Controlling managers' 'becoming': the practice of identity regulation

The aim of this chapter is to better understand how identity regulation — a key mode of control — is exercised within organizations. This process ‘encompasses the more or less intentional effects of social practices upon processes of identity construction and reconstruction’ (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p. 625). It is mainly constituted by the discursive practices that allow identity definition to prompt identity work, a form of more or less conscious self-work that is aimed at ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p. 626). Thus identity-regulation forms, along with identity work, the basis of identity construction — the process of ‘becoming’.