Workplace Identity Research Articles

Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices

In this article we examine issues of academic identity through the lens of academics’ everyday workplace writing, offering a complementary perspective to those already evident in the higher education research literature. Motivated by an interest in the relationship between routine writing and aspects of professional practice, we draw on data from interviews with 30 academics across three different universities. Our discussion is illustrated with excerpts from interview data, and is organised around three emerging themes: ‘reconstructing academic identities in a shifting academic workplace’, ‘considering new articulations of disciplinarity’, and ‘moving on from the golden age’. We conclude that the reconstruction of academic identities, through engagement with established and emerging workplace documents, may well be enabling academics to build new identities within the changing university.

The metaphor of therapy and its use in the learning of a workplace identity

The idea that learning involves a kind of therapy goes back to ancient times: Socrates was, at least in part, concerned with a kind of care of the self, and Plato in his early dialogues presents learning as a cure for bad intellectual and moral habits. Our metaphoric use of therapy supposes that worthwhile learning might be considered as a treatment for moral or physical non-well-being in that learning, like illness, might most easily be identified with a desire for good.

Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities - By Linda McDowell

Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities - By Linda McDowell

Talking sexuality online – technical, methodological and ethical considerations of online research with sexual minority youth

While Internet-based tools are gaining currency in social work teaching and practice, social work researchers are tapping into the development of computer-mediated methods for research with dispersed and hard-to-reach populations. This article is a reflective commentary about the opportunities and challenges of using computer-mediated methods in a qualitative inquiry about young people’s (18–26 years) experiences of negotiating lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) identities in Australian workplaces. The research used two Internet-based methods of online interviews and web-based surveys to capture young people’s experiences of disclosing and discussing LGBQ identities in past and current work environments. In this commentary, I outline these methods and explore the technical, methodological and ethical challenges and tensions presented by using online tools in qualitative research. To conclude, I discuss wider applications of computer-mediated communication for social work.

Book review: Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

Book review: Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

What makes a marketer? Development of ‘marketing professional identity’ among marketing graduates during early career experiences

A sample of marketing graduates was surveyed to identify the factors that caused some of them to feel that they had become ‘professional marketers’ consequent to their early experiences of work in graduate marketing positions. A model of the possible determinants of the form of ‘workplace identity’ that a marketing graduate would assume was developed and tested. The model hypothesised that: (i) a firm's approaches to training and management development, mentoring, appraisal and reward; (ii) the natures of the tasks allocated to graduate marketing recruits and the task culture prevailing within an enterprise; and (iii) specific characteristics of the individual employee affected the emergence of particular types of workplace identity. Levels of each category of professional identity observed among the sample members were then correlated with job and organisational satisfaction and commitment, self-assessed operational performance, and intention to remain with an enterprise.

Book Review: Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

Book Review: Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

Book ReviewWorking Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. By Linda McDowell. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009.Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. By Donna Dickenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development. Edited by Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa, and Susie Jolly. London: Zed, 2008.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. By Linda McDowell. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. By Donna Dickenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development. Edited by Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa, and Susie Jolly. London: Zed, 2008.Carol WolkowitzCarol WolkowitzUniversity of Warwick Search for more articles by this author University of WarwickPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 36, Number 1Autumn 2010Feminists Theorize International Political Economy. Special Issue Editors Shirin M. Rai and Kate Bedford Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/652922 Views: 37Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Linda McDowell, Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

Linda McDowell, Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities

The persistence of workplace ideology and identity across communicative contexts

We examine the discursive construction of organizational ideology, its role in sustaining membership in a workplace community, and the achievement of community cohesion in a workplace environment through the practice and reinforcement of communicative norms and identities that reflect this ideology. Using a range of spoken and written discourse examples from internal employee listservs, company documents, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation over a continuous four-year period during a time of rapid change at a small U.S. software development firm, we articulate interactional processes by which community membership and organizational alignments are conceptualized, established, challenged, and sustained in the day-to-day physical workplace and the concurrent online sphere. The longitudinal dimension demonstrates how the adoption and interpretation of the firm’s organizational ideology, which contributes to the formation and maintenance of its identity as an occupational community, persists across time and channels of transmission.

‘Oh you must be very clever!’ High‐achieving women, professional power and the ongoing negotiation of workplace identity

This paper uses a gender perspective to problematise the connection between high educational achievement and a fulfilling professional career. Drawing data from an Australian study of women working as professional engineers in a range of locations, the paper investigates the ways in which the identities produced in the women’s educational experiences require further negotiation in dealing with the realities of their divergent workplaces. Through a deconstruction of the power relationships that form a key feature of the women’s reported workplace experience, the women are shown to engage in a range of tactics in the effort to achieve a degree of workplace acceptance and some professional recognition. The paper concludes by urging renewed attention to changing engineering education and workplace culture if the profession is to attract and retain able women.

Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories

AbstractOne important function of narratives in workplace interaction is the valuable contribution they make to the construction of complex social identities. These identities typically include a professional or workplace identity, but may also include other facets of self. In the New Zealand workplace, a mainstream ‘white’ identity can be considered the unmarked, communicative cultural norm. In this context, storytelling provides a creative and socially acceptable strategy for constructing a contrasting ethnic identity. This paper explores the ways in which ethnicity is constructed in a New Zealand Māori organization that comprises an ethnically distinct community of practice. An extended narrative sequence (extracted from a naturally occurring meeting) is analyzed in detail for this purpose. Despite the predominance of English as the language of work in this organization, there is abundant evidence of the pervasive relevance of Māori cultural principles. For these workers, ethnicity acts as a backdrop for all their workplace communication; well-established culturally based norms underpin the ways in which they interact, and the ways in which they construct their social (including ethnic) identity. In this context, the stories told at work contribute not only to the construction of the ethnic identity of individual speakers, but also provide a means for co-constructing a distinctive Māori identity for the group.

Leadership and communication: discursive evidence of a workplace culture change

Communication is an important component in the construction of workplace identities, including leader and group identities. Micro-level analysis of everyday workplace discourse provides valuable insights into the way leadership is constructed and how workplace culture is created, maintained, and changed. In this context, leaders and managers are inevitably significant and influential participants, with a crucial impact on workplace culture. Drawing on audio and video data collected in 12 meetings of an IT department, the analysis demonstrates ways in which two leaders, who succeed each other in the role of Director, reinforce and shape the culture of the workplace in which they operate. While both leaders claim teamwork as an important cultural value for their teams, their respective instantiations of teamwork are rather different. To explore the leaders' effect on the culture of their department, this investigation of leadership change examines ways in which the leaders manage regular workplace meetings (communication with a predominantly transactional orientation) and how they contribute to workplace humour (more relationally oriented behaviour). The analysis provides detailed evidence of the ways in which a change in leadership style can create the conditions for a change in the culture of a community of practice.

The Structure of O*NET Occupational Values

The structure of occupational values is investigated using several analytical techniques. Data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) describing need reinforcers for 900 occupations are examined using exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling. Results indicated broadly defined values that primarily reflected elements of work-place identity and workplace structure.

Discourses of Leadership: Gender, Identity and Contradiction in a UK Public Sector Organization

This article explores leadership as a discursive phenomenon. It examines contemporary discourses of leadership and their complex inter-relations with gender and identity in the UK public sector. In particular, it focuses on various ways in which managers’ identities are constructed within discourse, produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies (Hall, 1996). Drawing from interviews with senior managers employed in a large UK local authority, this article researches the dominant discourses of modernization and the primacy afforded to discourses of leadership in the council. It explores first how these discourses become part of managerial workplace identities, and second, what other discourses help to shape managers’ identities. Contradiction, discursive production, plurality and ambiguity feature heavily in the analysis of these managers. Accordingly, the article questions dominant hegemonic and stereotypical notions of subjectivity that assume a simple, unitary identity and perpetuate androcentric depictions of organizational life.

Story-telling at work: a complex discursive resource for integrating personal, professional and social identities

Workplace narratives are one means of satisfying the complex demands of identity construction at work. Following reference to the relevant literature, this article discusses the range of narratives identified in our extensive New Zealand corpus of workplace interactions, distinguishing between more socially-oriented ‘workplace anecdotes’, and more transactionally-oriented ‘working stories’. While both orientations are often relevant, the distinction is useful in examining how different types of narratives function in the construction of diverse facets of an individual's identity. In the final section, one particular workplace narrative illustrates the complexities involved in accomplishing a narrative in a formal meeting, and the analysis explores how two members of a senior management team use the narrative to negotiate contrasting aspects of their professional and social workplace identities.

Markets, Contingency and Preferences: Contemporary Managers' Narrative Identities

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the ‘new’ capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new ‘cultures of control’, others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others identify a crisis in workplace identity formation. Focusing on these issues, we analyse the career narratives of 136 managers and show that our empirical data do not neatly fit any existing models. Managers' career stories were dominated by a ‘market’ narrative, in which they placed themselves as strategic actors making choices in a social world constituted by market-like interactions. We show that the market narrative frames how managers understand risks to their careers arising from the contingent actions of firms, and how it provides a space for managers to reflectively identify their preferences and pleasures. We consider the consequences of this analysis for contemporary understandings of work and identity.

Interpreting workplace identities: the role of office décor

AbstractUsing qualitative methods, I examine how employees in corporate office environments interpreted a variety of relatively permanent office décor (e.g., furniture, photos, personal mementos) as indicators of their colleagues' workplace identities (i.e., central and enduring categorizations regarding employees' status and distinctiveness in the workplace). Similar to the encoding of behavioral cues of identity, findings suggest that interpretation of physical identity markers begins with either (1) a top‐down process of social categorization, in which specific rules are applied to encoding a few, focal, and visually salient pieces of office decor as evidence of management prototypes, or (2) a bottom‐up process of social categorization, in which a variety of physical artifacts are examined and compared to specific managerial exemplars to develop a complex representation of workplace identity. Findings also suggest that some of the unique attributes of physical identity markers (i.e., their potential to be viewed independently from their displayer, and their relative permanence) may be associated with the focus of each profiling process (i.e., on interpreting status vs. distinctiveness, and consistency vs. change). Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Relating Physical Environment to Self-Categorizations: Identity Threat and Affirmation in a Non-Territorial Office Space

I used qualitative methods to explore why some employees working in a newly created, non-territorial office environment perceived that their workplace identities were threatened and used particular tactics to affirm those threatened identities. Findings suggest that the non-territorial work environment threatened some employees' workplace identities because it severely limited their abilities to affirm categorizations of distinctiveness (versus status) through the display of personal possessions. Categorizations of distinctiveness appeared to be most threatened by the loss of office personalization because of three characteristics: (1) their absolute, rather than graded membership structure, (2) their high subjective importance and personal relevance, and (3) their high reliance on physical markers for affirmation. In affirming threatened identity categorizations, employees chose different tactics, in terms of the amount of effort required and their conformance with company rules, based on the acceptability and importance of affirming the threatened categorization.

Employment Relations in France: Evolution and Innovation

Introduction: The French Exception. 1. An Institutional Legacy. 2. A New Era of Reform. A Brief Guide to the Following Chapters. 1: The 'Reform of Work' and the Evolution of Participative Management in France. Introduction. 1. Employee Involvement in France: Perspectives and Strategies. 2. The Impact of 1970's Workplace Experimentation. 3. The Auroux Laws of 1982. 4. The Progression of Work Reform Expression Groups and Quality Circles in the 1980's. 2: A Decade of Technological Modernization: Negotiation and Organizational Change During the '80's. 1. The Strategies of Institutional Actors in France. 2. Emergent Patterns of Negotiation of Technological Change. 3. Work Organization in the French Firm at the Dawn of the 90's. Conclusion: The Lessons of French Experience. Appendix: The Participative Introduction of Automation the Case of Peugeot and 'Projet ISOAR'. 1. Introduction. 2. The Environment of Peugeot in 1982 and ISOAR's Origins. 3. ISOAR - Principal Phases and Working Groups. 4. The Production of Analyses and Proposals. 5. Decisions, Action and Assessments. 6. The Impact of ISOAR. 3: Towards Quality and Process Redesign: Lean Production in French Industry. 1. Total Quality Management and its Spread as 'La qualite totale' in France. 2. 'Just-in-Time' Within Lean Production. 3. Management and Work Under 'Lean Production'. 4: Decentralized Bargaining and the Spread of Individualization in Appraisal and Remuneration. 1. The Scale of the Diffusion ofIndividualization. 2. Impacts of Individualization in the Firm New Workplace Identities? 5: Employment Crisis, Restructuring and 'Downsizing'. 1. Employment Crisis and Downsizing in France. 2. French Multinationals, Negotiated Restructuring and European Industrial Relations: A Tale of Two Companies. 6: The Impact of New Flexibilities in Working Time and Contracts. 1. French Innovations in the Use of Working Time. 2. Contractual Flexibility, Company Employment Strategies and the Problem of Insecurity. Conclusion: Employment Insecurity and the Future of Flexibility. 7: Conclusion: Crisis, Conflict and Reform in French Work and Society. 1. Crisis in Work and in Organized Labour: The Recent Resurgence of Industrial and Social Conflict. 2. Crisis of Politics and the 'Elite-Mass' Relationship. 3. Crisis of Values, Crisis of 'Identity'? Conclusion: On Reform.