Drawing on the discursive resources from psychological contracts to construct imaginary selves: A psychoanalytic perspective on how identity work drives psychological contracts

Michaela Driver

doi:10.1177/0018726717733312

Abstract

The study contributes novel theoretical perspectives for a more comprehensive and processual understanding of psychological contracts in the context of identity work. It builds on a psychoanalytic, specifically Lacanian, perspective to analyze 106 psychological contract narratives by employees of a wide range of organizations. Based on this analysis, the study suggests that psychological contracts can be understood as providing discursive resources on which narrators draw in complex and non-linear fashion to construct imaginary selves. Their inevitable unsettlement prompts both imaginary and symbolic responses that seem independent of the viability and type of psychological contract narrated. This suggests that identity work drives psychological contracts in surprising ways and empowers individuals as contract and identity-makers. Implications for psychological contract research are discussed.

Highlights

The psychological contract is a mental model (Chaudhry and Song, 2014: 341) or schema (Rousseau, 2003: 233) containing “an employee’s subjective understanding of promissory-based reciprocal exchanges between him or herself and the organization” (Conway and Briner, 2009: 35)
While there have been tentative steps in this direction linking psychological contracts to employees’ self-concepts (e.g. Low, Bordia and Bordia, 2016: 1459), more complex theorizing is needed to explore them in the context of “the management of identity work [which has] become more salient and critical to the employment relationship” (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002:623)
The analysis elucidates how psychological contracts furnish discursive resources for the doing of identity work (Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas, 2008: 9), as the ongoing process by which discourses are drawn on to narrate the self (Clarke, Brown and Hailey, 2009: 326), and how this may be understood in light of struggles with unconscious desire and underlying lack (Lacan, 1988b)

Summary

Introduction

The psychological contract is a mental model (Chaudhry and Song, 2014: 341) or schema (Rousseau, 2003: 233) containing “an employee’s subjective understanding of promissory-based reciprocal exchanges between him or herself and the organization” (Conway and Briner, 2009: 35). Like Dana, Larry seems to align his preferred self with dominant managerialist discourses (Hoedemaekers, 2009: 182) in his organization and as such is stuck in an imaginary order in which lack has to be covered over to maintain the fantasy that work can render the self complete.

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