Abstract
The article reviews research on identity in organizations. It suggests that current research reiterates imaginary constructions of identity by which identity can be defined as coherent or fragmented. Based on a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, it explores how articulating identity as lack may unsettle such imaginary constructions. The article develops the significant implications this has for how identity is conceptualized and researched and, importantly, how the failure of imaginary identity constructions relates to resistance and control in organizations. The article provides new directions for the study of identity in organizations particularly with respect to widening the discursive spaces in which creative identity struggles occur.
Highlights
Questions of identity, subjectivity and self have a long history in the social sciences (Collinson, 2003)
Organizational studies have been occupied with such questions in view of post-bureaucratic forms of organizing and normative controls in organizations (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002)
There are conference tracks and themed journal issues (e.g. Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas, 2008) and a large number of empirical studies investigating the complexities of identity work in organizations today (e.g. Alvesson and Robertson, 2006; Karreman and Alvesson, 2004; Kornberger and Brown, 2007; Laine and Vaara, 2007)
Summary
Subjectivity and self have a long history in the social sciences (Collinson, 2003). The implication of such identity conception for control and resistance in organizations is that the articulation and experience of lack in identity discourse absorbs, sucks up perhaps, discourses aimed at identity control and thereby makes resistance possible as creative struggles in discourse and new relations to others and the self (Vanheule et al, 2003) This in turn may make more externalized conceptions of subjectivity possible in practice by creating a discursive space in which it becomes possible to undermine an organization’s cultural management program by putting not 1 but 100 stickers bearing the company logo on one’s car (Fleming and Spicer, 2003) as a simple affirmation that the imaginary always fails and that lack feeds on organizational resources.
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