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Purpose: Branding is essential for business survival and growth, particularly for small firms in their early development. However, small firms approach branding differently than large organisations. This study aims to delve into the evolution of small firm brands over time, emphasising the role of founders' personal identities on shaping their firms' brands. It also explores how these firm brands develop through ongoing interactions with stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach: Over eight years, empirical material was collected through a longitudinal multi-case study of small firms and their brands, using in-depth interviews over time with founders as the primary data source. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the empirical data. Findings: This research reveals the intertwined relationship between founders' identity work and small firm branding. The authors emphasise how founders use their personal identities to shape their small firm brands, influencing recognition, differentiation and value creation. As firm brands evolve over time, they often deviate from founders' identities due to stakeholder pressure from within and outside the organisations. Originality/value: This study addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the branding processes within small firms, which have been largely overlooked in favour of larger organisations. By exploring the transformative journey of small firm brands from inception through development and ownership changes, this research elucidates the intricate entanglement of founder identity and brand. It highlights the distinctive challenges faced by small firms, offering new insights into their branding dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

This article investigates how the identities of frontline professionals are (re)constructed in their talk about their everyday work activities. Based on a study of a mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, we illustrate that when talking about acting in accordance with their organizational policies, the social workers' identities are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing the practices of documentation and regular meetings with their supervisors that constitute the routine processes of organizing. However, when discussing instances where they override the organizationally sanctioned rules, their identities are disciplined by the aspiration of fabricating a client-centred caregiver identity adopted from the dominant discourse in their profession. We, therefore, counterbalance the understanding that professionals' identity work related to their deliberate micro-emancipation acts are merely an expression of agency and argue that their preferred resistant identities pertaining to their self-declared apparent deviation from the organizational order are also made within frameworks of disciplinary power. By delineating that both discursive conformity and resistance cut across the boundaries between acting in alignment with and against organizational guidelines, we unveil an underexplored complexity of conducting professional identity work associated with the interrelationships between practices of talk and action that has largely been overlooked in prior scholarship. We, therefore, offer an action-related analysis of discursive identity work that extends beyond the context of this study and informs future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the discursive manifestation of normativities and participants' orientation to them for identity work in coming-out-to-family discourses in Japanese YouTube videoclips posted by self-identified gay men. The study focuses on how the participants – the YouTubers and their family members – use discourses of normativity as a resource to illegitimize and legitimize sexual identities. It also touches on the conceptualization of homonormativity in the Japanese context. The analysis suggests that in societies like that of Japan, where heteronormative ideals are deeply entrenched in the culture, homonormativity may not be fully conceptualized at the level of local gay male communities, while the dominant heterosexual community, conversely, may have a clear vision of homonormativity for these individuals. It thus further considers the viewpoints that shape normativities for marginalized social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with change and the resulting process of transition is challenging. In today's workplace, where change and innovation are increasingly a fact of life, too many transitions end in failure, at a high cost to both people and organizations. Interest in the identity work integral to career transition has grown rapidly in recent years and it is now recognized that career transition is more than simply a change in status, salary and role description. It involves social, relational and personal shifts, conscious and unconscious processes, and identity work--agentic, holistic engagement in the shaping and sustaining of who we become. Evidence suggests that specifically addressing identity work in coaching leaders, teams and groups significantly increases the success rate of transitions. And yet topics around identity and identity work are given little prominence in coaching education, leaving many coaches unaware of these basic constructs. This paper presents a new coaching framework, the MAP (Me-As-a-Process) coaching model, to support coaches and their clients as they embark on the process of identity work in voluntary career choices and transitions. It draws on research from my qualitative doctoral study (2021) which identified four stages in the process of women's identity work in voluntary career change and choice. It synthesizes academic theory, evidence from coaching practice, and findings from 53 women who had recently experienced career choice or change. [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]

We build a comprehensive and coherent understanding of organizational purity as an organization's steadfast adherence to a single institutional logic. This logic becomes the core tenet of its identity, an end in itself rather than a means toward survival. Instead of responding to institutional pressures, pure organizations may self-categorize vis-à-vis a potentially threatening 'other' through their own identity work. They mark and pursue their distinction from others, structure themselves to preserve their purity, and favor strategies that express the logic they embody. In so doing they may fail more often than organizations that are more responsive to institutional pressures. When pure organizations enter new institutional fields they can act as change agents, but where their logic dominates, they may block change. Different audiences, in turn, affect the success and survival of pure organizations by conferring authenticity, legitimacy or contempt, depending on their alignment with the pure organization's logic. Further examining purity will enable organizational theorists to better account for non-rational action and extend work on institutional logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latinas, along with many other minoritized groups, are underrepresented as inventors in the United States. Despite accounting for over 9% of the population, <1% of U.S. patent holders are Latina. In an effort to increase diversity among inventors and patent holders, a number of K-12 programs have been created to provide opportunities for students to participate in the iterative and recursive processes of inventing. One example is the emerging field of invention education. Invention education is an educational approach which teaches students how to identify and solve problems within their communities. Little is known about the experiences of Latina students who have participated in invention education and have begun developing identities as inventors. Through narrative methodology, we analyzed how the life experiences of one Latina student contributed to her identity development as an inventor. Four themes were developed through the analysis of the Latina student's narrative. The first was the early and consistent support of her family members. The second theme was the student's understanding of the importance of Latinx representation in STEM. The student's participation in extracurricular STEM activities was the third theme that contributed to the development of her identity as an inventor. The final theme was her continued involvement in engineering at the university level. While early, consistent, and continued identity work in extracurricular invention and STEM activities contributed to the development of an inventor's identity, literature has shown that opportunities such as these are not available to all students, especially those who have been historically underrepresented as inventors. We argue for making access to invention education more equitable by embedding it within the school day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Decades of interest in responsible leadership has drawn critical attention to how future leaders are formed by academic leadership education. It has forced teachers to increasingly contemplate what leadership ideas and pedagogical practices they bring to the classroom, and who they are in the light of the ideas and practices they adhere to. In this 'Leading Questions' we take an interest in how leadership educators' identities are formed and exploited in everyday teaching. The questions and comments we present are part of an ongoing conversation on identity work triggered by the controversies we experienced when co-teaching a course titled Rethinking Leadership at a renowned international business school. Where most discussions of identity work in a business school context only highlight the distressing and unfavourable aspects of identity work, we take a different approach. We confess how we struggle with our own identities as leadership educators. We then argue this identity work comes with pedagogical potential, yet to be accounted for, especially relevant to future education of critical and responsible leaders. Finally, we confess that even if our years of conversation on our different teacher identities did not result in a distinct pedagogical model, it dramatically changed and charged our ability to intentionally make space for controversial identity work in the leadership classroom. [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]

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

This qualitative study investigates refugees' socio-professional trajectories in France. Our findings suggest that refugees follow different socio-professional paths shaped by identity work and acculturation mechanisms as they go about integrating in the French context. We identify three socio-professional trajectories: 'adjusting', 'enhancing', and 'detaching'. This study contributes, firstly, to research on refugees' socio-professional adjustment and vocational adaptation, and secondly, to the literature on identity work. It does so by offering novel insights into the processes of repairing, reorienting, and reconstructing cultural and professional identities in the context of refugees' relocation to host countries, in this case, France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Introduction: This study aims to understand how new CEOs construct, revise, and maintain in their narrative, repertoire stories that represent their identity as it is associated with their new occupational role. Methods: For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative study using the Grounded Theory method, involving 47 CEOs from different sectors residing in Brazil. Results: Our results allowed for the construction of a central category called Storytelling Identity Work, which refers to stories that individuals tell about themselves, and enable them to propose and redefine who they are during major life transitions. This paper seeks to explain: (a) under what conditions this phenomenon tends to occur; (b) what characterizes the success of Storytelling Identity Work and; (c) what leads to the revision or retention of stories in the self. Our results show that storytelling identity work tends to be used by new CEOs during their transition period into the role, and when their new position involves higher levels of visibility and alteration of prestige levels in comparison to their previous position. They also suggest that storytelling identity work tends to be more successful when the stories are co-constructed and validated with other significant individuals and when they enable new CEOs to feel "sufficiently authentic" and "sufficiently impressive." Finally, we theorize that such feelings, along with a sense of coherence between the story being told and other narratives consciously or unconsciously being narrated by the interviewees throughout their lives, lead to the retention of the story within the individual's self. Discussion: This article innovates by connecting the literature on personal storytelling with identity work and exploring processes that are not only useful during the process of transitioning into the role of new CEOs but also influence the constitution of the narrative repertoire and, consequently, the identity of these individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article explores how women entrepreneurs enact identity work to construct their identities at the intersection of gender and entrepreneurship while facing challenges to their legitimacy as entrepreneurs. These legitimacy challenges trigger reflections into who they are as entrepreneurs, and where they belong within entrepreneurial contexts. We draw on 24 focus groups with women entrepreneurs and 30 interviews with enterprise support organizations. We present a model which advances our understanding of the complex identities of women entrepreneurs and how their use of identity work enables them (or not) to become legitimate members of an entrepreneurial community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using interview data from 23 mothers in jail, we detail how jailed mothers use oppositional identity work to challenge maternal stigma. Their reframing of "good" mothering prioritizes children's emotional security and physical safety over intensive, hands-on child-care. Findings suggest that oppositional identity work helps mothers cope with internal and external attributions of maternal failure. Findings also highlight the limits of oppositional identity work from the margins for countering entrenched social norms. We conclude with a call to build correctional practices and policies that reflect the lived realities of marginalized mothers in ways that support rather than stigmatize them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity work process allows athletes to achieve a continuous development, revision, and maintenance of themselves. It provides insight into their self-perceptions and particularly intensifies during critical life events. While this process has been widely acknowledged, scant attention has been given to explicitly identifying the specific activities (i.e., identity work modes) involved in athletic identity work and integrating an overarching framework to inform coherent and continuous identities. Thus, we conducted a systematic review of the athletic identity literature to assess how this perspective is represented. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we reviewed 54 articles and analyzed the overall characteristics, bibliographical networks, and accumulated empirical findings. Through this process, we were able to identify the impact of having a strong athletic identity on key variables within and outside of sport. Based on the findings, we examined how identity work modes are depicted and discussed in the literature. Further discussion on how athletic identity literature can contribute to the broader body of knowledge is outlined. [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]

Our article conceptualizes the experiences of women entrepreneurs through exploring how they negotiate an entrepreneurial identity in liminal digital spaces. Providing empirically textured narrative portraits of women's experience of transitioning from employment to a digital entrepreneurial career, this article counters the ascendant rhetoric celebrating the democratizing promise of digital technologies. We present a more critical analysis of the experience of self-doubt and existential precarity including the ways in which gender norms permeate the intimate structures of women entrepreneurs' everyday lives and selves. We also develop the concept of liminality by illustrating how women digital entrepreneurs cope with liminality through identity play and identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research predominantly portrays states of 'betwixt and between' in identity construction as unsettling, given the ambiguity and uncertainty they raise. However, our study suggests that in-betweenness can be experienced with comfort. To characterize such process of identity construction, we appeal to Turner's concept of liminoid, involving optionality, in contrast to the concept of liminal, involving obligation. Using an extensive dataset of interviews and observations on Twitter, we show how journalists comfortably construct online identities 'betwixt and between' as they exert autonomy in this process and learn to skilfully balance the freedom they enjoy with the constraints they still face. By reintroducing the underexplored concept of liminoid and extending it through the notion of autonomy, we clarify prior research conflating different identity construction processes with the concept of liminality. Furthermore, we provide a nuanced picture that takes into account structural constraints by showing that to ensure the comfort of their experience individuals must develop a liminoid competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Wellness tourism offers opportunities for consumers to explore the self. This paper aims to explore how identity transitions occur in a liminal tourism space – a holistic wellness retreat. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopt a qualitative methodology, including in-depth semi-structured interviews supplemented by various projective techniques. Following an interpretivist approach, eight consumers were interviewed at the commencement and the completion of a holistic wellness retreat stay. Participant observation was also undertaken during the retreat programme. Findings: The paper shows an identity transition is facilitated by the liminal space of the holistic wellness retreat and further shaped by self-work during the retreat. As participants gain new knowledge on the self and start living "consciously", they gain a sense of vision, clarity and direction to a new self, wherein identity transition is a starting point and a process of change rather than an end goal. Originality/value: While much past research views tourism activities as mainly "play", the findings reveal the holistic wellness retreat experiences as both identity play and identity work. This paper provides theoretical insights into the process from identity play to identity work and what makes this process effective for identity transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper shows that digital technologies have empowered new work practices and identity work in the setting of the legal profession in five different countries. Using qualitative data from 33 interviews with legal tech lawyers, supported by workplace and conference observations and photographs, we analyse how legal tech lawyers use social and material attributes to craft and enact a new identity. This identity is distinctly different from the established professional identity of lawyers, showing that legal tech lawyers see, and express, themselves as legal professionals in a broader sense, rather than identifying with traditional law. This paper explains how technology has functioned as an enabler for them to craft this new identity, much influenced by how , where , and when their work is done. The paper supports and extends a sociomaterial approach to understanding the implications of digital transformation and shows the potential of looking into the development of professional identities in this transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: I provide an exploration and critique of reflexive research practice, which explores the nature of reflexivity, its relevance to and influence on accounting academic identity formation. Design/methodology/approach: The paper gives detailed explanations of three different approaches to reflexivity dependent on perspectives on reality and exemplifies the chosen approach – intersubjective reflexivity. It draws from three personal experiences to illustrate intersubjective reflexive practice in action and its impact on academic identity, including my own identity as a feminist accounting academic. The examples involve the process of reflexively "being struck" regarding voice and representation; addressing power, privilege and decolonisation in knowledge production; and negotiating insider/outsider academic identities. Findings: I reconceptualise and illustrate reflexivity as academic identity formation that enables transformative experience and more reflexive academic praxis within a turbulent academic context. Reflexive academic identity formation will resonate with accounting academics who are reflecting on the role and purpose of the accounting academy and their identity within it. Originality/value: The paper provides a significant contribution into understanding intersubjective reflexivity, by reconceptualising intersubjective reflexivity beyond research and applying it to the identity formation of accounting academics. I identify the process of reflexive identity transformation through active engagement in identity work and emotion work, which transforms academic praxis. I argue for a broader more nuanced and power-laden perspective on reflexivity and academic praxis, which moves us to consider the responsibility of our academic identity and actions as accounting academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines identity work in the creative industries as a type of identity formation that has been underexplored in the literature on identity work to date. Based on interviews with performing artists in music and theatre, we show how creative workers feel compelled to perform negative (tortured and despondent) identity work in order to attain a positive (coherent, self-sustaining and self-affirming) sense of artistic self. We argue that the dubious link between mental illness and creativity, propagated not only by popular media and pseudo-scientific accounts but also by art history and the creative industries themselves, has served to undergird a social imaginary of the artist as a 'tortured' creator. This imaginary in turn provides discursive resources, behavioral cues and affective stimulation for the performance of occupationally desirable yet perilous tormented creative selves. We identify three distinct identity work strategies undertaken by creative workers, namely self-analysis, self-diagnosis and self-medication, in which social imaginaries purporting an overlap between mental illness and creativity in artistic work play a constitutive role. Our findings contribute to the emergent interdisciplinary literature on identity work in the creative industries and the arts. Moreover, we caution that the negative forms of identity-building practised by our interviewees, underpinned as they are by social imaginaries of the artist as anguished, dejected and agonized, may in fact be dangerously counterproductive for creative workers coping with the higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse found in precarious creative professions. [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]

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the process of identity regulation and identity creation on social media for employees in the IT sector of India and how this process is different for men and women. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on the thematic analysis of in-depth interviews of 31 IT professionals. Findings: The authors find that identity regulation and identity creation is a complex process when it is mediated on social media as cues and guidelines for professionals are ambiguous. Enriching Ibarra's model of identity creation, the authors find that this process consists of five steps: (1) motivation to build a desirable self, (2) experimenting with identity boundaries, (3) failed identity experiences, (4) active self-regulation and (5) enacting inauthentic selves. The authors further find that this self-regulation for men is driven by the pressure to conform to the identity of an ideal "corporate man", whereas for women it is driven by the need to conform to societal and cultural expectations. Practical implications: Since identity regulation is a cognitively demanding process that affects both the productivity and well-being of employees, organisations can proactively help employees manage their social media presence through training and mentorship programmes. Originality/value: The paper provides an enriched version of Ibarra's (1999) model on identity creation and regulation and highlights the role of gender in the process. The paper is practically relevant as it provides a window into how employees can feel the need to manifest inauthentic selves which is cognitively demanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research has investigated consumer mythopoesis (consumers' identity work using marketplace myths), little is known about its enactment involving ambiguous myths. Here, we investigate the myth of the witch (predominantly depicted by dominant mythmakers as a villain but recently repositioned more positively) and describe how consumers reclaim the empowering and heroic aspects of the ambiguous witch myth. Based on a qualitative study using archival data and in-depth interviews with self-proclaimed witches, we argue that the witch's ambiguity originates in different mythopoetic cycles. Then, we describe the following processes through which consumers reclaim positive cycles: incarnating the myth, coming out to selected others and practising myth-related craft. Finally, we show that reclaiming results in new forms of heroic agency that amplify the myth's ambiguity and identity value. Our results reveal that consumers cope with market-wide paradoxical injunctions, stressful situations and marginalisation by transforming these pressures into acts of self-heroism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurs play a critical role in the implementation of alternative market movement agendas. The courage and sacrifices of prosocial entrepreneurs who break from the mainstream in support of collective causes are often heroized. In the current study, I use a multiple case study design to explore the heroization of localized food entrepreneurs (LFEs) who are rigidly aligned with the local food movement. I am particularly attentive to how such heroization occurs through a combination of public narratives and the identity work of the entrepreneurs themselves. I argue that heroization reinforces and sustains the rigid alignment between the LFEs and the local food movement and in doing so insidiously compromises their livelihoods and the transformative capacities of their enterprises and the movement as a whole. I draw on the insights generated to introduce to marketing theory the concept of entrepreneurial martyrdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business failure often leads entrepreneurs to craft public narratives. Taking a performative storytelling perspective of such narratives, we investigate how entrepreneurs jointly reevaluate their ideas and identities, and how this relates to their subsequent career paths. We theorize that the stories entrepreneurs tell shape who they become, changing not only how others see them but also how they see themselves. This broadens theoretical understanding of how failed entrepreneurs navigate their transition to a diverse array of subsequent careers, including different forms of serial entrepreneurship (same industry; new industry) and exit (startup employee; established business employee; exit with reentry). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

This study investigates the introduction of AI in the field of radiology through a multi-level analysis (individuals, organization, and profession). Drawing on in-depth interviews with 54 participants (radiologists, radiological technologists, managers, hospital directors, and engineers), we examined how radiologists perceive AI and respond through job crafting behaviors and identity work. The findings reveal three categories of job crafting: approach, avoidance, and an emerging category of identity crafting, in which actors develop strategies to redefine their identity after the introduction of AI. This study contributes to a better understanding of AI and its implications for individuals at work and, in particular, employees' use of proactive approaches to job design, along with how such approaches are shaped by organizations and professional bodies. • Examining the transformative effects of AI on radiologists' job and identity • Investigating how radiologists perceive AI as a threat and opportunity, with a particular focus on work identity • Investigating how radiologists job craft in response to AI interventions • Providing insights into how radiologists shape their roles amidst technological advancements. [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]

Employee volunteering has become a common phenomenon in many organizations. However, it is unclear how sustained volunteering spreads between colleagues. Drawing on an empirical study set in the English legal profession, this study examines the processes through which existing employee volunteers influence their coworkers to internalize a volunteer identity. The study yields a theoretical model that specifies how coworkers may identify existing volunteers as moral exemplars. Five forms of social influence emanate, often unknowingly, from these exemplars: encouraging, evoking, edifying, enacting, and exemplifying. These forms of social influence inform coworkers' microprocess of moral identity work through which they claim a volunteer identity. This study thereby shifts attention from the well-theorized outcomes of moral identities to the largely unexamined social influences on moral identities in the workplace, enriching our understanding of the development of the moral self that is foundational to theories of volunteering and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governmental politics in China continue to be a male-dominated arena such that Chinese women political leaders often carefully perform contested gender and occupational identities to negotiate a work-body (mis)alignment. Turning to sociomateriality, this study examines how gender and organizational paradox comes to matter as Chinese women negotiate the occupational identity of political leaders. The study simultaneously explores the types of identity work women leaders perform and the nonhuman actors they routinely encounter while working to make boundaries that outline the identity of political leaders. A thematic narrative analysis reveals the following: Suzhi work(s), guanxi work(s), and abject body work(s). Participants perform identity work constitutive of the masculine shapes/bodies of political suzhi and guanxi, while forming the abject body of a symbolic woman. Meanwhile, these bodies serve as working actors that move and touch participants in paradoxical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do organizational members discursively construct large-scale organizational events that have identity implications? Whereas previous studies have focused primarily on collectively construed organizational identity threats and, to a lesser degree, identity opportunities, we move beyond past work to examine how individual members construct a single organizational event in divergent and more nuanced ways. Taking a discursive resources approach to members' discourse in response to a watershed event in the Episcopal Church, we find that members engage in organizational identity work processes as a means of constructing an identity-implicating event. Through their identity work, which involves the construction of (in)coherence among an organization's multiple identities, members construct an event as aligned with some organizational identities yet misaligned with others. Our study has implications for research on organizational identity and identity work, organizational events, and discursive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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