Identity Work Research Articles

Identity work support perceptions (IWSP): Development of a construct and measure.

Every day, people perform internal (e.g., thoughts) and external (e.g., behaviors) activities to repair, strengthen, or revise their identities at work. Despite organizations being the main stage on which this identity work (IW) occurs and a major contextual element invoking identity work, scholars still lack an understanding of employees' beliefs about their organizations' support for identity work. In this research, we conceptualize and operationalize identity work support perceptions (IWSP)-defined as the degree to which employees perceive that their organization encourages, allows, or provides opportunities to think about, talk about, or display aspects of work and nonwork identities, or engage in activities that foster understanding and sharing of identities. We develop a scale to measure four dimensions (i.e., cognitive, discursive, behavioral, and physical) of IWSP using seven empirical samples (two samples of subject matter experts and five samples of employed adults). We provide evidence of reliability, as well as content, convergent, and discriminant validity with constructs in IWSP's nomological network and IWSP's incremental predictive ability of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Who Am I at the Office? Employees’ Identity Work in a Placeless Workspace

Who Am I at the Office? Employees’ Identity Work in a Placeless Workspace

Responding to Opportunity Threats: The Impact of Founders’ Identity Work on Opportunity Development

Responding to Opportunity Threats: The Impact of Founders’ Identity Work on Opportunity Development

Purpose and Identity Work: How to Stay Purpose-Driven in a For-Profit Professional Service Firm?

Purpose and Identity Work: How to Stay Purpose-Driven in a For-Profit Professional Service Firm?

Identity Threat, Identity Work, and Identity Construction: A Study of Physicians in Public Hospitals

Identity Threat, Identity Work, and Identity Construction: A Study of Physicians in Public Hospitals

Rethinking Trans Trajectories via Life History

This article provides a life history analysis of Pepa Moreno, a transgender individual from Puebla, Mexico. The life events that she narrated in the interview conducted at her home and business—her move out of street sex work and her start as a business and property owner—offer a glimpse into the intertwining of personal/familial history and the processes unfolding in the spaces of society and economy. The article employs a critical realist framework around identity, based on life history as method, setting the scene around major restructurings of economy that private property regimes, urban transformation, morphing class realities, and capital investment (under neoliberalism) effected over her life: from adolescence into middle age. These transformations conjugate with changes across Pepa's own trajectory; key here are the meanings of “legitimate” work and moral worth that lie at the heart of the moral-legal economies that trans people in town, especially of working-class backgrounds, must confront. Labor status and class deeply intersect with a remaking of herself, which culminates with her naming herself as transgender once she has established herself as property owner and businessperson. However, even while invoking this category, she does not use it in line with the activist and sexological discourses that arose from the late 1990s on in Mexico City and which became prominent in Puebla in the early 2000s. The article thus maps the changing positions—and positionalities—of Pepa, examining the dialectics between lived experience and social structure, and the spaces of agency achieved through identity work.

“We are Like Little Elves who Never get Their Own Name”– Identity in Food Delivery Platform Work

“We are Like Little Elves who Never get Their Own Name”– Identity in Food Delivery Platform Work

The Future of (Identity) Work: New Frontiers in Occupational Identity Research

The Future of (Identity) Work: New Frontiers in Occupational Identity Research

Exploring the Role of Religious Rituals in Family Firm Identity Work: An Ethnographic Study

Exploring the Role of Religious Rituals in Family Firm Identity Work: An Ethnographic Study

“And Then I Undress the Work”: Materiality and the Embodied Identity Work Among Working Mothers

“And Then I Undress the Work”: Materiality and the Embodied Identity Work Among Working Mothers

Exploring Middle Manager Identity Work During Strategic Change

Exploring Middle Manager Identity Work During Strategic Change

Mediated Organizational Identity Work: Future-Making in Family Firms

Mediated Organizational Identity Work: Future-Making in Family Firms

Organizational Identity Work in Times of Identity Ambiguity

Organizational Identity Work in Times of Identity Ambiguity

Language and identity in the Windrush generation

AbstractThis paper examines how the Windrush generation uses phonological and morphosyntactic elements of Jamaican Creole (JamC), London Jamaican (LonJam) and standard British English (SBE) to do identity work in interviews broadcast as part of a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush. The data comprise oral history interviews with four members of the Windrush generation. The recordings were analysed using the method of lectal focussing in interaction. Results show variation across the four speakers, with some speakers using very few LonJam and SBE features, while others’ speech contains almost exclusively standard British variants. The use of JamC features clustered around topics such as home and family reunification, whereas LonJam features were especially present when interviewees talked about their youth. The study broadens the scope of world Englishes studies by including diasporic and elderly speakers and has important implications for the study of language and identity.

Assessing the Effect of Management Education on Vocational Behaviour

This article presents a two-phase longitudinal study on the effect of management education on vocational behaviour, using Holland’s Typology to test Congruence as a moderator. The Phase 1 sample was 360 male and female South African MBA/MBL and Specialised Master’s university students; the Phase 2 sample was 103 students. The study was conducted in Gauteng Province, South Africa, with participants from Johannesburg and Pretoria. A within- and between-subjects design was employed. The vocational behaviour indicators were career decision-making self-efficacy, vocational identity, work identity, career commitment, and vocational interest/personality. Discriminant Function Analysis identified the Enterprising personality type as the best predictor of the Enterprising type and Social type environments in South Africa. Holland’s fourth working assumption was partially supported. Congruence did not predict vocational behaviour, but t-test results established significant within- and between-group differences in vocational behaviour due to Congruence. Incongruence was not always linked to negative outcomes; nor was Congruence always linked to positive outcomes. Management education did not change students’ vocational behaviour. Keywords: Management education, Vocational behaviour, Holland’s Typology, Congruence (P-E fit)

The effect of basic public health service equalization on settlement intention of migrant workers in China: the mediating effect model based on subjective feelings

BackgroundDuring the 14th Five-Year Plan, China aims to transform rural migrants into urban citizens and ensure equal access to public services to enhance new urbanization. Understanding migrant workers' settlement intentions is crucial for their citizenship development. Based on the fundamental role of the right to life and health, equalization of basic public health services is essential. Therefore, understanding the potential impact of public health services equalization on the settlement intention of migrant workers is crucial in China’s new urbanization.MethodIn this study, we utilized data from the 2017 wave of China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) and employed the Propensity Score Matching method to investigate the impact of basic public health service equalization policy on the settlement intention of migrant workers. Additionally, we utilized the Mediation Effect Model to uncover the impact mechanism.ResultsOur findings indicate that basic public health service equalization policy has a significant positive effect on increasing the settlement intention of migrant workers, with an even greater effect observed among the low-income group, the cross-provincial subsample, and the new generation subsample. The results of the Mediation Effect Model suggest that Basic public health service equalization policy can bolster the subjective integration willingness and subjective identity of migrant workers, thereby enhancing their settlement intention.ConclusionBased on the results, we propose to strengthen the promotion of the basic public health service equalization policy and expand the coverage of health records to further increase the settlement intention of migrant workers.

Unmasking Malicious Stance Indicators and Attitudinal Priming: An ‘Evaluative Textbite’ Approach to Identity Attacks in Violent Extremist Discourse

The article explores the patterning and functioning of attitude semantics in the practice of identity attacks within terrorist communications. Positioned in facework and stance-taking research (e.g. Tracy & Tracy, 1998, 2008, 2017), it introduces the concepts of ‘evaluative textbites’ and ‘attitudinal priming’ to linguistic examinations, advocating a functional approach to unravelling identity attacks, drawing on corpus analysis methods (e.g. word frequency, and concordance-line qualitative analysis) and the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005). Findings reveal that, linked with stance-taking activity, attitudinal priming offers insights into how specific ideational targets are primed for particular attitudinal, evaluative functions. Evaluative textbites provide linguistic evidence of an author’s encoded hostile attitude and the nuanced patterning and functioning of ‘ideation-attitude’ co-occurrences in these attacks. Identity attacks are a rhetorical tool, normative and valuation-based, targeting individuals’ or out-groups’ immoral behaviours and devaluing victims by reference to their personal traits, power-distance relationships, interactional roles, and master identities. This article offers implications for future study of identity attacks in hate crimes, genocidal rhetoric, and defamation texts, and strengthens counter-extremism efforts by illuminating the investigative value of identity work.

Changing workscapes and their encroachment on private life: Do Montreal women perceive them differently from men?

Paid work is increasingly distributed across multiple workplaces. In a representative survey of 1325 Montrealers, we associate each job with two workscapes (defined as the various places, including the home, from which work activities are conducted), one pre-COVID and one for July 2020. In doing so we extend the mainstream approach to urban economic geography – which has typically associated each job with a single workplace - and draw upon feminist economic geography to frame and interpret the analysis. Changes in workscape between February and July 2020 are examined. Women, who bear heavier household responsibilities, have tended to report more friction between paid work and private life: our results, however, indicate that Montreal women perceive less interference of workscape arrangements with private life than men do. This is unconnected with observed COVID-related changes in workscape. A possible explanation is that women have developed more capacity to cope with, or accept, the interference of paid work and private life. Gendered differences in perception may be exacerbated by the fact that men feel more pressure to maintain ‘ideal worker’ standards, which conflict with their growing aspiration to prioritize private life.

Parallel patterns of cognitive aging in marmosets and macaques.

As humans age, some experience cognitive impairment while others do not. When impairment does occur, it is not expressed uniformly across cognitive domains and varies in severity across individuals. Translationally relevant model systems are critical for understanding the neurobiological drivers of this variability, which is essential to uncovering the mechanisms underlying the brain's susceptibility to the effects of aging. As such, non-human primates are particularly important due to shared behavioral, neuroanatomical, and age-related neuropathological features with humans. For many decades, macaque monkeys have served as the primary non-human primate model for studying the neurobiology of cognitive aging. More recently, the common marmoset has emerged as an advantageous model for this work due to its short lifespan that facilitates longitudinal studies. Despite their growing popularity as a model, whether marmosets exhibit patterns of age-related cognitive impairment comparable to those observed in macaques and humans remains unexplored. To address this major limitation for the development and evaluation of the marmoset as a model of cognitive aging, we directly compared working memory ability as a function of age in macaques and marmosets on the identical working memory task. Our results demonstrate that marmosets and macaques exhibit remarkably similar age-related working memory deficits, highlighting the value of the marmoset as a model for cognitive aging research within the neuroscience community.

What's in a norm? Deviation from the Ideal Worker Norm as an explanation for backlash against leave‐takers

AbstractPrior research has suggested that employees who take leave from work experience backlash – with some authors describing backlash to deviations from gendered norms and others to deviations from an ‘Ideal Worker Norm’ (IWN). In this study, we investigate the degree to which backlash against leave‐takers is explained by these two separate, but related, paths, and whether individual (gender of leave‐taker) or organizational (family‐friendly vs. competitive culture) moderators mitigate such effects. Using a pre‐registered experimental design, and our newly validated Ideal Worker Evaluation measure and evaluations of agency and communion to capture perceived deviation from the norms, we find significant indirect effects of leave‐taking on backlash via the IWN path and the agency portion of the gendered path, but not via the communion portion of the gendered path. We also find that family‐friendly organizational cultures partially mitigate the effect of leave‐taking on backlash, but predominately via the IWN path and not the gendered norms path. Whereas gender of the leave‐taker was found to affect backlash via the gendered norms path (and not the IWN path), but only for the agency using the proscribed operationalization of ‘dominance’. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are then discussed.