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Interest in adjustment issues Veterans face following incarceration has grown rapidly in response to the prevalence of stress-related disorders as well as the physical, social, and occupational challenges when reintegrating into communities. While reintegration may be a positive event that includes the reunification of family, friends, and a return to civilian life, transition can also involve a wide range of difficulties and crises impacting readjustment. Veteran reintegration has been understood as a complex process influenced by different levels, such as at the individual, interactional, and socio-cultural level. This article takes a Veteran standpoint to explore how Veterans' lived experiences are a basis to understand their transition readiness. Specifically, identity work clarifies the empirical self-constructions of Veterans' standpoint and their everyday strategies used for post-incarceration transition efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that emergent AI systems should be viewed as working partners rather than tools. Building on this perspective, this study investigates the process through which academics develop a working partnership with generative AI chatbots using a relationship lens and collaborative autoethnographic methods. Based on a collaborative autoethnographic analysis of our experiences of working with AI, we identify five stages of relationship development in building a successful working partnership with generative AI: Playing Around, Infatuation, Committing, Frustration, and Enlightenment and Readjustment. In reporting each stage, we provide vignettes to illustrate the emotional and cognitive challenges and rewards involved, the developing skills, and the experienced anthropomorphic dimension of this emerging relationship. Drawing on prior theory, we identify and examine three types of work that are required in developing this working partnership: articulation work, relationship work, and identity work. We analyse how each type of work unfolds with the stages of relationship development and consider implications for research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Finland, a grassroots initiative for accommodating asylum-seeking migrants in local homes took off in 2015. This hospitable initiative is about offering asylum seekers the chance to live with locals during the asylum process rather than in a reception centre. Drawing on the voices of local hosts, the article investigates how the racialised and gendered public discourses on asylum-seekers are challenged and reproduced in home accommodation. Moreover, it examines the identity work undertaken by hosts in the context of home, here conceptualised as contested and meaning laden space between the political and the intimate. Empirically, the article is based on qualitative interviews conducted with local hosts who accommodated asylum seekers in Southern Finland. The analysis shows how intersectional power relations structure the hosts' expectations and the relationships formed in complex ways, as they narrate the cohabitation experience in relation to gender, sexuality, class, and cultural differences and in relation to broader societal discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how homeroom teachers construct meaningfulness in their work and in their professional identity, and how this meaningfulness serves them as they interpret and react to public criticism of their profession. Our study relies on interviews with 95 teachers working in Israeli elementary‐, middle‐ and high schools, and draws on the theoretical lens of discursive identity work. We argue that meaningfulness is at the heart of homeroom teachers' identity. Accordingly, when faced with public criticism that questions the meaningfulness of their work, teachers experience threats to their professional identity. Notably, such identity threats are of a gendered nature, as teachers make sense of public criticism by conceptualising it through the gendered stereotype of 'babysitting'. Furthermore, female teachers are much more likely than male teachers to face criticism from family members and friends. We identify remedial identity work strategies that teachers employ in the face of such identity threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an expansion of the perspective on 'differences' by proposing a novel theoretical concept: 'differences work'. Differences work is the subjective and intersubjective effort that is put in place to approach differences from a dynamic stance, to encompass the different processes – identity, relational, and cultural – intertwined in experiencing ourselves and the relationship with differences. The concept is illustrated in its cognitive and emotional components. The paper contributes to developing new sensitivities to the in-situ work on differences, advising to investigate empirically how differences work deploys. The paper suggests methodologies for digging into dialogues and conversations, for entering the self-constructions and others' counter-constructions of differences, and for observing their dynamic and fluid evolution as it happens. The new concept enriches the possibility of going beyond category-oriented policies and orientations in organizations, which are generally aimed at proposing activities not always sufficient to represent all the differences circulating in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never‐ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a 'liminoid' experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on narrative interviews with late-phase doctoral candidates and early postdoctoral researchers, complemented by an autoethnographic diary, this study analyses the experiences of junior academics. A rational ideal of the doctoral process is identified, and its implications for doctoral students’ identity work are discussed. While the rational ideal of the doctoral process has its uses, it prescribes the preferred conduct of doctoral studies and regulates doctoral identities through preferred conceptions of the self. Consequently, doctoral identity work often involves the construction of one’s self in ways that seek to conform to the rational ideal while continuously failing to do so, making deviance from expectations a prevailing feature of it. These experiences of deviance from the elusive ideal both increase the precariousness of doctoral identities and reproduce the regimes of power in which doctoral students are embedded. Thus, this paper challenges the rational ideal and provides a more nuanced understanding of doctoral studies as a precarious, emotional and embodied identity construction process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the challenges Muslims face because of their stigmatized religious identity, little is known about how they navigate that identity in the workplace. Adopting an interpretivist perspective of identity work, this study investigates this issue by building on two‐round in‐depth interviews (35 in round‐one and 21 in round‐two) with skilled practising British Muslim professionals. It extends work on power positions to show the privileges those in senior managerial positions have, including assertiveness and control over workplace interactions and outcomes. It further advances understanding of authenticity, revealing that, despite their experiences of stigmatization, these professionals tend to remain true to their religious identity, openly practising their religion in the workplace. They perceive identity re‐interpretation to be part of authenticity, and a responsibility to contest religious stigma. Importantly, this study conceptualizes proactive religious coping as an identity work response to workplace stigmatization, theorized in this organizational context as turning to God and religious rituals for meaning, comfort, resilience and reconciliation, whilst also being proactive and fighting to challenge experiences of stigmatization. However, unlike for other stigmatized groups, inclusive organizational practices, particularly religious accommodation, are not a driver for authenticity, but rather a signal for environment‐fit and authenticity is instead driven by religious identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As ventures grow, founders must decide between hanging on to control over venture decision‐making or delegating authority to professional managers. This decision is challenging since founders are typically driven by strong feelings of ownership toward their ventures. Adopting a qualitative research design with a grounded theory approach, we investigate the psychological ownership impacts on self and others within the venture when founders delegate decision rights to professional managers. Our analysis draws on in‐depth interviews with 30 founders and 14 professional managers hired by the founders. We develop the first process model of founders' dynamic venture‐targeted psychological ownership and demonstrate how recalibrating psychological ownership is key to the successful delegation of authority to professional managers. Our conceptual model also outlines a novel relationship between recalibrated psychological ownership and founder identity work. We outline our theoretical contributions to psychological ownership and identity control theory and offer practical advice to founders and their professional managers to help with the successful recalibration of founders' venture‐targeted psychological ownership in support of effective delegation and venture growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses epistemic violence in social science research, drawing on a multiyear study with marginalized teenagers in Old Havana, Cuba to articulate an onto-epistemological approach to knowledge production that can contribute to the decoloniality of knowledge production. Building on decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, and poststructuralist theories, the heuristic presented here contributes an alternative to conventional positivist understandings of knowledge, by defining knowledge as social, created, performed and resistant, and illustrates how these theoretical tenets can be made material in research practice, in this case through the use of arts-based methods. Responding to calls to decolonize knowledge within the field of children's geographies and adjacent disciplines, this paper addresses the attendant need to reconceptualize what counts as knowledge and identify methodological innovations to support the achievement of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic paper explores attitudes and perceptions of Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) regarding Palestinians from the West Bank (PWB). It focuses on the semantic complex of ḍaffāwi ('who comes from the West Bank'), which entails a combination of cultural superiority, distrust, romanticizing, and ambivalence. Treating the ḍaffāwi as a speech act and reading it as a cultural text that is rooted in PCI's collective political unconscious, we argue that their mixed attitudes of superiority and idealization with regard to WBP, and by implication their self-Orientalism, reflect a deep sense of deadlock that characterizes their identity work, as indigenous citizens of an ethnocratic state that has been colonizing their people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing interest in STEM education and imminent curricular reform places new demands on teachers, giving impetus to re-examining how we prepare primary teachers for more integrated approaches. In addition to the acquisition of knowledge and skills, sustainable change demands the development of teacher identity, in which teachers are seen by themselves and others as STEM teachers. This paper reports on the emerging STEM teacher identities of five preservice primary teachers. Using STEM story-lines as an innovative graphing exercise, participants were prompted to reflect on key events that shaped their journey and share future-oriented narratives through drawing and storytelling, as they negotiated becoming STEM teachers. Findings suggest that although their own school experiences were varied and influential, an integrated STEM intervention was the common turning point in their STEM identity development, whereby participants aligned critical components of STEM with personal experiences and values. The reflective tools used supported identity work, by triggering a rediscovery and reinterpretation of their experiences with the benefit of increased knowledge for teaching STEM and, in turn, provided a means to re-envisage the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to synthesize the extant literature that brings sociological analysis to the context, production and perpetuation of the antiracist identity. Our aim is to distinguish this analysis from the huge body of literature written from inside antiracism. Antiracism began in the latter half of the twentieth century. This examination reveals antiracism as an identity and a project of organizational production maintained through discursive and symbolic formations and institutionalized forms of governance. Its members espouse easily digestible 'common sense' ideologies of racism and anti-racism premised on a belief in the 'absolute nature' of categories of ethnicity and race. It then builds on this discursive framing with commensurate solutions at these levels. It does this through discursive projects and codification of institutional self governance. However, this racializing identity work may perpetuate racism through its classifications and its obfuscation of class privilege and economic inequalities. Its ever-expanding codified extension into organizations, businesses and global grassroots movements calls for a critical lens to direct historical, economic and political analysis onto the obfuscating work of this identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores vulnerable clients' techniques of identity talk, drawing on interviews with clients in Danish job centers. We combine the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism with the sociology of nothing to explore techniques of disidentification from the nonworker identity. The study demonstrates how the actors perform agentic vulnerability to resolve their identity dilemmas. We identify three techniques of identity talk: (1) hero‐talk to reassert their hard worker identity, (2) victim‐talk to excuse their current positions, and (3) resister‐talk through commissive and omissive responses to digital demands and requirements. The latter involves different forms of negational action: doing something, nondoing, and doing nothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood vaccination consultations are considered an important phase in parents' decision‐making process. To date, only a few empirical studies conducted in the United States have investigated real‐life consultations. To address this gap, we recorded Dutch vaccination conversations between healthcare providers and parents during routine health consultations for their newborns. The data were analysed using Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology. We found that the topic of vaccination was often initiated with 'Have you already thought about vaccination?' (HYATAV), and that this formulation was consequential for parental identity work. Exploring the interactional trajectories engendered by this initiation format we show that: (1) interlocutors treat the question as consisting of two types of queries, (2) conversational trajectories differ according to which of the queries is attended to and that (3) parents work up a 'good parent' identity in response to HYATAV, by demonstrating that they think about their child's vaccination beforehand and make their decisions independently. Our findings shed new light on the interactional unfolding of parental vaccination decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the national, linguistic and ethnic profiles of students in UK higher education mean that students’ names are also likely to have become increasingly culturally diverse. In this article, we develop new empirical and theoretical understandings about how student-facing staff working in higher education in England experience cultural diversity in students’ names and the accompanying uncertainty of how some names should be pronounced. Using data from our qualitative studies we show that staff typically framed the pronunciation of names as an equalities issue, including in terms of power relations between themselves and students. Drawing on theorisations of identities as social processes, we analyse the ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’ activities used by staff to manage the pronunciation of students’ names. We argue that, through these equality-framed activities, staff are doing ‘identity work’ in relation to their own selves and, importantly, also for students whose named-linked identities are minoritised within the ‘whiteness’ and ‘Englishness’ of higher education institutions in England. We conclude that, to support the pioneering identity work already undertaken by individual staff, policymakers in higher education should develop and implement ‘whole institution’ initiatives in recognition of the pronunciation of students’ names as a key equality, diversity and inclusion issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientific research has become increasingly aware of power asymmetries and the elitist and exclusive nature of scientific knowledge production. These debates have resulted in more inclusive and participatory research practices. In this article, we focus on co-research, which is a participatory and multi-perspective research strategy that invites the people whom the research concerns to participate as active and influential agents throughout the research process as experts on 'the studied world.' Co-research is increasingly being adopted in research involving people who belong to marginalised groups or who face the threat of stigmatisation. Despite its increasing applications, engaging in co-research requires reflection on several methodological and ethical questions that so far have been underexplored in the methodological literature. In this article, we address challenges in practicing inclusion and overcoming power asymmetries in co-research, particularly when it is conducted with people who inhabit societal positions with institutionalised stigma and whose participation in research is usually highly limited. In this article, building on our own experiences from different co-research projects—with care leavers, experts-by-experience with a history of crime and mental health recoverers—we aim to contribute to this literature by specifically focusing on issues of inclusion of co-researchers who face the need to negotiate with institutionally stigmatised positions. We suggest that reflexivity on positionalities and attending to plurality in identity work could provide a fruitful tool for increasing inclusivity in co- (and peer) research. We claim that such reflexivity is crucial from the very beginning of a co-research process (including ways of inviting and recruiting co-researchers) because this stage is crucial, as it forms the basis for the following stages and for the possibility of practising inclusion—even if imperfect—throughout the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital microwork consists of remote and highly decontextualized labor that is increasingly governed by algorithms. The anonymity and granularity of such work is likely to cause alienation among workers. To date, we know little about how workers reconcile such potential feelings of alienation with their simultaneous commitment to the platform. Based on a longitudinal survey of 460 workers on a large microworking platform and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, we show that (1) alienation is present in digital microwork. However, our study also finds that (2) workers' commitment to the platform over time may alter their subjective perceptions of alienation. Drawing from qualitative statements, we show (3) how workers perform identity work that might help reconcile feelings of alienation with simultaneous platform commitment. Our findings contribute to solving the paradox of worker commitment to precarious platform labor, which is an issue frequently raised in the digital labor literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through participant observation of the redemption‐focused identity work of formerly incarcerated citizens affiliated with an urban faith‐based nonprofit organization run by ex‐offenders, this paper examines religiously motivated desistance among eighteen male respondents who attribute lasting desistance to intense religiosity. Recent research portrays the "identity work" of criminal justice‐involved citizens as "narrative labor" fraught with capricious experiences of social rejection and "uncanny" patterns of discrimination and exclusion. Drawing from eight years of participant observation and adopting methodologies of "lived religion" and "appreciative inquiry," life‐history interviews reveal three "frames" of "performative speech" through which religious narrative labor helps signal a "disavowal and recasting" of criminal identities: "coming out of the desert" {learning not to hide}, "bringing it to the altar" {help‐seeking through religiosity}, and "making your test your testimony" {using testimonial storytelling for status elevation}. Prolific integration of Christian scripture into personal narratives mirrors the Identity Theory of Desistance. The paper deepens understanding of how religious narrative labor is performed by ex‐offenders enduring carceral citizenship, arguing for more direct exploration of religiosity by criminologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers provide essential services to community sport organizations; thus, it is important to understand the underlying factors in successful volunteer–organization relationships. Organizational identification, an integral component of relationship building for members in an organization, is a useful yet underutilized concept to understand how and why volunteers create lasting, deep relationships with sport organizations. This research utilizes a sequential mixed-method design to examine the evolution of organizational identification among volunteers in a community sport organization. The survey results indicate that new volunteers formed their organizational identification over the course of a single program season, such that, by the end of the season, they were similar to returners. Subsequent qualitative analysis of focus group data indicated that the content and evolution of organizational identities varied for newcomers and returners. These results provide important contributions related to the ongoing nature of identity work of volunteers and offer practical implications for volunteer management within community sport organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the complexities associated with managing and ultimately exiting a career in the police through an analysis of semi-structured interviews undertaken with 27 police officers who voluntarily resigned from an English police force between 2014 and 2019. It does this through a microsociological approach to the study of identity construction which focuses upon the interactive and shifting relationships within policing identities and considers both the role of the individual and of the organisation itself in identity management. The findings indicate that police officers suffer irreconcilable identity threats through an incompatibility between their work and non-work roles and a perception that their work is not valued or recognised and has not met their prior expectations. These issues are exacerbated for those returning from maternity leave and for primary care givers and further by the salience of the policing identity. Despite undertaking identity work in order to align the incongruity in their conflicted and damaged identities and despite their attempts to mitigate the impact of implicit organisational control through the management of identities, officers ultimately feel that their only course of action is to voluntarily resign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the authenticity experiences of South African women in law enforcement from a best-self perspective. Narrative interviews were conducted with 12 women from police and traffic services, aged between 26 and 55 (25% black, 58% mixed race and 17% white). Using thematic analysis, three themes were generated, namely, developing self-awareness, growing self-determination, and practising self-appraisal. By developing their self-awareness, they engaged in a self-reflective recognition of negative stress responses and realised alternative responses. Growing self-determination denotes consciously and actively applying best-self enhancing strategies to realign with the best-self. The women said to consistently apply self-appraisal to assess and confirm congruence with the best-self. The findings suggest three self-processing elements that are key to authenticity development. Opportunities to engage in authenticity development interventions aimed at empowering women should focus on sense of realignment with the best-self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme. Design/methodology/approach: By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers. Findings: In collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness. Research limitations/implications: Longitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship. Practical implications: Universities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking. Originality/value: This study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing interest in intersectional entrepreneurship studies investigating the interplay of privileged and disadvantaged identities, people with disabilities still appear to be a ‘forgotten minority’ in that field. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 29 entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD), this study examines how differences are constructed by EWD when performing intersectional identity work at the crossroads of disability, gender, and entrepreneurship. The results revealed four overlapping strategies in response to different sources of identity threats, such as disability and gender threats: bracketing, reconciling, adjusting, and neglecting. While the identity work of EWD was informed by challenging dominant entrepreneurial discourse impregnated by ableism and hegemonic masculinity, simultaneously, othering was also used in crafting positive identities, which instead reproduced power-laden social differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the leadership literature has emphasized the importance of leader identity for leader behaviors and leader effectiveness, little is known about whether and how professionals, who are experts in their field and hold a formal leader role, construe a leader identity. To expand our understanding of leader identity construal, we explored how professors in German research universities interpreted their formal leader role and whether and how they saw themselves as leaders. Based on findings from an inductive interview study, we contribute to the literature in three ways: First, our findings imply that patterns of professional identity and leader identity dimensions likely predict when a leader role is rejected, accommodated, incorporated, or emphasized. Second, we explain why professionals with a formal leader role see themselves primarily as specialists, mentors, managers, or shapers. Third, we extend previous notions of the leader identity concept by elaborating on its dimensions. Our findings have practical implications on an individual and organizational level, and may help design more effective leadership development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the changing landscapes of higher education, a large body of research has studied how scholars make sense of academic identities and careers. Yet, little is known about how academics actually 'work' on their identities to navigate normative demands and complex career structures. This paper explores how scholars negotiate career scripts trough identity work. Drawing upon 35 interviews with early career academics in political science and history, the analysis discerns four patterns of identity talk through which academic identities are constructed: achievement talk (signalling achievement and competitiveness), authenticity talk (signalling genuineness and being true to self), loyalty talk (signalling loyalty and willingness of helping out), and personation talk (adjustment to privileged identities). Defining what to display and how to correctly embody its corresponding values, these patterns convey different ways in which scholars manage their identities according to the perceived rules of recognition. Identifying several contrasting understandings of what it means to act and to represent worth, the study shows that successful identity management requires a certain feel for the game of recognition. Involving the symbolic struggle of 'fitting in' and 'standing out,' strategies for identity work are shaped by scholars' social class background and gender. In demonstrating how the prevalence of project-based work accentuates the importance of identity performances on academic markets, the findings suggest that the concept of identity labour may open up new avenues of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how minority ethnic employees account for witnessing selective incivility to ethnically similar others. Our study is based on qualitative interviews with British Asian employees – the majority who witnessed incivility directed towards migrant Asian employees working for the same company. Our findings indicate that, for those whose minority ethnic identity was of central importance, witnessing selective incivility towards others from a similar ethnic background can be perceived as an identity threat. We provide insights into three identity work strategies undertaken by witnesses of selective incivility, while illuminating how minority ethnic identity shapes the way witnesses' respond to selective incivility in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From semi-structured interviews with 42 Canadian police officers, the study suggests that the occupational context created both personal and professional identity threats are largely based on the degree to which officers aligned with the image of the ideal worker as physically strong, aggressive and committed to the job. Because perceived nonconforming members also violated gendered expectations for behavior, they not only experienced threats to their personal identities, but also were potentially subjected to bullying, harassment, and isolation. Socialization processes and occupational stigma were identified as two key factors that intensified the occupational identity and the 'us' and 'them' divide leading to more vigorous defenses against group identity threats. Despite the salience of these contextual factors, not all officers experienced the identity threats in the same way, highlighting changing views on what it means to be an 'ideal' police officer as well as opportunities for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tension between the traditional scenario, in which women fulfil themselves mainly as mothers, as well as the emancipatory approach to women's roles reverberates more and more in Polish society. This conflict between various social expectations has a significant impact on women's experience of picking up the role of a mother, as well as the intensification of identity ambivalence accompanying their departure from said role. This paper describes the stage in mothers' lives when adult children move out of their family homes. As part of the [blinded for the review] project, the authors have analysed the stories told by 40 Polish women, whose adult children had moved out of the house, leaving behind a void. The moment of entering a new stage of motherhood and womanhood has been told in the context of a private place – their homes. To further highlight the experience of this moment by the women who participated in the study, the authors have conducted an analysis of their stories within the framework of Victor Turner's liminality theory. In the case of the women, who participated in the study, the experience of liminality does not lead to a new status that would be socially recognisable. Only nine of them – according to the analysis carried out by the authors – experienced, among other things due to owning or changing their own space, the phase of aggregation, which is typical of becoming a woman in a new role – a mother of an adult child who left home. In contrast, their approach towards space and the practices of everyday life became a pointer showing them the way out of the role of mothers and let them change their status, which the sociologists lack a name for, as the authors argue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the escalating number of people diagnosed with chronic disease globally, research aimed at supporting their adjustment and coping is invaluable. Reconstructing a sense of self is core to the psychosocial adjustment of people with chronic disease (PwCD), and meaning making is central to their coping with the diagnosis. Despite the growing number of PwCD living productive lives, their identity work is underexplored. This article reports on an in-depth multiple case study that explored the identity work of PwCD from a meaning-making perspective. Data were gathered from three cases using semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and diaries. Data analysis entailed interpretative phenomenological analysis and flexible pattern matching. Three themes describe participants’ identity work process: First, they narrate a broken identity, having experienced identity disruption, discontinuity, and loss; second, they envision an ideal identity through existential reflection; and third, they reconstruct a meaningful identity. Reconciling the broken self with an ideal self leads to the construction of a meaningful self. The meaningful self is conceptualized in participants’ application of Frankl’s meaning-making principles, as they constructed a purposeful self (creative), a connected self (experiential), and a determined self (attitudinal). The article discusses the implications for helping professionals and organizations in supporting PwCD as they work toward rebuilding a meaningful self, facilitating their identity work in the search of a meaningful self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the concept of micro-political resistance, this article presents an empirical analysis of how officers of the Finnish Defence Forces challenge, resist, and reinforce the collective military identities constructed within the prevailing organizational discourses. There is a need for identity work to meet the norms and ideals of the military, but individuals can also work as change agents. Micro-political resistance derives from feelings of otherness as well as conflict between the dominant organizational identities and individuals' personal interests. This study presents a thematic discourse analysis based on texts written by 108 officers and 12 interviews on the theme of "the ideal soldier." Three main discourses of micro-political resistance were identified: perceiving the profession of a military officer as a job like any other rather than a sacred calling, putting family first, and being oneself instead of embodying the traditional masculine ideal soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Research Commentary draws on the articles in the March 2022 issue of JRME, engaging with the notion of labor as a key concept to push the field toward novel understandings of equity in mathematics education. We introduce the concepts of identity work and racialized emotions to provide an alternative reading of the articles in that issue, arguing that attention to the interplay of these two concepts is vital to consider issues of equity because mathematics identity intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other social identities historically marginalized in the classroom. We argue that a focus on such interplay could help to revitalize the discourse on equity in mathematics education across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the recollections of 12 successful women in science during their school years before postsecondary education. The participants shared detailed descriptions of their science experiences through three semi‐structured interviews. An identity works conceptual framework consisting of figured worlds, positioning, and agency constructs to portray the complex dynamics of their experiences was used to analyze the data. The following four themes emerged from the data analysis: participants had an early interest in mathematics and science; they were "stubbornly" persistent in science‐figured worlds; they engaged in science‐figured worlds beyond school; and they positioned themselves as science leaders. These findings add to the evolution of science identity development theoretical models because they are from a nondeficit perspective. Participants engaged in identity work that advanced their science identities despite the gender biases in science‐figured worlds. From a practical stance, girls and women could employ the agentic and positive positioning identity work that the findings show to develop their science identity in educational contexts. Science educators and researchers are encouraged to structure figured worlds where girls feel empowered to enact identity work to build strong science identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Further Education (FE) lecturers and trainers manage a mild stigma that socially taints their work through a discourse intersecting gender and class. To frame their experiences, I draw upon identity work tactics established within the dirty work literature. Through an interview and observational study, the potency of cultural imagery and discourse is shown to manifest as a stigma. This stigma differentiates those associated with hair and beauty work by imposing discrediting tropes pertaining to skill, class status, and social value. Lecturers and trainers become tainted by proxy through the association with an industry and interaction with bodies that are discredited through a gender‐class discourse. Through close proximal positioning to a tainted subject matter, FE lecturers and trainers rely upon esteem‐enhancing strategies to minimize discrediting assumptions. The students they teach may embody stigma through tainted attributes that signal working‐class femininity, yet they enable FE lecturers and trainers to minimize taint by drawing from an alternate discourse that celebrates upward cultural mobility and a more refined iteration of femininity. By broadening the landscape of stigma to recognize it as milder than its extreme theorization in dirty work, this article explores discourse and representation as a centralizing source of stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Within the context of high school student clubs, the acronym "GSA" originally stood for "Gay-Straight Alliance." It described gay and straight youth working as allies to learn about themselves and each other's lives and to navigate and address interpersonal and institutional anti-LGBTQ school policies and practices. Today, the acronym is commonly parsed by Gen Z members as "Gender-Sexuality Alliance" to better represent the presence and needs of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students, and their cisgender allies. Purpose of Study: We inquire how students learn about themselves and others—partially, unevenly, and, at times, uneasily—as they incorporate socially resistant gender and race identity work within their GSA school clubs. Participants: Participants were cisgender (n = 10) and transgender and nonbinary (n = 10), racially diverse high school students in GSAs between 14 and 18 years of age. Research Design: Our analysis is grounded in critical pragmatism, a methodological integration of critical theory and pragmatism, which stems from reflexive immersion in the research context and use of empirical inquiry as a tool to acknowledge and guide transformation of entrenched anti-trans oppression in schools, noting that racism, among other forms of structural inequality, is built into schools. We analyzed the interview component of a larger mixed-methods research study conducted by the GLSEN Research Institute, which was intended to generate insight about student and advisor experiences of GSAs. Findings: Our study reveals that while GSAs can be a space for marginalized LGBTQ students to create a collective empowering identity, they can also be a space where some differences may be flattened or left out. We explore how students make visible racial and gender identity groups during GSA activities that are often erased in secondary schools. This implicitly and explicitly entails deploying identity as a challenge to a school's heteronormative, cisnormative, and white-dominant official curriculum, although the depth or complexity of a GSA's visibility-based education and critique may be inadequate, given available resources. Our findings demonstrate how GSA students leverage their identity as a goal when mobilizing themselves and their peers to alter a school's norms and practices. Conclusions: Gen Z GSA students have begun to reimagine their clubs as if they were built from the ground up, with the needs of transgender students and students of color placed at their center. GSAs remain a critical but underdeveloped resource for learning how to recognize and challenge intersectional forms of interpersonal and institutional marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the emerging attempts to integrate identity work into teacher education programs, how identity can be incorporated into professional development of in-service teachers is still an open question. This study reports on a professional development program on productive teacher questioning that was offered to secondary school English teachers in Hong Kong. The program aimed to pedagogize identity work for the native English-speaking teacher participants while they were engaging in the target pedagogic knowledge-base through identity-oriented activities. Using a comparative case study design, we drew on data collected with narrative frames, stimulated recalls, and semi-structured interviews. Our thematic analysis revealed that the teachers juxtaposed their enacted and narrated identities by negotiating multiple externally defined roles, that they identified professional tensions while reflecting on the academic cultures as transnational teachers, and that their identity work unveiled the emotion labor of becoming a native speaker teacher in Hong Kong. The findings highlight the interface of identity work and teacher learning and call for an identity focus in in-service teacher learning as well as the betterment of the native English-speaking teacher policy in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine reports of poetic confluence, in which one person's utterances seems to connect with another's unspoken or unarticulated thoughts. We argue that analysis of these narratives can be investigated as a window onto social reality, and as a site in which social realities are produced, especially with respect to identity work. We show how this approach complements and develops from the small story paradigm in narrative inquiry. In our discussion we try to identify common principles that may underpin work on both the content of poetic confluence narratives, and the work done in the features of those narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a narrative analysis of 33 interviews with Vietnamese early career academics, we explore whether a Confucianist/collectivist academic context in Vietnam has a key influence on academics' identity work, within the embrace of encroaching managerialist practices. We show how these academics from 11 universities negotiated identity alignment and identity tensions between such cultural orientation and managerialism. On the one hand, a Confucianist ethic underpinning higher education in Vietnam is likely to encourage academics to engage in managerialist practices, as it promotes harmony and loyalty to their respective university and its global, 'excellence' goals. On the other hand, a cultural underpinning of collegiality can create tension with the individualist nature of managerialist practices. Our recommendations for universities in a similar context are to adapt the more individualistic performative approaches borrowed from the West by crafting their own collegiate, soft managerialist hybrid practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article answers the call for more research on Millennials' experience of the graduate transition to work (GTW). Using an identity perspective, it investigates how Millennials explored and developed their career identities after the GTW, with a particular focus on traits often associated with younger generations such as boundaryless, protean and intrinsic motivations. Interviews were conducted with 36 Millennial graduates from U.k. and Irish universities. Findings confirmed that graduates largely avoided identity exploration until the GTW, with the latter perceived as a boundary experience and self-learning event. Four main themes of identity work developed from the data analysis: restraining the ideal self; reasserting the ideal self; revising the ideal self; and re-exploring possible selves. Participants appeared to increase their adaptability, self-drive and intrinsic motivation after the GTW in a way different from previous generations. Moreover, they continued to develop and change their career-identities long after the first few transitional years. Implications for Higher Education and organisational practice are accordingly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment of newly arrived migrants can be seen as one of the key aspects to managing both national labour market needs and the inclusion of individuals in both work and society. In Sweden, efforts to manage recent migration – for example, from Syria – has resulted in various labour market 'fast tracks' that aim to facilitate labour market integration. In this article, we consider how individual migrants attempt to negotiate the new national demands of professional identity to become teachers in Sweden by following a Swedish introduction course to teaching. The study builds on qualitative interviews and fieldwork following two different cohorts of students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupations are increasingly embedded with and affected by digital technologies. These technologies both enable and threaten occupational identity and create two important tensions: they make the persistence of an occupation possible while also potentially rendering it obsolete, and they magnify both the similarity and distinctiveness of occupations with regard to other occupations. Based on the critical case study of an online community dedicated to data science, we investigate longitudinally how data scientists address the two tensions of occupational identity associated with digital technologies and reach transient syntheses in terms of "optimal distinctiveness" and "persistent extinction." We propose that identity work associated with digital technologies follows a composite life-cycle and dialectical process. We explain that people constantly need to adjust and redefine their occupational identity, i.e., how they define who they are and what they do. We contribute to scholarship on digital technologies and identity work by illuminating how people deal in an ongoing manner with digital technologies that simultaneously enable and threaten their occupational identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying biology entails negotiating knowledges, identities, and what paths, more or less well‐trodden, to follow. Knowledges, identities, and paths within the very practices of science are fundamentally gendered and it is, therefore, critical to recognize when exploring students' learning and participation in natural sciences. Even though students' numbers in undergraduate Higher Education Biology are female‐biased, it does not mean that gendered processes are absent. In this study, we focus on early undergraduate biology students' identity work at a Swedish university, analyzing 55 study motivation texts discursively. Embedded in a Figured Worlds framework, we explore how students imagined and authored themselves in(to) the Figured World of Higher Education Biology along two imagined identity trajectories, the Straight Biology Path and the Backpacking Biology Path. While the first and numerically dominant imagined trajectory entails typical stories of a scientific child striving toward a research career, the latter recognizes broad interests and biology competences to be collected in a backpack for transdisciplinary use. Students imagining the Backpacking Biology Path authored themselves in relation to and explicitly not as having a linear trajectory, which positions the Straight Biology Path as dominant and culturally recognized. Our findings reveal gendered myths about science practices present in Higher Education Biology, yet also contested through alternative imaginaries. We, thereby, show that it is crucial for Higher Biology and Science Education to be aware of how students imagine their trajectories and how they negotiate masculine norms of science to create spaces for diverse and alternative identity trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and analyzes experiences of involuntary childlessness at work and, through that, attempts to increase our understanding of emotional and silenced experiences in organizations. While primarily being an exploratory study with a purpose to get an initial glimpse into working life through involuntary childless individuals' point of view, this article also engages with Arlie Hochschild's (1979, 1983) conceptualization of emotion work to analyze experiences of involuntary childlessness at work. The empirical data used in this paper are mainly collected through an anonymous diary studies method in Finland, and thematically presented in this article in three segments where three categories of emotion work related to involuntary childlessness are analyzed and discussed. In addition to offering an initial glimpse of involuntary childlessness at work, this paper hence contributes with a demonstration and analysis of the multifaceted emotion work related to these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transpeople in India forge identities at the confluence of contradictory social forces. Interviews conducted in the state of Kerala suggest that the experience of transphobic stigma results in self‐employed transpeople being abjectified. Social abjectification, in turn, triggers their identity work within liminal social spaces located between the everyday lifeworld and postcolonial legal institutions. Through this work, the participants in this study navigated the contradictions between two identity‐constituting external structures: culture and law. Culture is a source of identity threat, but it also supplies a socially legitimated identity template—the hijra—used in the vital self‐formative work of mirroring and witnessing. Similarly, trans‐supportive social policies and laws provide institutional scaffolding for identities. Yet, despite the agential nature of the participants' identity work, the inherent limitations of the law and the vulnerability of embodiment render them susceptible to the ongoing threat posed by the transphobia emanating from ambient cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 77 supervisors in seven hospitals across the U.S. that participated in a national workforce development program for low-wage frontline workers, we explain how supervisors justified and reproduced social inequalities by accepting culture of poverty and neoliberal discourses and how supervisors used these discourses to resolve identity-work dilemmas. We demonstrate how supervisors engaged in identity talk that justified deprivation for workers and shielded management from blame. We discuss how supervisors subtly invoked class, race, and gender stereotypes—and thus reproduced ideologies supportive of structural inequalities—as they crafted accounts that drew attention away from economic and organizational problems and focused on the victims. This research extends the literature on blame attribution, explained here as victim-blaming in disguise, which subsequently shaped supervisors' perceptions of their staff, defined workers' opportunities, and inadvertently, reproduced inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses oral history to consider the relative merits of symbolic interactionism in revealing new insights regarding the Irish immigration experience in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a variety of rubrics attributed to Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, I critically examine the nature of identity work performed by Irish men and women when in their new host country. The paper highlights the interface between citizenship and sociocultural identity epitomised by both the use props (corporeal modifications) and the power of sign vehicles, notably Irish accents in shaping the nature of social interactions. The extent to which Goffman neglects sensory driven constructs of identity is highlighted. The way in Irish immigrants negotiated two simultaneous worlds front and back stage in response to the anticipated reaction of the given audience evokes the metaphor of a revolving door of identity fluid and chameleon like in nature. Actions were at times driven the anticipated reactions of others following presentation but then reclaimed elsewhere manifested by front and back stage behaviours. The Irish men and women worked inside and alongside systems of control where their identities were contested, ambiguous, or problematised to create a fluid sense of self (selves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The re-professionalisation of those who work in education is a common theme explored in the literature. This paper reports on research undertaken at an English Business School that was concerned with how academics responded to external accreditation and the introduction of five categories that demarcated them according to their academic achievements, professional experience and standing within the sector. In reporting on this way of re-professionalising academics, this research makes a contribution to the discourse on working in Higher Education, and how academics view this process. The research adopted an approach based on interviewing and analysed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings suggest that although academics often question the imposition of an artificial identity, they adopt a pragmatic position of compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-Latino natives often conflate "Latino" with "Mexican," treating Mexican as a stigmatized group. Latinos often engage in "identity work" to neutralize this stigmatized identity. We link these micro processes of identity work with macro structures of stratification through "intersectional typicality." We argue that the selection of which positive traits immigrants highlight to avoid stigma is systematic and tied to intersecting dimensions of race and class stratification at the macro level. We argue that this process is context-specific. We use the case of middle-class Dominicans and Mexicans living in Atlanta. Our findings show that both groups perceive that the pervasive image of the typical Latino in Atlanta is that of a working-class Mexican. While both groups perceive this image to be low-status, they diverge in their strategies for countering this presumption. Mexicans emphasize their middle-class status and often try to change the typical image of Latinos. Dominicans emphasize that they are not Mexican and highlight their atypicality. Interview data show that Dominicans are concerned about the Mexican label because of embedded working-class assumptions. We argue that although many respondents successfully avoid negative stereotyping, their identity work actually reaffirms the low-status meaning of the typical Latino category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]