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

Despite a growing interest in intersectional entrepreneurship studies investigating the interplay of privileged and disadvantaged identities, people with disabilities still appear to be a ‘forgotten minority’ in that field. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 29 entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD), this study examines how differences are constructed by EWD when performing intersectional identity work at the crossroads of disability, gender, and entrepreneurship. The results revealed four overlapping strategies in response to different sources of identity threats, such as disability and gender threats: bracketing, reconciling, adjusting, and neglecting. While the identity work of EWD was informed by challenging dominant entrepreneurial discourse impregnated by ableism and hegemonic masculinity, simultaneously, othering was also used in crafting positive identities, which instead reproduced power-laden social differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the leadership literature has emphasized the importance of leader identity for leader behaviors and leader effectiveness, little is known about whether and how professionals, who are experts in their field and hold a formal leader role, construe a leader identity. To expand our understanding of leader identity construal, we explored how professors in German research universities interpreted their formal leader role and whether and how they saw themselves as leaders. Based on findings from an inductive interview study, we contribute to the literature in three ways: First, our findings imply that patterns of professional identity and leader identity dimensions likely predict when a leader role is rejected, accommodated, incorporated, or emphasized. Second, we explain why professionals with a formal leader role see themselves primarily as specialists, mentors, managers, or shapers. Third, we extend previous notions of the leader identity concept by elaborating on its dimensions. Our findings have practical implications on an individual and organizational level, and may help design more effective leadership development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the changing landscapes of higher education, a large body of research has studied how scholars make sense of academic identities and careers. Yet, little is known about how academics actually 'work' on their identities to navigate normative demands and complex career structures. This paper explores how scholars negotiate career scripts trough identity work. Drawing upon 35 interviews with early career academics in political science and history, the analysis discerns four patterns of identity talk through which academic identities are constructed: achievement talk (signalling achievement and competitiveness), authenticity talk (signalling genuineness and being true to self), loyalty talk (signalling loyalty and willingness of helping out), and personation talk (adjustment to privileged identities). Defining what to display and how to correctly embody its corresponding values, these patterns convey different ways in which scholars manage their identities according to the perceived rules of recognition. Identifying several contrasting understandings of what it means to act and to represent worth, the study shows that successful identity management requires a certain feel for the game of recognition. Involving the symbolic struggle of 'fitting in' and 'standing out,' strategies for identity work are shaped by scholars' social class background and gender. In demonstrating how the prevalence of project-based work accentuates the importance of identity performances on academic markets, the findings suggest that the concept of identity labour may open up new avenues of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

We examine how minority ethnic employees account for witnessing selective incivility to ethnically similar others. Our study is based on qualitative interviews with British Asian employees – the majority who witnessed incivility directed towards migrant Asian employees working for the same company. Our findings indicate that, for those whose minority ethnic identity was of central importance, witnessing selective incivility towards others from a similar ethnic background can be perceived as an identity threat. We provide insights into three identity work strategies undertaken by witnesses of selective incivility, while illuminating how minority ethnic identity shapes the way witnesses' respond to selective incivility in the workplace. [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]

IntroductionBreastfeeding is much more than a biological event. It is a social construction, full of cultural meanings and framed by social structures. Being, simultaneously, a natural event and a social practice, breastfeeding poses challenges to feminist approaches in the sense it may be acknowledged as an empowering practice for women and/or as a setback in the process of women's social emancipation. Often focused on the product, i.e., the milk and its beneficial properties for the infant's health, the dominant discourse on breastfeeding makes it a trait of good mothering, withdrawing the understanding of the particular (but also structural) contexts in which this practice occurs.MethodsBased on results from a focus group with five mothers of a first child, this paper addresses first-person testimonies about breastfeeding and transition to motherhood, aiming to capture eventual self-concept dilemmas, impacts of social judgments, difficulties related to the work-family balance, as well as negotiation processes taking place within couples and early-parents.Results and discussionDespite being subject to tensions and sometimes stressful adaptation processes, motherhood and breastfeeding tend to be ultimately described by women as experiences that enhance welcome changes in personal trajectories, life priorities and identities.

In this autoethnographic article, I discuss the consequences of being exposed to two competing breastfeeding discourses during my first mothering experience—the “self-regulated dyad” and the “externally regulated dyad” discourse. The former represents the ideal scenario and the evidence-based practices recommended by the World Health Organization (i.e., breastfeeding on demand, internally regulated by the dyad). The externally regulated discourse refers to the standardized health interventions that take over when difficulties arise (e.g., weight gain deviations and latching issues). Building on Kugelmann's critique about our blind reliance on “standardized health,” existing evidence, and my breastfeeding journey, I argue that unqualified and unindividualized breastfeeding interventions are highly counterproductive. To illustrate these points, I discuss the implications of the polarized interpretation of pain and the limited dyadically focused support. I then move on to analyze how ambivalent social positioning around breastfeeding impacts our experience. In particular, I found that I was highly regarded as a “good, responsible mum” up till my baby was 6 months, and how breastfeeding became increasingly challenged by others when my daughter was approaching her first birthday. Here, I discuss how performing attachment mothering identity work allowed me to navigate these challenges. Against this backdrop, I reflect upon feminist ambivalent positionings on breastfeeding and the complexity of balancing the promotion of women's hard-earned rights while supporting them to engage in whatever baby-feeding choice they feel appropriate. I conclude that unless we acknowledge the physical and social complexities of the process, and our healthcare systems seriously invest in allocating human resources and training them appropriately, breastfeeding rates may continue to suffer and women continue to interiorize it as their own failure.

The tension between the traditional scenario, in which women fulfil themselves mainly as mothers, as well as the emancipatory approach to women's roles reverberates more and more in Polish society. This conflict between various social expectations has a significant impact on women's experience of picking up the role of a mother, as well as the intensification of identity ambivalence accompanying their departure from said role. This paper describes the stage in mothers' lives when adult children move out of their family homes. As part of the [blinded for the review] project, the authors have analysed the stories told by 40 Polish women, whose adult children had moved out of the house, leaving behind a void. The moment of entering a new stage of motherhood and womanhood has been told in the context of a private place – their homes. To further highlight the experience of this moment by the women who participated in the study, the authors have conducted an analysis of their stories within the framework of Victor Turner's liminality theory. In the case of the women, who participated in the study, the experience of liminality does not lead to a new status that would be socially recognisable. Only nine of them – according to the analysis carried out by the authors – experienced, among other things due to owning or changing their own space, the phase of aggregation, which is typical of becoming a woman in a new role – a mother of an adult child who left home. In contrast, their approach towards space and the practices of everyday life became a pointer showing them the way out of the role of mothers and let them change their status, which the sociologists lack a name for, as the authors argue. [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]

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

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

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

The negative effects of stereotyping arising from a victim's acceptance and internalisation of stereotype identities are well-known. As stereotypes are created and maintained in discourse, understanding how targets of stereotyping employ discursive resources to resist the constraining structures of stereotypic identities imposed upon them can provide insight into the process of stereotyping and contribute to efforts to reduce the threat of stereotyping. We examined the strategies used by targets of stereotyping in contesting stereotypic representations of their social group through the mobilisation of a range of discourse strategies when presented with stereotyping attacks on the group. The findings revealed that stereotypes are subtle in nature and may not be easily recognised and hence, difficult to resist. Participants employed a number of discourse strategies to repair their fragmented self and group identities. However, in their attempt to maintain identity coherence, they ended up using stereotyping discourses themselves to devalue the perceived outgroup as well as subgroups they created within their own social group. The study highlights the complexity of stereotyping and its self-perpetuating character, and sheds light on the difficulty faced by targets of stereotyping discourse in reconciling their identities through intense discursive and identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master’s of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people’s efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals’ aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant narrative of project risk management pays homage to scientific rationality while conceptualizing risk as objective fact. Yet doubts remain regarding the extent to which the advocated quantitative techniques are used in practice. An established counternarrative advocates the importance of intuition and subjective judgment. New insights are developed by conceptualizing risk as a narrative construct used for the purposes of identity work. Project-based practitioners are seen to mobilize resources from competing narratives to meet the transient expectations of those with whom they interact. Ultimately, they tend to emphasize approaches that sustain their ascribed identities as custodians of rationality. [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.

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

This Research Commentary draws on the articles in the March 2022 issue of JRME, engaging with the notion of labor as a key concept to push the field toward novel understandings of equity in mathematics education. We introduce the concepts of identity work and racialized emotions to provide an alternative reading of the articles in that issue, arguing that attention to the interplay of these two concepts is vital to consider issues of equity because mathematics identity intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other social identities historically marginalized in the classroom. We argue that a focus on such interplay could help to revitalize the discourse on equity in mathematics education across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethical behavior prevalent in an organization often determines business success or failure. Much research in the business context has scrutinized ethical behavior, but there are still few insights into its roots; this study furthers this line of inquiry. In line with identity work theory, we examine how employees' identification with a family business shapes internal ethical decision-making processes. Because it is individuals who engage in decision-making—be it ethical or not—our research perspective centers on the individual level. We followed an inductive, qualitative approach and conducted interviews with 19 employees in seven family businesses. We found that individuals engage in identity work when they identify as individual family firm employees and when they identify with the perceived characteristics of the family firm. These processes of identification, in turn, influence how employees cope with ethical situations. Our findings contribute to ethics and family business research, as well as to identity theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the recollections of 12 successful women in science during their school years before postsecondary education. The participants shared detailed descriptions of their science experiences through three semi‐structured interviews. An identity works conceptual framework consisting of figured worlds, positioning, and agency constructs to portray the complex dynamics of their experiences was used to analyze the data. The following four themes emerged from the data analysis: participants had an early interest in mathematics and science; they were "stubbornly" persistent in science‐figured worlds; they engaged in science‐figured worlds beyond school; and they positioned themselves as science leaders. These findings add to the evolution of science identity development theoretical models because they are from a nondeficit perspective. Participants engaged in identity work that advanced their science identities despite the gender biases in science‐figured worlds. From a practical stance, girls and women could employ the agentic and positive positioning identity work that the findings show to develop their science identity in educational contexts. Science educators and researchers are encouraged to structure figured worlds where girls feel empowered to enact identity work to build strong science identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines how forcibly displaced people cope with prolonged liminality through identity work. Our paper is based on a longitudinal multiple case study of women refugees who fled Syria and experienced liminality in Amman-Jordan, the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan and the United Kingdom. We contribute to the liminality literature by demonstrating how forcibly displaced people respond to extreme structural constraints and maintain cognitive control over their sense of self during liminality with an end date that is unknown. We develop the concept of liminality by illustrating how the actors were pushed into a state of 'indeterminate liminality' and coped by co-constructing it through three forms of identity work – recomposing conflicting memories, reclaiming existence and repositioning tradition. This enabled them to stretch the boundaries of indeterminate liminality, symbolically restore their familiar past and narratively construct a meaningful future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research has focused on financial and social goals in impact investing, we add to the limited research that focuses on how individuals manage identity multiplicity, defined as three or more role identities. Based on our qualitative study of Christian impact investors, we develop a model of identity multiplicity work, explaining how individuals manage their multiple role identities (financial, social, and religious) to reduce identity tensions during the process of impact investing. We find individuals engaged in an interactive, ongoing three-step process of identity multiplicity work: prioritizing one of their salient identities, managing their identity multiplicity interrelationships, and reinforcing their prioritized identity. Investors generally prioritized an identity that was neither financial nor social, but rather religious. We also find this identity work implemented through three novel mechanisms: shadowing, one identity casts a shadow over another thereby enabling the simultaneous pursuit of related goals; distinguishing, all identities are retained and at least a minimum threshold of role expectations are met; and surrendering, partial sacrificing of goals of one (or more) identity in favor of another identity based on an individual's self-reflective importance of the role. Our findings offer new insights to multiple identities, impact investing and business ethics literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Further Education (FE) lecturers and trainers manage a mild stigma that socially taints their work through a discourse intersecting gender and class. To frame their experiences, I draw upon identity work tactics established within the dirty work literature. Through an interview and observational study, the potency of cultural imagery and discourse is shown to manifest as a stigma. This stigma differentiates those associated with hair and beauty work by imposing discrediting tropes pertaining to skill, class status, and social value. Lecturers and trainers become tainted by proxy through the association with an industry and interaction with bodies that are discredited through a gender‐class discourse. Through close proximal positioning to a tainted subject matter, FE lecturers and trainers rely upon esteem‐enhancing strategies to minimize discrediting assumptions. The students they teach may embody stigma through tainted attributes that signal working‐class femininity, yet they enable FE lecturers and trainers to minimize taint by drawing from an alternate discourse that celebrates upward cultural mobility and a more refined iteration of femininity. By broadening the landscape of stigma to recognize it as milder than its extreme theorization in dirty work, this article explores discourse and representation as a centralizing source of stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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