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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

To increase knowledge about the consequences of introducing strategic measures in public organizations, for both intra- and interorganizational relationships, interviews in eight - and shadowing in two - public facilities management organizations were performed. Using a frame for data analysis based on institutional work, findings show that, when introducing strategic measures, public officials worked to place their organizations in a new position within the institutional field. During this process, officials engaged in both external and internal institutional work. The findings highlight how tensions between working externally and internally, influences public officials' day-to-day practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Danish retail banking is characterized by a role conflict between sales and advice. Through the lens of identity work, this study explores how bankers negotiate this conflict by seeking to make sense of themselves and justify the work that they do. We show that bankers are keenly aware of the role conflicts they face in doing their jobs, but they also discover ways of making these conflicts meaningfully productive for themselves, their employers, and their customers. To explain these findings, we introduce Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance, provisionally understood as a processual and relational conceptualization of well-being. This leads to a conceptualization of bankers' identity work of managing the sales–advice tension as striving for professional resonance, the attainment of which is possible through three strategies: an advice orientation, which can be understood as a protection of resonance; a sale orientation, which relies on a promise of resonance; and an integration of sales and advice, which can be seen as an incorporation of resonance. Following the analysis, the normativity of resonance theory is leveraged in a critical discussion of the identified strategies of professional resonance, and the potential implications for well-being research and human resource management practices are considered. [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]

Through the qualitative analysis of 81 semi-structured interviews of academics from the STEM fields, working in UK, Australia, and Italy, we support and challenge the previous literature on academic entrepreneurship. On the one hand, our research supports previous studies which suggest that some academics find compatibility between their academic roles and forms of science commercialization and knowledge transfer. The findings suggest that such an alignment of roles takes place in contexts (disciplinary, proximal) which stimulate and support academic entrepreneurship. At the same time, we argue against of the idea of fusion of academic-entrepreneur role identity and we suggest whilst the two roles may coexist, they are separate, as the academic identity remains the central salient identity. Continuity of core academic values is linked to 'supranational' factors such as norms and values of the academic profession and of disciplinary fields, which influence perceptions of alignment or misalignment with various activities, including the entrepreneurial one. We offer a redefinition of academic entrepreneurship through the lens of social entrepreneurship which could constitute the bridge between two worlds which are typically considered difficult to connect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study increases our understanding of Westerners seeking genuine fairy tale experiences of magic, transformation and enchantment within South American psychedelic ayahuasca tourism. Examining 63 tourists, this study shows how vision-based spirit sensegivers facilitate individuals in exorcising demons, to make sense of themselves as spiritual beings within an enchanted universe. However, and with this potion quickly wearing off upon returning to the West, tourists feel abandoned by their spirits, and disconnected from the fairy lands. Coupled with not wanting to re-experience intense inner tensions from stepping in and out of a fairy tale, further tourism is rejected. As such, ayahuasca tourism becomes a 'forgotten' fairy tale, rarely told. [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]

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]

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]

Identity work, the process through which entrepreneurs create a coherent and distinctive identity for themselves and their businesses, constitutes an important source of legitimacy. Yet while the ongoing social and spatial contexts in which entrepreneurs operate are increasingly viewed as critical contingencies for understanding their identity work, historical context is largely neglected. We focus on how entrepreneurs in the nascent start-up scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia employ history in their identity work as they navigate a rapidly changing societal context. Based on three months of qualitative field research, our findings indicate that research participants distance themselves from the older generation by describing them as risk-averse, conventional and distrusting, while they embrace their own generation as innovative, globally oriented, and socially engaged. Through the articulation of these generational identity markers, young entrepreneurs construct and position themselves within a historical narrative of Cambodian development and, in turn, seek legitimacy for themselves, their business ventures, and the broader start-up scene. Our contribution lies in providing a more historically-sensitive understanding of entrepreneurial identity work, proposing generational identity work as a mechanism for entrepreneurs to gain legitimacy, and illuminating the importance of conceptualizing generations as social forces in entrepreneurship studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study examines the magico-spiritual identity work and sensegiving, carried out by five indigenous South American shamans engaged in selling and delivering ayahuasca ceremonies. Although ayahuasca tourism is the most popular and pervasive form of psychoactive tourism, shamans are routinely stigmatised from selling indigenous knowledge, either as demonic witch doctors from their local communities, or as drug dealers from the West. Unpacking the shaman identity, this study contributes to our understanding of how this hegemonic supernatural identity is well suited to mitigating stigma, and geared towards dominating the spiritual marketplace. Key findings indicate how the otherworldly is the foundation of the shaman identity, sensegiving, and shamans being viewed as the arbiters of all knowledge, unchallengeable by any other system of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), we know little about how SIEs develop the aspiration to leave both home employers and home countries behind. Based on rich empirical data from Western European SIEs, who migrated to North America, we explored key dynamics of identity work leading up to their decision to expatriate. We found that an SIE's self-concept as a talented professional is initially negatively impacted by interactions with their home employers. However, through elevating conversations with 'trusted outsiders', SIEs engage in re-crafting a more positive sense of self. SIEs associate the trusted outsiders' foreign professional background with idealized future work environments, the 'promised land', in which they see their elevated selves fulfilled. Our findings have important implications for research on drivers of self-initiated expatriation, voluntary turnover and talent management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, the majority of D/deaf students enter schooling in a mainstream setting. Little has been written about their experiences and how a change in school settings impacts their learning and social identity. In this study, semi-structured interviews have been conducted with nine students, and the results show that their time in a mainstream school setting has led them to construct a marginal or negative social identity, but after transitioning to a Deaf school, the social identity has shifted towards a positive one. According to students, this is due to feelings of belonging as equal members of the social group where they are given the opportunity to develop language skills that allow them to communicate without restrictions. The students also report improvement in academic achievements as a result of the sign bilingual school setting. Parents and D/deaf students need to experience the different language settings to make an informed decision. [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]

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]

This paper examines how entrepreneurs within different settings reflect on social interactions to work on their identity. Using life story narratives, we explore a business membership network and a creative hub in the central belt of Scotland. Our subsequent model shows how individuals in these settings use different dominant interpretive repertoires, as represented by structural-instrumental work in the business network and relational work in the creative hub. We also show how the interpretive repertoires both shape and are shaped by what individuals strive for in their identity work: striving for esteem and striving for closeness. We discuss how our findings offer insight into the dynamics of social identities and how they are reproduced and maintained through situated exchange using specific interpretive repertoires and striving agendas. [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]

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]

When researching reading events, the depth to which we understand the student experience is all-important. Much insight has come from exploring sociocultural understandings, yet by focusing upon how the critical sociocultural dynamics of identity, agency and power relationships are mediated, we can understand differently the moment-to-moment negotiations undertaken. This article reports on a study that investigated how small groups of diverse students aged ten and eleven from two Melbourne schools experienced talk around two picturebooks that prompt thinking around important social issues. Some often surprising insights were revealed around shifts in student identity portrayals, degrees of agency and individual students' abilities to take some control in this, as well as how these negotiations can be beneficial yet somewhat unsettling at times. The article also shows that these shifts and negotiations can be both challenging and potentially rewarding for students as well as the teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship has been proposed as a solution to extending working lives. However, little is known about how older (50+) entrepreneurs manage their personal transitions into entrepreneurship. In this paper, we propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity paradoxes that older entrepreneurs experience during their transition into entrepreneurship and how they manage it. We use a qualitative study conducted over 14 months in the United Kingdom. Our analysis shows how older entrepreneurs confront identity paradoxes, interruptions and identity polarization in their attempts to shift from older identities and activity patterns into new ones. The entrepreneurs who manage to overcome the identity interruptions and polarization that the transition brings move away from an initial sense of isolation and bring creative understandings to older entrepreneuring processes. Our results expand current understanding of entrepreneurial identity work in liminal conditions, especially among older entrepreneurs, by looking at the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviours as an important aspect of entrepreneuring transitions rather than as negative frictions to be avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study investigates how entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWDs) position themselves, in their identity work, vis-à-vis dominant, normative representations of the entrepreneur that tend to exclude them. Addressing the current neglect in how EWDs deal with such discursive barriers, we document four identity positions which they deploy, in various combinations, to construct an identity as an entrepreneur. Our findings show that outward positions, by which EWDs compare their own self with (non)-entrepreneurial (able-bodied) others and emphasize similarity and uniqueness, reproduce normative representations of the entrepreneur. Inward positions, by which EWDs engage in inner conversations contrasting their current self with older, aspirational or impossible selves, on the contrary lead to the destabilization of normative representations. This study speaks back to wider debates in entrepreneurship studies, including the plea to consider 'ordinary' entrepreneurs, the difference between 'being' an entrepreneur and 'doing' entrepreneurship, and the value in difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale construction projects increasingly have powerful and knowledgeable clients as project owners with whom professionals, such as architects, must interact. In such contexts, clients may have a significant impact on the constitution of a coherent and stable professional identity. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 architects across four large multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs) located in Sydney, Australia, supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article explores how architects constitute their identity in interactions with clients. The findings led us to conceptualise professional–client interactions in terms of two overarching discursive strategies deployed by architects in attempts to manage clients that are powerful and knowledgeable: best for client and best for project. We illustrate the anxieties that architects experience and suggest that attempts to secure professional identity may result in (re)producing an enduring sense of anxiety with unintended consequences for project outcomes and organisational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human sexuality is a highly regulated but fluid construct that people communicatively organize around. What has been socially constructed as "normal" sexuality (e.g., preferences, rights, vocabulary, etc.) has shifted dramatically over time, and differently between communities and geographic boundaries. In workplace contexts, where policies and daily practices explicitly and implicitly regulate performances of and communication about sexuality, regional and cultural sexual "norms" can affect how people of diverse sexualities understand and experience their jobs. The Midwestern United States is a particularly complex and diverse region when considering sexual equality in the workplace. Using the lens of co-sexuality, this study explores how people identifying with varying sexual, gender, and professional identities in Midwestern workplaces explained their perceptions of "normal" sexuality and how it affected their workplace experiences. Participants drew on the master narrative of the Midwest, composed of perceived Judeo-Christian norms and a cultural discomfort with difference, and described feeling simultaneously pulled toward and pushed away from cultural sexual "norms" in their day-to-day work environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing interest in promoting environmental education (EE), as in other countries, its status within the formal education system in Israel is still ambiguous and its effectiveness questionable. Proceeding from the view of structure-agent interdependency, the present study focuses on teachers' identity as key to understanding the situation in their professional field. Analysis is based on in-depth interviews with ten EE teachers in ten public elementary-schools in Israel, to investigate their occupational self-perception as part of the system in which they operate. Findings reveal an ambivalent professional identity and a weak sense of agency as EE teachers. Teachers' impaired occupational self-image have implications for their potential role in advancing EE in particular and for the educational field in Israel in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of digital media enables entrepreneurs to develop their startups in strategic manner. However, how entrepreneurs develop their identity through digital media is currently underexplored. Therefore, our focus is on how entrepreneurs describe and reflect on their communication with their audiences over digital media and, in turn, how that shapes their becoming as entrepreneurs. Our empirical data consists of 29 qualitative interviews and close observations in the start-up incubator neudeli at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Through our analysis we show how the practice of strategic sparring and the practice of brand co-creation facilitate the development towards three alternative identity types, which are "solution-driven", "purpose-driven" and "lifestyle-driven" identity. Ultimately, our study highlights how media management can be seen as a practice of self through communication over digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As concerns spread about the capacity of teacher education programmes to prepare preservice teachers for entry into the teaching profession, literature and policy have begun to scrutinise the knowledge and skills of teacher educators. Some publications have focused on the professional development needed by teacher educators to align their teaching with standards-based reform policies. Little attention has been paid, though, to the complex ways teacher educators, individually and in communities, negotiate these policies in the course of their day-to-day practices. This qualitative study examines how standards-based reforms have come to dominate teacher education policy in the English speaking world, and how they have influenced the practices and identities of teacher educators over the past three decades. It employs reflexive autobiographical narratives written by five English teacher educators from different generations in one Australian university to investigate how their practices and identities are shaped by, or resistant to, the de-professionalising potential of standards-based reforms. The authors advocate for the concept of ideological becoming to better understand the formation and development of English teacher educators, and they identify a number of 'enablers' which can activate and sustain teacher educators' becoming throughout their careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores one female student teacher's experiences of learning to teach mathematics. Data included weekly emails and an interview through which Kelly expressed her struggle to be recognised as mathematical and to be heard in pedagogical relationships within a subject that is discursively aligned with masculinity. Analysis drew on feminist post-structural understandings of discourse and power relations. I identify an array of discourses of gender, mathematics, ability, confidence and complex micro-relations of power which shaped her 'identity work' and examine how she was able to reposition herself positively as a teacher of mathematics, resisting dominant transmission-based approaches to teaching mathematics. While the course sought to challenge traditional mathematical pedagogies, gendered ways of being mathematical were not confronted. I argue that teacher educators need to pay attention to the way power circulates to marginalise and silence some students and to focus on transformation of their own identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances knowledge of the productive, strategically important roles that media consumers play in brand co-creation in the empirical context of multichannel media outlets. Based on a qualitative study, the paper shows how a media company leverages the power of communities and networks in its strategic brand management to engage its consumers in brand co-creation by authoring, contesting, and circulating narratives about the brand and their relationship with the brand in the course of their identity work as individuals and members of the online community of the brand. The paper concludes that in the contemporary co-creative media culture, media managers might need to develop new practices and approaches to brand management that stimulate and motivate brand co-creation all the while preserving the brand's essence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that the ascendency of managerialism in the higher education sector and its fundamental contradictions with the professional values has placed misaligning identity claims upon academics. However, the identity tension that arises from the misfit between the professional ethos and the organisations' market-driven requirements, and the ways in which academics cope with it has received insufficient attention. In this article, grounded on a conception of identity that describes it as in-progress narratives available to people, I analyse the routine work of academics in a Canadian public university. The results reveal that they reflexively and situationally construct different versions of their professional selves to minimise the tensions between the co-existing yet contradictory identity claims. In so doing, I found that the academics undertake two discursive strategies of embracing and distancing. I explain how these 'identity work' mechanisms help to strike a balance between the two contradictory discourses and suggest some directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers are essential to the management of nonprofit community sport organizations (CSOs). Although previous research has focused on the individual or institutional factors that influence volunteerism in these contexts, there has been less attention to how these factors collectively impact group identity formation, which is associated with collective solidarity. Using the theoretical lens of identity work, this case study analyzes this process from a critical realist perspective. Document analysis and a focus group with three paid staff members were used to generate data on the 'sensebreaking' and 'sensegiving' cues projected by a CSO, and interviews were conducted to understand volunteers' 'sensemaking' of these cues, along with the corollary influence on group identity formation. Results indicate reconciling sport identities and adjusting to formalized tasks were salient 'sensebreaking' cues. Moreover, the reputation of the CSO and establishment of role identities were identified as key 'sensegiving' mechanisms, while symbols and conviviality among volunteers helped promote collective group identities. The discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of findings, focusing specifically on the identity work performed by volunteers and group identity formation, and also discusses key implications for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With more graduates, degree outcomes have a renewed significance for high-achieving students to stand out in a graduate crowd. In the United Kingdom, over a quarter of undergraduates now leave university with the highest grade – a 'first-class' degree – although students from non-traditional and underprivileged backgrounds are the least likely. This article explores the experiences of high-achieving non-traditional (HANT) university students. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 final-year students who are on course to achieve a first-class degree from working-class, minority ethnic and/or mature backgrounds, we examine their pathways to academic success through identity works and negotiations. We argue that early successes are crucial for students to re-evaluate their self-expectations as students who can achieve in higher education, while self-esteem, pride or fear can prevent students from maximising their available resources and opportunities. Implications for practice and policy are discussed, including the reflective advice from HANT students towards academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid professional managers appear less effective in introducing management into public professional settings than policymakers hope. To date, research has offered little understanding of professionals' identity transition challenge and the role of social interactions underpinning this process. We studied the identity work of hybrid doctors inside a large public health-care organization, finding that it takes place through processes of familiarizing with management, rationalizing being a hybrid, and legitimizing the new role-identity. We contribute to the literature by showing that identity work is distributed and enabled by social interactions beyond the professional group. Implications for policymakers and executives are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite common experiences of identity damage, decline, and deterioration, many brain injury survivors succeed in reconstructing robust identities in the wake of injury. Yet, while this accomplishment greatly benefits survivors' quality of life, little is known about how positive identity work might be facilitated or enhanced in therapeutic institutions. Drawing on data from a women's self-help group, we argue that an egalitarian, reflective, strength-focused, and gender-segregated environment can provide female ABI (acquired brain injury) survivors with a fertile scene for identity enhancement and offer unique opportunities for collective identity development. Sociolinguistic interactional analysis revealed four types of positive identity work undertaken within the group: constructing competent selves; tempering the threat of loss and impairment; resisting infantilisation and delegitimisation; and asserting a collective gender identity. This identity work was facilitated by specific programme attributes and activities and contributed to the global project of decentring disability and destigmatising impairments and losses. We call for increased attention to identity issues in brain injury rehabilitation and argue that gender-segregated programming can provide a unique space for female survivors to construct empowering individual and collective identities after injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two and a half years after the July 2011 massacre on the Norwegian island of Utøya, 68 of the adolescent survivors were interviewed about their everyday life at school. The interviews revealed changes in the interplay and counterplay between student identity and social identity when new identities connected to the massacre were introduced in the school arena. This dynamic has two prominent contradictory aspects: (1) the strong need to avoid being associated with the massacre, yet (2) they also experience a high degree of imposed external framing of identity configuration. This article investigates school as an arena where unwanted identity changes are played out. School emerges as an arena that can complicate the rehabilitation process by confirming and specifying the changes caused by exposure to trauma. Implications for what trauma support at school could entail for trauma-exposed adolescents are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many negative portrayals of bisexuality within Western culture relate to relationships, yet only a small body of research has explored bisexual people’s experiences of their bisexual identity within their partner relationships, particularly in relation to the wider cultural context of binegativity. Twenty qualitative interviews were conducted with bisexual men, women, trans and genderqueer/non-binary people in relationships. Participants were based in the United Kingdom and ranged from 18 to 40 years old. We conducted a thematic analysis of the data and identified two key themes: 1) The case of the disappearing bisexual: Invisible identities and unintelligible bisexual relationships and 2) That’s not my bisexuality and not my bisexual relationship: Defending self, relationships, and partners against bisexual negativity. In the first theme, we report how bisexual identity was understood by participants as largely invisible, particularly when they were in relationships, and discuss how the notion of a ‘bisexual relationship’ was seemingly unintelligible. In the second theme, we discuss how participants engaged in identity and relationship work to defend themselves and their partners against binegativity in order to protect their bisexual identity, their partners and their relationships. These results contribute novel findings to our understandings of how bisexual people experience and manage their identities and relationships within the wider context of binegativity. We conclude with a discussion of the importance and implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on an in-depth case study of narrative identity work to explore heuristically the role of host country nationals in the reproduction of orientalist discourses in multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on this analysis, it presents an identity strategy termed the other Chinese. The other Chinese claims to be in-between the West, that is constructed as superior modern and rational, and China, that is constructed as backwards and chaotic. This in-betweenness allows the other Chinese to take the role of a mediator between locals and expatriates, and at the same time claim superiority towards normal Chinese. Thus, this identity construction is a creative act of hybridization and localization, but it is not subversive to existing power structures in the MNCs. However, as we show, the construction of the other Chinese is not inextricably bound to the field of the MNCs, but is based on a hybrid and creative entanglement of various sources such as class positions and public discourse in China, in which the MNCs only occupy an insignificant role. It is, therefore, to be understood as an aspect of identity construction in China relevant for MNC identity, rather than an aspect of the transnational field of the MNCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) research considers the achievement of a collaborative identity as a key enabler of a successful collaboration. As a result, little has been said about the interactions between collaborative and non-collaborative identities. We build on narrative identity work and positioning theory, to explore how collaboration partners engage in identity work positioning to manage the interactions of the multiple identities emerging through the process of collaboration as they try to accomplish collaborative work. We illustrate this process through a qualitative longitudinal study of an educational partnership in Greece. Our analysis shows how IOC partners manage the interactions between collaborative and non-collaborative identities by positioning themselves, and others, in narratives of collaboration as part of their daily identity work when responding to emerging collaborative needs. Our research extends our current understanding of identity work processes in IOCs by demonstrating the paradoxical nature of the collaboration, which requires relying on both collaborative and non-collaborative identities for the successful achievement of aims. We therefore suggest that identity tensions should not be resolved but rather managed, since they enable partners to respond creatively to contextual organizational changes and make sense of the collaboration as it happens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health social work is a field with challenges, opportunities, and ways of professing social work that may vary between different national contexts. In this article, we look at how Romanian health social workers construct their professional identity through their everyday identity work. Drawing on a qualitative study based on interviews with 21 health social workers working in various organizational contexts, we analyze what health social workers say they do and how this shapes their self-conception as professionals. Four main themes emerged from participants’ descriptions: being a helping professional, being a mediator, gaining recognition, and contending with limits. Through these themes, participants articulated the everyday struggles and satisfactions specific to working as recently recognized professionals in Romanian health and welfare systems not always supportive of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyses how gender bias impacts upon women’s efforts to legitimate nascent ventures. Given the importance of founder identity as a proxy for entrepreneurial legitimacy at nascency, we explore the identity work women undertake when seeking to claim legitimacy for their emerging ventures in a prevailing context of masculinity. In so doing, we challenge taken for granted norms pertaining to legitimacy and question the basis upon which that knowledge is claimed. In effect, debates regarding entrepreneurial legitimacy are presented as gender neutral yet, entrepreneurship is a gender biased activity. Thus, we argue it is essential to recognize how gendered assumptions impinge upon the quest for legitimacy. To illustrate our analysis, we use retrospective and real time empirical evidence evaluating legitimating strategies as they unfold, our findings reveal tensions between feminine identities such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ and those of the prototypical entrepreneur. This dissonance prompted women to undertake specific forms of identity work to bridge the gap between femininity, legitimacy and entrepreneurship. We conclude by arguing that the pursuit of entrepreneurial legitimacy during nascency is a gendered process which disadvantages women and has the potential to negatively impact upon the future prospects of their fledgling ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) have been described as being ‘neither fish nor fowl’, occupying a role between student and teacher. Their multiple identities are commonly framed within the literature as a key challenge. This study explored the perspectives of GTAs when discussing their teaching work, through activity-oriented focus groups with nine GTAs from a UK university. Thematic analysis revealed that whilst GTAs showed a lack of clarity over their identity, they are actively involved in the process of ‘identity work’ through negotiating an emerging professional identity. Furthermore, liminality of status, being neither fully a student nor teacher, allows GTAs to operate with identity malleability, adjusting their most salient identity to meet the demands of the situation. It is argued that rather than occupying an ‘ambiguous niche’, GTAs occupy a ‘unique niche’ and the identity malleability they possess affords the optimum conditions in which to engage in identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, academic identity work is explored through an examination of its portrayal in a work of narrative fiction using a conceptual tool from literary studies. It is found that such an approach provides insights that would otherwise be difficult to uncover by more conventional methods. The analysis reveals academic identity work as an ongoing narrative process of interplay between internal (individual) perspectives, actions, and stories and external (organisational and institutional) influences. It is also found that timespace contexts – chronotopes – play an important role. They show that maintaining a coherent academic identity is fraught with challenges, particularly when navigating the multitude of perspectives on what it means to become an academic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the identity work of science-based entrepreneurs in two very different country contexts: Finland and Russia. Building on the literature investigating role identities, we first analyse the identification of individuals with the roles of a scientist and an entrepreneur; and second, how individuals manage the boundary between these two roles. Methodologically, we take a narrative approach, which regards life stories as identity constructions. Our empirical data consist of 23 biographical interviews with science-based entrepreneurs that are inductively analysed. Our findings show that the Russian informants considered being a scientist a salient part of their self-identification, distanced themselves from the role of an entrepreneur, and set discursive boundaries to segment the two roles. For the Finnish informants, identification with the professional roles as a scientist or as an entrepreneur was less salient for the personal identity as they make a clear distinction between ‘what one does’ and ‘who one is’. They also view the two roles as integrated rather than segmented, and have no significant need to justify the border-crossing between them. Our contribution is in demonstrating how science-based entrepreneurs’ identity work is influenced by importance and meanings attached to different work roles, and how these are contextualised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]