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The relationship between emotions and identity work is well established, yet the dynamic between emotional dissonance and identity work remains under-researched in organizational studies. We explore this relationship in the context of organizational scandal, examining the required and experienced emotions of organizational members when 'working in the shadow of shame'. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic study of Danske Bank collected at the peak of its money-laundering scandal, the article makes two contributions to the emerging interest in the intertwined nature of emotions and identity in organizations. First, we challenge the literature on emotional dissonance by demonstrating that employees do not attempt to resolve or reduce their emotional dissonance, but instead sustain it. Second, we advance the literature on identity work by showing how emotional dissonance can be understood as a trigger and resource for strategic and preferred identity work to maintain a positive social identity and self-identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a collaborative ethnography told through narratives and a counter-map drawn from Mapuche ontology, we determine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) simultaneously fractures and strengthens the collective identity of an Indigenous community through the mechanism of community benefit sharing. This study reveals how a young Mapuche Indigenous leader, Simón, and his allies underwent the re-rooting and resurgence of their ancestral identity while resisting the construction of a hydropower project and the company's CSR, as well as their neighbours who supported the project. This study also discusses the emergence of repoliticized spirituality because of the collective identity work dynamics. We propose that this form of spirituality is particularly salient within groups whose ancestors endured colonization. This phenomenon unfolds through a sequence of mechanisms, including collectively reaching breaking points catalysed by external threats (e.g. large-scale projects) that prompt group self-reflection regarding their identity and history. Subsequently, Indigenous communities mobilize to safeguard their ancestral ontologies and spirituality. This, we assert, is a political act. We conclude by reflecting on the social responsibilities of businesses when interacting with Indigenous communities and territories. Managers and policymakers need to comprehend the potential impact of CSR initiatives on the intricate fabric of Indigenous identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how age diversity on corporate boards affects their monitoring performance. Despite the critical importance of the monitoring function of the board, previous studies focus mainly on the advisory role of age-diversified boards. Our emphasis is on banks where the opacity in their complex operations poses a challenge for external stakeholders to assess performance and thus they heavily rely on the board for monitoring managerial activities. We examine how age diversity affects one of the primary monitoring roles of corporate boards – a responsibility over the provision of high-quality financial reports. Using a large panel data of banks in the United States (N = 7005) our findings suggest that age-diversified boards are associated with less earnings management, indicative of higher-quality reporting. Our results still hold for different indicators of the monitoring performance of the board in other areas, such as loan risk. Further analysis reveals that, as age diversity increases, the strength of the board's monitoring effectiveness also increases. Overall, our findings suggest that age-diversified boards are more effective at monitoring managerial decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working in a domain to which one feels called has been heralded as a source of deep meaning and fulfilment, but not everyone is able to pursue their calling through paid employment. Current thinking positions such abandoned occupational callings as a source of regret, stress and disappointment but, by focusing on the perspectives of those still in mid-career, extant research has overlooked the potential for a calling to re-emerge in late adulthood. Drawing on life history narratives from retired individuals who felt called to music at an early age but did not pursue a musical career, we contribute to the corpus of work on unanswered callings by proposing the construct of latent callings to explain how callings may be held in the individual's identity set primed to re-emerge, and reveal the mutable calling identity scripts that re-awaken the potential to live out a calling later in life. Our research shows how latent callings may be resumed via accommodation, deferred and emergent pathways and highlights the potential for a previously unanswered calling to become a source of social connection, deep happiness and enjoyment late in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives is both developed through and a resource for individuals' narrative identity work. We show how organizationally-based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities that are sanctioned and supplied by societal (master) narratives embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members' quest for meaningful identities may falter and sometimes fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emergent identity work perspective that draws on multiple intertwined streams of established identities theorizing and identities-related research. This perspective is characterized loosely by five broad sets of assumptions: (i) selves are reflexive and identities actively worked on, both in soliloquy and social interaction; (ii) identities are multiple, fluid and rarely fully coherent; (iii) identities are constructed within relations of power; (iv) identities are not helpfully described as either positive or authentic; and (v) identities are both interesting per se and integral to processes of organizing. Recognition of an emergent identity work perspective is valuable in part because this may act as a counterbalance to centrifugal tendencies – fed by myopia, insularity and ethnocentrism – which might otherwise lead to blinkered research and fragmentation. The contribution of this article is to provide a baseline for identity work scholars, and to promote collective critical reflection on identities in and around organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who have a sense of calling to their work are more inspired, motivated and engaged with what they do. But how is calling constructed and maintained within organizations? More importantly, how do people maintain a sense of calling to their work when this is a source of ongoing material and existential hardships? This article seeks to address these questions by looking at the artistic setting of theater where actors maintain their calling despite their precarious work situation. The study employs a narrative approach to illustrate how three dominant narratives—religious, political and therapeutic—are central in constructing theater work as deeply meaningful. Specifically, each narrative explains how theater actors maintain their calling through different processes of identity work enacted through sacrifice (religious), responsibility (political) and self-care (therapeutic), with corresponding role identities as martyrs (religious), citizens (political) and self-coaches (therapeutic). We contribute to the literature on callings by: (a) showing how different processes of identity work are central to maintaining callings in precarious work situations, (b) exploring the role played by the 'other' as an interlocutor in accounting for and maintaining callings, and (c) advancing a theoretical explanation of callings that illustrates how callings contingently emerge as acts of elevation, resistance or resilience within contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories we tell about our origins can shape how we think and act – helping us make sense of and communicate who we have "become" over time. To better understand the role that origin stories play in individuals' work lives, we explore how 92 men and women leaders make sense of "becoming" a leader (origin stories) and "doing" leadership (enactment stories). We find that, despite the uniqueness of their experiences, their narratives converge around four frames, being, engaging, performing, and accepting, through which they understand, articulate, and enact their leader identities. We theorize that these narrative frames serve as sensemaking and identity work devices which allow them to create temporal coherence, validate their leader identity claims, and offer them behavioral scripts. Our findings also unearth key gender differences in the use of these frames, in that men used the performing frame more often and women tended toward the engaging frame. These findings provide novel insights into the ways in which the gendered context of leadership becomes embedded in leaders' understandings of who they are and what they intend to do in their roles. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on scholarly conversations around identity, leadership, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culturally different professionals often encounter stigma as they negotiate work lives. Professionals commonly seek to repair stigmatized identities by constructing more positive and relatively coherent self-views. This study draws on interview, observation and diary data from Romanian professionals in the UK, in order to understand how they construct their identities when faced with ethno-cultural stigma. We find that these professionals engage in counterintuitive identity responses which consist of simultaneously denying and acknowledging personal stigmatization (doublethink), and evading engagement with the stigmatized identity (dodging). Unlike the restorative identity work highlighted by previous studies, these atypical responses require less effort, provide less coherence and do not attempt to restore the blemished ethno-cultural identity. Our analyses further indicate that being professional and being White confer on individuals privileges that sustain doublethink and dodging. We contribute to scholarship by underscoring the need to consider both stigmatized and privileged identities when investigating reactions to stigma. We also reflect on the practical implications for organizations of what it means for stigmatized individuals to deny stigmatization or to dodge engagement with stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing reflexively over their lifespan the shifting meaning of their career success. We propose the adoption of Nussbaum's capability approach in the study of such career transitions as a means of strengthening current theorizing about the role played by urban contexts in individual conceptualizations of career success and meaningful professional identities. Applying this analytical lens, we tease out the ways in which our informants perceived the influence exerted by different urban contexts on their capacity to enact a set of capabilities for the attainment of well-being and quality of life at different stages in their careers while striving to preserve a stable professional identity as creative workers. We argue that a good life evaluation, which includes a reflexive and comprehensive reassessment of the capabilities to live life well while pursuing a creative career, underlies creative workers' shifting interpretations of geographical career transition that contravene conventional measures of career upward mobility, development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the identity work processes of severely disabled soldiers who faced discontinuous and involuntary career transitions. As these individuals engaged in rehabilitation and vocational training at a military-affiliated facility, their identity transitions were not marked by deletions of past identity elements or reference groups. Instead, their transitions involved collectively and contextually edited imaginations of the future that allowed for continuity of their foundational self-narratives. The findings extend past research by identifying why the forging of continuity is generative during certain identity transitions. The findings also show that when similar others contribute to the script of one's identity narrative within a familiar liminal context, maintaining a semblance of the status quo is construed as change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid people can be riven by identity conflicts and yet be profoundly disruptive of social boundaries. How can we understand these two facets of hybridity? This study examines how internal identity conflict resolution is related to external boundary disruption by focusing on the identity work of individuals who cross professional knowledge boundaries. It looks at artist-academic hybrids who operate at the interface between the academic and art worlds. The analysis shows the dynamic interplay between their hybrid identity work and knowledge boundary work. It distinguishes three categories of hybrids ('Janusian', 'ambivalent' and 'asymmetric') whose varied identity work strategies ('integrative', 'multiplex' and 'buffering') disrupt knowledge boundaries in different ways ('blurring', 'transgressing' and 'brokering'). The study sheds light on the varied nature of hybrids and the mutually constitutive nature of their internal and external identity work. It advances our understanding of identity work as an agentic activity and reveals the identity processes underlying the disruption of knowledge boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do immigrants with multiple sources of identity deal with the identity tensions that arise from misidentification within the workplace? In order to answer this question, we reposition two under-researched self-presentational identity work strategies – covering and accenting – as particular types of intersectional identity work. Adopting a minoritarian perspective, we apply this framework to an autoethnographic study of a non-white business scholar's identity work. To the extent that covering and accenting allow the scholar to draw identity resources from non-threatening and widely available social identities, we find that this work enables him to avoid being discredited in the eyes of others. Yet, as a practical response to being misidentified, it also risks reproducing oppressive social structures. We conclude that as ways of doing intersectional identity work, covering and accenting take on heightened significance for non-white immigrants who seek to craft identities at the intersection of several discriminable and stigmatizable categories of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While hybrid managers are increasingly important in contemporary organizations (especially in the public sector), we know little about why or how they become hybrid managers, or how this is shaped by the interplay of professional experience and organizational circumstances. In pursuit of a more variegated, contextualized and dynamic understanding of hybrid management, this article focuses on how individuals transition into managerial hybrids, emphasizing the dynamic and emergent nature of hybrid management identity. Studying managers in English healthcare, we employ the concept of identity work as expressed through career narratives to examine the influence of career trajectories and organizational experiences on emerging hybrid manager identity. The study identifies three broad managerial career narratives – aspirational, ambivalent and agnostic – and relates them to experiences of doctor and nurse hybrid managers in three healthcare settings. An interpretive analysis of these narratives reveals a more variegated, situated and dynamic interpretation of hybrid managerial identities than previously considered and underscores the importance of personal and organizational experiences in shaping emergent hybrid professional/managerial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, although extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work. Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies (idealizing, reframing and distancing) that are bound up in junior architects' emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects' efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prestige has traditionally been viewed as a primary explanation for individuals' identification with organizations. Yet there are clues in the literature that some individuals identify with organizations that have lost their prestige owing to failure. We use data from a survey of former employees of a defunct technology firm to test a proposed model of identification with failed organizations. We find that the extent to which the perceived identity of a failed organization fulfills former members' self-enhancement and belongingness motives has a positive relationship with their identification with it. Identification, in turn, inclines former members to socially interact with each other and participate in alumni associations. Further qualitative analysis reveals the organizational identity work practices by which former members recast a failed organization's identity in positive terms. These findings suggest the merit of relaxing assumptions about prestige as a necessary precursor to organizational identification, and augment scholarly understanding of the cognitive and relational mechanisms that facilitate individuals' identification with organizations in the wake of events that injure their reputations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop a theory of Abject Appearance to explain women elite leaders’ embodied identity work within a context of intra-gender relations. The theory of Abject Appearance illuminates a dynamic and dialectical process whereby women elite leaders ‘manage’ the ambiguities of their ‘in-between’ and ‘abject’ status. This process is understood as a possible material effect or consequence of women’s abjection in organizations. Women elite leaders hold power through their formal positions, yet remain marginalized in social relations because their feminine bodies are out of place in organizations. In a qualitative study with women elite leaders, we illustrate how the theme Fascination with bodies and appearance depicts a dialectical process of simultaneous disgust and attraction with women’s bodies and appearance. We discuss how this material effect of abjection may be played out through two embodied identity work strategies in an intra-gender context, namely: Shifting focus from the body and appearance and Achieving a professional balance. We offer insights into how women’s embodiment in elite leader roles may be constrained in a context of intra-gender relations. We suggest opportunities to strengthen women’s agency by raising awareness to the theory of Abject Appearance and women leaders’ associated body work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of large scale, ‘macro’ role transitions on professional identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with two different groups of immigrant professionals, it theorizes how organizational outsiders with established professional identities respond to the institutional requirements and specifically to professional pre-entry scripts in their new host country. The study demonstrates how identity work evolves among each group as they navigate the permeable and impermeable pre-entry scripts in their respective professions. It identifies both barriers and facilitators to engagement with, and fulfillment of, local pre-entry scripts. These findings demonstrate how different professional domains and power structures create different opportunities for re-entry and as a result give rise to different forms of identity work – involving, for example, identity customization, identity shadowing, struggle and enrichment. Implications for policy makers in the field will be discussed, focusing on how different groups of professionals respond to unique forms of identity threat emerging from their respective professional institutions and structural barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to reported experiences of boredom in knowledge work. Drawing on extensive qualitative data gathered at two management consultancy firms, we analyze these experiences as a particular interaction with identity regulation and work experiences. We conceptualize the reports of the bored self as a combination of unfilled aspirations and the sense of stagnation, leading to an arrested identity. Our contribution is to expand extant conceptualizations of employee interactions with identity regulation, in particular relating to identity work and identification. The findings provide a critical rendering of the glamourized image of knowledge work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops theoretical understanding of the involvement of wealthy entrepreneurs in socially transformative projects by offering a foundational theory of philanthropic identity narratives. We show that these narratives are structured according to the metaphorical framework of the journey, through which actors envision and make sense of personal transformation. The journey provides a valuable metaphor for conceptualizing narrative identities in entrepreneurial careers as individuals navigate different social landscapes, illuminating identities as unfolding through a process of wayfinding in response to events, transitions and turning-points. We delineate the journey from entrepreneurship to philanthropy, and propose a typology of rewards that entrepreneurs claim to derive from giving. We add to the expanding literature on narrative identities by suggesting that philanthropic identity narratives empower wealthy entrepreneurs to generate a legacy of the self that is both self- and socially oriented, these ‘generativity scripts’ propelling their capacity for action while ensuring the continuation of their journeys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at gaining a better understanding of how, in a market environment, categorized actors construct their identity in relation to the category to which they are assigned. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted at eBay, we consider how the newly categorized ‘business sellers’ connected eBay’s framing of the category (categorical framing) to their subjective interpretations of it (categorical self). We find that business sellers perceived varying levels of discrepancy between categorical framing and categorical self, which led them to engage in processes of identification, identity work and disidentification. Based on our findings, we present a framework relating the level of perceived discrepancies to distinctive paths of identification and we draw implications for understanding the interaction of categorization and identification. The framework highlights how feelings of self-enhancement, injustice and alienation intervene in orienting individuals’ paths of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narratives play a very significant role in human social life. An ethnographic study within and ‘around’ a contemporary ‘real-ale’-based pubs organization shows narratives playing a part in the construction of reality at a societal level, in the negotiation of order at an organizational and family level and in the shaping of self identities at the level of the human individual. It is shown that narrative resources at these three levels of social reality come together in particular individual and social circumstances. In the process of doing this an ethnographic narrative about the ‘fall and rise’ of ‘real beer’ and ‘real pubs’ is produced. This offers significant anthropological insights into a culturally interesting aspect of recent and contemporary British life. In addition, insights are offered about processes of ethnographic enquiry and the potential for an ‘everyday ethnography’ style of research that ‘grounds’ theoretical work, without resorting to a notion of ‘grounded theory’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine how physical and psychotherapeutic discourses regulate the identity work of older workers. We show that they have separate effects: physical discourse inferred that the loss of work for older workers would be permanent whereas psychotherapeutic discourse suggested that the solution to unemployment lay in the mind of older workers themselves. They also have combined effects through the notion of grief: older workers are expected to progress through the normative stages of grief to arrive at acceptance of job loss and continued exclusion from the labour market. Despite moments of resistance in the identity work of older workers, these individuals were subjected to these regulatory effects through three key processes: participation by individual older workers in these discourses through their own identity work; collaboration from a range of diverse actors in contributing to this identity work; and translation of the meaning as initial narratives are retold by other actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of professional identity work, using in-depth interview material from research conducted into the work lives of 10 gay men employed in a UK National Health Service Trust. Using the men's portraits of professional life, we examine the different ways they understand what it means to be a 'professional'. The article suggests that while gay men appear to be empowered by forms of agency to self-identify as professionals in 'gay-friendly' work contexts, they are by no means unaffected by dominant professional norms and discourses of heteronormativity that treat sexuality and professionalism as polar opposites. Thus how straightforward it might be for the interviewees to self-identify as 'professional' and openly gay within an organization that is perceived to be 'gay-friendly' is scrutinized in terms of the professional identity dilemmas experienced by the study participants. We conclude that, even within 'gay-friendly' organizational settings, fashioning a professional identity is a process marked by negotiation and struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study and better understand people's working lives and organizational involvement in the context of their whole lives and in the context of the societal culture in which they have grown up and now live, it is helpful to bring together three key concepts of narrative, identity work and the social construction of reality. Such a move can be connected to the abandonment of widely used but limiting concepts, such as that of 'managerial identity'. The essentially sociological nature of this move also provides an antidote to the equally limiting tendency towards the 'narrative imperialism' which is associated with the idea of the 'narrative self '. The value of the suggested theoretical framing and its linking of narrative, identity work and social construction is demonstrated by the close analysis of a large private autobiography of a former manager. This individual's identity work simultaneously uses discursively available narratives and creates new narratives (many small stories being embedded in one large life story), all within the framework of history, social structure and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how frontline managers establish managerial identities. It combines narrational and Goffmanesque conceptions of managerial identity work in a longitudinal study of one first-line supervisor at a restructured Australian industrial plant. We argue that, singly, neither self-narration nor dramaturgical performance accounts for the practical discursive work that constructs managerial 'identity'. We demonstrate that frontline manager identity work is an iterative process in which self-narration and dramaturgical performance are almost seamlessly interwoven. The supervisor uses these different identity work stratagems simultaneously, and they are processually co-dependent. We conclude, therefore, that organizational scholars who study how persons construct managerial identities should take Goffman's dramaturgical perspective more seriously. It is an indispensible complement to the analysis of identity narratives, because successful performances undergird managers' attempts to craft stable narrative identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]