“Identity-Work” and Workers’ Interests Articulation in an Oil Refinery, Nigeria: A Post-Structuralist Evaluation

Abstract

Beyond mainstream “essentialist” discourse and analysis of management and leadership practices in work organizations, labor process theory has continued to interrogate normative assumptions behind management roles and practices, in shaping the “lived-work” experiences and “agentic” responses of workers, in contemporary workplace. Critical analysis of management roles in the context of contemporary workplace has been able to make insightful and critical connections between work processes, workers own–sense making, and articulation of their interests in the workplace. Using post-structuralist analysis in the evaluations of the concepts of “identity-work”, and “interest articulation”, the paper offers a somewhat different understanding of management and leadership discourses and their normative assumptions, in an Oil Refinery, Nigeria. Workers construct and enact their workplace identity, thereby giving a re-interpretation and re-appropriation of management discourse in the organization. While utilizing the analytical remits of labour process theory and critical perspectives, the paper re-conceptualizes how workers in the oil refinery, enact “repertoire” of “selves” in securing their identities in the workplace. In their “knowledgeability” and “agentic orientation”, workers in the refinery “collude” with the “hubris” of management in the organization, in order to invert and subvert managerial practices, and its normative intentions. Through theoretical conceptualizations, the paper demonstrates the specific dimensions of these inversion and subversion. The paper therefore seeks to insert “workers-agency” back into the analysis of power-relations in the workplace; agency that is not overtly under the absolute grip of management’s control, but with multiplicity of identities and multilevel manifestations.