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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.

PurposeThis study seeks to explore the key themes in identity play during unemployment and the potential obstacles faced by unemployed individuals.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative study is based on 23 interviews with unemployed individuals in Germany.FindingsThe authors identify three obstacles to identity play during unemployment: a lack of psychological safety to explore possible selves, a lack of opportunity to try out possible selves and a lack of social validation for possible selves. Several interviewees highlight the impact of social context, creating an absence of institutional support and a limited identity “playspace.” As such, the authors illustrate that when faced with these obstacles, the unemployed individuals of this study predominantly focus on identity work instead of identity play. Only a few interviewees seem to engage in and sustain identity play. The authors propose that the elaborate nature of their possible selves and their focus on future opportunities may overshadow the present self and immediate obstacles.Originality/valueThe authors argue that identity play is not readily available to all individuals in all situations. Instead, they suggest that some psychologically and socially threatening contexts such as unemployment are characterized by obstacles that constrain individuals' identity play and prevent the adoption of new work identities. Hence, the authors call for a more balanced and localized understanding of identity play.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the experiences of permanent liminality of academics and the associated multidimensional processes of identity negotiation.Design/methodology/approachThe article draws upon a three-and-a-half-year at-home ethnography. The first author – as insider, participant and researcher – investigated the consequences of an organizational redesign that pushed members of a local university department into a situation of permanent liminality.FindingsThe paper describes how academics simultaneously followed multiple trajectories in their identity negotiation as a response to ongoing experiences of ambiguity, disorientation, powerlessness and loss of status.Practical implicationsManagement decisions in higher education institutions based on administrative concerns can have adverse effects for academics, particularly when such decisions disturb, complicate or even render impossible identification processes. University managers need to realize and to respond to the struggle of academics getting lost in an endless quest for defining who they are.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the dual character of identity negotiation in conditions of permanent liminality as unresolved identity work through simultaneous identification and dis-identification. It further shows the multidimensionality of this identity work and argues that identity negotiation as a response to perpetual liminality is informed by notions of struggle and notions of opportunity.

Understanding what ties precarious workers to online organizations and what makes them drift away is a key issue in today’s digitalized world. In this article, we present a study of a blog portal developed for commercial purposes and show how professional and amateur bloggers engage in this emerging online community and organization. We develop new understandings of dynamic relationships between boundaries, roles and identities, and offer an analysis of how identities are (re)constructed in interaction with others in fluid online spaces. We theorize boundary work as a form of identity work, elucidate how roles influence the way individual and collective identity constructions are intertwined, and highlight the importance of emotions in conformist and resistant identity work online. Our study has broader implications for understanding identities in the age of technology and precarity.

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.

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.

Narrative criminology has successfully demonstrated how the construction and structure of self-narratives are important for prisoners’ process of change and desistance from crime. However, much of this work has tended to focus narrowly on the offender and how he or she uses self-narrative to relate to the offense, the victim, past childhood, the family, or projected hopes for future change. In an effort to extend prior work, this study takes a complementary approach by analyzing how children and their long-term incarcerated fathers in Danish maximum-security prisons talk about family relations and cohesiveness during imprisonment. To address the gap in research and methodology, we introduce the notion of family narratives, and through microanalyses of in-depth interviews with seven prisoners and seven children, we extract three kinds of family narratives. These narratives were prompted by using a board game recently implemented into the visiting program in Danish prisons to help children and prisoners to re-construct disrupted family relations. Our findings illuminate how the design of a game can be a novel method for collecting data on children and incarcerated fathers and how family narratives can serve as lenses for studying fragile family identity, masculinity, and child–parent relations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of identity play process by including the stories we live by in depth. Over the past decade, identity play literature has placed more emphasis on the role of self-narratives. Yet, the “stories we live by”, including the told or untold stories of past and imagined events of the future, have not been considered in depth in these self-narratives.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper draws on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures and attempts to include the stories we live by in scholarly conceptualizations and explorations of identity play processes.FindingsDrawing on the personal construct theory, narrative identity and constructivist psychotherapy literatures this paper offers a comprehensive conceptual model of how the stories we live by infuse individual identity construction processes. The model highlights the inter-connectivity among stories we live by, identity play, identity work, sensemaking and social validation. Looking through the lens of the personal construct theory and taking these inter-connectivities into account lead to the observation of temporality in identity construction and the plurivocality of self-narratives.Originality/valueThis paper looks at identity play through the lens of the personal construct theory. However, self-narratives are seen as a medium for manifestation of personal constructs. Thus, this paper also draws on the narrative identity literature and dialogical-self concept, which helps access the multiplicity of the self-narratives to widen our grasp of personal constructs. This paper combines discourse of deconstruction with the dialogical-self concept and provides more means for the explication of identity play.

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.

An organization’s identity, as defined by its members, must be aligned with its collective identity prescribed by institutions. This alignment is broken when an institutional change threatens the collective identity and jeopardizes the existence of a group of organizations. They then undertake to carry out identity work, both internal and external, in order to establish a new alignment. Based on a single case study, this research article explores the interplay between the two forms of identity work: internal and external. The findings of this study reveal that introspective internal identity work feeds the work to repair the collective identity with traditional values that have been rediscovered thanks to a reflexive examination of self by the organization. By internal extrospection identity work, the external identity repair work is fed with new values that the organization internalizes and enacts in its practices. Based on these findings, this article puts forward new theoretical propositions, as well as a model of the interplay between internal and external identity work that aims to realign the organization’s identity with that of the collective., L’identité de l’organisation telle qu’elle est définie par ses membres doit être alignée à son identité collective prescrite par les institutions. Cet alignement est rompu quand un changement institutionnel menace l’identité collective et remet en cause l’existence d’un groupe d’organisations. Celles-ci s’investissent alors dans un travail identitaire, à la fois interne et externe, afin d’obtenir un nouvel alignement. Cet article explore, à partir d’une étude de cas unique, l’articulation entre les deux formes de travail identitaire, interne et externe. Les résultats mettent en évidence qu’un travail identitaire interne d’introspection alimente le travail de réparation de l’identité collective en valeurs historiques, retrouvées grâce à un examen réflexif de soi par l’organisation. Le travail externe de réparation se nourrit de nouvelles valeurs que l’organisation internalise et énacte dans ses pratiques, grâce à un travail identitaire interne d’extrospection. À partir de ces résultats, l’article met à jour de nouvelles propositions théoriques et une modélisation de l’articulation entre le travail identitaire interne et externe visant à réaligner l’identité propre à l’organisation et l’identité collective.

Based on an autoethnographic study of early career researchers’ field research experiences, we show how individuals deal with moments of discrimination that present identity threats. This is accomplished through participating in the construction of a shared holding environment to provide emotional shelter and resources for resultant identity work. We show how they collectively develop anticipatory responses to future identity threats and inadvertently how this allows the effects of discrimination to be both unchallenged and amplified. We draw implications for identity work theory, adding to current understandings of identity threats, tensions, and challenges and the dynamics through which these are addressed, avoided, or worked around, as well as the shadow side of such activities. We also offer practical implications about the business schools’ role in nurturing early career researchers’ identity work. Postprint

Entrepreneurship education (EE) theory and practice show increasing interest in the concept of identity work as integral to entrepreneurial learning. EE offers various approaches to guiding students towards entrepreneurial identities, but critics note that these meet neoliberal manifestations of the entrepreneurial self, leaving little room for alternative identities to be cultivated in EE. Concerned with this critique, we aim to contribute to the EE literature through a detailed investigation of the identity work practices enacted in a case of EE, which explicitly seeks to facilitate the entrepreneurial identity construction of students. Through an in-depth analysis of teacher–student interactions, we identify three practices: setting new rules to activate the entrepreneurial self, playing by the rules by figuring the script and bending the rules protecting the self. Our analysis highlights the significance of resistance and notions of authenticity, which leads us to rethink the meaning and conditions of entrepreneurial identity work in EE.

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.

textabstractPhysicians are known for safeguarding their professional identities against organisational influences. However, this study shows how a medical leadership programme enables the reconstruction of professional identities that work with rather than against organisational and institutional contexts to improve quality and efficiency of care. Based on an ethnographic study, the results illustrate how physicians initially construct conflicting leadership narratives – heroic (pioneer), clinical (patient's guardian) and collaborative (linking pin) leader – in reaction to changing organisational and clinical demands. Each narrative contains a particular relational-agentic view of physicians regarding the contexts of hospitals: respectively as individually shapeable; disconnected or collectively adjustable. Interactions between teachers, participants, group discussions and in-hospital experiences led to the gradual deconstruction of the heroic –and clinical leader narrative. Collaborative leadership emerged as the desirable new professional identity. We contribute to the professional identity literature by illustrating how physicians make a gradual transition from viewing organisational and institutional contexts as pre-given to contexting, that is, continuously adjusting the context with others. When engaged in contexting, physicians increasingly consider managers and directors as necessary partners and colleague-physicians who do not wish to change as the new ‘anti-identity’.

This paper investigates how leaders construct ‘loss’ identity narratives which defuse the scope for external attack and sustain self-meanings. We draw on a sample of 31 United Kingdom business school deans, who although often depicted as multi-talented, high-status achievers, are also targets for criticism and have high rates of turnover. Our study makes two principal contributions. First, we argue that leaders may employ a specific pattern of identity work involving talk about loss to construct identities that bolster their leadership by presenting them as making sacrifices for their institutions. Losses are ubiquitous and malleable discursive resources that constitute both identity threats and opportunities for constructing preferred identities. Second, we deepen understanding of ‘preferred identities’, i.e. normative self-narratives that specify who people want to be, and to be seen to be, and which serve self-meaning and impression management functions. Preferred identities, though, do not necessarily serve people’s interests, and deans tied themselves to demanding requirements by authoring themselves as research credible, scrupulously moral, hard-working professionals.

Although many scholars in the field of mathematics education are aware that identity discourses are highly political, research in the field usually lacks a framework theoretically and methodologically to address the political dimension of identity research. Based on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and the case of a female secondary school student at a German public school, the present paper analyses identity as a socio-political process of identity work articulated around the discourse of ‘refusing school mathematics’ in our contemporary times. Her refusal of mathematics is constituted around issues related to a series of noted classroom practices such as collective work, being together and having fun, relevance of mathematics in society and life, respect of one’s own dignity instead of becoming humiliated, and bodily activity instead of seated work. We illustrate how discourse theory allows us to see the identity work of refusing mathematics as a contingent process in a discursive field of socio-political struggle. In this process the subject moves beyond an essentialist ‘refusal’ of mathemat- ics learning towards articulating her refusal of a particular mathematics education socio-materiality that needs to become subverted and reworked into more affirmative terms.

Online collaboration has become a regular practice for many Internet users, reflecting the emergence of new participatory cultures in the virtual world. However, little is yet known about the processes and conditions for online collaboration in informally formed writing spaces and how these create opportunities for participants’ identity work. This ethnographic case study explores how four young adults, fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (bronies), negotiated a dialogic space for their online collaboration on a fan translation project and how this created opportunities for their identity work. After a year of participant observation, we collected interviews, ethnographic diaries and participants’ chats, which were analysed with qualitative content and discourse analysis methods. The findings showed how the Etherpad online writing platform used by the participants facilitated the construction of dialogic space through the visualization of a shared artefact and adjustable features. It was in this dialogic space where the participants negotiated their expert identities which furthered their discussions about writing, translating and technological innovations. The study advances present-day knowledge about online collaboration in affinity groups, engendering the construction of a dialogic space for collaborative writing and participants’ identity work.

Athletes’ identity development upon retirement from elite sport was examined through a model of self-reformation that integrates and builds on the theoretical underpinnings of identity development and liminality, while advancing seven propositions and supporting conceptual conjectures using findings from research on athletes’ transition out of sport. As some elite athletes lose a salient athletic identity upon retiring from sport, they experience an identity crisis and enter the transition rites feeling in between their former athletic identity and future identity post-sport life, during which a temporary identity moratorium status is needed for identity growth. Given the developmental challenges encountered in moratorium and psychosocial processes necessary to establish a new, fulfilling identity for life after elite sport, we identified key conditions, triggers, and processes that advance how a journey of identity growth paradox experienced during liminality serves as a catalyst toward identity achievement. Elite athletes must be encouraged to persevere in this challenging identity search and delay commitments for as long as it is necessary to achieve identity growth despite experiencing uncomfortable feelings of confusion, void, and ambiguity during the liminal phase. Reforming into an achieved identity for life after elite sport would corroborate the successful navigation of transition, as elite athletes evolved into a synthesized sense of self by cementing, through a negotiated adaptation pathway, constructed identity commitments that will provide new beginnings and meaningful directions to their life after elite sport.

PurposeThis paper aims to further the understanding of women entrepreneurs' multiple identities by exploring how they interact throughout women's life cycles.Design/methodology/approachThis article combines a case study and a narrative analysis to investigate the experience of a woman who founded a business and retired after passing it on to her son. Data were collected by combining two different methods: biographical interview and follow-up interviews or conversations.FindingsFindings show that interactions between a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities may evolve through two main processes of change: transformation and fading. In the transformation process, adverse interactions between identities turn into synergistic and fruitful relationships. In the fading process, conflicts between identities gradually disappear, giving way to peaceful coexistence. Women's agency proves paramount in making these processes possible and helping her achieve personal and professional fulfillment.Originality/valueIn prior studies, women entrepreneurs have mostly been observed at a specific time or stage in their life and entrepreneurial experience. This paper responds to the call for the adoption of a dynamic perspective in the analysis of interactions among a woman entrepreneur's multiple identities so as to show how they may evolve during her entrepreneurial experience.

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities facing educators who wish to facilitate management students’ identity construction as a means to foster their students’ emergent professional identities and post-graduate career attainments. We look to medical and law schools’ recent advancements, alongside their traditional dissemination of knowledge and technical skills, in better aligning students’ developing identities and related behaviors with respective professional ideals. Drawing on insights from these professional schools, we examine whether the concept of “professional virtues” that’s proven valuable in these contexts might also be used to facilitate students’ professional identity construction within management education.

The paper advances our understanding of managerial identity work in the context of HQ–subsidiary relations. We argue that a key part of this identity work is related to cultural stereotypes. On the basis of an analysis of two Finland-based MNCs operating in Russia, the paper elucidates three forms of stereotype-based identity work with enabling or constraining power implications. The first form, stereotypical talk, refers to identity work whereby managers enact their stereotypical conceptions of ‘the other’ to bolster their self-image and ‘inferiorize’ ‘the other’. The second form, reactive talk, is identity work that emerges as a reaction to stereotypical talk whereby managers aim at renegotiating the proposed social arrangement for their own benefit. Finally, the third form, self-reflexive talk, refers to identity work whereby managers attempt to go beyond the social arrangement produced through stereotypical and reactive talk by distancing themselves in a self-reflexive manner from essentialist cultural conceptions. Overall, the paper offers an initial attempt to elucidate how stereotype-based identity work is used to justify or resist existing power structures and power asymmetries in HQ–subsidiary relations within the MNC.

Family values are argued to enable ethical family business conduct. However, how these arise, evolve, and how family leaders articulate them is less understood. Using an 'identity work' approach, this paper finds that the values underpinning identity work: (1) arise from multiple sources (in our case: religion, culture and sustainability), (2) evolve in tandem with the context; and, (3) that their articulation is relational and aspirational, rather than merely historical. Prior research mostly understood family values as rooted in the past and relatively stable, but our rhetorical analysis unlocks a more dynamic and promising research direction advancing family business ethics.

In this article, we propose that social economy organisations (SEOs) can improve their effectiveness if their leaders create a strategy for the management of organisational identity, that is, if they get involved in identity work. After placing the mission at the core of the effectiveness of SEOs, we identified four main focuses of identity work that we see as fundamental to promote the performance of these organisations: a) identity as a lens and as a compass; b) identity as a resource; c) management of multiple identities; d) identity as source of identification. We end with the suggestion of SEOs leaders' development practices that, by emphasizing these four lines of identity work, take advantage of organisational identity, a valuable asset to be used by all those who place the collective benefit above all other income obtained through organised action. En este artículo, proponemos que las organizaciones de economía social (OES) pueden mejorar su efectividad si sus líderes desarrollan una estrategia dirigida a la gestión de la identidad organizacional, es decir, si consiguen involucrarse en la creación de una identidad laboral. Tras situar esta misión en el centro de la efectividad de las OES, identificamos cuatro funciones de la identidad laboral fundamentales a la hora de mejorar el rendimiento laboral: a) la identidad como lente y brújula; b) la identidad como recurso; c) la gestión de múltiples identidades; y d) la identidad como fuente de identificación. Finalizamos con sugerencias para que los líderes de OES desarrollen prácticas, que enfatizando en las cuatro funciones de la identidad laboral descritas anteriormente, aprovechen la identidad organizacional como un valioso activo que pueda ser utilizado por todos aquellos que sitúan el beneficio colectivo por encima de cualquier otro ingreso obtenido a través de la acción organizada.

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.

The number of studies on how the process of identity work takes place in pre- and in-service teacher training contexts has recently increased. This narrative study contributes to this body of work by examining one elementary teacher’s identity work in the context of teaching mathematics at two points in time—the present, as an experienced teacher, and two decades prior, as a pre-service teacher. As part of our narrative approach, this study introduces a biography-stimulated recall method and exemplifies its use. The findings account for continuity and change in a teacher’s identity over time and broaden understanding of influences on identity in pre- and in-service teaching stages. The central role of crisis in teachers’ identity development, particularly when initiated within teacher education contexts, is highlighted. Methodological considerations in narrative follow-up studies are discussed.

The relationship between private security professionals and the military in Israel is complex. While there is growing attention to the fact that security and military actors and their activities are becoming increasingly blurred, the Israeli case shows something different. In this ground-up analysis of the relationship between private security practices and the military, I investigate its constant negotiation by private security professionals through their identification with and differentiation from the military, whereby they reconfigure the meaning of military capital. This identity work should be understood, I propose, within the strongly militarist context of Israeli society, where military capital is highly valued. I argue that actors who exit the military system feel the need to demonstrate the added value of their work in the private sector in order for it to gain value in the light of the symbolic capital given to the military. I analyse these processes as leading to a new kind of militarism, which includes security skills and ideas about professionalism. Such an approach sheds new light on the ways in which security actors can actively reconfigure the workings of military capital in and outside the nation-state and produce a different kind of militarism.

Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting meritorious innovation that is created outside disciplinary boundaries. The open innovation model challenges these boundaries and opens the knowledge work to be conducted by anyone who chooses to contribute. At NASA, the open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed using unusually limited resources; yet it challenged not only the knowledge-work boundaries but also the professional identity of the R&D professionals. This led to divergent reactions from R&D professionals, as adopting the open model required them to go through a multifaceted transformation. Only R&D professionals who underwent identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries, truly adopting the knowledge from outside and sharing their internal knowledge. Others who did not go through that identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced. Adopting open innovation without a change in R&D professionals’ identity resulted in no real change in the R&D process. This paper reveals how such processes unfold and illustrates the critical role of professional identity work in changing knowledge-work boundaries and shifting the locus of innovation.

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11024-017-9332-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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.

The practice of othering has been widely documented in sociological research relative to social networks, ethnicity/race, sexuality, and place. This article considers othering as a strategy to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm the habitus in a small, qualitative sample of twenty-three white working-class boys from South London, aged fourteen to sixteen years, who self-identified as Boremund boys. The research relied heavily on visual methods and Bourdieu's theoretical tools to explore how images of transgression influenced the boys' conception of their own identity as centered upon a distinct version of normative race, class, and gender or othering the nonnormative behavior within their locale. The data show how white working-class boys monitor and police what they perceive as a normative white identity. As a result, the habitus of the Boremund boys engages with complex work to reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of ordinary, white, working-class male in South London. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This study explores how organization members manage institutional contradictions in their everyday life without aiming at change-oriented agency. Drawing on interviews, observations, and archival data from four religious communities in Italy, we find that when organization members experience institutional contradictions between two logics that provide conflicting identity prescriptions but to which they are emotionally attached, they engage in identity work that helps them ameliorate – but not eliminate – tensions that surface when identity elements do not align. More specifically, identity work proved integral to reaching a temporary identity truce, or reconciliation of experienced contradictions, through distancing from illegitimate others and embedding of one’s identity within an established tradition. These findings draw attention to the role of contradictions in institutional maintenance, extending theory that has tended to focus on the experience of contradictions as a source of institutional change. We discuss implications for managing institutional contradictions in everyday organizational life.

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.

Celikoglu, Ozge Merzali/0000-0003-0906-5700 In this study, we explore the identity work among volunteers in a local restaurant in one of the metropolitan cities of Turkey, which serves to paying customers by daytime, and free food to the homeless in the evening. Our setting, which we callThe Diner, is a local attempt to help homeless people whose number increases day by day. Through ethnographic fieldwork, we found that the volunteers at The Diner act asteamsbased on their selective association with a particular volunteer group. To gain an in-depth understanding of these volunteer teams, we examined the volunteers' identification process with volunteer work; structures and motivations of the teams; and collaborations and competitions between the teams. Our approach relies on Snow and Anderson's conception of identity work, and we utilized Goffman's terms of performance, teams, and definitional disruptions.

Conceptualizing organizational representations of disabled workers as a form of socio-ideological control, this study investigates the identity regulation of disabled employees. The comparative analysis of a bank, a labour market intermediary organization and a local public administration unveils distinct ways in which the able-bodied/disabled dichotomy is used to regulate disabled workers’ identity in function of organizational goals and the organization of work: by subsuming them into the ideal employee, by constructing them as the negation of the ideal employee, and by constructing the disabled and the able-bodied employee as distinct and mutually dependent ideal workers. These ‘varieties of ableism’ produce specific understandings of disabled employees that give them differential access to an ideal worker identity, and are resisted in multiple and surprising ways, including reclaiming the ideal worker’s identity and the promised rewards associated with it, and disclosing or hiding one’s embodiment and disability. The study advances the extant knowledge by showing how ableism variously functions as a principle of organizing shaping whom disabled workers are (not) allowed to be in specific organizational settings.

This article seeks to develop our understanding of how management concepts are translated by examining the role of identity work in this process. Rather than a sole focus on changes in a management concept, we examine tensions and congruences between agents’ orientations towards that concept and how they see the broader organizational engagement with it. Through an examination of qualitative data from a study of those specifically tasked with the implementation of Lean in hospital contexts, we identify their narratives of self in relation to the concept. We show how, through four different types of translation-as-identity-work – externalizing, professionalizing, rationalizing and proselytizing – both the concept and the agent are constructed simultaneously. In recognizing interconnectedness, diversity and dynamism in these actors’ involvement, we seek to integrate, contextualize and broaden existing perspectives on agency in translation research.

This article concerns how dentists in a Swedish dental care organisation conceptualized work division when teamwork was requested by the senior manager and their boundary work in relation to dental auxiliaries. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with the dentists. The dentists’ made claims on tasks based on legislations and wanting to focus on tasks that required their expertise. Dental auxiliaries may be reluctant to take on new tasks and become more involved in patient care, which indicates that they have some influence in the work division. Nevertheless, the dentists retained control as the invitation for dental auxiliaries in patient care was based on certain conditions. Realising the dentists’ idea of work division meant improving the dental auxiliaries’ competence. By focusing on certain tasks, dentists may be reinforcing their professional identity, which can reinforce boundaries and highlight differences in the expertise of dentists and dental auxiliaries.

Why do social entrepreneurs retain their faith in social entrepreneurship despite the organizational tensions and anxieties inherent to this field of practice? In this article, we employ the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to advance knowledge on social enterprise creation. The research analyses qualitative data relating to the adoption of the Community Interest Company, a bespoke organizational form for social enterprise. We argue that social entrepreneurs adopt a specific organizational form because it represents a fantasmatic object that supports their desire for pro-social work. This fantasmatic form appears to temporarily neutralize tensions and anxieties while preserving attachments to pro-social ideals. Our first contribution is to extant research on the role of fantasy in social enterprise. Specifically, we elucidate how social enterprise creation is riven with fantasy-laden attachments to ideals of pro-social work that promise to counteract concerns about future viability as well as competing social and for-profit missions. Our second contribution is to highlight the role that organizational form choice plays in effectively managing such tensions and anxieties as it provides a robust anchor for pro-social desires. Fantasmatic attachments to pro-social work and organizational form thus emerge as integral to social enterprise creation. This research was funded by Isaac Newton Trust and Edmond de Rothchild Foundations. peer-reviewed

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.

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.

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.

Rapidly expanding rural ("rurban") areas are generally discussed with regard to logistical and administrative challenges while the impact of expansion on community resilience remains relatively unexamined. This paper describes a preliminary study on rurban community resilience with a view to supporting these communities with digital socially engaged art interventions. A series of focus groups, conducted to better understand the strengths of and challenges faced by rurban communities, demonstrated nuanced notions of identity as well as identity tensions that paradoxically contribute to a sense of belonging and inclusion. We propose that engaging with this kind of 'identity work' is a necessary first step for those who wish to deploy digital SEA interventions in communities undergoing rapid changes.

This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com . By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.

This article explores how we make sense of identity in situations of dynamic complexity. It contributes to debates on how dynamic complexity, conceived as periods of heightened uncertainty, disrupts the balance between acting and thinking that is constitutive of sensemaking. The article follows narratives of adult learners (including the first author) aspiring to become academically trained coaches within an emerging industry. We examine dynamic complexity in terms of individuals relating to multiple contexts (e.g. biographical, learning and industry), arguing that each of these creates varying degrees of complexity as individuals relate to a multitude of others within them. We show that heightened uncertainty resulting from such complexity makes greater demands on identity work. This involves both failure (more persistent intransigence of identity) and success (transience of identity). We suggest a mediating role for relationality and reflexivity in making sense of identity as they offer a balance between acting and thinking. By exploring the professional identity work of the first author in relation to the participants, we explicate the intersubjective nature of identity work and sensemaking. The contribution we make is to theorize identity work as intersubjectively conducted.

To remain relevant and valuable, the psychology profession in South Africa continues to transform and evolve in response to the changing needs of society. Some psychologists embark on development opportunities to advance their professional qualifications and skills. In doing so, they experience identity tensions inherent to professional identity development and transformation. Understanding how psychologists cope with professional identity transition will enable them to develop a self-efficacious service offering and broaden the reach of psychology in the South African context. The aim of this study was to explore the identity work of a group of eight consulting psychology doctoral students to develop a system psychodynamic understanding of their coping dynamics while transitioning to a professional role identity. Students&rsquo, self-reflective essays about becoming a consulting psychologist constituted the data protocols for the study and were analysed through hermeneutic phenomenological analysis. Findings describe how students cope with performance and survival anxieties through anti-task behaviour and immature as well as sophisticated psychodynamic defences. The study contributes to the exploration of the coping concept and its manifestation, by proposing defensive coping as a natural dynamic phenomenon in the process of adapting to a transforming professional identity.

Research on green identity work has so far concentrated on sustainability managers and/or top-management actors. How lower-level green employees cope with identity tensions at work is, as yet, under-researched. The paper uses an identity work perspective and a qualitative empirical study to identify four strategies that lower-level employees use in negotiating and enacting their green identities at work. Contrary to expectations, lower-level green employees engage substantially in job crafting as a form of identity work despite their limited discretion. In addition, the study demonstrates that lower-level green employees make use of identity work strategies that uphold rather than diminish perceived misalignment between their green identities and their job context.

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.

Pioneers of organic farming often faced social challenges as their innovative ideas on agriculture not only encountered opposition in the conventional farming community, but led to stigmatization of organic farmers as social deviants. In this study, we examine what kind of stigma management strategies pioneer organic farmers engage with in order to cultivate an alternative positive image of themselves. Our research is based on the interviews with 14 pioneer organic farmers. Based on a qualitative analysis of the interviews, we provide a model of those strategies that the creation from a stigmatized to valued identity requires. Our study increases the understanding of the institutionalization process of organic farming by demonstrating how pioneer organic farmers overcame the negative attributes associated with their farmer identities while actively building a new agricultural category which was different from that of conventional farming.

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.

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power and ethnicity in the creative industries by documenting ethnic minority creatives’ discursive micro-struggle over what is creative work and who qualifies as a creative. Specifically, we show their counterpolitics of representation of ethnicity in the creative industries through the re-signification of the relation between the 'west' and the 'other' in less disadvantageous terms. Despite such re-signification, the continued relevance of the discourse of ethnicity as a key marker of difference suggests that ethnicity remains a principle of unequal organization of the creative industries.