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Drawing from in-depth interviews of cleaners employed in the cleaning industry in India, the study examines the ongoing process of constructing a positive identity among dirty workers. Cleaners respond to the intense identity struggles emerging from caste stigma, dirty taint, and precarity by constructing ambivalent identities. Cleaners' identity work is constituted by the very identity struggles they encounter, and their efforts to negotiate stigmatized identities further create identity tensions. Apart from accenting the paradoxical duality inhered in identity work, the findings show how caste/class inequalities are reworked in a neoliberal milieu and reproduced in identity construction processes. The findings call attention to caste as an important social category in organizational studies that has implications for work identities, dirty work, and precarious work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how autoethnographic vignettes can be used as a reflexive tool to problematize the power relations in which organizational ethnographers participate when doing and representing their fieldwork. Foucault's analysis of the ethical self-formation process provides the impetus to explore the embodied experiences of my autoethnographic study of a cooperative retail outlet in New York. In questioning how power and knowledge reflexively generated my actions and interpretations, I frame this autoethnography as a means of critically reflecting on my own practice as a researcher. By writing about our own embodied interactions with others through discourses that constitute our experiences, we begin to understand how power is exercised in practice. I conclude by discussing the practical benefits for researchers of writing autoethnographic vignettes and, in particular, for doctoral students seeking to become qualitative researchers in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a rugby organisation, in which a distinct configuration of hyper-masculinity exists as the hegemonic one. Using three storified accounts that emerged during ethnographic research, empirics show that when a player's body fails to align him with hegemonic masculine ideals, he encounters an identity-threat and a separation from the organisational collective. In turn, a player participates in embodied remedial identity-work processes, to (re)accomplish hegemonic masculinity and (re)integrate with the organisational collective, using his body as an identity-resource to counter the identity-threat. Empirics reveals the extent to which the body underpins expressions of hegemonic masculinity, and how important the body is as a site that is used to symbolically maintain a viable organisational identity. Ontologically, it is emphasised that men whose bodies appear to fit normative organisational ideals do not necessarily encounter the embodied aspects of their organisational experiences unproblematically; rather, their bodies – like those of less normative actors – are vulnerable to identity threats and a source of exclusion. This encourages scholars to think about the relationship between embodiment, gender, hegemony and integration in organisational settings in more nuanced ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study introduces a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the investigation of care in organizations. It examines 52 stories describing how employees care for one another in material and emotional ways and explores how the narration of care becomes mapped on to struggles with unconscious aspects of the self, variously subjugating the self to, and empowering the self from, existing power structures. The study finds that current conceptions of care facilitate an imaginary project to fix identity and therefore privilege a more disempowering practice of care. It also reveals that, if investigated from a Lacanian perspective, care can serve more empowering constructions of identity. Specifically, care can create a space in which divided subjectivity can surface and action can be freed from identity projects and the vulnerabilities to identity control this introduces. Implications for theorizing the function of care in relation to identity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities' processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some occupations are subject to more complex identity work processes than others. This rings true for those professional endeavours that are relatively poorly known and that cannot rely on institutions as a reference for identification, such as digital nomadism. Digital nomads can broadly be defined as professionals who embrace extreme forms of mobile work to combine their interest in travel with the possibility to work remotely. Building on a two-stage data collection process, this paper proposes a typology that characterises four archetypes of digital nomad lifestyle promoters' narratives found online and show how these online narratives play a role in the process of identity work of other digital nomads. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we show that while the archetypes act as an important online identity regulatory force, they do so through dis-identification. Second, we explain how identity work for digital nomads involves evaluating discursively available subjectivities and propose a three-step reflexive process that entails (i) interpreting, (ii) dis-identifying and (iii) contextualising. We contend that our findings extend beyond the specific case of digital nomads and shed light onto the intricacies of work identity for 'new' occupations that are romanticised and monetised through social media and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For LGBQ employees, the disclosure and management of sexual identity in the workplace are likely to cause additional identity work. In this paper, we explore how such identity work is undertaken collectively by gays and lesbians on internet forums. Drawing on the literature on discursive identity work and social media affordances, we conduct a netnographic study of two internet forums, and analyse the ways in which these forums enable gay and lesbian employees' identity work and guide their identity management processes. Overall, our study advances knowledge on sexual identity disclosure and management in three main ways. First, by shifting the focus from the identity disclosure accounts of individual gay and lesbian employees to online peer discussions around the topic, it sheds light on the broader context of identity management beyond the workplace. Second, our findings elucidate particular types of collaborative identity work – consulting, legitimating and questioning identity work – enabled by the affordance of interactivity of internet forums that inform and guide gays and lesbians' identity management practices in organisations. Third, we identify and elaborate on specific discursive identity threats – the 'falsehood', 'incoherence', 'exaggeration' and 'outdatedness' of identity – which gay and lesbian employees are likely to encounter when reflecting on and performing specific identity management strategies, such as concealing or revealing their sexual orientation at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the financial crisis, Danish retail bankers have experienced a marked increase in mundane administrative tasks, which do not conform to what they expect their work lives to be. Seeking to understand how the bankers cope with this, the paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into the identity work of Danish retail bankers, focusing on the ways in which they reconcile experiences of boredom with their work-identity. Drawing on pragmatic sociology, this reconciliation is conceptualized as individual justifications of boredom through different orders of worth. The paper identifies three justifications of boredom: (1) Projective boredom posits boring administrative tasks as unwanted and problematic. This justification is generally in line with currently dominant empirical and theoretical accounts of the financial sector and finds no justification for boredom, seeking, instead, to eliminate it. (2) Domestic boredom justifies the boring tasks as a duty performed by the humble and respectable banker, who is concerned with their status in the local community and whose sense of pride has been damaged by the many scandals in the sector. Finally, (3) civic boredom justifies boredom as a sacrifice made by the selfless banker who acts in the interest of the common good, understood as a more responsible, and less greedy, financial sector. Here, the meaninglessness of specific tasks is transcended in the service of a higher purpose, which helps the individual sustain an identity as a solidary professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how the consequences of disidentification from prevailing professional identities impacted the creation of a new identity and how social media tools enabled and shaped this process. We investigate these phenomena through the struggle of a group of Brazilian journalists who strived to escape the regulation of traditional media identity, creating their own identity as progressive bloggers. Analyzing blog entries and press articles, we uncover four distinctive forms of identity work—historical construction, embracing stigma, establishing authenticity, and satirical deconstruction—fueled by four journalism macro-discourses. Our article contributes to existing literature by uncovering the dynamics of disidentification, its consequences, and identity creation. We also add to the debate on the interaction between identity and resistance by proposing the concept of resistant-identity work, where—beyond being a form or a result of identity work—resistance might enact this process. Finally, we contribute to the study of online-identity processes by demonstrating how the characteristics of social media enable and shape a new form of identity work that is collective and visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisation studies has paid little attention to the contemporary private security industry, despite its enormous recent growth as a supplement to or replacement for state military services in theatres of conflict. To address this neglect, we investigate the workers at the heart of the industry: private security employees or contractors. Amidst widespread and extremely critical media coverage of their activities, we consider the individual contractor as a central agent of contemporary conflict, identifying three main objections to their deployment: a lack of just cause, virtue and professional legitimacy. Using scholarship on identity work and stigma management more specifically, we analyse contractors' accounts of their employment to identify the communicative strategies they employ to challenge the stigma attributed to their occupation and/or to them as incumbents. Our data set is memoirs written by five British contractors, published between 2006 and 2011. We also suggest that data such as these are under-utilised in organisation studies' treatment of identity work, because they represent a distinctive form of this work which we label identity writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical management scholars have emphasized that organizations’ attempts to regulate employees’ identities can prompt the reproduction or transformation of self-identity. The emotional consequences of identity regulation, however, remain largely unexamined. This article explores the experiences of eight management consultants in the British office of a global consulting firm over several months. Interviews and observations were analysed according to the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The results of the study highlight consultants’ identification with an organizationally inspired elite discourse alongside high levels of commitment and the presence of a counter-intuitive yet significant status anxiety. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories that connect identity and anxiety, this article suggests that the continual promotion of an elite identity within the consulting firm leaves many of the consultants feeling acutely anxious about their status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses a study that reveals employees using humour to resist an organization’s normative control attempts via a ‘workplace justice’ program. In an interesting ‘doubling’, the program used excerpts from the television comedy The Office which were intended to provide clear examples of inappropriate workplace behaviour and foster consensual understanding. However, The Office can be read as a parody of the performativity of management, gender and political correctness, a reading that problematizes the organizational purposes and one exploited by employees to construct alternate interpretations. Analysis focuses on a number of intersecting areas centring on identity work and humour. Firstly, resistance to normative control and its presumed intrusions, with resistance manifest in the form of humour. Related to this are employee perceptions that the organization required the mere performance of ‘appropriate behaviour’ in conformance with politically correct, managerially fashionable and legalistically expedient expectations. This raises questions about performance, identity and authenticity. Secondly, identity work takes place within power, but operates through a series of plateaux: actions may act resistively in relation to a managerial/hierarchical plateau whilst at the same time acting to reproduce forms of heteronormative masculinity in a different, gender power plateau. Thirdly, the article examines the role of humour in the complexities of identity work and in relation to different frameworks of power. It further theorizes and illustrates the ambiguities of humour and its double-edged capacity to contribute to the maintenance of the status quo and the performance of power as well as its resistive and subversive potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science research can play a valuable role in enabling people to understand how their personal predicaments relate to the broader structures and historical circumstances in which they arise. This was argued by Wright Mills (1970, originally 1959) with his concept of the sociological imagination, a notion of considerable relevance to the identity issues which arise in relation to organizational involvement. Using a rare combination of ethnographic, autobiographical and interview research material, a close examination is made of two managers' identity work and the part played in this by their involvement in one specific organization in particular structural and historical circumstances. In the course of carrying out this study the concept of 'identity work' has been developed and refined. This incorporates a clear analytical distinction between internal personal 'self-identities' and external discursive 'social-identities' with social- identities being seen as a link or bridge between socially available discourses and self-identities. 'Managerial identities' take their place among the multiplicity of social-identities to which any particular manager may relate in both their 'inward facing' and their 'outward facing' identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics between identity (who I am) and anti-identity (who am I not) are drawn on to explore the identity work of senior and middle managers who have elected to embark on formal, sustained and intensive leadership development work. We construct the concept of a default identity, not primarily as an oppositional or negative identity, but as a baseline identity that, because it is securely held, has a major role to play in the understanding, acquisition and performance of more emergent identity constructions. In exploring the dynamics between management (default identity) and leadership (emergent and desirable identity) for instance, it becomes clear that each is shaped by the other in subtle and overt ways. We conclude that the recognition of the dynamics and relationships between them holds some promise for new thinking and innovation in terms of individual organizational identity work, leadership development and organizational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to supplement the theory that identity work incorporates a dialogic process by focusing on how such processes can proceed. The research question is: how do people's identities become meaningful? The aim is to theorize the 'route to meaning construction' of the self by producing a model of micro dialogical process. The model synthesizes current research on dialogic processes and classic concepts of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein. An empirical analysis is conducted of a longitudinal multi-method engagement with an organization in the cultural sector, focusing on the multiple identity narratives of a manager. Subsequently, the model is developed to incorporate the concepts of meaning-giving tensions and enabling/militating factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]