Enacting Identities: An Ethnography of a Job Training Program

Abstract

In this article, we explore “identity enactment” within the context of a job training program that pushed its adult students to adopt certain work-related identities. Drawing on analyses of long-term participant observations, longitudinal interviews, and written artifacts, we reveal the tensions, adjustments, and reorientations that occurred when adults' conceptions of their current and future identities collided with different, even disparate, models of the professional people they were asked to become. This research reveals job training as a prime context for identity construction and speaks to the complicated relationship of identity formation to skills development. It also provides a set of terms for analyzing such identity work, conceptual categories developed from our reading of sociocultural theoretical perspectives on identity formation, ethnographies of personhood, and our ethnographic data. These terms—enacted identities, mediational means, performative moments, and reorientations of self—comprise a useful heuristic for fine-grained examinations of the process of identity formation.