various organizational dynamics with identity—especially as they occur over time. Of course, looking at identity in this way may need to involve some good metaphors or possibly better similes.¹⁰ For example, we can view identity dynamics as a fundamental force (akin to gravity) in organizing. Looked at in this way, identity is just one
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force, along with power, status, and resources that each influence human behaviour. If we viewed identity as one force of many, this would shape future research in this area. For example, scholars would need to better understand how these forces are ‘ordered’ and thus how they work together. In nature, forces are ordered in terms of strength. Strong nuclear forces, the strongest forces, act within an atom, whereas the weakest, gravity, acts between objects that have mass (and thus, atoms). Even though identity may have some effect across multiple levels, we might ask whether there are some areas where this force is stronger than other forces, and how the potency of identity dynamics in combination with other forces play out in different parts of the organization. Alternatively, we could view identity as a ‘Trojan horse’ that ‘brings’ other dynamics into play. For example, in our study of the merger, we could argue that the issue of identity disguised more deep-seated issues of power and status that were prevalent in the relationship between the two hospitals. Taking this view, we would need to ‘look inside’ identity to see what things may be revealed. This brings us back to my first suggestion: seeing identity as fuller.
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.................................................................................................................................. Even if identity saving the world is hyperbole, on my most cynical days I continue to believe that understanding identity dynamics can help make our organizations better. I have posited three pathways that researchers may take to achieve this ambition. Taken together, I argue that identity research should capture more of the inherent complexity: (a) within an identity (fuller rather than emptier identities); (b) between and across identities (parts and wholes); (c) and between identity dynamics and other dynamics within organizations (identity as ensemble player rather than star). Capturing such complexity is not simply for complexity’s sake. If we take seriously the notion that the sophistication of our ‘tools’ (e.g. our identity schemas or stories) needs to match the complexity of our problems (Brown, ), then I believe the future of identity research is towards a deeper and richer understanding of identity dynamics in organizations.
N . As noted in this book and in various publications, however, the hegemony of these perspectives is being challenged. For example, narrative (e.g. Humphreys and Brown, ), psychodynamics (e.g. Petriglieri and Stein, ), and other perspectives on identity and identification in organizations have been increasing. . As I have noted previously (Pratt, ), identification as it is used in organizational behaviour is very close to what other scholars have viewed as internalization. . It is also interesting to note that early definitions of organizational commitment included identification as a component of it. For example, Mowday et al. (: ) defined organizational commitment as ‘the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization’. . Research I university is a ranking used by the Carnegie Classification of Higher Education and indicates a ‘very high research activity’, http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/classification_descriptions/basic.php. . It is important to note that some treatments of ‘simple’ identity conflicts do treat identity as any other difference, and therefore regard their resolution as involving an integrative solution: the
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imposition of a superordinate identity (Caruso et al., ; Clark et al., ; Gaertner and Dovidio, ; Gaertner et al., ). As discussed in the case of identification and performance, it is not clear that such treatments are fully utilizing the unique features of identity in their theorizing. Despite calls for more research on exploring identification as a process (see Pratt, ) or at least in more dynamic terms (Alvesson et al., ), there continues to be relatively little work in this area. Of course, treatments of identification can also discuss multiple identities or multiple identifications. Some considerations of identification also discuss identity content. However, two commonly used measurements of identification—the Mael and Ashforth () and Bergami-Bagozzi () scales—do not mention the content of the identities at all. Similarly, part of the power of a minimal group paradigm is that, under some circumstances, content may be irrelevant. There are many others who have also looked at this issue of identity and selves. Watson (), for example, notes the importance of the self as recognizing that identity work does not only involve an internal referent, but external ones as well. Hatch and Schutlz () use Mead’s () distinction if ‘I’ and ‘me’ to better articulate the relationship among an organizational culture, image, and identity. Notions of identities and selves do not mean that they are ‘real’ in any objective sense; they can also be narrative constructions (Watson, ). We might view identities as stories we tell people about who we are now or at a given point in time, and selves as stories that link identities across time. We do, of course, have some good similes: we can view identities as resources or managing identity as normative control.
R Alvesson, M., Ashcraft, K. K., and Thomas, R. (). ‘Identity Matters: Reflections on the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies’. Organization, , –. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (). ‘Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual’. Journal of Management Studies, (), –. Ashforth, B. E., Harrison, S. H., and Corley, K. G. (). ‘Identification in Organizations: An Examination of Four Fundamental Questions’. Journal of Management, (), –. Ashforth, B. E., Moser, J. R., and Bubenzer, P. (). ‘Identities and Identification: Beyond our Fixation on the Organization’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Atewologun, D., Kutzer, R., and Doldor, E. (). ‘Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Identity Foci at Work’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Azar, E. E. (). ‘Protracted International Conflicts: Ten Propositions’. In E. E. Azar and J. Burton (eds.), International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. –. Bar-Tal, D. (). ‘Societal Beliefs in Times of Intractable Conflict: The Israeli Case’. International Journal of Conflict Management, (), –. Bazerman, M. H. and Neale, M. A. (). Negotiating Rationally. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bergami, M. and Bagozzi, R. P. (). ‘Self-Categorization, Affective Commitment and Group SelfEsteem as Distinct Aspects of Social Identity in the Organization’. British Journal of Social Psychology, (), –. Blader, S. L., Patil, S., and Packer, D. J. (). ‘Organizational Identification and Workplace Behavior: More than Meets the Eye’. Research in Organizational Behavior, , –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities and Identity Work in Organizations’. International Journal of Management Reviews, (), –. Caruso, H. M., Rogers, T., and Bazerman, M. H. (). ‘Boundaries Need Not Be Barriers: Leading Collaboration among Groups in Decentralized Organizations’. In T. L. Pittinsky (ed.), Crossing the Divide: Intergroup Leadership in a World of Difference. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, pp. –.
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Clark, S. M., Gioia, D. A., Ketchen, D. J. Jr., and Thomas, J. B. (). ‘Transitional Identity as a Facilitator of Organizational Identity Change during a Merger’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Coleman, P. T. (). ‘Characteristics of Protracted, Intractable Conflict: Toward the Development of a Metaframework – I’. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, (), –. Crocker, C. A., Hampson, F. O., and Aall, P. R. (). Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press. Dutton, J., Roberts, L., and Bednar, J. (). ‘Pathways for Positive Identity Construction at Work: Four Types of Positive Identity and the Building of Social Resources’. Academy of Management Review, , –. Elsbach, K. D. (). ‘Interpreting Workplace Identities: The Role of Office Décor’. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, (), –. Fiol, C. M., Pratt, M. G., and O’Connor, E. (). ‘Managing Intractable Identity Conflicts’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Fisher, R. J. (). ‘Third Party Consultation as a Method of Intergroup Conflict Resolution: A Review of Studies’. Journal of Conflict Resolution, (), –. Gaertner, S. and Dovidio, J. F. (). Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model. New York: Psychology Press. Gaertner, S. L., Dovidio, J. F., Anastasio, P. A., Bachman, B. A., and Rust, M. C. (). ‘The Common Ingroup Identity Model: Recategorization and the Reduction of Intergroup Bias’. European Review of Social Psychology, (), –. Glynn, M. A. (). ‘When Cymbals Become Symbols: Conflict over Organizational Identity within a Symphony Orchestra’. Organization Science, (), –. Haidt, J. (). ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’. Psychological Review, , –. Hatch, M. J. and Schultz, M. (). ‘The Dynamics of Organizational Identity’. Human Relations, (), –. Hekman, D., van Knippenberg, D., and Pratt, M. G. (). ‘Channeling Identification: How Perceived Regulatory Focus Moderates the Influence of Organizational and Professional Identification on Professional Employees’ Diagnosis and Treatment Behaviors’. Human Relations, (), –. Hogg, M. A., Terry, D. J., and White, K. M. (). ‘A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory’. Social Psychology Bulletin, (), –. Humphreys, M. and Brown, A. D. (). ‘Narratives of Organizational Identity and Identification: A Case Study of Hegemony and Resistance’. Organization Studies, (), –. Jehn, K. A. (). ‘A Multimethod Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict’. Administrative Science Quarterly, (), –. Lepisto, D., Crosina, E., and Pratt, M. (). ‘Identity Work Within and Beyond the Professions: Towards a Theoretical Integration and Extension’. In A. Costa e Silva and M. Aparicio (eds.), International Handbook of Professional Identities. Rosemead, CA: Scientific & Academic Publishing, pp. –. Mael, F. and Ashforth, B. E. (). ‘Alumni and Their Alma Mater: A Partial Test of the Reformulated Model of Organizational Identification’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Magee, J. C. and Galinsky, A. D. (). ‘Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status’. Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Mead, G. H. (). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mowday, R. T., Steers, R. M., and Porter, L. W. (). ‘The Measurement of Organizational Commitment’. Journal of Vocational Behavior, (), –. Northrup, T. A. (). ‘The Dynamic of Identity in Personal and Social Conflict’. In L. Kriesberg, T. A. Northrup, and S. J. Thorson (eds.), Intractable Conflicts and Their Transformation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. –. Petriglieri, G. and Stein, M. (). ‘The Unwanted Self: Projective Identification in Leaders’ Identity Work’. Organization Studies, (), –.
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Petriglieri, J. L. (). ‘Under Threat: Responses to and the Consequences of Threats to Individuals’ Identities’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Pratt, M. G. (). ‘To Be or Not to Be? Central Questions in Organizational Identification’. In D. A. Whetten and P. C. Godfrey (eds.), Identity in Organizations: Building Theory through Conversations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. –. Pratt, M. G. (). ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ambivalent: Managing Identification among Amway Distributors’. Administrative Science Quarterly, , –. Pratt, M. G. (). ‘Social Identity Dynamics in Modern Organizations: An Organizational Psychology/Organizational Behavior Perspective’. In M. Hogg and D. J. Terry (eds.) Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, pp. –. Pratt, M. G. (). ‘Rethinking Identity Construction Processes in Organizations: Three Questions to Consider’. In M. Schultz, S. Maguire, A. Langley, and H. Tsoukas (eds.), Constructing Identity in and around Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Pratt, M. G., Fiol, C. M., O’Connor, E., and Panico, P. (). ‘Promoting Positive Change in Physician–Administrator Relationships: Lessons for Managing Intractable Identity Conflicts’. In K. Golden-Biddle and J. Dutton (eds.), Exploring Positive Social Change and Organizations. New York: Routledge, pp. –. Pratt, M. G. and Foreman, P. O. (a). ‘The Beauty of and Barriers to Organizational Theories of Identity’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Pratt, M. G. and Foreman, P. O. (b). ‘Classifying Managerial Responses to Multiple Organizational Identities’. Academy of Management Review, (), –. Pratt, M. G. and Kraatz, M. S. (). ‘E Pluribus Unum: Multiple Identities and the Organizational Self ’. In L. Morgan Roberts and J. Dutton (eds.), Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation. New York: Routledge, pp. –. Ramarajan, L. (). ‘Past, Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Towards an Intrapersonal Network Approach’. The Academy of Management Annals, (), –. Riketta, M. (). ‘Attitudinal Organizational Commitment and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis’. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, (), –. Riketta, M. (). ‘Organizational Identification: A Meta-Analysis’. Journal of Vocational Behavior, (), –. Rosso, B. D., Dekas, K. H., and Wrzesniewski, A. (). ‘On the Meaning of Work: A Theoretical Integration and Review’. In A. P. Brief and B. M. Staw (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. . Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. –. Rothman, J. and Olson, M. L. (). ‘From Interests to Identities: Towards a New Emphasis in Interactive Conflict Resolution’. Journal of Peace Research, (), –. Sen, A. (). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W. W. Norton. Stets, J. and Burke, P. (). ‘Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory’. Social Psychology Quarterly, (), –. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (). ‘An Integrative Theory of Inter-Group Conflict’. In W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole, pp. –. van Knippenberg, D., van Knippenberg, B., Monden, L., and de Lima, F. (). ‘Organizational Identification after a Merger: A Social Identity Perspective’. British Journal of Social Psychology, , –. Vough, H. (). ‘Not All Identifications Are Created Equal: Exploring Employee Accounts for Workgroup, Organizational, and Professional Identification’. Organizational Science, (), –. Watson, T. J. (). ‘Managing Identity: Identity Work, Personal Predicaments and Structural Circumstances’. Organization, , –.
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Some Concluding Thoughts ......................................................................................................................
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Abstract The future of research on identities in and around organizations is ours to make. Sifting through the chapters of this handbook gives indications of what the immediate future may look like and the issues that might figure large in identities theorizing. Substantial attention is paid by contributors to: (i) our changing times and their implications for identities; (ii) the increasingly less definite and less assured nature of identities; (iii) the scope for generating new metaphors for understanding identities and their utility; (iv) the possible benefits of focusing not merely on discursively construed identities but their performed, embodied, and emotional characteristics; (v) the contextual and relational dynamics of identities formation; (vi) issues of temporality and spatiality; (vii) discourses of authenticity, real and fake selves; (viii) the need for intersectional approaches to identities research; and (ix) the desirability for identities scholars to be reflexive in the conduct and write-up of their research.
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.................................................................................................................................. A to Swann and Bosson (: ) psychology’s relationship with the ‘self ’ was initially tempestuous, with the term, having been introduced by James (), at first ‘ignored by a psychological mainstream’. It is notable that while self-identities have been embraced, to an extent, by scholars in organization studies, their most enthusiastic support has come from those with discursive, critical, interpretive, and poststructural inclinations. Arguably, despite a stellar rise in interest in identities over the past two decades, they remain ignored or marginalized in key discourses on organizations and organizing. Indeed, there remains the danger that identity specialists continue to talk largely among themselves while, as in social psychology of old, identity concerns are overlooked by a ‘mainstream whose
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embrace of positivism . . . [makes] it squeamish about constructs that seem . . . to lack clear empirical referents’ (Swann and Bosson, : ). Whether this continues to be the case is a shared concern for everyone with a stake in the identities in organizations literature.
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.................................................................................................................................. I conclude with a brief overview of some of the key emergent themes evident in the chapters of this handbook. This is a convenient means for summarizing a number of interesting ideas that appealed particularly to me; but I offer them also in the hope that they may be helpful in shaping and invigorating future research agendas (see also Brown, a). Some well-attested themes need little further elaboration. These include, for example, the need for identities to be studied at multiple levels of analysis and how identities framed at different levels interconnect and inform each other. Almost all the contributions to this handbook assume or assert explicitly that identities are processual phenomena. While many authors regard identities as worthy of study in their own right, there is also agreement that identities matter because they are embedded in, and key to our understanding of a range of, individual and collective processes and outcomes. All identities—age (Ainsworth, ), sexual (Rumens, ), career (Hoyer, ), gender (Fotaki, ), racial (Greedharry et al., ), networked (Ellis and Hopkinson, ), branded (Karreman and Frandsen, ), entrepreneurial (Fauchart and Gruber, ), creative (Josefsson, ), philanthropic (Maclean and Harvey, ), etc.—and all aspects of identities construction, are entangled in and produced through relations of power (Bardon and Pezé, ). While there is less consensus on which set of theoretical resources are best deployed in the study of identities, it is noticeable that some key established scholars are heavily referenced in this volume, with Butler, Giddens, Goffman, Foucault, and Mead attracting particular attention, and some, such as Bauman, Bourdieu, Freud, Lacan, and Weick inspiring entire chapters. Among a host of other issues, perhaps less predictably, substantial numbers of chapters make reference to: (i) our changing times and their implications for identities; (ii) the increasingly less-certain nature of identities; (iii) the role of and the need for new metaphors for understanding identities; (iv) the benefits of focusing not merely on discursively construed identities but their performed, embodied, and emotional nature; (v) the contextual and relational aspects of identities formation; (vi) issues of temporality and spatiality; (vii) authentic, real and fake selves; (viii) the advantages of intersectional approaches to identities research; and (ix) the requirement for identities scholars to be reflexive in the conduct and write-up of their research.
Changing Times The contexts in which identities are constructed have changed and are changing. At a global level, Koveshnikov et al. () argue that this is an age where globalization often collides uncomfortably with nationalism, bringing to the fore issues of national identity fed by historical and colonial memories and fuelled by emotionally charged media representations (Boussebaa, ). Continuing macro-political and economic realignments, such as Brexit, the
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election of Donald Trump, and the rise of ‘post-truth’ (Fairhurst and Sheep, ; Pratt, ) and divisive identity politics, often informed by an aggressive nostalgia that promotes populist and extreme right-wing identities (Gabriel, ), have altered what Patriotta () refers to as the ‘pre-interpreting mechanisms’ by which people make sense of their selves in what is an increasingly liquid world (Coupland and Spedale, ; Harding, ). Clarke and Knights () describe how in recent times trends ranging from Karojisatsu (work induced suicide) and Karōshi (death from over-work) to progressive struggles against discrimination and disadvantage, and the ‘me too’ campaign, have transformed the modern world in which identities in organizations are fabricated. In short, ours is a time of considerable economic crisis, social uncertainty, and political repositioning (Ford, ) that has witnessed the rapid growth of social inequalities (Fotaki, ). Moreover, individuals face an increasingly dynamic, virtual, and temporary organizational world featuring shorter, flexible, part-time, and zero-hour employment contracts (Ahuja et al., ). In the gig economy careers are more flexible, less bounded, and unpredictable (Hoyer, ). More people are now involved in networks of organizations and boundary-span between firms engaged in inter-organizational collaborations (Ellis and Hopkinson, ). There are fewer anchor points for constructing stable identities, and there are a greater number and variety of identity and identification options attaching not just to work groups and organizations but to artefacts and practices (Ashforth et al., ). The rupturing of heteronormative hegemony means that sexual identities in organizations are also no longer rigidly ‘prescribed’ (Rumens, ). Complementarily, Hirst and Humphreys () remark on the new ways of working, workspace designs, and office and building aesthetics that are often rich in symbolism, and novel spatial arrangements, which foster distinctive patterns of behaviour and promote fresh prospects for identities to be developed and performed.
Increasing Uncertainty This new discursive and material landscape for organizing poses both opportunities and challenges for organizational members. Identities are less fixed, secure and certain, more open, fluid, ambivalent, conflicted, paradoxical, vulnerable and protean (Fairhurst and Sheep, ). Selves, as Petriglieri (), asserts, are ever more provisional. Coupland and Spedale () focus on the need for people to develop agile identities better able to cope with increasing temporariness, fluidity and porosity, while Ahuja et al. () discuss the rise of digital nomads whose identities are, perchance, well adapted to our ambiguous and transitional times (Simpson and Carroll, ). All of which means that individuals have ever more scope for, and need to engage in diverse forms of identities construction, and identities management, and to devise innovative strategies for their performance and (non) disclosure (Rumens, ). In particular, identities are now often described as hybrid, liminal, and precarious. Currie and Logan () concentrate on hybridity, the idea that people are increasingly likely to be required to blend two or more professional identities at work, and the implications of this for their selves, their professional status, and institutions. Liminality is a key theme that manifests in liminal spaces that provide opportunities to construct noncorporate identities (Hirst and Humphreys, ), the liminal positions of boundary
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spanners in inter-organizational collaborations (Ellis and Hopkinson, ), and the ‘perpetual liminality’ of those who, on a quotidian basis, must re-cast their identities for different audiences (Hoyer, ). For Ibarra and Obodaru (), in contemporary organizations people are often betwixt and between—jobs, careers, technologies, etc.— and live liminal working lives. Zundel et al. () draw on Simmel to argue for an understanding of liminal identities using the metaphors of the bridge and the door. For Simpson and Carroll () leadership is explicitly conceived as a perpetually liminal practice. Drawing often on the work of Butler, ‘precarity’ is another well-used descriptor of contemporary identities (Fotaki, ; Harding, ). Josefsson () remarks on the precarity of creative workers whose working lives often resemble a ‘high stakes lottery’. Beech and Broad () comment on the precarious identities of those engaged in the performing arts for whom it (the performance of the self) could go wrong at any moment. Even ‘positive’ identities, for Sheep (), are precarious accomplishments threatened by detractors, sceptics, competitors, and social stigmas that continually nip at people’s heels.
New and Reworked Metaphors While their stated aims are often divergent, for social scientists ranging from the conventional to the post-positivist, developing identities scholarship often means finding ways to enrich our identities discourse by devising new—and elaborating on the implications of existing—metaphors that enhance, refine, and extend understanding. Oswick and Oswick () show just how saturated with metaphors and metaphorical theorizing the extant identities literature is, though they are not wholly enthusiastic about this, claiming that at present there is considerable metaphorical complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. Their recommendation is that metaphors be used as data gathering as well as interpretive devices, that researchers should be more sensitive to the metaphors in the epistemologies they adopt, and that the conceptual blending of metaphors may offer a fruitful way forward for theorizing. While these are eminently sensible suggestions, nevertheless, as Pratt () argues, there is a continuing need for compelling images to better explain identity dynamics, and the possibilities are exciting to contemplate. Indeed, many intriguing metaphors are evoked in the chapters of this handbook. Mostly, metaphors for identities (both of ourselves as professional researchers and of those we study), and identity construction processes, are mentioned fleetingly and without much further analysis. For example, Carter and Spence () refer to themselves as ‘tourists’ who appreciate, critique, and contribute to (intellectual) territory that is not their own. Ashcraft () identifies us as ‘sleepwalkers’ who act somnambulantly adrift in relational currents of which we are not fully aware. Ybema () uses the phrase ‘caste members’ to describe hierarchized professional status. Some authors reference multiplicities of overlapping (or perhaps competing) metaphors. For Ahuja et al. (), identities are variously liquid, plastic, elastic, paradoxical, and nomadic, while Coupland and Spedale () describe identities that are not just agile but nimble, versatile, supple, lithe, responsive, and fragile. Lok () analyses the identities metaphors implied in various strands of institutional theory. Others, however, take a particular metaphor to investigate in a more thorough-going way its analytic potential. Maclean and Harvey () identify types of philanthropists as ‘travellers’ embarked on four distinct philanthropic journeys. Tracy and
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Town () discuss the merits of the ‘crystallized’ identity metaphor. Fairhurst and Sheep () use the metaphors of identity ‘paradox’ and ‘knotting’ to refer to identity work that reveals multiple tensions.
From Discourse to Action, Embodiment, and Affect Discursive approaches to identities in organizations, especially those that emphasize people’s intentionality and rationality, continue to attract considerable attention (e.g. Whittle and Mueller, ). That said, there is also some dissatisfaction with this perspective, and increasing insistence scholars recognize that identities are not just talked about but acted on, that there are limits to individuals’ conscious manoeuvrings and rational intent, that people are emotional beings, and that identities are embodied (e.g. McInnes and Corlett, ). As, among others, Kuhn and Simpson () note, allied with the practice and ontological turns in organizational theory, interest is turning to reframing identities as socio-material accomplishments: shattered bodies, homes, careers, and environments cannot reasonably be reduced to the non-material, argues Harding (). Instructive here is Bardon and Pezé’s () analysis of how the attention of identity scholars, when investigating identity construction fluctuates between the power of language and the power of materiality, and how poststructuralist identity studies have not infrequently been criticized for neglecting materiality. Also worthy of note in this respect is that interest in Lacanian approaches to identity may in part reflect an ‘affective turn’ in social and organizational theory (Kenny, ). Evidently, scholarly discourses are now shifting so that even scholars predisposed to focus on talk and texts often acknowledge that identities manifest in material things like objects, contextual spaces, timeframes, and bodies (Tracy and Town, ; Zundel et al., ). Coupland and Spedale () insist that identities are ‘fundamentally embodied’. In Ashcraft’s () analysis identities are socio-material productions that are posthuman, social, material, and transpersonal. For Ybema () identities are co-produced performances that are enacted in myriad ways, not least how we act, dress or even stand in a queue, our cars, tattoos and other means by which we present ourselves to others. Petriglieri () comments that people ‘feel’ as well as ‘know’ who they are. Winkler () reminds us that identities are intersected by emotions. That identities are embodied becomes all too evident when they begin to age, functional decline and dependency loom, and physical ailments pose restrictions on what kinds of identities can be performed (Ainsworth, ). Much is omitted from solely discursive analyses of racialized identities that do not account adequately for the physicality of such identities (Greedharry et al., ). Summing up the thrust of this new turn, Watson () argues for an approach to identities that emphasizes emergence, social processes and relationality, and that embraces the study of emotions, feelings, and personal wants (cf. Fotaki, ).
From the Individual to the Social There is consensus on the merits of releasing identities studies from the straitjacket of a micro-focus on individual selves and studying them in broader processes of social relations.
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Moreover, there is ongoing criticism of those studies that focus exclusively on individuals and which fail to account adequately for the contexts in which identities are formed and the relational processes through which they are negotiated with others (Kuhn and Simpson, ). Among those who favour better contextualized studies of identities is Ybema (), who is adamant that identity is inherently social, and that individuals are caught in and engage actively with Geertz’s webs of cultural significance. Carter and Spence (), drawing on Bourdieu, suggest that identity scholars pay more attention to issues of field and class. In Ahuja et al.’s () analysis, identities can only be understood adequately in the context of broader sociological theorizing on the nature of liquid modernity and its ethical, political, and organizational consequences. Several authors consider explicitly the media, film, and literary resources we draw on to construct our work and organizationbased identities (e.g. Watson, ). Learmonth and Griffin (), for example, analyse how ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘tragic’ portrayals of managers in fictional works shape who we think of when we consider a ‘manager’ in contemporary society. Complementing calls for more attention to be paid to context are injunctions, following Mead () and Goffman () to attend also to the micro-interactions with significant others through which identities are made. All identities, whether highly specific such as those of philanthropists (Maclean and Harvey, ) and managers (Learmonth and Griffin, ) or that draw on shared social categories such as age (Ainsworth (), gender (Fotaki, ), and sexuality (Rumens, ) are negotiated in relation to diverse social actors. As Pratt () argues, identities ultimately come in part from the expectations of others, and one’s identities may be viewed as internalized expectations that others have of us. For Simpson and Carroll () and Ford () it is not possible to appreciate fully issues of leadership and leader identity formation without regard to the followers they require to play their roles through relational encounters. Langley et al. () show how, from narrative and work perspectives, the identities of individuals are tied intimately to the identities of organizations. Identities, whether discursive, symbolic, dramaturgical, sociocognitive or psychodynamic, are constituted in the dynamics of social relationships and enacted relationally (Cutcher, ; Karreman and Frandsen, ; Koveshnikov et al., ; Petriglieri, ).
Temporality and Spatiality There is discernible interest in studying identities in relation to issues of temporality, including how identities develop historically, and spatiality (e.g. Ibarra and Obodaru, ). Petriglieri (), for example, proposes that identity is a fabrication, i.e. a process of positioning the self in (existential) time and (social) space. Time is implicated in many different ways in this handbook by those who regard social actors as temporally embedded (Coupland and Spedale, ). Suddaby et al. () exhort scholars not to valorize identity stability but to embrace how in autobiographical memory individuals and organizations draw creatively on the remembered past, present, and future to construct coherent selves. For Fairhurst and Sheep () temporality is one aspect of the paradoxical nature of identity adaptation, that is, how does one transition from a current (or former) self into future possible selves? From a Bourdieusian perspective, identities can only be understood fully through the prism of history (Carter and Spence, ; cf. Rowlinson and Heller,
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). Gabriel () discusses how nostalgia is an emotion that anchors people to their past and that prevents identities from drifting or being overwhelmed by current concerns. Racial identities are historical products (Greedharry et al., ) while ‘age’ identities make little sense without reference to unfolding chronological time (Ainsworth, ). Fewer authors account explicitly for the spatialization of identities, and when they do so it is often merely to note, as Atewologun et al. () remind us, that identities caught in discourses at micro, meso-, and macro levels are also constituted both temporally and spatially and that the meanings of identity foci are changeable across time and space (Langley et al., ). That said, McInnes and Corlett () argue that studies of identities in relation to space and place have become more significant recently. For Ahuja et al. (), today, identities are less anchored in spatial proximities of family and work life, as symptomized by the rise of global leasing companies such as WeWork, the blurring of home/work boundaries, the prominence of virtual working, and the phenomenon of digital nomads with their plural identities who are able to live life on the move. Harding () observes that space is an active and important actor in the endurance of emerging organizations. Bardon and Pezé () draw on Våland and Georg’s (: ) notion of ‘spacing identity’ to refer to how identities are constituted through organizational practices taking place within, enabled by, and constitutive of particular constellations of the social, material, and spatial. In this volume, the most in-depth analysis of how identities require study in relation to spatiality is provided by Hirst and Humphreys () who show how they are tied intimately to issues of space and place in contemporary work settings.
Authentic, Fake and Real Selves As Oswick and Oswick () note, ‘authenticity’, and its implication that there are both ‘real’ and ‘fake’ selves, is one of many metaphors used to typify certain identities. Sheep () regards authenticity as integral to ‘positive’ identities such that the search for a positive identity is also a quest for the authentic self. Maclean and Harvey () speculate on the extent to which philanthropic identities are assumed ‘authentically’ by the superwealthy, or whether they are perhaps masquerades adopted to deflect and diffuse the politics of envy. Dis-identification, for Karreman and Frandsen (), is more likely when employees experience identity material provided by their organizations as fake or inauthentic. For Beech and Broad () authentic identities may be both disguised and revealed through performance. Ibarra and Obodaru () discuss how people may strive to maintain authenticity in the face of identity integrity violations. In Pratt’s () analysis, bringing one’s entire portfolio of identities to work, and thus being wholly ‘authentic’, is a privilege restricted to the white male leaders of organizations. Fairhurst and Sheep () refer to the real-self/fake-self duality as a paradox of authenticity. For some, in less certain times authenticity, often regarded as the challenge of discerning a ‘true’ self among a multiplicity of possible selves, becomes a more significant issue (Ashforth et al., ). Ahuja et al. (), for instance, suggest that notions of authenticity are challenged by the changes associated with liquid modernity. Others counsel against essentializing selves and the pursuit of ‘true’ or ‘real’ identities and more-or-less fixed sets of personality traits and behavioural repertoires (Watson, ). Tracy and Town (), in keeping with much poststructural, and relational
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theorizing, regard ‘authenticity’ and the real-self$fake-self dichotomy it enshrines, as an ideological discourse created and maintained through contemporary literature, scholarly theories of identity, discourses of power, and everyday organizational talk and practices. From this perspective, there is no ‘authentic’ self, and its continued use by scholars dangerously obscures how authenticity discourses are used to discipline identities in organizations. This critique is echoed and elaborated by Bardon and Pezé () who invite researchers to look with renewed vigour at the disciplinary mechanisms by which biocratic corporate initiatives align notionally ‘authentic’ selves with corporate interests and to novel forms of agency, and in particular resistance, that can be anticipated to emerge in work contexts where being ‘authentic’ is officially promoted by managerial discourses. Scepticism regarding the possibility of ‘authenticity’ in identity matters is also implied in the many analyses of how organizations manipulate individuals to engage in personal branding to create supposedly authentic identities that are commodified for organizational ends (Coupland and Spedale, ; Josefsson, ; Karreman and Frandsen, ; Kuhn and Simpson, ).
Intersectionality The concept ‘intersectionality’, defined by Atewologun et al. () as ‘an approach that pays conscious attention to multiple positionality and power in conceptualizing, theorizing, and analysing identities and identification’ (p. ) is used by a multitude of authors, though in quite different ways. In general, interest in intersectionality reflects growing scepticism that specific social identities can be studied meaningfully in isolation from one another, and a conviction that an intersectional perspective leads to more complex, verisimilitudinous, and theoretically worthwhile research (Pratt, ). Multiple authors make the case for studying specific age-related, national, and racial identities in relation to other identities such as those relating to gender, sexuality, disability, and social class (Ainsworth, ; Fotaki, ; Greedharry et al., ; Koveshnikov et al., ). Identities, as Ellis and Hopkinson () show, are increasingly forged in networks featuring multiple overlapping and interconnected identity opportunities. Watson () argues scholars need better to appreciate how work identities—e.g. managerial, professional etc.—intersect with those they adopt across different—e.g. personal, familial—aspects of their lives. In addition to a variety of general ideological commitments to intersectional research a number of authors make specific recommendations or point to particular opportunities and potential drawbacks. Tracy and Town () suggest that the metaphor of the ‘crystallized self ’ is useful to account for the intersectionality of identities and how subjectivities may develop, adapt, and mutate, raising the interesting question of whether some metaphors might be more and others less facilitative of intersectional research. For Fotaki (), intersectionality is a means to develop our understanding of identities as embodied practices. Many authors argue for the generativity that may be unleashed through the intersection not of individuals’ identities but of the identity literature per se with specialist literatures such as those on stigma (Kreiner and Mihelcic, ), careers (Hoyer, ), sensemaking (Vough et al., ), race (Greedharry et al., ), paradox (Fairhurst and Sheep, ; Sheep, ), and LGBTQ+ sexualities (Rumens, ). Perhaps most
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intriguing is Clarke and Knights’ () note of caution that a preoccupation with intersectionality is not in itself necessarily laudable: an intersectional approach, they suggest, may be deficient unless those identities and the discourses from which they are constructed are sufficiently interrogated.
Reflexivity Many authors comment on the importance of researchers being explicitly reflexive in their research on identities (e.g. Cutcher, ; Watson, ). This is in part predicated on a concern that what we think we know about others is contingent on how we conceive ourselves, and the relations of power in which researchers and the researched are enmeshed. Moreover, the quest to understand others is, importantly, also an endeavour to know ourselves. In some of the chapters in this handbook the researcher self is foregrounded by scholars in ways that highlight their personal history, values, and concerns. Mostly, scholars reference the need for reflexivity incidentally, en passant, in summary or concluding thoughts, though often in interesting and insightful ways. Sheep () comments on how in the course of his career he has experimented with multiple possible and provisional selves. Ybema () references a conversation with an occupational therapist about organizational attire. Atewologun et al. () make revealing comments about their gender, sexual, national, professional, and career identities. Gill () discusses constructivist approaches which foster researcher reflexivity about their own interpretations. Sometimes reflexivity is more sustained, though most often confined largely to a vignette or two. Patriotta () relates a personal confessional narrative as an Italian living in the UK following the vote for Brexit. Ashcraft () tells a poignant tale of how her and another’s identities were fabricated in an encounter with a sommelier. Watson () foregrounds a conversation between himself and an HR manager, making the observation that in our research we are ‘inevitably’ engaged in processes of identity work and that we should be sensitive to it. In a few instances, such as in Cutcher’s () chapter, the practices associated with being a reflexive identity researcher are a key feature of the arguments made, and reveal how researcher selves are accomplished and also ‘undone’ through encounters with others in research processes. For critical management scholars in particular, it is towards a more reflexive identities literature that we should strive.
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.................................................................................................................................. Even in a volume with fifty three major chapters, lacunae are inevitable.¹ The topic ‘identities in organizations’ is vast—and the scope for new empirical studies, innovative ideas, and of forging connections between existing notions so considerable—that no handbook, not even one of this magnitude, can realistically hope to be fully comprehensive. One wonders what has been lost as a result of there being no contributors with affiliations to institutions based in Latin America, the Middle East, China, India, or any African country. Most of the contributors to this handbook have focused on subjectively construed identities as constituted through discursive and other symbolic means, with only a few drawing
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substantially on objectivist theorizing such as Social Identity Theory (Ashforth et al., ). Rather than identities at the group or other collective level, the emphasis of this handbook is on the self-identities worked on by individuals participating (mostly working in and around) organizations. There are no specific chapters on moral/ethical concerns or identities in relation to decision-making processes. Moreover, there is always another identity ‘type’ or identity narrative ‘template’ that can be devised or discovered, a further ‘resource’ for identity work to be analysed, a unique context for the study of identity to be explored, and novel theoretical synthesis to be sought. The fecund potential of the concept of identity, which is part of its attraction, means also that the range of scholarship centred on it or which meaningfully implicates it is impossible definitively or conclusively to delimit.
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.................................................................................................................................. The turn to identities and processes of identity construction in organizations continues apace. Of course, it is important not to make unrealistic claims (cf. Alvesson and Gjerde, ), in particular regarding what a focus on identities issues can accomplish, to continue to strive to craft more interesting and more theoretically generative concepts, not to waste resources on trivial concerns, and to challenge relations of power that sediment identity inequality and stigma. As long as we can stay focused not just on identities themselves but on those topics in which identity dynamics are an important explanatory component then, as with other commentators on the identities field (e.g. Swann and Bosson, : ; Caza et al., ), we may be justifiably sanguine regarding the literature’s long term prospects.²
N . For example, little attention is paid in this handbook to the substantial literature on consumer identities. . I gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of Michael Pratt and Michael Humphreys on an earlier draft of this chapter.
R Ahuja, S., Nikolova, N., and Clegg, S. (). ‘Identities, Digital Nomads, and Liquid Modernity’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ainsworth, S. (). ‘Age Identity and Organizations: Critical Potential and Challenges’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Alvesson, M. and Gjerde, S. (). ‘On the Scope and Limits of Identity’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –.
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Ashcraft, K. L. (). ‘Senses of Self: Affect as a Pre-Individual Approach to Identity at Work’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ashforth, B. E., Moser, J. R., and Bubenzer, P. (). ‘Identities and Identification: Beyond our Fixation on the Organization’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Atewologun, D., Kutzer, R., and Doldor, E. (). ‘Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Identity Foci at Work’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Bardon, T. and Pezé, S. (). ‘Identity and Power in Organizational Theory’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Beech, N. H. and Broad, S. (). ‘Performed Identities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Boussebaa, M. (). ‘Identity Regulation and Globalization’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Brown, A. D. (). ‘Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Carter, C. and Spence, C. (). ‘Bourdieu and Identity: Class, History, and Field Structure’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Caza, B. B., Vough, H., and Puranik, H. (). ‘Identity Work in Organizations and Occupations: Definitions, Theories, and Pathways Forward’. Journal of Organizational Behavior, (), –. Clarke, C. and Knights, D. (). ‘The Killing Fields of Identity Politics’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Coupland, C. and Spedale, S. (). ‘Agile Identities: Fragile Humans?’ In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Currie, G. and Logan, K. (). ‘Hybrid Professional Identities: Responding to Institutional Challenges’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Cutcher, L. (). ‘Conversations with the Self and Others: Practising Reflexive Researcher Identity Work’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ellis, N. and Hopkinson, G. (). ‘Networks and Identity: Positioning the Self and Others Across Organizational and Network Boundaries’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Fairhurst, G. T. and Sheep, M. L. (). ‘ “If You Have to Say You Are, You Aren’t”: Paradoxes of Trumpian Identity Work Knotting in a Post-Truth Context’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Fauchart, E. and Gruber, M. (). Entrepreneurship and Identity;. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ford, J. (). ‘Leadership and Identities: Towards More Critical Relational Approaches’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Fotaki, M. (). ‘Gender Identity: Does It Still Matter in Organizations and Society?’ In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Gabriel, Y. (). ‘Anchored in the Past: Nostalgic Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Gill, M. J. (). ‘How Can I Study Who You Are? Comparing Grounded Theory and Phenomenology as Methodological Approaches to Identity Work Research’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –.
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Goffman, E. (). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (original work published ). Greedharry, M., Ahonen, P., and Tienari, J. (). ‘Race and Identity in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Harding, N. (). ‘Materialities and Identities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Hirst, A. and Humphreys, M. (). ‘Finding Ourselves in Space: Identity and Spatiality’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Hoyer, P. (). ‘Career Identity: An Ongoing Narrative Accomplishment’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ibarra, H. and Obodaru, O. (). ‘The Liminal Playground: Identity Play and the Creative Potential of Liminal Experiences’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. James, W. (). The Principles of Psychology, vol. . New York: Henry Holt. Josefsson, I. (). ‘Creating Creative Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Karreman, D. and Frandsen, S. (). ‘Identity, Image, and Brand’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kenny, K. (). ‘Lacan, Identities, and Organizations: Potentialities and Impossibilities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Koveshnikov, A., Tienari, J., and Vaara, E. (). ‘National Identity in and around Multinational Corporations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kreiner, G. E. and Mihelcic, C. A. (). ‘Stigmatized Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Kuhn, T. R. and Simpson, J. (). ‘Discourse, Communication, and Identity’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Langley, A., Oliver, D., and Rouleau, L. (). ‘Strategy and Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Learmonth, M. and Griffin, M. (). ‘Fiction and the Identity of the Manager’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Lok, J. (). ‘Theorizing the “I” in Institutional Theory: Moving Forward Through Theoretical Fragmentation, Not Integration’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. McInnes, P. and Corlett, S. (). ‘Preserving the Generative Potential of Identity Scholarship: The Value of Writerly Texts’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Maclean, M. and Harvey, C. (). ‘Crafting Philanthropic Identities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Mead, G. H. (). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Oswick, R. and Oswick, C. (). ‘ “Identity Work”: A Metaphor Taken Literally?’ In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Patriotta, G. (). ‘Noise, Identity, and Pre-Interpreted Worlds: A Phenomenological Perspective’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –.
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Petriglieri, G. (). ‘A Psychodynamic Perspective on Identity as Fabrication’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Pratt, M. G. (). ‘Identity Saves the World? Musings on Where Identity Research Has Been and Where It Might Go’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Rowlinson, M. and Heller, M. (). ‘Historical Methods for Researching Identities in Organizations’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Rumens, N. (). ‘Organization Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Identities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Sheep, M. L. (). ‘Paradoxes in the Pursuit of Positive Identities: Individuals in Organizations Becoming Their Best’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Simpson, B. and Carroll, B. (). ‘Identity Work in Developing Collaborative Leadership’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Suddaby, R., Schultz, M., and Israelsen, T. (). ‘Autobiographical Memory and Identities in Organizations: The Role of Temporal Fluidity’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Swann, W. B., Jr and Bosson, J. (). ‘Self and Identity’. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. –. Tracy, S. J. and Town, S. (). ‘Real, Fake, and Crystallized Identities’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Våland, M. S. and Georg, S. (). ‘Spacing Identity: Unfolding Social and Spatial-Material Entanglements of Identity Performance’. Scandinavian Journal of Management, (), –. Vough, H. C., Caza, B. B., and Maitlis, S. (). ‘Making Sense of Myself: Exploring the Relationship between Identity and Sensemaking’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Watson, T. (). ‘Human Identities, Identity Work, and Organizations: Putting the Sociological Imagination into Practice’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Whittle, A. and Mueller, F. (). ‘Membership Categorization Analysis: Studying Identities in Talk and Text “In Situ, In Vivo” ’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Winkler, I. (). ‘Emotions and Identity’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Ybema, S. (). ‘Bridging Self and Sociality: Construction and Social Control’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –. Zundel, M., Mackay, D., MacIntosh, R. and McKenzie, C. (). ‘Between the Bridge and the Door: Exploring Liminal Spaces of Identity Formation Through Video Diaries’. In A. D. Brown (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. –.
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Note: Tables are indicated by an italic ‘t’, respectively, following the page number.
A
Acker, J. Acs, Z.J. Adkins, L. Ahmed, S. –, – Ahonen, P. , – Ahuja, S. , , –, , , , Ailon-Souday, G. –, , , , Ainsworth, S. , , , – Alaimo, S. Albert, S. , , , Alldred, P. Althusser, L. –, , Altman, D. Alvesson, M. , , , , –, –, –, t, , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , Aman, A. , Amatori, F. Anderson, L. , n, , , Antaki, C. Anteby, M. Anthony, C. Antonakis, J. Appiah, K.A. Arena, D.F. Jr Arnaud, G. , – Arthur, M.B. Ashcraft, K.L. , , , , , , –, , , Ashford, S.J. , , , , , , Ashforth, B.E. , , , , , –, , , , , , , t, , , , –, , , , –, n Atewologun, D. , , –, –, , , Auburn, T. Aujoulat, I. Austin, J.L.
B
Bagozzi, R. n Baker, S.J. Baker, T. Bakhtin, M.M. , Baldry, C. – Bamber, M. Banks, M. Barad, K. , –, , –, –, –, Barbulescu, R. –,
Bardon, T. , , , –, , –, , , Barker, J.R. Barnes, A. Barnes, R. Barnet, R.J. Barry, D. Barthes, R. , , –, , , Basque, J. Bauman, Z. , , , , , , – Baumeister, R.F. Baumeler, C. , Beatty, J.E. Bechky, B.A. –, Beck, U. Beech, N. , , , , , –, , , , , , , Bencherki, N. Bendien, E. Benjamin, J. , – Benner, P. Bennett, A. Bentham, J. Bergami, M. n Berger, P.L. , , , , , Berg, P.O. Bergström, O. Berkeley, G. Berlioz, H. Bertilsson, J. Besen, Y. Besharov, M.L. Bévort, F. Beyer, J.M. Biggs, S. – Bion, W.R. – Blau, J.R. – Bligh, M. Block, E.S. , Blom, M. Blustein, D.L. Bob-Waksberg, R. Bochantin, J.E. Boden, D. Böhm, S. Bohn, N. Boje, D.M. Boltanski, L. ,
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Bolton, S.C. – Borg, E. , , Bosson, J. Bosworth, D. Boudreau, M.-C. , Bourdieu, P. , , –, , , , , Boussebaa, M. , , , , , – Bowlby, J. Boyd, C. – Braidotti, R. , , , –, Brannan, M.J. , – Bresnen, M. Brewer, M.B. Brickson, S.L. Bridges, W. , – Brink, T.L. Broad, S. , , –, , Brocklehurst, M. Bronté, C. – Brooks, A. Brown, A.D. –, , –, –, t, , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , – Bubenzer, P. –, – Budtz-Jørgensen, J. Bullock, S. – Burawoy, M. n Burke, K. , Burke, M. Burke, P. Burns, J.M. Burrell, G. –, , Butler, J. , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , Byrne, B. , Byron, K. Byun, H.
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Cahusac, E. Cain, C.L. Calasanti, T. , Callahan, D. Cameron, K. – Capell, B. Cardon, M.S. Carnegie, A. – Carrim, N.M.H. Carroll, B. , , , –, , Carroll, W.R. Carter, C. , –, , Cascon-Pereira, R. , Casey, C. Cass, V.C. Castells, M. ,
Caza, B.B. , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , Cederström, C. , , Challeff, I. Chamberlain, J. Chandler, A.D.J. Charmaz, K. , – Chiapello, E. , Childs, M.D. , – Chiu, C.Y.C. Chreim, S. Cixous, H. Clarke, C. , , , , , , , , –, , Clegg, S.R. , , , –, – Clough, P.T. Cnossen, B. Cochran, L. Cohen, L. – Colbert, S. , Colgan, F. – Collinson, D. , , Coltrane, J. Conrad, J. Conroy, S.A. , , Contu, A. Conway, M. Cooper, D.J. Cooper, R. , , Coopery, J. Cooren, F. Copjec, J. Corlett, S. , , , –, Corley, K.G. Cornelissen, J.P. –, Corrington, A. Costas, J. , , , Côté, J. Coupland, C. , , , , , –, , , Courpasson, D. , –, , Cox, T. Creary, S. , – Creed, W.E.D. –, , , Crenshaw, K. , Croft, C. , Cronin, J. – Crosina, E. Cross, I. Crossley, N. n Csikszentmihalyi, M. Cunliffe, A.L. , , Currie, G. , , , –, Cutcher, L. , , –, Czarniawska, B. , ,
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Dale, K. –, , Dalpiaz, E.
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Darwin, C. Daskalaki, M. , , David, E. Davis, F. – Davis, G. Davis, M. – Davis, N. Day, D.V. , t, Dean, A. Decker, S. De Clercq, D. Deetz, S. Defoe, D. DeJordy, R. , Deleuze, G. , , , , Denker, K.J. Denzin, N.K. De Rond, M. Derrida, J. DeRue, D.S. –, , , , Descartes, R. Deveare Smith, A. Dewhurst, M. – Dicken, P. Dickens, C. –, Diderot, D. DiMaggio, P.J. , , , n Di Stefano, G. Dobusch, L. Doldor, E. , – Douglas, M. Down, S. , Dreyfus, H.L. Driver, M. , Drori, I. Drucker, P. Duberley, J. Duerden Comeau, T. Duffy, F. Du Gay, P. Dukerich, J.M. Dunk, S. – Dutta, S. , Dutton, J.E. , , , –,
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Eagly, A.H. Edensor, T. Edwards, D. Eger, E.K. Eglin, P. , Eisbach, K.D. , Elias, N. Ellingson, L.L. Ellis, B.E. Ellis, N. , , , –, Elmes, M.
Else-Quest, N.M. – Emerson, R.W. , Emirbayer, M. , Empson, L. , Endrissat, N. – Engels, F. , Erikson, E.H. –, , Escher, M.C. Ettinger, B.L. , –, –, – Evans, S.K. Ezzell, M.B.
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Fachin, F. Fairhurst, G.T. , , , , , , , –, , , Fanon, F. –, , Fauchart, E. , , , , – Fauconnier, G. Faulconbridge, J. Faulks, S. Fearon, J.D. Felstead, A. Fenton, C. Fenwick, T. Ferguson, J. Fiol, C.M. , Fitzgerald, R. Fleming, P. , , , , , , , , Fligstein, N. , Flood, M. – Flores, F. Ford, J. , , , , –, Foreman, P. Foster, K. Fotaki, M. , –, , –, Foucault, M. , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Fournier, V. Fox, N.J. Fraher, A.L. Francequin, G. Frandsen, S. , –, Frankenberg, R. Freeman, M.P. Frenkel, M. , Freud, S. , , –, –, –, , , Friedland, R. Fukuyama, F. , –
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Gabriel, Y. , , –, , , , , –, , , Gagnon, S. Garfinkel, H. Garrett, L.E. Gartner, W.B.
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Gatens, M. Gedalof, I. Gee, J.P. Geertz, C. , Gell, A. Gendron, Y. Gentry, M.B. Georg, S. , Giddens, A. , , , –, , , Gieryn, T.F. Gilleard, C. Gill, M.J. , , , –, Gill, R. , Gilmore, S. – Gilroy, P. –, Gioia, D.A. , , , , , Giorgi, A. , –, , Gjerde, S. , , – Glaser, B.G. –, Glynn, M.A. , , Goffman, E. , , , , –, , –, –, –, , , , , Go, J. Gordon, C. Gosling, J. Graff, A. Gramsci, A. Grant, A. Greedharry, M. , , , , – Grey, C. , –, , , –, Griffin, M. , , –, Grimshaw, T. Grint, K. Grossmith, G. Grossmith, W. Grotowski, J. Gruber, M. , , , , –, n Gullette, M.M. Gupta, A.
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Habermas, J. Hacking, I. Hackley, C. Haines, V.Y. Halbwachs, M. Hall, D.T. Hällgren, M. Hallier, J. , , – Hall, S. – Hammond, R. Hannah, D.R. Harding, N. , –, , , Harding, S. , Hardy, C. , , –, , , , Harker, D. Harquail, C.V.
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Ibarra, H. , , , –, –, , –, , , , –, , , , Introna, L. –
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Irigaray, L. , Irni, S. Irwin, J. Iser, W. , Ishiguro, K. – Israelsen, T. , – Iszatt-White, M.
Jackson, B.G. Jacquart, P. Jain, S. , James, E.L. Jameson, F. James, W. , , , Jaques, E. Jayyusi, L. Jefferson, T. Jenkins, R. , Jepperson, R.L. , Jian, G. John, J. – Johnsen, C.G. , , Johnson, P. Johnston, A. Jones, K.P. , – Jones, S.R. , , – Josefsson, I. , , –, Joshi, A. Josserand, E. Jung, C.G.
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Leuty, M.E. Levin, D. Levinson, B. Levinson, D.J. Lewin, K. , Lewis, M. Lewis, S. Lilley, S. Lincoln, Y.S. Linstead, S. Liu, Y. , – Livengood, R.S. – Llewellyn, N. Lloyd, G. Locke, J. Locke, K. Lodge, D. Logan, K. , , , –, Lok, J. , , , –, Long, N. Loveday, V. Lucas, J.H. – Lucas, K. Lucas, M. Luckmann, T. , , , , , , Lukes, S. n Lundholm, S.E. Lupu, I. Lury, C. – Lutgen,Sandvik, P. Lyons, S.
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Nath, V. Navis, C.
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Nelson, N. Newman, K.S. Newton, T. Nikolova, N. , , – Nkomo, S.M. , , Nkrumah, K. Noumair, D.A.
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Quinn, R.W.
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Rothman, J. Roth, P. Rouleau, L. , – Rowan, B. , , , n Rowlinson, M. , , – Roy, A. – Rudman, L. Rumens, N. , , – Ryan, A. Rylander, A.
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Tajfel, H. , Tansley, C. Tarantino, Q. –
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Taylor, S. , , Thanem, T. Thatcher, M. , Thatcher, S.M. Thomas, R. Thornborrow, T. , –, , , Tienari, J. , –, –, , Tietze, S. , – Tomlinson, F. – Town, S. , , –, –, – Tracy, S.J. , , , –, –, –, –, – Tressell, R. , Trethewey, A. , – Trettevik, R. , Tripsas, M. Tulving, E. , Tuori, A. Tureck, R. Turner, J.C. , Turner, M. Turner, R.H. Turner, V. , , , –, Turner, V.W. , Tyler, M. –
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Xu, Q.
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Zander, U. Zanoni, P. Zembylas, M. , , Zhang, Y. , –
Zhu, X. Zingsheim, J. Žižek, S. Zucker, L.G. , , n Zundel, M. , , , –,
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Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic ‘t’ and ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number.
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abject identity , absenteeism academic identity accountability, moral , , – achievement of identity actions , , , , activism actorhood see under institutional theory Actor-Network Theory (ANT) , , adaptation , adaptive/instrumental ethos affect , , –, , , affective economy , , affiliation/belongingness affinity and emulation age identity , , , , –, age colonization of later life by productivism agency , –, , at work – autonomy and class , cohort-based generational identity coming-of-age corporate colonization cultural visibility and invisibility of identity difficulties re-entering paid work and disability discourse and communication discrimination – future beyond work – and gender , , , , – generational identity , –, incumbency-based stereotypes indeterminacy of generation infantilized and sexualized at younger ages intergenerational conflict – intersectionality , –, job loss menopause normative identity fluidity and temporality not yet old occupational and industry ideals old older workers , –, oldest-old ,
old-old over-inclusiveness part-time, low-skill and casual employment perpetual worker physical changes politics of identity , prime age worker proactive work planner and race , reflexivity , retirement –, – self-employment and sexual identity successful ageing , temporality unemployment written off and rendered invisible young-old – agency , , , age identity , –, , agile identities career identity , – creative identities discourse and communication , , , – fabrication , , global supply chains – hybrid professional identities , , institutional theory leadership liminality , , materialities –, – networks , paradox approach –, performed identities philanthropic identity positive identity power –, – real, fake and crystallized identities , , scope and limits of identity agential cuts agential realism agile identities , , –, aesthetic labour n agency/structure autonomy biocracy – biopower ,
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agile identities (cont.) capitalism –, change and complexity choice , , , critique – demand and experience discursive relations disempowerment diversity domination embodied agility – emotional labour , empowerment , , freedom , goal-seeking inventiveness language and discursive practices liberation management , , manoeuvrability master signifier negative aspects – neoliberalism –, , , neo-managerialism oppression passive adaptation performance appraisal – postmodernism , power relations , precarity pro-activity purposivity re-activity resistance selection – self-determination stress subjugation technology virtuosity alienation , , , , , , see also self-alienation altering identities alternative identities , ambiguity , , , , , , ambivalence –, anger , , antagonisms , anti-identities anxiety , , , , , , , , –, globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) liminality , , appearance approaches to identity studies – ARIA framework (Antagonism, Resonance, Invention and Action) arrested identity
artefacts and assemblages , –, aspirational identities , –, , , , – at-home identity attachment , – attire/dress – attributes authenticity , , , , , agile identity digital nomads and liquid modernity future research identification liminality: play and creativity – paradoxes and positive identity stigmatized identities – authoritarianism –, , , autobiographical memory: temporal fluidity , – acting in character (honouring the past) analepses (flashbacks) , autonoesis (remembering together) autonoetic consciousness , , –, – coherent sense of self , –, collective identity , , – collective memory –, , –, , competing narratives co-production of individual and organizational memories – corporate history – corporate memory cultural memory , deliberate neglect and/or forgetting of memories episodic memory equivocality fluidity of memory – historical category of time implicit theory approach individual identity , – individual memory – internal narrative of the self , life narrative – linguistic performance material memory memorializing mythic category of time narrative category of time nostalgia organizational autobiographical memory , – past experiences constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed practices of memory processual turn prolepses (flash-forwards) , reflexive memory revisioning rhetorical history – sacralizing self-narratives of identity – sensemaking ,
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sense of self –, sites of memory social memory strategic storytelling temporality –, , – autobiographical narratives autonomy age identity , , creative identities , –, , , , ,
B
back region , –, Bannon, S. behaviours , , , , beliefs , , , belonging , Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , , blurred identities boosting behaviours boundaryless career , , , , , , , boundary spanning , , , , , – Bourdieu: class, history and field structure , – aspirational identities and the British Parachute Regiment (Paras) – capital , – cultural capital –, , , , , doxa , , , n economic capital , , , elite MBAs and portable selves – field: rules of the game –, , , , , , , habitus: feel for the game –, , , n habitus, individual habitus, primary , , , habitus, secondary , , hysteresis , , , illusio , , insecurity thesis macro level of economy and society , , – meso level of the field , , , – micro level of individual , , , , power and prestige provisional selves – reflexivity –, sexual heterodoxy and the Church – social capital , , , , , , n symbolic capital , branded identity , , see also image and brand Brexit –, , , , , , bricolage , ‘bridge and door’ metaphor –, –, –, , bridging self and sociality: identity construction and social context , , – agency and structure , , (co)production: individual as producer and product
duality of social realities – dynamics of social reality construction – identity-as-politics: strategic agency and power structures – performance: symbolism of words, acts and artefacts – positioning: similarities and differences – process: long shots and close-ups see also social circuits of identity construction Broad, Edith Broad, Ely bullying , , burnout business-to-business (BB) marketing concepts , –
C
camaraderie/communitas capital , – capitalism –, career identity , –, achievement adaptability assembling boundaryless career , change , –, , , competence development contemporary career developments and identity implications – continuity , –, , , critical potential of taking career perspective – cultural narratives employability flexibility – history ideal involuntary exits mobility narratives , , performing personal growth precarious career paths protean career , socially constructed through narrative – stability – transitions , caste structure (hospitals) – categorization , , t, , , , , see also membership categorization analysis (MCA); self-categorization challengers , challenging environments change , career identity , –, , , digital nomads and liquid modernity liminality: play and creativity in narrative career identity –
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change (cont.) sensemaking strategy change management - unfreeze, change, refreeze charismatic, inspirational visionaries , – class , affiliation and age identity , agile identity conflict discourse and communication distinctions , and gender identity , , historical methods for research identity work: sociological imagination , intersectional perspective , , , , national identity and multinational corporations nostalgic identity , politics of identity and race identity , , sexual identity , working class – clinical orientation – coercion , cohabitation , coherence , , , , , autobiographical memory , , –, digital nomads and liquid modernity , – collaborative identity collective action collective endorsement collective identities , n autobiographical memory , , – class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) fabrication identification institutional theory , , networks and identity , noise and pre-interpretation nostalgic identity , paradox approach to identity race and identity sensemaking stigmatization strategy , , – collective memberships collective purpose colonialism and neo-colonialism , , –, , , –, , commercial identity commitment n affective , communication , – communication-based interpretive repertoire communicative and discursive construction of organizing (CCO) ,
communitarian founders t, , f, , , compartmentalization of identities , , compassion , compensation competence lock-ins competing identities , , conduct conflict , , , , – based on differences cooperation – emotions , future research n globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) hybrid professional identity identification – intractable –, , liminality: play and creativity moral paradoxes and positive identity resource-based strategy conformist identity , confusion , , , connected selves , consent consistency , see also self-consistency constitution of identities construction n, , , , , , , autobiographical memory collaborative leadership emotions –, liminal spaces of identity formation –, noise and pre-interpretation , , sensemaking see also self-constructions; sensemaking construction sites – constructivist approach , , see also social constructionist perspective consultants consumer culture contemporary career developments and identity implications – content , , , context-specific identity , , continuity , career identity , –, , , and institutional change in narrative career identity – strategy see also self-continuity contract work contradictory identity , , , , , control , , , , , , , Conversation Analysis (CA) ,
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conviviality cooperative identity , coping strategies corporate history – corporate identity , cosmopolitanism , –, – counter-identity –, courage-based identity work co-working spaces , creative identities , , –, , agency artistic fulfilment aspired-to identities , –, autonomy , –, , , , , biopolitical governance of labour collaborative leadership complications – creative selves at work – cultural industries eliteness emancipation emotional elements enterprise , feelings, values and behaviour hierarchies ideal and complete self independence individuality , inside the creative organization - structured work – liminality –, , love and passion for one’s work , –, , – negative experiences , , new geography of work organizational control performed identities , positive experiences power relations precarious employment and short-term contracts , , projects – rarity sacrifice and struggle self-actualisation , self-completion self-confidence self-creation self-discipline self-employment self-esteem self-exploitation – self-expression self-identity self-investment self-positioning self-realization , , sense of self
signature style socio-cultural dimensions socio-political context , soft capitalism struggle, experiences of – subjectivities , – symbol-making valorisation process value production – Warhol economy , well-being , worker alignment worker commitment creativity see liminality: play and creativity credibility critical approach , –, t, , , , , , critical leadership studies –, – critical management studies critical orientation , critical potential of taking career perspective – critical realist perspective criticism of identity – cross-cultural interactions with ‘the Other’ , , cross-cultural leadership cross-cutting identities , – cross-sector collaboration crystallized identities see real, fake and crystallized identities culture/cultural background capital –, , , , , , change , conditioning contexts differences , , , , , identity , , image and brand industries , intersectional perspective narratives norms politics of identity positioning race/ethnicity , stereotypes –, t turn values current identity cyberethnography and netnography cynicism ,
D
dangerous identity Darwinian founders t, , f, , , death resulting from overwork (Karōshi) , , defamiliarization
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defending identities depersonalization desired identity , , , , , , , difference , , , see also outsider status and difference difficult situations digital nomads and liquid modernity , –, Bauman on liquid modernity – blurring of work and leisure coherence strategies – ethical, political, identity, and organizational consequences of liquidity fragmentation strategies – networked homeworkers nomadic model of identity precarious, open-ended contracts tension strategies – virtual spaces, temporary projects and self-managed practices – digitized careers dilemmas , ‘dirty work’ , , , , , , , disability and age identity discrimination and gender identity intellectual intersectionality politics of identity and race identity , and sexual identity , , see also stigmatized identities/stigmatization discomfort disconnection to the self discourse , , , , , , , – see also discourse and communication discourse and communication , – communication –, t critical and poststructural theory –, t, discourse –, t discourse and communication distinction discourse/Discourse (d/D distinctions) –, – grand Discourse approach linguistic turn macro-discourses , mega-Discourse approach meso-discourse approach (later called text-focused studies) micro-discourse approach , multi-level discourse analysis narrative theory , –, t, relationality t, – self-narratives Social Identity Theory (SIT) –, t, discrimination , , – age – disability
gender , sexual identity , , , , see also race/ethnicity discursive approach , , n, –, , , , , , dis-identification , , , age identity emotions , image and brand , – Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) , mutual – nostalgic identity out-group sense of self strategy dis-integration displayed identity disruptive identity , , , , dissension distinctiveness , , , , distress divergent identity – diversity , –, , –, , , divided identities domains-interaction model , domination , –, , , , , doubt , dramaturgical identity , , , , drive theory , dual identities , , duality of social realities – dynamic identity , – dynamic process model dynamics of social reality construction – dynamism , –
E
economic capital , , , economized identity elite identity , elite MBAs and portable selves –, , , – emergent identity work emerging themes – action, embodiment and affect authentic, fake and real selves – changing times – intersectionality – metaphors, new and reworked – reflexivity social identity – temporality and spatiality – uncertainty, increasing – emotions and identity , , –, , – anger angst anxiety , , attachment and detachment
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cognitive, emotional and behavioural elements of identification – connecting individual to social collectives control control systems coping strategies depletion detachment/distancing , , emotions as discursive resources in processes of identification – empathy and care engagement –, , euphoria excitement , exhaustion feeling, meaning and performance of emotions future research – guilt humour – identity negotiation strategies identity verification/non-verification – identity work: sociological imagination insecurity , instrumental compliance joy labour, emotional , –, – liminality management strategies – negative emotions –, neutrality norms organizational members’ responses to social influences – pleasure positive emotions –, potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) profiles real and fake emotions rhetoric role of emotion – Role Identity Theory , , selective perception Self Categorization Theory (SCT) , sense of self shame Social Identity Theory (SIT) , strains surface acting vulnerability well-being worry employment relations empowerment , , , , endings-neutral-zone-beginnings model enhanced identity see also self-enhancement enrichment
entrepreneurship , , , , , , –, , artist entrepreneurs behavioural variation causal behaviour challenges and tensions communitarian founders t, , f, , , compartmentalization, integration and metaidentity current role identity Darwinian founders t, , f, , , developer role identity , f development of entrepreneurial identity effectual behaviour failure female entrepreneurs , , for-profit ventures founder role identity , , f friends and parents future research – identity capital assets identity content f identity formation –, f identity management –, f identity refinement, rehearsal and reflection identity verification episodes identity work – impersonal others (society-at-large) t inventor role identity , f mentors missionary founders t, , f, , , necessity entrepreneurs part-time founders personal others (community) t philanthropic identity – potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) prior identities – Role Identity Theory (RIT) , –, self t significant others Social Identity Theory (SIT) , –, social ventures strategic responses to adversity strategic use of identity – stressful events success transition process – voluntary (opportunity) entrepreneurs work peers envy ephemeral identity epistemological stance –, , , , , equality social establishing identities ethical issues , , gender identity , , , – image and brand
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ethical issues (cont.) networks philanthropic identity politics of identity real, fake and crystallized identities ethics of difference ethnicity see race/ethnicity ethnographic methodology , , , , , evolving identity , excitement existing identity exits , expectation experiential learning , experimentation expert independent professional identities exploitation , –, ex-prisoners external aspects of human identity externalization
F fake identities see real, fake and crystallized identities fantasy , –, feared selves , feeling identity see under sense(s) of self feelings , , , feminism , , fictional self-narratives , film projects/movie sets , –, fixed identity , flexibilization of labour , , fluid identity , , focus groups , follower identity/followership –, –, , , –, – foreclosure , formation of identity , , career identity cycles of grounded theory and phenomenology liminal spaces of identity formation –, managers: fictional portrayals strategy , see also liminal spaces of identity formation founder role identity , , f fragile identity fragmented identity , , , , age identity , career identity , collaborative leadership digital nomads and liquid modernity , – future research paradox approach to identity , , strategy – front region , –, , frustration
functionalist orientation future identity aspired-to desired and feared , ideal liminal spaces of identity formation , , –, sensemaking future research –, – attachment and conflict – moving from identity as ‘star’ to identity as ‘ensemble member’ – moving from parts to wholes –, viewing identity as fuller (less empty) –,
G
game changers (philanthropy) , f, , , , gender issues/gender identity , , –, , , –, abject identity , and age identity , , – agile identity – constructivist approach corporeal gender dynamics cultural assumptions deconstructing and refusing – discourse and communication , discrimination/sexism , empowerment equality feminist theories and feminists –, generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) , , t heteronormativity historical methods for research hostility hybrid professional identity ideology illiberal populism image and brand inequality , intersectional perspective , , , , , , , , Lacan – leadership LGBT liminality , mainstreaming managers: fictional portrayals materialities matrixial transsubjectivity , , minoritarian subjectivities national identity and multinational corporations nomadic subjectivity , – nostalgic identity
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pay gap performed identities , , politics politics of identity , post-colonial feminism , poststructuralist theory , potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) power differences , practical implications – psychoanalytic feminist ideas , , race and identity , , , , , – reflexivity , relationality –, – restrictive gender identity sexual harassment , – sexual identity social phenomena and organizational work – sociological imagination , subjectivity , , transnational perspectives , , , , transsubjectivity General Theory of Strategic Action Fields generational identity generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) , – comparative analysis: identity work and space and place , – comparative analysis: identity work and struggles – conceptual position t methods position t readerly texts , readerly and writerly distinction –, –t thematic position t theoretical position t generative selves generativity , scripts – ‘gig economy’ , –, , –, , , , , glass slipper model see under sense(s) of self globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) , , , , , –, ambivalence – assimilation autonomy business schools, universities and international students contestation control co-opted indigenous managers country-of-origin effects cultural values decentralization de-globalization n developing world – emerging markets n exploitation
home-country institutions host-country contexts international division of labour international organizations , , loyalty and commitment mimicry national identity , nation-based hierarchies (neo)colonial power relations –, offshore outsourcing , , , n oppression ‘Other’ – post-colonial era racial subordination regulation of identities across national borders – resistance shared norms and values socialization and Westernization of employees stereotyping subjective interpretations n tension and anxiety transnational governance West-centrism – Westernization Western managerial elites – ‘golden couples’ (philanthropy) –, graffiti metaphor grieving of identity grounded theory and phenomenology as methodological approaches to identity work , , – comparison of methodologies t, delimiting the theory epistemological assumptions , focus groups future research grounded theory –, analytical process constant comparative method –, – constructivist theory t, , –, epistemologically subjectivist assumptions evolved theory formal theory grand theory – interpretive theory objectivist theory ontologically relativist assumptions , , substantive theory theoretical sampling –, theoretical saturation –, traditional theory t, –, , integrating categories and their properties key analytical steps – lived experiences mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative studies)
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grounded theory and phenomenology as methodological approaches to identity work (cont.) phenomenology –, Dasein descriptive phenomenology t, , –, – epistemology hermeneutics imaginative variation inductive analysis , interpretive phenomenology t, –, –, – interrogative phenomenology iterative analytical processes meaning units sampling , scientific practices semi-structured interviews single-case studies research – writing the theory group identity , classifications cohesion emotions group-level relations in-group support membership nostalgic identity performed identities scope and limits of identity see also collective identity guilt
H
harassment hate hate crime – healthcare sector (doctors and nurses) , , –, –, , – hembigs (hegemonic, ambiguous and big) , –, , – methodological antidotes – theoretical scrutiny – heroic identity hierarchy , , – higher self (sociality) him-too campaign historical methods for research , – clerical workers –, conceptual or analytically structured history corporate history , , cultural aspects diaries dual integrity ethnographic history , – historic turn in organization studies – imagined community invented tradition
life history method – narrative or literary sources , , novels oral history interviews organization studies – remnants replication logic rites and rituals serial history – silence of the archives , – structural aspects verification logic historicization – holding environments , , , – holistic integration honour hope humour –, t, hybrid professional identities , , , , –, agency , , coercive institutional pressure cognitive comparisons commercial identity controlled professionalism critical management perspective definition – digital nomads and liquid modernity educational programmes expert independent professional identities future research pathways – globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) healthcare sector (doctors and nurses) , , –, –, , – hybrid role modelling identity-based leader development identity salience – institutional challenge of enactment – job profile – liminality – macro-level impacting micro-level professional identity managerial identity , , , micro-level identities organizing professionalism politics of identity professional/commercial hybrids – professional credibility and collegiality professional leadership professional logic professional/managerial hybrids – professional networks progressive or regressive professionalism –, sensemaking traditional identity transitional support – variation in enactment of –
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hyphenated identity hypocritical identity ,
I
ideal identity/idealized identity , –, , , , , identification , , , –, – alternative work arrangements – artefacts and practices –, n by others conditional identification deep structure identification dynamism external foci –, networks –, projects/gigs , roles –, third places –, future research , holding environments – image and brand , in-group institutional theory internal foci , –, personal branding , protean self , location of personal identification , pluralistic employment environments: challenge of authenticity –, , , , , politics of identity positive identification process, internal projective identification –, –, proximal targets – reconciled , , , schizo-identification , , selective identification sensemaking , short-term tenure or self-employment , , , , temporary/project-based environments: challenge of stability –, , , , , virtual environments: challenge of salience –, , , , see also dis-identification identity-as-(co)production: individual as producer and product identity-as-equilibrium identity-as-performance: symbolism of words, acts and artefacts – identity-as-politics: strategic agency and power structures – identity-as-positioning: similarities and differences – identity-as-process: long shots and close-ups identity-based (inward-facing) challenges , –
Identity Theory (IT) , t, , identity work t, autobiographical memory objectives outward facing , – paradoxes and positive identities t, see also grounded theory and phenomenology as methodological approaches to identity work; identity work - sociological imagination; identity work and use of metaphor identity work - sociological imagination , – agile identities class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) discourse and communication doing and researching – emergent-relational view epistemological stance – ethnographic and participant-observation research external aspects of human identity internal aspects of human identity nature of organizations and human beings – noise and pre-interpretation: phenomenological perspective –, ontology personas –, f, –, Philosophical (or American) Pragmatism – rationalism scope and limits of identity self-identity –, f, –, sensemaking , , , –, social identities –, f, –, cultural-stereotype , embracing and resisting – formal-role gender historical, literary and media local-organizational – local-personal official social-category – societal and cultural contexts sociological perspective truth claims Identity Work Theory (IWT) , t, , , n identity work and use of metaphor , – ambiguity cognitive integration complexity concepts and metaphors – conceptual blending –, conceptual imposition , correspondence-based identity metaphors – counter-metaphor dead metaphors , , deductive approach – denotative role
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identity work and use of metaphor (cont.) deployment development and elaboration of the blend – disseminating knowledge domains-interaction approach dormant metaphors , –, drawing pictures educational devices emergent meaning – empirical imposition figurative dichotomization generative devices generic structure identification of metaphors and metaphorization of identification – imposing and exposing identity metaphors – indeterminacy inductive approach – knowledge constraining devices literal and figurative language – literal and metaphorical identity terms categorization –t literal and metaphorical terms, prevalence of in identity discourse –t literal target domain live metaphors , metaphor consumer metaphorical source domain metaphor producer obvious and less obvious metaphors – poetic embellishment quantity source domain target domain toy construction models identity writing ideology , , , , image and brand , –, activation points brand ambassadors or brand citizens brand-centred control – brand equity – brand meanings brands and branding – contemporary empirical studies – corporate branding , employee branding future directions identity – identity-incentive branding image – internal branding internal marketing marketization of self on-brand behaviour organizational image personal brands
self-categorizations self-narrative slogans imaginary character of identity work imperialism –, – imposters , impression management , impulse inclusion , incumbents , independent workers –, individual identity , –, autobiographical memory , – class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) , creative identities , digital nomads and liquid modernity – fabrication image and brand intersectional perspective , , , , leadership – liminality: play and creativity networks , noise and pre-interpretation paradox approach to identity , performed identities real, fake and crystallized identities sensemaking stigmatization , strategy inertia inner conversations –, innovations , , , insecurity , , , , thesis insider status , , –, instability institutional dynamics –, institutional environments institutionalization institutionalized termination institutional theory , – actorhood – actor as institutional bricoleur , , , t, actor as mythicized, rationalized subject –, , t, actor as strategic political activist , , , t, , n actor as structurally constrained responder –, , , t, , n actor as value rational, affected practitioner –, , t, ‘cultural dope’ conceptualization agency/structure dualism , – causal ambiguity of identity – class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) –
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conceptual complexity and lack of definitional clarity cultural conditioning cumulative theoretical progress myth – contingency fallacy – structure/agency fallacy – different identity-constructs emotions, role of – external pressures n fragmentation – habit and imitation Identity Work Theory (IWT) , t, , , n ‘I’ in institutional theory – incompatible source theories increased theoretical integration, implications for promise of – institutional complexity institutional entrepreneurship – institutional legitimacy isomorphism new or neo-institutional theory , , n personhood political power practice theory rationalization and normalization of selfhood rationalization of society resource accumulation – role conflict role expectations , n Role Identity Theory (RIT) , t, , n role structure and role expectations Social Identity Theory (SIT) , t, , n social movement theory structural institutional processes substitutions or displacements of alternative institutional theories tensions theoretical complexity and conceptual confusion – value claims value rational identification with substance work and building blocks metaphors intangible concepts integrative solutions , , , n interactions of identities , , social interdependence , intermediaries Internal-Combustion Monster (fictional tale of noise) –, internalization , , , , n international partnerships inter-organizational relationships (IORs) –, –, , , – interpellation theory interpersonal relationships , , ,
interpretivist orientation , , intersectional perspective , –, , – being and becoming yourself at work – evolving content of identity targets f, – evolving context of identity targets f, – stable content of identity targets f, – stable context of identity targets f, – content f, – context f, –, – definition of intersectionality – follower identity –, , , , – future research gender issues/gender identity , , , , , , , , identities and identification in organizations – individual-level identity , , , , leader identity –, , –, – manager identity , –, –, , politics of identity reflexivity – strong intersectionality team identity –, , –, – weak intersectionality intersubjectivity , , –, , intolerance – intra-actions , , –, – intuition inventor role identity , f inward facing identity work , –
J
job loss , job mobility , job performance job profile – journey metaphor joy ‘jujitsu’ (identity) , , , ,
K
kinship knotting dynamics – see also paradox approach to identity, Trump administration and identity knotting knowledge discourse and communication economy potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) , see also self-knowledge
L
labelling , Lacan: potentialities and impossibilities , – affect –, , discourses of work and organization – gender – impossibilities and future directions –
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Lacan: potentialities and impossibilities (cont.) language, power of macro level studies , , , , methods – micro-level studies , , , – organizational identification , – poststructuralism psychodynamic approach , Real , – signification – subjectification , subjection –, subjectivity –, symbolic order , , – language , , –, , –, linguistic performance linguistic turn leadership , , –, , –, – analysis – charismatic, inspirational visionaries , – class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) , community justice centre (CJC) as site of perpetual liminality – innovating and incubating –, learning and resilience – reading the movements of identity work – risk-taking and rule-breaking –, competency and behavioural frameworks – critical leadership studies –, – cross-cultural discourse and communication domination –, emotions ethnographic and/or in-depth interview approaches feminist psychosocial theorizing , followership , , , –, , – hierarchy and discriminatory practices – identity construction theory implicit theory of leadership identity impression management inequality interdependencies interpersonal relationships intersectionality –, , –, – intersubjectivity , –, leadership development – leadership studio (Scottish Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) –, lessons log – liminality , –, macho, distant and uncaring leader – magnetic and inspirational leader managers: fictional portrayals – membership categorization analysis (MCA) –, , mobility turn
Object Relations Theory – omnipotent and individual leader performed identities , permissible leadership identities perpetual liminality plurality, ambiguity, complexity and heterogeneity post-liminal phase , power relations , , pre-liminal phase , process ontology processual theory professional leadership psychosocial theories – radical-follower-centred approach recognition paradox –, reflexive approaches , relational leadership , – role self-monitoring self-regulation sensemaking stigmatization structure/agency subordination , , travelling concepts , , values-based and shared model leavers – legitimacy –, , – Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust lifestyles choices life themes/life narratives , –, , , – liminality , competence – hybrid professional identities – identification perpetual , , strategy – see also under leadership; liminal spaces of identity formation; liminality - play and creativity liminality - play and creativity , –, – adaptive instability ambiguity, solitude and alienation anticipation, confusion and fear artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics away days business consultancy dinners career identity change and adaptation chaos, loss or doubt confusion co-working spaces creative potential –, , cultural change , delayed commitment , –
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divergent exploration –, endings-neutral-zone-beginnings model experiential learning , exploration and commitment –, growth , –, , holding environment hybrid professional identities – ideational flexibility/fluency identity redefinition individual and collective identity play – innovation , , learning liminal experience – liminar neutral zone – off-sites and strategy retreats organizational innovation play psychic pain, discomfort, anxiety, conflicts and self-esteem reincorporation (post-liminal) role confusion separation rites special camaraderie/communitas time, space and relationships transition , , –, – uncertainty unfreeze-change-refreeze theory liminal spaces of identity formation , – anxiety, danger and darkness , ‘bridge and door’ –, –, –, formation/construction –, meanings, symbols and rituals new thresholds – past, present and future identities , , –, pathways relational dynamics rites of passage , , , – separation shifting identity Simmel: life as transcendence transition , –, –, – transmission station – video diaries , – liquid identity , local heroes (philanthropy) –, f, , ,
M
macho, distant and uncaring leader – magnetic and inspirational leader maintained identity , , , , , managerial identity/managerialism , , , , age identity class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) , –, digital nomads and liquid modernity
hybrid professional identities , identity work: sociological imagination image and brand management strategies real, fake and crystallized identities self-management , sexual identity – virtual managers see also leadership; managers: fictional portrayals managers: fictional portrayals , – academic and common-sense ideas – caricature cultural portrayals , –, negative portrayals –, positive portrayals – tragic or nihilistic portrayals – fictional portrayals – historical dimension – hyperbole leadership, rise of – negative portrayals –, , positive portrayals –, scientific accounts sexual assault and harassment and #MeToo movement sexual identity and authority , – subjectivity theoretical background – mangle of practice , marginalization , , , materialities , – agency –, – artefacts and assemblages – attire/dress – boundary-making practices , generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) inter-action interpretivist approach intra-actions , , –, – Marxist materialism , – material-identities perspective – matter new materialist theories – ontology phenomena, cultural and natural –, – poststructuralist approach –, power – real, fake and crystallized identities –, reductive materiality steps towards material-identities theory – meaning(s) of identity , membership categorization analysis (MCA) , – ascribed, avowed and displayed membership blame, guilt or responsibility category entitlement category predicates ,
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membership categorization analysis (MCA) (cont.) Conversation Analysis (CA) , culture-in-action discursive practice , ethnomethodological approach , , fact production in flight identity categories in talk and texts inference rich categories leadership –, , membership categorization device (MCD) , moral accountability , , – New York Times Op-Ed piece on Trump Administration – author identity , – Trump’s identity – normative expectations organizations – origins – phenomenological approach practical actions reasoning and inference routine ordinary common-sense knowledge social identities , , , Trump, D. –, mental health issues, stress, depression and anxiety , , , , , , , , meritocracy , –, metaphors , , , –, t, – see also identity work and use of metaphor methods for identity studies – MeToo Movement , , micro-level identities minimal group paradigm , , n minimalism of identity missionary founders t, , f, , , moral accountability , , – moral codes moral or ethical imperative moral judgements moral reasoning motivation , , motive , –, , multiple identities , , – autobiographical memory career identity conflict cooperation conflicting digital nomads and liquid modernity entrepreneurship fabrication future research n gender identity – identification identity work: sociological imagination intersectional perspective , , –, – liminality , , networks and identity ,
politics of identity race and identity real, fake and crystallized identities sensemaking , – targets , see also plurality multiple positionality , –, –, , , – multi-stage identity work mutable identity mutational identity –
N
narcissism narrative approach , , , , , see also self-narratives narrative-as-identity t, t, narrative-based identity , t, t, , narrative convergence or divergence narrative inquiry narrative methodology , narrative structures narrative theory , , –, t, , nascent identity , national identity , –, –, , , , , , see also national identity and multinational corporations (MNCs) national identity and multinational corporations (MNCs) , – antenarratives and national symbols , t colonialism and neo-colonialism –, , constructions at different levels – cosmopolitanism , – cross-cultural interactions with ‘the Other’ , , cultures and cultural differences , , , –, t, discursive resources distancing dynamic perspective elitism globalization , historical relations between nations humour –, t ideologies and worldviews , t, inequality and exploitation interactional perspective international relations language choice – looking forward – macro-level (transnational): ideologies and world views as overarching structures –, , , t, – media (mass media and social media) –, , – meso-level (organizational): specific organizational purposes , –, , t metaphors –, t
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micro-level (individual): daily interactions , –, t, narratives and corporate language , nationhood new understandings oppression political factors power relations , , –, – reactive talk (re)construction of national identity , – relational perspective self-reflexive talk stereotypical talk storytelling , t, superiority and inferiority universalistic norms nationality , , , , , , , , , see also national identity and multinational corporations (MNCs) negative identity , , , negotiation , , neighbourhood work centres neo-colonialism , –, neo-fascism neoliberalism , , –, –, , , , neo-managerialism nested identity , , – networks and identity , , , –, , , agency in global supply chains – analysing identities – business-to-business (BB) marketing concepts , – extant work – homeworkers inter-organizational collaborations – liminality and boundary-spanning , –, , , –, research agenda – supply chains and industrial networks neutral identification , new identity , , new or neo-institutional theory , , n new organizations New York Times Op-Ed piece on Trump Administration – nexus concept noise and pre-interpretation: phenomenological perspective , – acting self (holistic I) –, Brexit (confessional tale of noise) –, construction of identity , , following noise in the field identity work –, Internal-Combustion Monster (fictional tale of noise) –, repair , f, –, self , –
self-identity , , , sensemaking , , sense of self , – silence , , , situational me –, studying identity through noise – theorizing noise threats , , f, understanding what noise stands for normative identity , nostalgic identity , –, – aggressive nostalgia –, , collective identities , , and conspiracy theories cultural and social contexts and cynicism defensive nostalgia generational identity individual nostalgia – mourning neophilia nostalgia as an emotion – nostophobia , , organizational nostalgia and group identity – postalgia , selective forgetting selective or strategic deployment of nostalgia sentimental nostalgia , social nostalgia and social identity – solidarity and belonging , , total forgetting
O
objectively assigned identity Object Relations Theory – obligations occupational identity , , , , , –, see also career identity; work-related identity offshore outsourcing , , , n off-sites and strategy retreats omnipotent and individual leader online identity construction and maintenance –, ontological approach , , , , , oppositional identities oppression , , , , , , orienters otherhood othering , , otherness –, –, , ‘Other(s)’ future research gender identity , , , , globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) national identity and multinational corporations networks and identity , , , , ,
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‘Other(s)’ (cont.) performed identities politics of identity reflexivity – serviceable ought identity out-groups , outsider status and difference –, –, , over-identification , ,
P paradox approach to identity, Trump administration and identity knotting , – affect paradox , – affiliation paradox –, , , – agency – automaticity paradox –, – conformity paradox , , elasticity paradox , , entity paradox , , identity knotting , , –, f, , , – implications for identity work – language, communication and discourse – poststructuralism, identity work and knotting – real-self/fake-self: authenticity paradox –, , , – relational dialectics site paradox , , , – strategic ambiguity – temporality paradox , , paradoxes and positive identities , – adaptation-staying process conformity paradox criticisms of over-accentuating the positive – entropy , – experimenting with possible selves t, , future research – heliotropism – identity theory (role-identity) t, individual or personal identity internal-external identity gap paradox: developmental (adaptive) perspective: identity theory frame t, , – internal identity gap paradox: developmental (progressive) perspective: narrative frame –t, , , , knotting dynamics – learning-exiting process leveraging (in)congruence t, , – narrative-as-identity (crafting narratives of identity growth) t, t, optimal balance, searching for t, , paradoxical tensions – positive identity balance paradox: structural (balanced) perspective: Social Identity Theory (SIT) frame t, , ,
positive identity coherence paradox: virtue and structural (complementary) perspectives: narrative frame t, , positive identity theoretical frame t, t, t positive identity threat/growth paradox: evaluative perspective: identity work frame t, , , positive identity work tactics t, t, t, positive organizational scholarship (POS) , positive presentation of self positive psychology positivity-negativity paradox: aspirational outcomes, tensions and tactics –, –t social identity theory (group identification) t, spiritual identity and holistic integration at work t, , suppressed or privileged elements of paradox tactics become paradoxical t temporality paradox tensional/paradoxical view , –, transforming identity threats t, , unity of opposites (anti-identities) work-related identity perspective(s) t, t, t paradoxical identity , , , , , see also paradox approach to identity, Trump administration and identity knotting; paradoxes and positive identities participant-observation research partitioning part-time, low-skill and casual employment , past experiences past identity , , , , –, , – past and present practices interpretive repertoire path dependence , , patriarchy performative perspective , , performative qualities performativity of language performed identities , – back region , – connections to audiences (dis)connecting: precarity of performed identities – distancing dramaturgical approach , , – front region , – leadership , performer-as-magnetized-ring performer-as-skilled deceiver performers – performing a biography – perpetually deferred identity , – perpetual worker personal identity autobiographical memory future research gender identity
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grounded theory and phenomenology identification – identity work: sociological imagination image and brand institutional theory intersectional perspective networks and identity , paradoxes and positive identities performed identities prosocial real, fake and crystallized identities – sensemaking , , stigmatization strategy personas –, f, –, phenomenological approach see also grounded theory and phenomenology as methodological approaches to identity work; noise and pre-interpretation: phenomenological perspective philanthropic identity , , –, , conceptualization – contributory and disruptive philanthropy cultural capital empowerment gap entrepreneurship – ethics formative dispositions f, game changers , f, , , , generativity scripts – ‘golden couples’ –, institutional philanthropy , t, , f, , journey metaphor legitimacy and elite power – liquidity event local heroes –, f, , , modelling philanthropic identity formation –, f modes of engagement orientation philanthropic engagement f philanthropic journey – philanthropic means philanthropic practices f, pillars of society –, f, , , positive feedback loops , satisfactions and rewards of engagement scale , social capital social crusaders , f, , , symbolic capital tax relief , transformational philanthropy , t, –, f, , virtue Philosophical (or American) Pragmatism –
physical activities physical discipline pillars of society (philanthropy) –, f, , , place identity , , , –, , plastic identity play , , active individual and collective – serious see also liminality: play and creativity plurality , –, see also multiple identities politics of identity , , , , , –, affinity authoritarianism background behaviour coercion, control and domination , collaborative leadership death resulting from overwork (Karōshi) , discrimination, prejudice and intolerance – gender discrimination him-too campaign hybrid professional identity identity defined – identity work , – intersectional perspective macro-political forces mental health issues, stress, depression and anxiety , meritocracy –, nationality, ethnicity, race and religion , , , negative effects neoliberalism – oppression , organization of hatred – populism power relations , , , precariat or or ‘gig’ economy , processes , qualities racial discrimination , resistance sexism and sexual predatory behaviour and me-too campaign social constructionism – strategy symbolic interactionism – totalitarianism well-being initiatives work-induced suicide (Karojisatsu) workplace absences zero hour and self-employed contracts , populism portable selves , , –,
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portfolio careers – positioning , , positive identity , –, , autobiographical memory digital nomads and liquid modernity , identity work and use of metaphor liminality philanthropic identity power scope and limits of identity sensemaking see also paradoxes and positive identities positivism , , , possible future identity , , post-bureaucratic managerial ideology –, – post-colonialism , , , , –, posthuman identity postmodernism , poststructuralist approach , discourse and communication –, t, , gender identity , Lacan materialities –, paradox approach to identity politics of identity , power , –, sense of self , – power relations , –, , –, agile identities , biopower Bourdieu: class, history and field structure career identity collaborative leadership control corporeality – creative identities critical perspective discourse and communication , double individualization elites (managers)/ shopfloor employees , – functionalist perspective future research – gender identity , generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) , globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) –, identity politics , , , institutional theory interpretive perspective intersectional perspective , , , , , , , , , language and materiality –, – leadership , , liminality materialities Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)
national identity and multinational corporations (MNCs) , , –, – neo-colonial power –, networks and identity , , objects/artefacts paradox approach to identity philanthropic identity – politics of identity , , , post-bureaucratic managerial ideology –, – poststructuralist approach , –, potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) , , race/ethnicity , , real, fake and crystallized identities –, , , reflexive researcher identity work , , , resistance , , sense of self structure/agency –, – see also empowerment precarious employment and short-term contracts , , , , , , , , – pre-interpretation see noise and pre-interpretation: phenomenological perspective prejudice – present identity , , –, prestige , , , , prior identity see past identity privileged identity , , , processual approach –, t, , , , , conflict cooperation future research generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) intersectional perspective leadership liminality strategy , professional identity , , , gender identity image and brand institutional theory networks paradox approach to identity sensemaking , – see also hybrid professional identities promotion , – protean career , , , , , , protected identity , provisional identity , , , , , –, , psychoanalytical approach feminist , , psychodynamic approach , , , , see also psychodynamic perspective on identity as fabrication
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psychodynamic perspective on identity as fabrication , – adolescence is never enough – advantages of psychoanalysis – becoming a self, fabricating identity – dynamism – emotion longing for identity – multiplicity ‘There is no such thing as an infant!’ and neither a psychoanalysis – unconscious is plural – vitality psychological blind spots psychological ownership psychological security psychological transitions psychosocial moratorium psychosocial theories –
Q
qualitative research , quantitative methods quasi-biological thinking –, –, , –
R
race/ethnicity , , , , , –, , and age identity , agile identity biological concept – black feminist theory class, history and field structure (Bourdieu) collective differentiation colonialism –, , connection with other fields – cosmopolitanism – critical race theory cultural and ethnic studies , decolonization dehumanization discourse and communication discrimination , , , , , , , , diversity , –, , – entrepreneurship equality – ethnicity Eurocentric thinking , and gender identity , , , historical methods for research identity work: sociological imagination image and brand imperialism –, – inclusion , , – intersectionality intersectional perspective , , , , , leadership liberation
marginalization national identity and multinational corporations nostalgic identity oppression , , paradox approach to identity –, politics of identity , , , post-colonialism –, power dynamics , , quasi-biological thinking –, –, , – racial hierarchies racialization , , –, – ‘racialized body’ –, , – raciology recruitment and promotion – reflexivity , and sexual identity , , social science – socio-cultural applications – stigmatization visible and invisible – whiteness –, – see also nationality radical constructionism , radical-follower-centred approach rationalism , ready-made employee real, fake and crystallized identities , , – authentic, fake and real selves – auto-dressage , , , compartmentalization of identities , , crystallized self/crystallization , compressed – critical intersectionality –, future identity research – gendered work and boundary spanning , metaphor – organizational identity qualitative research , discursive struggles of self-disciplining and resistance in relation to preferred self – fake self , –, ‘good little copers’ multiplicity of identity as valuable rather than contradictory – non-work relations and activities, marginalized – paradoxes and positive identity perpetually deferred identities , – power and discourse –, , , real-self/fake-self dichotomy –, self-branding techniques – self-subordination , –, Real (Lacan) , , – recognition paradox –, recruitment – redefinition , ,
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redundancy , reflexive researcher identity work , – critical reflexivity deconstruction of texts emotional engagement , –, insider status and same , –, outsider status and different –, –, , pair interview method power relations , , , reflexive moments after time reflexive moments in time reflexive recognition – self-reflexivity semi-structured interview shared identity work in research process –, – social interactions voice vulnerability , , –, , reflexivity –, , Bourdieu: class, history and field structure –, collaborative leadership grounded theory and phenomenology potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) see also reflexive researcher identity work; self-reflexivity regulation , , , , , digital nomads and liquid modernity generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) image and brand strategy relational identity n, , –, , , discourse and communication t, – gender identity –, – real, fake and crystallized identities relational ontologies , , , religion , , , , , remote work repair of identities , , , , , noise and pre-interpretation , f, –, resilience resistance , , agile identities career identity collaborative leadership globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) image and brand intersectional perspective paradox approach to identity performed identities real, fake and crystallized identities , resources , – attentional re-storying of identity restructured identity , , ,
retirement , –, – revised identity , , , , , rites of passage , , , –, , role identity , , , , see also Role Identity Theory (RIT) Role Identity Theory (RIT) emotions , , entrepreneurship , –, institutional theory , t, , n role(s) concept – confusion development distancing embracing expectations and liminality performed identities and sensemaking theories see also role identity
S
sameness –, , satellite offices scepticism schizo-identification , , scope and limits of identity , – fake – hembigs (hegemonic, ambiguous and big) , –, , – identity minimalism – meaning(s) of identity organizational culture (OC) role concept – sidestepping work and swapping concepts – spot-on – stretch trimming down identity work scripted identity self acting (holistic I) –, age identity career identity coherence and consistency collective self n discourse and communication fabrication – grounded theory and phenomenology – hopeful self ideal and complete self identity work: sociological imagination n image and brand , inner self internal narrative , mediated Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)
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networks and identity , , noise and pre-interpretation , – non-self-sufficiency paradoxes and positive identity politics of identity preferred self presentation of , sensemaking , , social self see also sense(s) of self self-actualisation , self-affirmation self-alienation , , , , self-anchoring self-appraisal self-care self-categorization , , see also Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) , –, , , discourse and communication emotions , self-completion self-concept , , , , , , , career identity discourse and communication , entrepreneurship , , image and brand liminality national identity and multinational corporations positive identities stigma self-confidence self-consistency , self-constructions self-continuity self-creation self-delusion self-direction , , , , self-discipline , self-doubt self-efficacy self-employment , , , , , self-enhancement , , , self-esteem , , , , –, , self-evaluation self-exploitation –, self-expression , , self-help practices selfhood , , , , , , self-identity , , , , , , , –, f, –, age identity agile identity collaborative leadership – creative identities digital nomads and liquid modernity
emotions gender identity generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) historical methods for research identity work and use of metaphor liminality networks and identity , noise and pre-interpretation , , , paradox approach to identity performed identities , , philanthropic identity power race and identity real, fake and crystallized identities scope and limits of identity spatiality self-improvement self-interpretation self-investment self-knowledge self-labelling self-made identity paradox self-making self-management , self-mastery self-meanings self-monitoring self-narratives –, , self-object attachment self-other identities , , –, self-positioning self-presentation self-protection self-questioning self-realization , , self-reflexivity , , – self-regulation self-respect self-serving bias self-verification self-worth senior identity sensemaking , , –, autobiographical memory , collaborative leadership collective sensemaking constraining critical sensemaking (CSM) process definitions and assumptions – future research identity (definition) – identity impact on sensemaking –, f, identity role in sensemaking processes f, – image and brand integrated model motivating
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sensemaking (cont.) national identity and multinational corporations noise and pre-interpretation , , paradox approach to identity , , sensemaking impact on identity f, –, sensemaking role in identity processes f, –, strategy triggering and orienting sense(s) of self , , , n, – affective economy , , age identity agile identity autobiographical memory –, creative identities digital nomads and liquid modernity , , emotions feeling identity: orienting to the pre-individual – affect and the individual – bodily encounter as alternative unit of identity analysis – porous bodies, sleepwalking subjects: molecular politics of identity –, fictional portrayals generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) glass slipper model – associational stickiness metonymic slide – occupational identity as social construction: people make meaning with material consequence – occupational identity as sociomaterial production: affective economies – politics of bodily vulnerability , – pre-individual reflections – show: empirical illustration – tell: conceptual development – grounded theory and phenomenology identification identity regulation identity work image and brand impressions intersectional perspective , , – materiality , Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) metonymic slide –, networks and identity , , noise and pre-interpretation , – politics of identity positive sense of self potentialities and impossibilities (Lacan) , pre-individual approach , , , social sense of self somnambulist subjectivity , –
transference of affect work-body alignments , – separation , rites sexual alientation sexual identity/sexuality/sexual orientation , , –, , anti-discrimination employment legislation – assault and harassment and #MeToo movement and authority , – avoidance – biphobia – bisexuals , – ‘corporate closet’ counterfeiting – disclosure (‘coming out’) –, discrimination , , , , , , , double life (dual identity) employer gay-friendliness entrepreneurship external factors – gay-friendly closet gender identity gender queer harassment , – heterodoxy and the Church – heteronormative regime , – heterosexuality , , , homophobia – homosexuality (gay men and lesbians) –, , , , , , , hostility and bullying identity dilemmas identity management – integration – intersectional perspective , , , , leadership LGBTQ+ , –, , –, , misogyny non-disclosure (‘the closet’) , – passing politics of identity , , Queer Nation queer theorists and anti-identity politics –, race and identity , – reflexivity stage-based or linear models stigmatization , , , subcultures threats to personal safety, dignity and careers top management support transgender , , , shame , shared identities , –, –, shifting identity , , shopfloor employees , , – short-term contracts ,
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sidestepping work and swapping concepts – signification – silence and interaction with noise , , , situated interactions –, situational me –, situational relevance – social capital , , , , , , n, social circuits of identity construction – inner conversations (self-directed positioning) , – institutional dynamics (subject positioning) , – self-other definitions (relational positioning) , – situated interactions (reciprocal positioning) , – social constructionist perspective , , , , –, , social crusaders (philanthropy) , f, , , social hegemony theory social identity , –, f, –, , – autobiographical memory career identity collaborative leadership – conflict cooperation discourse and communication emotions , , future research gender identity generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) , grounded theory and phenomenology hybrid professional identity identity work and use of metaphor image and brand , institutional theory intersectional perspective , , , membership categorization analysis (MCA) , , , nostalgic identity philanthropic identity – politics of identity power sexual identity social nostalgia – stigmatization see also under identity work: sociological imagination; Social Identity Theory (SIT) Social Identity Theory (SIT) , , , t, , , , discourse and communication , –, t, emotions , entrepreneurship , –, fabrication generative potential of identity scholarship , –, institutional theory , t, , n
paradoxes and positive identities t, sensemaking social interactions socialization , , , , , social locations socially constructed identity through narrative – social movements , social networking social norms social order f social phenomena and organizational work – social processes social rejection social support social validation –, societal contexts , , socio-cognitive approach , sociological perspective socio-materiality solidarity and belonging , , spatiality , –, , – active, power-infused and politicized spaces aestheticized workplaces – agency anti-structure , artefacts –, boundary-crossings boundary objects class distinctions , danger of liminal spaces domination of space everyday routines of embodied action flexiworkers – free spaces further research directions – gendered and performative qualities of space generative architecture geographical non-representational theory heterotopias , – home-working , –, – hot-desking or non-territorial environments – institutional theory inward-facing identity work – liminality – location, material form and subjective meanings material environment material semiotics meanings attributed to space negative responses – network organization , new offices offices older, emblematic work buildings, stabilizing influence of outward-facing identity work – permanent liminality place identity –
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spatiality (cont.) power relations process-relational geography reshaped workspaces resisting spaces – rites of passage sensual methodology settled ‘neighbourhoods’ social action space and place – spatial meanings spatial modernization in public sector spatial reconfiguration spatiotemporal work routines and rhythms , ‘squatting’ or ‘settling’ teamwork teleworkers and flexible and distributed working arrangements translocal work universities and corporate campuses – workspaces and new ways of working – spiritual identity and holistic integration at work , t, , stable identity/stability , , , , , career identity , , , – collaborative leadership , digital nomads and liquid modernity , gender identity identification , intersectional perspective liminality: play and creativity national identity and multinational corporations sensemaking status future research – grounded theory and phenomenology identity work: sociological imagination image and brand intersectional perspective liminality , performed identities politics of identity stayers – stigmatized identities/stigmatization , , , –, accepting limits of countering stigma affiliation cycles bullying, harassment or social rejection categorizations – challenges of stigma – character blemishes collective strategies – concealing , conditional identification conformity façades core stigma , courtesy stigma ,
covering cross-cutting identities – cultural, historical and demographic differences current event stigma deep education definition – desensitization and immersion techniques de-stigmatization direct preparation ‘dirty work’ , , , disabilities discredited versus the discreditable distancing edge-walkers event stigma formal roles , – front-stage/back-stage boundary humour identification identity authenticity – identity-based (inward-facing) challenges , – identity management strategies identity writing ideological techniques – image-based (outward-facing) challenges , – image and brand – individual strategies – informal roles , – intellectual disabilities (including autism spectrum disorders) – internal versus external to the work domain – invisible stigma large collective movements later-in-life stigma leadership legitimacy, status, respect and reputation mental health issues multiple stigmas negative attitudes, beliefs or emotions nested identities – overcompensating paradoxes and positive identity passing performed identities , physical attributes physical disabilities post-stigma conceptions pre-stigma conceptions psychological group real, fake and crystallized identities realistic stigma preview reconciled identification responses by non-stigmatized – responses by stigmatized – resuming whitening revealing , , salience of stigma –, ,
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selective identification sexual identity short-term versus long-term stigma signal , , situational relevance – small interest groups social buffering social group socialization patterns social validation social weighting sources of stigma – stigma magnification effect stigma management stigma management rehearsals stigma symbols stigmatizing identity threat subjective importance – system justification theory targeted divestiture temporary stigma , tribal identities visibility , storytelling , , t, , strategy , – collective strategy distinctiveness elaboration and deployment emotional dimension entitative perspective –, f, , , , consensus, continuity and change – levels of analysis – methodological considerations nature of strategy and identity , future research directions – consensus, continuity and change levels of analysis – methodological considerations – nature of strategy and identity narrative perspective , f, –, , consensus, continuity and change levels of analysis methodological considerations – nature of strategy and identity – partial and fragmented narrative normative dimension past and forgetting political dimension strategic alliances strategic ambiguity – strategic differentiation strategic discourses of leaders strategic drift strategic goals strategic possibilities strategy discourse visual and textual artefacts
work perspective , f, –, , , consensus, continuity and change – levels of analysis methodological considerations nature of strategy and identity – strengthening identity , , , , , structure , , agile identities institutional theory intersectional perspective leadership networks and identity performed identities power –, – subjectification , , subjection/subjugation –, , subjectivity , , – creative identities , – gender identity , , importance – individual subjectivity , Lacan , managers: fictional portrayals meanings minoritarian subjectivity nomadic subjectivity , – scope and limits of identity senses of self – see also intersubjectivity subordination , , , superordinate identity , n surprises suspicion , symbolic approach , , symbolic capital , , symbolic interactionism , –, , , , , – symbolic order , , – symbolic violence systems psychodynamic approach , –, systems theory
T
target identity , evolving context of f, – stable content of f, – stable context of f, – team identity –, , –, –, see also collective identities technology , changes of foolishness of rationality usage teflonic identity manoeuvring (TIM) , , , temporality , , , , – temporary employment agencies
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temporary identity , , temporary organizations temporary work , , see also short-term contracts tensions digital nomads and liquid modernity , , – entrepreneurship globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs) image and brand paradox approach to identity , , , power strategy textual data , , threats agile identities career identity conflict cooperation discourse and communication emotions fabrication future research generative potential of identity scholarship (writerly texts) –, hybrid professional identity identification image and brand , , noise and pre-interpretation , , f, paradox approach to identity , –, t, , , –, performed identities , politics of identity sensemaking , , stigmatized identities totalitarianism traditional identity transformations –, transitional objects , transitions , , , , liminal spaces of identity formation , –, –, , , – transnational perspectives and gender identity , , , , see also globalization and multinational enterprises (MNEs)
traumatic experiences travelling concepts , , trimming down identity work trust , , typification , ,
U
unbounded careers uncertainty , hybrid professional identity image and brand , increasing uncertainty – liminality: play and creativity power reduction of uncertainty reflexivity sensemaking under-identification undoing identity unemployment unfreeze-change-refreeze theory unmarked identity utilitarian identity
V
values , , , , , , values-based and shared model virtual spaces, temporary projects and self-managed practices – visible identity , vulnerability , , –, , ,
W
well-being –, werketreue whimsical identity workgroup identity work-induced suicide (Karojisatsu) , work-life identity negotiation work performance – work-related identity , , t, t, t workspaces ,
Z
zero-hour employment contracts , ,