Organization and identity (routledge studies in business organizations and networks)

Organization and Identity provides an exploration of identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and as a key concept in the social sciences, particularly focusing on how ideas a

Organization and Identity provides an exploration of identity as a contemporary concern

in everyday life and as a key concept in the social sciences, particularly focusing on how ideas about identity can be applied to organization and management studies The contributors to this volume use and develop recent philosophical thought on the nature of identity to ask questions about the key social divisions of gender, class and nation, such

as whether we are able to write our own identity stories or if we remain bound by social constraints and inequalities

The book fulfils three objectives: it confronts established notions and assumptions about identity and its relevance to organization and management; it looks critically and in detail at the performance of identity in different contexts; and it explores beyond current understandings of identity, asking whether identity itself is a concept which now only has

a history The chapters in this collection bring approaches from contemporary philosophy into the area of organization theory and critically assess their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion

Alison Pullen is Senior Lecturer in Critical Management and Director of the PhD

programme in the Department of Management Studies at the University of York She is

the co-author of Thinking Organization (also with Stephen Linstead, Routledge 2005)

and has published in several journals on issues including organizational change and poststructuralist feminism Stephen Linstead is Professor of Critical Management and Head of the Critical Management Studies Group at the University of York He was previously Director of Research, and Professor of Organizational Analysis, Durham Business School, University of Durham He has published widely on organizational aesthetics, language, philosophy, qualitative methodology, gender and sexuality and is

the author of Text/Work (Routledge 2003) He is an Academician at the Academy of the Social Sciences and co-edits the journal Culture and Organization

and networks

1 Democracy and Efficiency in the Economic Enterprise

Edited by Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn

2 Towards a Competence Theory of the Firm

Edited by Nicolai J.Foss and Christian Knudsen

3 Uncertainty and Economic Evolution

Essays in honour of Armen A.Alchian

Edited by John R.Lott Jr

4 The End of the Professions?

The restructuring of professional work

Edited by Jane Broadbent, Michael Dietrich and Jennifer Roberts

5 Shopfloor Matters

Labor-management relations in twentieth-century American manufacturing

David Fairris

6 The Organisation of the Firm

International business perspectives

Edited by Ram Mudambi and Martin Ricketts

7 Organizing Industrial Activities Across Firm Boundaries

Anna Dubois

8 Economic Organisation, Capabilities and Coordination

Edited by Nicolai Foss and Brian J.Loasby

9 The Changing Boundaries of the Firm

Explaining evolving inter-firm relations

Edited by Massimo G.Colombo

10 Authority and Control in Modern Industry

Theoretical and empirical perspectives

Edited by Paul L.Robertson

Edited by Anna Grandori

12 Privatization and Supply Chain Management

Andrew Cox, Lisa Harris and David Parker

13 The Governance of Large Technical Systems

Edited by Olivier Coutard

14 Stability and Change in High-Tech Enterprises

Organisational practices and routines

Neil Costello

15 The New Mutualism in Public Policy

Johnston Birch all

16 An Econometric Analysis of the Real Estate Market and Investment

Peijie Wang

17 Managing Buyer-Supplier Relations

The winning edge through specification management

Rajesh Nellore

18 Supply Chains, Markets and Power

Mapping buyer and supplier power regimes

Andrew Cox, Paul Ireland, Chris Lonsdale, Joe Sanderson and Glyn Watson

19 Managing Professional Identities

Knowledge, performativity, and the ‘new’ professional

Edited by Mike Dent and Stephen Whitehead

20 A Comparison of Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe and in the USA

Solomon Karmel and Justin Bryon

Edited by Gerhard Bosch and Peter Philips

23 Economic Geography of Higher Education

Knowledge, infrastructure and learning regions

24 Economies of Network Industries

Hans-Werner Gottinger

25 The Corporation

Investment, mergers and growth

Dennis C.Mueller

26 Industrial and Labour Market Policy and Performance

Issues and perspectives

Edited by Dan Coffey and Carole Thornley

27 Organization and Identity

Edited by Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead

28 Thinking Organization

Edited by Stephen Linstead and Alison Linstead

29 Information Warfare in Business

Strategies of control and resistance in the network society

Edited by Alison Pullen and

Stephen Linstead

LONDON AND NEW YORK

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© 2005 Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead selection and editorial matter; the

contributors their contributions All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or

by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers

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requested ISBN 0-203-30008-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-35001-4 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-32231-6 (Print Edition)

1 Introduction: organizing identity ALISON PULLEN AND STEPHEN LINSTEAD 1

2 Now where was I? Questioning assumptions of consistent identity NIC BEECH AND PETER MCINNES 20

3 Theorizing narrative identity: symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics DOUGLAS EZZY 40

4 Self and other in everyday existence: a mystery not a problem BOGDAN COSTEA AND LUCAS D.INTRONA 55

5

Living a story and storying a life: a narrative understanding of the distributed self

6 Career as a project of the self and labour process discipline CHRISTOPHER GREY 96

7 Fetish failures: interrupting the subject and the other STEFFEN G.BÖHM 114

10

Beyond happy families: a critical re-evaluation of the control-resistance-identity triangle

11

Casting the other to the ends of the Earth: marginal identity in organisation studies

12 Making global subjects: diasporic identity as a media event GOLDIE OSURI AND BOBBY BANERJEE 223

13 Fluid identities and ungendering the future STEPHEN LINSTEAD AND ALISON PULLEN 242

14 Identity aesthetics: asymmetry and the assault on order ROBERT GRAFTON-SMALL 270

Per Bäckius teaches and researches at Gotland University and at Stockholm University

School of Business His main area of interest concerns the role of philosophy, art and figures of thought in business and economic life He has been working on beggary, uncertainty, entertainment and the individual as important figures of thought for understanding human endeavour and he is currently completing a study on gambling

Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of the PhD Program

at the University of South Australia in Adelaide He has taught at the University of Massachusetts as well as at the University of Wollongong where he headed the doctoral program, and RMIT University where he was Director of the Doctor of Business Administration program His research interests are in the areas of sustainable development, corporate environmentalism, socio-cultural aspects of globalization, postcolonial theories and Indigenous ecology He has published in several

international journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Human Relations,

Organization, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Advertising and Management Learning

Nic Beech is Professor of Management Studies at Strathclyde Graduate School of

Business where he is also Director of Research Nic’s current research is focused on the construction of individual and group identity at work and the problems and possibilities that arise from such constructions His research has been published in

journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies and the Journal of Applied Behavioural Science Nic chairs the British Academy of Management Special Interest Group on Identity, is a senior editor of Organization Studies, and is co-author of three

books on HRM and Management Learning

Steffen G.Böhm is Lecturer in Management and PhD Director in the Department of

Accounting Finance and Management at the University of Essex He holds degrees from Lancaster University and Warwick, where he obtained his PhD in 2003 A

founding editor of the electronic journal, ephemera: critical dialogues on

organization, his research interests encompass the political philosophy of

organization, alternative organizational forms and futures, the organization of

resistance and social movements, the critique of automobility and other contemporary transport regimes, and art and organization A frequent contributor to conferences, he has organized or co-organized several international workshops or conference streams

at such colloquia as the European Group for Organization Studies, the Art of

Management and Critical Management Studies

The undecidable Stewart Clegg was nevertheless born in Bradford, England, and

migrated to Australia in 1976, after completing a first degree at the University of Aston (1971) and a Doctorate at Bradford University (1974) Previously he has held positions at the University of St Andrews, Scotland; University of New England, NSW; University of Western Sydney, in all of which he was Professor and Head of

(Innovative Collaborations, Alliances and Networks), a Key University Research Centre of the University of Technology He also holds an appointment at the

University of Aston Business School, UK, as well as currently being a Visiting Professor and International Fellow in Discourse and Management Theory, Centre of Comparative Social Studies, Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Visiting Professor of Organizational Change Management, Maastricht University Faculty of Business He has written extensively on power and organizations His most recent

books are Trends in Japanese Management: Continuing Strengths, Current Problems and Changing Priorities, co-authored with Toyohiro Kono (London: Palgrave 2001) and the eight-volume collection on Central Currents in Organization Theory

Paradoxes of Management and Organizations (Amsterdam: Benjamins 2002) as well

as, with Robert Westwood, Debating Organisation: Point/Counterpoint, (Oxford: Blackwell 2002) He has just completed Managing and Organizations: an

Introduction to Theory and Practice (with Martin Kornberger and Tyrone Pitsis, London: Sage) He publishes regularly in leading journals such as the Academy of Management Education and Learning Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations and Administrative Science Quarterly, at only

slightly greater length than this biography

Stewart Clegg, whilst agreeing that he was indeed and coincidentally originally born and

educated in England and migrated to Australia in 1976, is at pains to point out that unlike Stewart Clegg (above) his 30year academic career was not always in

management (also in humanities and sociology) He has also been a labourer on construction sites, worked in textile factories, been a shop assistant in a hardware store, an announcer on the radio, where he used to produce a couple of shows for

Radio 4ZZZ in Brisbane, including The Jazz Program, and he has been a book series

editor as well as a journal editor Currently he also works at The University of

Technology, Sydney, where he is a Professor of Management and shares the

Directorship of ICAN Research and several international visiting posts with the other Stewart Clegg, but is a lot more interesting than he is

Bogdan Costea is a member of the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology

at Lancaster University’s Management School His main research and teaching preoccupation is the constitution of new subject positions in Western management practices (such as, for example, how HRM reflects multiple modalities of

appropriating and expropriating, producing and controlling subjectivity in late modern cultures) He is similarly interested in management education and its cultural origins,

in particular, the world-historical narratives this form of education promotes and how

Douglas Ezzy took his PhD at the University of Tasmania where he is now a Senior

Lecturer in Sociology, Australia He is currently researching contemporary Witchcraft, and his research is driven by a fascination with how people find meaning and dignity

in contemporary life His publications include Narrating Unemployment (Ashgate 2001), Qualitative Analysis (Allen and Unwin/Routledge 2002) and the edited

collection Practising the Witch’s Craft (Allen and Unwin 2003) He has also published

articles and book chapters on contemporary spirituality, the meaning of work and unemployment, illness experiences, identity theory and research methodology

London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley His main research interests are in organization theory (especially leadership, group dynamics and organizational culture), consumer studies, management learning and knowledge,

storytelling, folklore and psychoanalysis Gabriel is author of Freud and Society, Working Lives in Catering (both Rout ledge), Organizations in Depth (Sage) and Storytelling in Organizations (Oxford University Press) and co-author of Organizing and Organizations and The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and its Fragmentation and Experiencing Organizations (all Sage) He has recently edited the collection, Myths, Stories and Organizations, published by Oxford

University Press in April 2004 Other publications include articles and book chapters

on illness narratives, computer folklore, organizational nostalgia, chaos and

complexity in organizations, fantasies of organizational members about their leaders, organizational insults and research methodology using stories and narratives He has

been Editor of Management Learning and Associate Editor of Human Relations

Robert Grafton-Small holds a CNAA doctorate on social aspects of consumption

Prematurely retired after posts in Marketing at Strathclyde and Organisational

Symbolism at St Andrews, he has lately been an honorary professor at Keele

University’s Department of Management Now attached to the University of Leicester Management Centre, he maintains an active interest in original research, publishing regularly in several disciplines

Christopher Grey is Reader in Organization Theory at the Judge Institute of

Management, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge

He gained his PhD at Manchester University and has previously held faculty posts at UMIST and Leeds University He has been a Visiting Fellow at Stockholm University,

and Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning, an Executive Committee member of the

Management Education and Development Division of the American Academy of Management and a Fellow of the ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Economic Performance He was a member of the DfES’s National Educational Research Forum and chaired its task group on research quality He is currently chair of the

Management Research Advisory Forum to the National College of School Leadership

He has published widely in the fields of management, accounting, organization theory and sociology of organizations and his main research interests are in professional services, management education and learning, and the sociology of management and organizations

Peter M.Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in HRM at the University of Durham His main

research interest is a focus on the rhetoric of industrial relations and human resource management He has degrees from the Universities of Glasgow, Manchester and

London Amongst others he has been published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Personnel Review, Journal of Management Studies and Organization He

thinks he longs to return to Stornoway!

Lucas D.Introna is a Reader in Organisation, Technology, and Ethics at Lancaster

University Management School Previously he lectured in Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science His research interest is a critical

Ethics and Information Technology and a founding member of the International

Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT)

Stephen Linstead is Director of Research and Professor of Organizational Analysis,

Durham Business School, University of Durham Recent books include The Aesthetics

of Organization (Sage 2000 with Heather Höpfl), The Language of Organization (Sage 2001 with Robert Westwood), Text/Work (Routledge 2002) and Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (Sage 2004) An Academician of the Academy of the

Social Sciences, he currently co-convenes a Standing Working Group of the European

Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) on The Philosophy of Organization and coedits the journal Culture and Organization He is currently working on qualitative methods projects; still sending his letters of application to Pop Idol; and until they relent and double the qualifying age (Double? Hmmmm, it would take a bit more than that! … Ed.), he whiles away his spare moments trying to communicate with geese

and learning to know his place

Peter Mclnnes is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde’s Graduate School of

Business, Glasgow, UK Before taking up an academic post, Peter was a management accountant working in a variety of industries including aircraft manufacturing and food production His current research focuses on the role of identity in organizations under conditions of change His interests lie in identity’s role in organizational life, specifically the way that language usage shapes both perceptions and the lived experience of organization

Goldie Osuri is Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales

and holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Her research involves interdisciplinary work in media, cultural and postcolonial studies on race, ethnicities and contemporary nationalisms

Alison Pullen is Senior Lecturer in Critical Management at the University of York

having worked for the University of Durham at Durham Business School, and the Universities of Leicester and Essex Alison’s research explores changes in managerial subjectivities, looking at issues of fluidity and the breaking down of binary

categorizations in theory and practice, and gender and change She remains confused about who Alison Linstead is and scared that she is becoming her mother Unable to construct an interesting identity for the sake of this book, she will end about now, but she is also interested in other people’s narcissism and particularly how this is

gendered

Graham Sewell is Associate Professor of Organization Studies and Human Resource

Management in the Department of Management, University of Melbourne, Australia

He is also a visiting professor in the Department of Economics and Business,

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain He obtained his PhD in 1994 from Cardiff University, UK Graham has published widely in the areas of workplace surveillance, teamwork, and business ethics He is currently involved in two long-term research projects, one examining the use of evolutionary theory in management and organization studies and the other assessing the social and economic impact of

“identity theft” He lives in Melbourne with his wife Alison and his pet parrot, Schmooly

operational research and organizational behaviour, and completed his PhD at Bath University His research interests are in the relationship between managerial living, thinking, learning and storying He has applied these areas to topics as diverse as leadership, motivation of middle managers, agenda shaping, problem construction, consulting skills and mergers He is currently struggling with the self-referential character of writing a short biography for a book on identity

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce:

The MidWest Sociological Society and the University of California Press for Chapter

3 which originally appeared as “Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism

and Hermeneutics.” Sociological Quarterly, 39, 2:239–252, Spring 1998

The British Sociological Association for Chapter 6 which originally appeared as

“Career as a project of the Self and Labor process discipline sociology.” 28, 2:479–497, May 1994

The Tavistock Institute for Chapter 10 which originally appeared as “Beyond happy

families: a critical reevaluation of the control—resistanceidentity triangle.” Human Relations, 52, 2 179–203, 1999

An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 11 appeared as Clegg, S.R., Linstead, S.A and Sewell, G., “Only Penguins: a Polemic on Organization Theory at the Edge of the

World.” Organization Studies—Millennium Special Issue, 21, 0:103–117, 2000

1 Introduction

Organizing identity

Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead

The study of identity has a long history in management and organization studies, with a background inter alia in the symbolic interactionism and studies of self-making of George Herbert Mead, the functionalism of Talcott Parsons, the development of role theory by Robert Merton, of dramaturgical sociology by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of how social membership was achieved through talk Focus

on the organized dimensions of identity received particular emphasis during the 1980s with the rise of what has been called “corporate culturism” Although some early contributions to this area recognized both the importance of identity as an explanatory concept as well as culture, and a handful acknowledged the importance of power and subjectivity in identity formation (Knights and Willmott 1985), these approaches tended

to part company in the 1990s “Organizational Identity” effectively replaced corporate culture as a focal topic and incorporated an outward-facing consideration of identity as brand, whilst consideration of issues of power and subjectivity became synonymous with

a Foucauldian approach to such management issues as strategy and HRM (Hatch and Schultz 2002; Townley 1992) In sociology more broadly, in response to societal changes and increasing cultural diversity—globalization, the dawn of the e-society, the networked

or virtual society and the information age, the mobility of labour and citizenship—identity has now become a more nuanced core topic stretching across a variety of sub-fields

This collection develops existing work on identity in organizations by incorporating philosophical contributions to the area which have hitherto been neglected This book,

then, has three objectives which correspond to its sections: first, to confront established

notions and assumptions about identity and its relevance to organization and management

studies; second, to look more closely and critically at the performance of identity in different contexts; third, to explore what is beyond current understandings of identity and

whether identity itself is a concept which now has only a history The contributors to this collection bring a wide range of approaches from current philosophizing into the area of organization theory, and critically assess their relevance and impact in a way which

interrupts identity as a notion, and which means, we believe, that it can never be quite the

same again

As we have noted, the work of the 1980s and early 1990s on corporate and

organizational cultures has led to a concern with the concept of organizational identity,

and there have been several recent attempts to work with the concept, particularly through the deployment of discourse and symbolic analysis (for example, a special issue

of Academy of Management Review in 2000) This issue covered such aspects as

identification, multiple organizational identities, organizational image and adaptive instability, identity and learning and stakeholder approaches More recently, several additional seminal papers have been collected by Hatch and Schultz (2004) into a reader, covering classic contributions such as those of Mead and Goffman, important early contributions including Albert and Whetten’s first statement of the concept of organizational identity, Alvesson’s introduction of the idea of image, Ashforth and Mael’s introduction of the concept of identification from social identity theory and Dutton and Dukerich’s use of grounded theory It also explores multiple identities, stability and change in identity, identity as narrative and discourse, identity threats and the question of identity audiences In other areas, the effects of societal changes and

organizational restructurings on the identities of managers have been examined (for

example, Linstead and Thomas 2002; Thomas and Linstead 2002; see also Pullen A., (2005), for a comprehensive treatment of managerial identity), the changing nature of the idea of “career” (see Grey in this volume, and also McKinlay 2002) and the shift in significance from production to consumption have also been brought into a focus which addresses identity incidentally as a by-product of social fragmentation and simulation (du

Gay 1995; du Gay et al 2001; Ritzer 1999, 2004) At another level, literature on diversity has shown an interest in the formation of ideas of otherness including gender, the effects

of globalization and multiculturalism and the emergence of postcolonial critiques (Banerjee and Linstead 2001; Calàs and Smircich 1996) During the same period, however, contemporary philosophy has also explored issues of identity and otherness, the creation and negotiation of selfhood, the relations among selves and others, and has challenged many of the existing basic assumptions, such as the essentially unitary nature

of self, and traditional concepts such as the nature of class, which still underpin much of the mainstream work in organization and management studies on identity Some of this has worked its way unevenly into management and organization such as work on the fragmented self (Cohen 1994; Friedman 1992; Hassard 1993; Hancock 1999; Kellner 1992; Linstead and Grafton Small 1992) as Hatch and Schultz note in their introduction Although his important work is not included in the reader, Weick’s definition of sensemaking makes identity the ground of the sense-making process, and he illustrates this with a case study of the tensions between collective (industry/region) identity and

organizational (firm) identity undertaken by Porac et al (1989; see Weick 1995:76–82)

Despite the fact that Weick deploys terminology that renders the self multiple, ambiguous, dynamic, an interpretive structure, where shifting interactions consti-tute shifting definitions of self, self as text, and that self is reflexive, mutable and adaptable (Weick 1995:20), his work should not be seen as a bridge into postmodernism, partly because of the essentially constructed nature of self and agency that his account

preserves, and partly because of the unremitting positivity of concepts such as need

which are seen to drive sense-making Weick’s account remains psychological, and even where he draws heavily on philosophy, he seems only partially aware of the sources of his ideas—the section on retrospection cites Schutz, Pirsig and Hartshorne but the argument is pure, yet unacknowledged, Bergson, whose work was a known influence on these writers (Weick [1995:25] uses William James’ description of Bergson’s concept of duration rather than Bergson’s own account) Indeed, as we note below, Weick’s emphasis on the retrospective quality of sensemaking truncates the retrospective-

prospective dimension of accounts which Garfinkel (1967) derives from Bergson via Schutz and which is essential to the understanding of the virtual in postmodern thought Weick’s account of the “mirror” presents Cooley (1902) as its origin, yet again the account owes much to Hegel (Hancock and Tyler 2001) and would, in fact, have allowed

a bridge, inter alia, to Kojéve, Lévinas and Derrida and their readings of the “Other” There are other, more recent, influential concepts such as social capital (Adler and Kwon 2002; Nahapiet and Ghoshal 2002) which similarly await integration with theories of identity and organizing It is one of the purposes of this book to open up this interpassage with philosophically informed accounts of identity, to enrich rather than displace existing work in the field, and offer some alternatives

In this chapter we will introduce the contributions to the book in terms of the tripartite structure of purpose we have outlined But the overall approach of the book is not to look

at levels of identity as such (such as individual, role, group, professional, organizational, community, regional, national), although these considerations will surface, but to consider identity as a process rather than a product—a process which involves societal factors, psychological factors, interaction, reflection, practice and performance So, before we briefly outline the contributions to the book, we wish to present our attempt to map and integrate some of these different aspects of identity formation, taking a perspective that the lack of definitional convergence in the field is a fair reflection of the complexity of the concept, rather than a failing of analysis The model we present goes beyond existing studies of managerial and organizational identities which regard those identities as changing but relatively stable, towards the recognition of identity construction as a form of first order accounting (Garfinkel 1967) characterized by paradox, fluidity, inconsistency and being constantly emergent To appreciate and accommodate diversity, difference and the voice of subjects’ “equivocal positions” (Willmott 1997:1337), we suggest that identity construction is not a matter of resolving ambiguity and making clear-cut choices, but is often characterized by confusion and conflict within the individual as well as in the context Identity formation in and around organizations is not only embedded in the demands of the present, but is constructed in terms of the conjunction of past and future, as an explanation of previous events as episodes in an unfolding narrative in a way that positions the constructor of the account advantageously for future episodes—indeed, may be a rehearsal for them Identities can

be seen as masks that are actively used, manipulated and created as resources for participation in the performance of an ongoing masquerade (Goffman 1959) Within this ongoing process are particular events which significantly affect the shaping of identity and may change its course dramatically

Our framework was originally developed from qualitative fieldwork with managers in the public and private sectors and draws, inter alia, on the work of Bergson, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari It discerns three areas of identity formation, which are interconnected and recursive rather than sequential, and which are infused by power

relations and suffused by reflexivity We outline the three areas, which we term identity capital, processes of subjective identity formation and identity performance (or identity

events)

Identity resources and identity capital

Identity as a process rather than a product is, we note, following Lévinas, a result of a response to the Other, grounded in ontological insecurity and uncertainty However, of what symbolic traces the generalized Other consists, when not embodied in specific interpersonal interactions, is often complex Whenever identity processes occur, they draw on and relate to some contextual features which may be present, historical or based

on a shared expectation of the future These Derridean “traces” reaching forward and backward may be material, socio-economic, symbolic or discursive—identity will be a combination of all these phenomena, although not all may be given the same degree of

attention We can suggest that these “resources” could be regarded as identity capital, a

concept which we believe goes further than the concept of social capital in terms of what

it takes into account phenomenologically, but which preserves the idea that adheres to the use of capital as a term, in that it may accrue or deplete, increase or decrease in value, and be subject to symbolic trade-offs where influence, trust, credibility, honour and reputation are involved (Adler and Kwon 2002) We also wish to preserve the language sense of capital as a capital letter which embodies the naming function—certain properties of identity capital often act so strongly as to “name” an individual or body, to convey a set of attributes and expectations which may be either an advantage or disadvantage to the change or creation of new identity, so that capital may represent both burden and opportunity for leverage The contextual field too is dynamic and identity capital may lose or increase value when shifted from one place to another—whether an individual changes organization, an organization attempts to operate in a different market, or both move to a new physical location This is one of the emphases of the new social geography, that land-scapes relate to identityscapes, that selves are always in some sense geoselves, capable of deterritorialization (Pile and Thrift 1995; Sibley 1995) Identity also changes over time and in relation to prevailing interpretations of history, which was one reason why, in the 1980s, corporate culture investigators paid considerable attention to founding myths, and why IBM in recent years has invested part

of its knowledge management capability into managing its own internal stories (Snowden

2000, 2001) The immediate history of power relations in an organization or community, historical and prevailing class or caste relations, and familial dynamics which may be partly cultural or ethnically shaped may all have influence Castells (1997) argues that the dominant groups in a society may have the power to institute “legitimizing identities” in order to extend this domination and, in connection with this, Alvesson and Willmott (2002) identify forms of “identity regulation” Additionally the relations which individuals have to technology or work processes and skills, including membership of professions, or nascent professions can also be an important identity resource, even outside the scope of work activities (Fineman 1983)

Where individuals are concerned, physical attributes such as body, sex and race may play a part in the formation of identity alongside associated social constructions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity Also, at an individual level, one’s personal life-history and its ongoing (and intertextual) life-narrative form an interpretive structure and often provide a teleology into which identity resources can be drawn This affects those aspects

of selection and deployment over which the individual has some exercise of agency Finally, there is the active effect of individual and collective psychodynamic processes, such as projective identification or narcissism Whilst the status of these processes as unconscious is problematic, we believe it is legitimate to regard such important, habitually deployed mechanisms as ego-defences as identity resources They constitute a form of psychological skill or competence capital, which is effective even where it may

be pathological

Modes of subjective identity formation

For Friedman (1992) narcissism or self-obsession is closely linked to the changing nature

of identity formation in the shift from modernity to postmodernity Kellner (1992) somewhat wrily observes that identity has always been experienced as a problem, and has not just recently been problematized by the postmodern, although the postmodern condition has accelerated and fragmented the processes of identity formation For Kellner, what is left may be a disaster of instability, a totally “fragmented, disjointed life subject to the whims of [managerial] fashion”, or it may be a new set of opportunities for reconstructing the self Friedman sees that postmodern narcissism accordingly cannot be one where the self-obsessed narcissist seeks support for their existence in any coherent or

unified way, but in which the whimsicalities of that existence, seen almost as a game,

conscript others into supporting or subordinate roles which shift as the rules of the game themselves shift In considering how subject formation may be said to occur, then, we can identify five categories, or modes, grounded in power, knowledge and language through which the “game” may be said to pass These are perhaps best conceived in terms

of the five questions which they address

1 Mode of Incorporation (the ways that individuals accommodate organizational goals

in a climate of change and restructuring) The question here is how individuals align themselves with new organizational goals and objectives and accommodate visions which may be at odds with what they previously held or currently hold These may range from enthusiastic embrace to attempts at avoidance Examples included: vision/advocacy (seduction); acceptance; accommodation; consent; citizenship; legitimation; “knowledge management”, where what is acknowledged to be known is selective, and the unpalatable denied; and the “dual identity” system where contrasting and often opposing identities and values are simultaneously subscribed to

2 Mode of Disciplined Subjectivity (how individuals fit themselves into gendered

organizational social systems/discursive structures) The question here is how individuals identify with new systems with different requirements of them and different means of controlling and evaluating them as organizational members Where the mode of incorporation deals with values and beliefs, this mode is more grounded in the praxis of membership and what sort of a member the subject becomes Examples include: social subject/team player (surveillance); leading subject; political subject; professional subject;

“acting subject” (performer of a role or roles)

3 Mode of Subjective Identity (the means by which individuals position, or see

themselves positioned, within/identify with wider social discourses) The question here is how the individual weights organizational discourse to other wider discourses of which

they may be a part Here we are dealing with the subject in relation not just to the

organization, but to who they see themselves being in the world, and the tensions, strains

or opportunities that may ensue Alvesson and Willmott (2002) discuss self-identity in a relevant but slightly more restricted way than we have in mind here This is more about the “I” in Mead’s terms than the “me” Examples include: personal; familial; professional/careerist; ethical; aesthetic, etc

4 Mode of Resistance (how individuals resist, transgress and change established

discursive structures or create new ones) Here the question is how individuals resist being colonized by discourses of which they do not approve or in which they do not believe, and how they resist having unacceptable identities inscribed upon them Castells (1997:8) argues that collective resistance identities may be formed from common modes

of resistance permeating a group or society Examples, both individual and collective, include: political opposition; non-cooperation; subversion; symbolic/ discursive opposition; counter-seduction; transgressive reinscription; reflexive critique; dissent

5 Mode of Autonomy (how individuals convert identity into agency and how praxis can

thereby be enabled and realized) The final question is how individuals are able to create identities which they can use to establish some sovereign epistemological space that can become a resource for change and development Examples include: political agency; emancipation; empowerment; networking and alliances; bricolage/improvisation; play; managing boundaries

The modes may be thought of as being involved in deploying masks, at a tactical level, whilst simultaneously cohering to form different dimensions of a larger mask Different

masks may consequently be employed within different modes of subject formation to

achieve a common objective, or a specific combination of modes of subject formation may constitute one particular mask

Identity performance and event

Judith Butler (1990, 1993) develops the argument, in relation to gender, that we are not looking at “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through

a stylized repetition of acts’ (1990:140) In her 1993 book, she extends this consideration

to the ways in which bodies exceed the demands placed on them by discursive limits But, in both books, identity is a social temporality which accomplishes its own origin—it

is performative in that in functioning as a label for a set of behaviours and styles, it constructs those behaviours as the result of a substantial source of identity As she puts it,

“these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (1990:141) This approach has had only minor impact in organizational identity studies (her work is not cited once in the Hatch and Schultz reader), yet the distinction made between the expressive and the performative is crucial—in Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) model, they incorporate the expressive but not the performative So the third part of our model deals with aspects of performativity, how identity, or its appearance of substance, may be generated from acts or series of acts, stylized in harmony with the modes of subjective identity formation we identified in the second part of the model

Narrative and story may become part of the performative dimensions of identity, as Sims in this volume argues, and as Czarniawska (1997) has previously outlined in the context of institutional theory We have also hinted that identity performance may be enacted through the assumption of a succession of masks, as Foucault might have argued Yet perhaps the most significant new concept in our model is one developed from Foucault by Gilles Deleuze—that of the Event An Event is not simply something that happens, according to both Deleuze and Foucault—indeed we could distinguish between

an event as something that happens and Événement Événement is something that changes

the way we experience the world, the way we think about it—after it happens, things can never be the same again The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was certainly

Événement; in this volume, Osuri and Banerjee explore the World Trade Center attacks

of September 11, 2001, and look closely at how Événement may be constructed We

sometimes hope in our identity performances to permanently change the way people

think of us, to make our performance Événement, sometimes just to contribute to the

chain of performative signification that Butler identifies But caught up as we have to be

in others events and chains of signification, we cannot rule out the possibility that

someone else’s Événement may envelop us and change who we “are” forever

Finally, issues of agency and praxis come together in the consideration of identity politics, the paradigm case of which would be feminism Again, Castells (1997:8)

attempts to capture this dimension in terms of what he calls project identity where “social

actors draw on the cultural materials available to them” (identity capital) to create new identities and bring about social change (which could also be organizational change where conditions are appropriate) Castells argues that, whereas legitimizing identities produce civil society and resistance identities produce community, project identities produce subjects We disagree with his terminology in the latter two cases, as his use of the term “subject” appears to be more Hegelian and set against sovereignty at the level of the state rather than as a form of autonomy But we wish to retain the notion of project identity as a form of purposeful collective identity performance which can achieve small and potentially large-scale social change

Our model then seeks to encompass a wider range of considerations of identity than attempted by previous approaches We believe that identity is such an important concept that it requires thinking through from as many dimensions as possible, and a more thorough grasp of the treatment of identity in philosophy and sociology is needed than we presently have available before this can be said to have been achieved We believe that

we have a basis in our model for bringing together a variety of approaches not yet considered alongside each other, without seeking to subsume them to any functionalist teleology We also believe that our explicit understanding of the nature of process, which sees the three elements as constantly inter-relational rather than sequential, acting amidst each other rather than upon each other, should help to prevent any such adoption of the model Finally, we have to disagree with Hatch and Schultz’s view that early definitions

of identity as essence can be fused with what they term “postmodernist definitions of identity as flux and multiplicity” (see Letiche 2004 for a telling critique of this sort of assumption, and our contribution in this volume for a discussion of multiplicities) In order to understand why this fusion cannot occur, we need to ground our identity explorations in a conscientious engagement with the philosophy and social philosophy of identity This is what research in the field needs to do, and what this book hopes to begin

In beginning our confrontations with considerations of identity, Nic Beech and Peter Mclnnes argue that much managerial research and practice, for example in organizational culture, leadership and teamworking, does not problematize the conception of the self as having identity Individuals are taken as simple entities whose actions and ideas can be researched and reported on as if their entity-ness was fairly stable and simple Drawing

on empirical research in a large media organization concerned with publishing, television and radio, and a large multi-national drinks production and distribution organization, both organizations undergoing change which impacted on people, processes and physical location, they develop a perspective of three types of identity

The first holds that individuals are singular and consistent, they have attributes that may change over time, but which are consistently located within the person, and boundaries between the person and others are clear and incontrovertible The second holds that, for each person, there is a central unifying entity, which may be expressed and perceived differently in different social situations, but nonetheless has underlying identity Different parts of the self are activated in different interactions The third holds that an “individual” is a carte blanche for multi-authoring Others are emphasized at least

as much as the individual, and it is others who construct the nature of the individual In the “weak” version of this type of perspective, the individual is recipient of characteristics imposed by others, or is, in a sense, a mirror which reflects the impressions of others In the “stronger” versions, there is nothing but mirrors, which

reflect other mirrors They conclude by exploring two areas of impact—reflexive practice and methodology If, in reflexive practice, we move away from type-one conceptions of

identity, certain questions are raised about sustainability of concepts such as the individualism/collectivism distinction in organizational culture leadership and

followership and the individual’s role in teamworking A multi-perspective consideration reveals that role-based theories can misconstrue as permanent a version of self that is confined to a temporal and social environment Beech and Mclnnes explore some of the impacts of raising these questions for practice In regard to methodology, they raise questions of the appropriate object of investigation, whether the focus should be on individuals, groups, social environments, systems, interaction, a combination or some other “object” Finally they reflect on the ontological and epistemological assumptions made by their “selves” in “their” chapter

In Chapter 3 we reproduce Douglas Ezzy’s classic paper, where he argues for a synthesis of George Herbert Mead’s conception of the temporal and intersubjective nature of the self with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic theory of narrative identity Combining the insights of Ricoeur’s philosophical analysis with Mead’s social-psychological orientation provides a subtle, sophisticated and potent explanation of self-identity He argues that a narrative conception of identity implies that subjectivity is neither a philosophical illusion nor an impermeable substance Rather, a narrative identity provides a subjective sense of self-continuity as it symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the story a person tells about his or her life The utility of this conception of identity is illustrated through a re-reading of Erving Goffman’s study

of the experience of mental patients This example underlines the social sources of the self-concept and the role of power and politics in the construction of narrative identities The problem of self and other in the everyday is explored by Bogdan Costea and Lucas Introna in a consideration of diversity They argue that, ever since diversity has been discovered by management circles as a new “problem”, literature on “diversity management” has continued to accumulate Part ethical, part political and part functional, mainstream models for diversity management rely on concepts which uphold oversimplifications characteristic of almost any area of reflection which emerges in the realm of management

The complexity of diversity seems to escape the “problem—model-solution” framework of management literature Rather, the more we think about diversity, the more its mystery deepens This chapter discusses philosophical issues implied in thinking about the Other from the perspective of Heideggerian and Lévinasian existential phenomenology This is a direct attempt to confront mutilating simplifications of diversity in management literature with two crucial contributions of twentieth-century philosophy First, they critique attempts to rationalize diversity as a “problem” for management All managerialist “solutions” represent an inevitable call upon Reason and upon a Science which could intervene in the process They argue that these attempts to make Self—Other relationships manageable relies upon a rationalistic and homogenizing metaphysics—a gesture which defeats the very purpose of engaging with the deep meaning of the inquiry Second, they re-immerse the discussion of diversity in the critiques of meta-physics developed by Heidegger and Lévinas as they are central to the aspiration of existential phenomenology to understand Otherness and to disclose the limits of transcendental metaphysics Heidegger and Lévinas opened up the mystery of the Other in ways unavailable to traditional philosophical or scientific reasoning by attacking the unrealistic rationalist bases of essentialist t metaphysics of difference, focusing respectively on each side of the Self—Other relationship Otherness always

implies an ethical demand which comes prior to every category that Self may impose in order to know the Other

Two conclusions follow The complexity of the issues involved in any reflection upon Otherness cannot be reduced to some mechanically derived categorial essence of

“diversity” If this is so, then the attempt to frame diversity as a social, organizational,

ethical, political, economic or cultural “problem” is fundamentally flawed Second, the

relationship between self and other can be seen both for everyday existence and for

philosophy as a central mystery (alongside others such as time, language, death, divinity,

etc.) Thus to be irreducibly different from “others” is not a matter of any simple act of definition, nor is it an “ontological disease” of the species, and no appeal to Reason or Science can overcome the depth of silence required sometimes in order to begin thinking about human diversity Otherness is encountered by the self somehow before it can reach categories which would entail the possibility of “managing” it—which, in effect, means

its silencing They argue for a radicalization of the notion of Other as that which

questions the Self, thus silencing it in turn for a moment which lies beyond the grasp of categorial metaphysics, but which also offers us the continuous “disturbance” out of which the “self arises anew In practice, this demands a continual opening up and putting into question of the grounds of such an encounter, maintaining the “problem” (to be solved) as an ever-deepening mystery (that has no solution), but because of this, excites and revitalizes the very meaning of such human encounters—Other in its otherness David Sims explores the way in which people act as authors of their own lives, and the way that their lives, in turn, act to author them This happens in three time frames, conceptually if not experientially separate Retrospectively, people tell stories about their past in which they emplot themselves as the people they would like to be taken to be Currently, they live out roles according to the places they want to take in their own and others’ stories Prospectively, they are engaged in preparing and writing the next section

of the personal story which is their life

We routinely expect each other to be able to produce a story about who we are, where

we are developing and who we are becoming We expect the same from ourselves Stories are for ourselves, and for others, but also for what Sims, following Bruner, calls the Distributed Self which, he argues, is a very rich way of thinking about identity and about the stories that maintain it My self, my identity, is not simply within my skull, or even within my body It is in my organization, my place of work, my family, my friends

At different stages of our lives, our identities are differently distributed, and this can be a matter of amusement to others when we get bound up in things in which others have no interest—like train-spotting Our identities may be distributed in our houses, our cars, our partners, our children, our communities, our sports clubs, our hobbies, or our political and religious affiliations Within organizations, our identities may be entailed in our departments, our roles and status, our industries or our companies The self, therefore, cannot be understood without knowing something about where it is distributed

Stories about lives need to be persuasive and, to do that, they need to display coherence, orderliness, interest and a range of levels of awareness But storying is still a risky enterprise and threats are posed to the distributed self by defeat, disbelief, disinterest, disproof and losing the plot In conclusion, Sims argues that life is multiply storied We lead storied lives, and develop storytelling skills which then give us the stories that we proceed to live out Our storytelling is always precarious, and our attempts

to make our life in some way more permanent and less precarious lead us continuously into strategies to defend endangered stories It therefore is not always easy to work out whose life we are leading

In Part II, having questioned the relation of self and other, we consider how “selves” may be performed for others In Chapter 6, a reproduction of an influential paper, Christopher Grey draws together formative insights in labour process analysis, which highlighted the role of panoptic techniques of disciplinary power, and work which suggests that the project of self-management has become a defining feature of contemporary subjectivity In particular, he argues that the discipline operationalized within the discursive and non-discursive practices of “career” should be treated as an aspect of this contemporary project of self-management The pursuit of career is then seen to have the potential to transform techniques of disciplinary power into adjuncts of these projects of the self These themes are explored through the presentation of case study material on the accounting labour process

Steffen G.Böhm turns his attention to the processes of consultancy, through consideration of Lacan’s idea of the “barred” or the “destructed” subject, the subject that

is nothing, full of emptiness Lacan’s subject has no identity itself, being defined by a lack that is filled by the Other Such a destructed subject is Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the dandy who strolled through nineteenth-century Parisian arcades The flâneur’s subjectivity is characterized by a special empathy with the commodity that lures him into

an indexical “dream world” in which the most mundane things for sale can be enjoyed Böhm uses the textual device of a series of interruptions to translate the image of the flâneur, who for Benjamin is the archetypical subject of nineteenth-century modernity, into today’s world of twenty-first-century “hypermodern(organ)ization”, whose main icon, and perhaps agent, he argues, is the management consultant This interruptive

“translation” is done by way of discussing the “goings-on” of commodity fetishism which

is shown to be the main “phantasmagoric” fantasy, or ideology, of modernity It is argued that the commodity enables the subject to identify with what is otherwise a failing Other—the commodity-Other fills the subject, as fragments shored against its ruin But Böhm’s critique of commodity fetishism is, however, not presented as a call for a transparency of social relations Drawing on the work of Zižek, Böhm demonstrates that this belief in transparency is already part of the “goings-on” of commodity fetishism He argues in conclusion that there is no hope for transparency, progress or a full identity of the subject; instead, there is only hope for a failure of the relationship between subject and Other It is precisely this failure which establishes the political importance of the question of the subject and the Other

Peter Hamilton explores the significance of rhetoric in managing the relationship between the organization and its various perceived others, and in establishing some public impression of organizational identity Addressing the common criticism that organizational mission statements are mere rhetoric, Hamilton argues that this adopts too narrow a focus of what rhetoric is Implied in both the many criticisms and definitions of mission statements is a view that they are in some way concerned with organizational identity This concern with organizational identity, it is argued here, means that mission

statements are inherently rhetorical, not in the sense of manipulation, obfuscation or

bombast, but in the Aristotelian and Burkean sense of rhetoric’s concern with, respectively, persuasion and the generation of identification The argument of the chapter

is, therefore, that if an objective of mission statements is the generation or continuation of

an organizational identity, it is dependent on rhetoric in attempting to do this In that rhetorical sense, the mission statement may therefore be seen as performing organizational identity

On the basis of this argument, the rhetorical nature of mission statements is illustrated before going on to situate the rhetoric of mission statements within Aristotle’s epideictic genre While Hamilton accounts for mission statements in the traditional sense of epideictic’s projection of honour and praise, he positions mission statements within a re-appraised notion of the epideictic genre in relation to its role as ritual (and hence performance), focusing on ritual’s function in constituting and promoting community This re-appraisal of epideictic as community promoting, it is argued, is closely related to the notion of organizational identity and the chapter argues that this is important to understanding the nature of the rhetoric of the mission statement Hamilton shows that rhetoric matters and that, through appreciation of the rhetorical genre(s), we begin to understand how the discourse of organizational identity operates instrumentally, for example, through its various texts such as mission statements They embody a representation of organizational image and identity which, in part, can only be understood through understanding the rhetorical processes at play within their attempts at persuasion/identification, whether our conception of rhetoric is unilateral or bilateral Thus, whether a particular organization’s mission statement is unilaterally oriented

towards a passive audience to which it is trying to do something to, or whether it is bilaterally oriented to an active audience in which it is trying to do something with,

organizational identity is primarily a rhetorical process

Per Bäckius argues that as a paramount notion—a figure of thought—the individual has served as one of the founding figures in the construction and development of Western societies for at least the last five centuries In the process, however, it has been under constant pressure and threat, in perpetual crisis, and hence under endless reconstruction There seems to be no reason for disagreement on any of these instances, so what is the nature of the current crisis in which we hear calls for the concept of the individual to be rethought? As Deleuze put it: “a concept does not die simply when one wants it to, but only when new functions and new fields [of thought] discharge it”, Bäckius seeks out the functions and fields that make the concept of the individual feel too lonely, too much on its own, too individual Contemporary imperatives of enterprise call for us to become enterprising individuals, i.e individuals that have turned our selves into enterprises in a quest for self-expansion and fulfilment They focus on what the self contains, on inner growth, on filling it up as if from within As a container-entity, then, an individual hosts such “stuff” as personality, self, I, me, mind, soul, subjectivity, agency, creativity, motivation, (self)identity—but also split personality, divided and multiple selves One should nourish and develop the former, battle or heal the latter and the assumption is that

it can expand endlessly, that it will never burst—if the self grows, individuality follows Current discourses and practices of enterprise produce, or command, an ever-expanding individual with one sole occupation—the work of self-fulfilment Bäckius argues for the possibility that an enterprising self, with the one sole work in progress, may hit the wall of its individual container; may hit the wall so hard, it bursts or cracks And if the phenomenal individual, i.e the individual human being, bursts, so will the concept Bäckius takes two lines to rethinking the individual, of thinking it otherwise, of

conceptualizing it in another fashion One follows the enterprising individual in its daily

dealings using Strindberg’s concept of other work which can never be completed; the second takes up Deleuze’s idea of the dividual, the informational other of the individual

With the use of various historical exemplars and Snark hunters, Bäckius works towards

an other conception of the individual in enterprise: the dividual individual; divided in itself and in others

In Part III, which looks at what lines of thought and critique might be pursued out of a philosophically grounded engagement with identity, we reproduce Yiannis Gabriel’s trenchant dialogue between psychoanalysis and critical management studies against a background of the study of organizational culture In this chapter, the author explores the nature of contemporary organizational controls, the extent to which they can be said to colonize employee subjectivity, and the types of resistance which they generate Labour process, psychoanalytic, critical theory, and Foucauldian perspectives are juxtaposed and

a number of similarities and divergences are noted It is argued that many of these perspectives prematurely lament the end of employee recalcitrance and exaggerate the magnitude and totality of organizational controls, generating over-managed and over-controlled images of individuals, organizations and societies It is proposed that a rapprochement of psychoanalytic and labour process theory approaches can lead to an appreciation of unmanaged and unmanageable terrains in organizations, in which human agency may be rediscovered, neither as a classconscious proletariat nor as a transcendental subject, but as a struggling, feeling, thinking, suffering subject, one capable of obeying and disobeying, controlling and being controlled, losing and escaping control, defining and redefining control for itself and for others

Stephen Linstead, Stewart Clegg and Graham Sewell present a muchextended version

of their millennial philosophical reflection on some of the conditions associated with having, or not having, the identity of “Australian” management scholar, in the field of Organization Studies (whilst being recognized in other respects as being Australian) Their argument is that, whilst recent critical accounts of diversity in organizations recognize that the concept of difference is used to classify, position and perpetuate in disadvantage those very groups that it should have advantaged, it is rarely if ever acknowledged that in Organization Studies itself this process has been occurring for the best part of a century Embodying, bricolating and wrily performing their identity as they

go, they take a reflexive and historical look at one aspect of this process—the position of the Australian scholar of organization from Elton Mayo onwards, and the way in which the particularities of being Australian have been silenced or marginalized—altercast and remaining cast out, even to the ends of the earth They argue that, as being Australian has functioned symbolically for other cultures for decades, it might begin to do so for Organization Studies, to alert us to the ever-increasing centrist influence of North Atlantic Theory of Organizations (NATO), felt through career advancement, the allocation of research funds and the acceptance of papers in scholarly journals They argue that this situation is more than just an Australian problem, and more than just a problem of identity

Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee take this globalized exploration of altercasting even further Taking the representations and subsequent interpretations in the Australian media

of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as their example, they argue that global identities, which produce global subjects on a

collective scale, are staged through global media events Drawing on ideas from Virilio, Wark and Appadurai to theorize these global media events, they further argue that such representations are racialized through the general conceptualization of “whiteness” which functions as a powerfully identifying, but entirely fictional, racial category, and also of the related idea of “diaspora”, through which apparently unconnected groups can draw on their current localities to generate myths of origin and achieve increased influence or advantage After carefully outlining the background of their work in “whiteness studies”, they point out that theorizing whiteness within media representations as an embodied, historical construct that needs to be localized within specific racialized social formations, requires taking account of the national—local dynamics of its formation Consequently, whiteness within the Australian media has to be theorized within the context of “white teleologies” (that is, assimilative scripts, narratives of the foundational status of the Anglo nation, and the attempted erasure of Indigenous ownership) as well as whiteness as lived realities and visualities “Whiteness” as a form of identity capital in the Australian context was expressed and marked through the localization—or symbolic customization—of the global media event of September 11 by the sympathetic reinscriptions of governmental leaders and the mainstream media, and through their readings of this material they demonstrate the importance of recognizing the discursive and material relationship between the global and the local in the formation of collective identity Having interrogated how the attacks came to be constructed in terms of transnational loyalty, a threat to whiteness via “democracy” and “freedom”, and how they were deployed politically, they argue in conclusion that, against the discursive imperatives of whiteness, perhaps even against existent forms of the nation-state, we may need to draw our translocal maps based on the notion of movements towards justice even

as we continue to actively foreground and challenge the identity maps of diasporic teleologies

Stephen Linstead and Alison Pullen begin from the understanding that gendered thinking is not confined to explicit gender relations, but our understanding of social institutions is shaped by gender Prevailing binary assumptions can be challenged at two

levels—the biological level of sexed bodies and the social level of ascribed genders—and

their chapter considers alternative approaches to binary thinking such as multiplicity and fluidity They argue that, although approaches taken to thinking of gender in terms of fluidity have been informed usefully by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the implications of this work have not been fully realized at the level of ontology Attempts

to move beyond binary thinking in gender relations rest upon the conceptualization of multiplicity, but this is rarely addressed directly In order to identify further directions for progress in thinking beyond binary gender relations, in this chapter they interrogate

multiplicity and find three actual or possible types—multiplicities of the same,

characteristic of feminist approaches which we critique through a reconceptualization of

desire; multiplicities of the third, characterized by anthropological, transgender and queer theory approaches; and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, typified by the

rhizomatics and fluid theorizing of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz and Olkowski They propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire which, rather than compensating for a lack or pursuing the fulfilment of a wish, is characterized simply

by its own exuberance, realized in proliferation This, they argue, enables a meaningful connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, thought through in terms of

gender identity as immanence, intensity and consistency From this, they consider various possibilities of a future outside or beyond gender, emptied of gender (ungendered) or gendered to excess (genderful) They argue in conclusion that, although gender is no longer widely considered to be a property of individuals, the alternative of viewing it in terms of performativity, where it is the outcome of linguistic and social peformances (whether agentic or structural, conscious or unconscious), unnecessarily limits the possibilities of thinking multiplicity

Robert Grafton Small concludes by arguing that the very order which is so often seen

as the object or core of organization in theory and practice is itself unnatural—and our bodies remind us of this on a daily basis He examines our identity aesthetics, arguing that the symmetries of industrial aesthetics estrange us from the essential asymmetry of our own bodies, a dislocation we disguise with mass consumption and collective obesity, but never deny These artificial uniformities are also coercive, themselves an attempt at organization and a target for assaults made shocking by their deliberate randomness Imbalance, then, and the otherness of order are discussed as aspects of an aesthetic with which we seduce and belittle ourselves simultaneously, arranging our everyday worlds around an architecture of displacement and the inhabiting of inhibited space

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subjectivity” Human Relations, 50, 11:1329–1359

Confronting identity: selves

and others

2 Now where was I?

Questioning assumptions of consistent identity

Nic Beech and Peter Mclnnes

Introduction

Identity-related issues have long been a feature of managerial practice and of writing aimed at practitioners For example, managers have been exhorted to develop strong cultures in which people identify with organisational purpose (Deal and Kennedy 1982), develop leadership styles with which followers can identify (Semler 1993) and develop strong in-group ties in teams (Katzenbach and Smith 1993) such that there is peer group identification The underlying presumption is that focused and unified identities will enable stronger performance and efficiency in the organisation The critical literature which has developed alongside the managerialist literature has adopted an alternative perspective There has been a focus on differentiated and fragmented cultures (Martin

1992), struggles within and between groups demonstrating tensions (Ezzamel et al 2001)

and a recognition of divisions and fractured unities (Parker 2000) However, this critical literature has not eliminated the attractiveness of the more unitary concept of the managerialist approach as this offers perceived certainties and answers to the demands for performance which are placed upon managers (Clark and Salaman 1998; Watson and Bargiela-Chiappini 1998) In this chapter, we will contrast alternative ways of ‘reading’ identity The purpose of doing this is to be able to recognise the alternatives in practice and hence to be in a position to make choices about how one interacts in managerial situations Our contention is that the uncritical ‘simple’ reading of identity misrepresents the complexity of social reality Hence, although it may have the appearance of usefulness, in fact it lacks utility Conversely, the more critical perspectives on identity may appear to be less pragmatic than the simple version, but we will argue that these are more useful in practice because they bring into question what, in many cases, may be fallacious assumptions

In this chapter we will discuss three different ‘modes of reading’ identity: the first conceives identity as singular and consistent; the second sees identity as a central unifying conception, which may be expressed and perceived differently in different social settings; and the third holds that an ‘individual’ is a carte blanche for multi-authoring, in which others are the primary source of the changeable nature of the self Much of the practitioner-oriented literature fits with the first mode of reading, whilst the critical literature tends towards the latter two modes We will briefly set out the three modes before discussing empirical illustrations of the use of these modes in organisational talk

Three modes of reading identity

The first mode holds that individuals are singular and consistent Attributes are acquired

by the individual over time but are consistently located within the person who has clear and incontrovertible boundaries between themselves and others (Cattell 1965; Holland 1985) The assumption that individuals have singular and consistent identities can be seen embedded in a range of managerial practices and practice-oriented literature For example, the process of employee selection can be regarded as identifying the personal

traits of individuals and matching them to clear job criteria (Barrick et al 2000; O’Reilly

et al 1991) Similarly, personal traits can be regarded as underpinning job performance

(Gardner and Martinko 1996) Practitioneroriented responses to issues such as teamwork focus on the ‘natural’ roles of individuals (Belbin 1995) while the ‘emotional intelligence’ of leaders (Goleman 2002) is portrayed as a stable trait of individuals High-performing teams are regarded not only as having a common purpose, but also as managing group-membership identity: Team members must agree on… how continuing membership in the team is to be earned’ (Katzenbach and Smith 1993:115) Earning membership is about ‘feeling the spirit’ As Bolman and Deal put it: ‘More and more teams and organizations now realize that culture, soul and spirit are the well-springs of high performance’ (1995:261) Such approaches are ultimately about selecting people who fit with requirements and ensuring that they continue to display the appropriate identity features, such as traits, spirit and cultural acceptability The presumption is that individuals can be defined by their attributes and characteristics and that these will pertain over time, hence enabling the organisational systems to function efficiently Such an approach is attractive for a number of reasons It implies that, in managing people, there are right and successful ways of operating: choosing the correct candidate, building a strong culture It also implies that managerial action is worthwhile and is the source of effectiveness The style of leadership adopted, for example, will be effective when it fits with the particular characterisations of the followers (Hersey and Blanchard 1982) More broadly, it has been argued that this way of thinking about people has strongly embedded, if not hegemonic, appeal in Western society (Gergen 1999) Indeed, the four aspects of individualism—freedom, action, rationality and self-motivation

(Abercrombie et al 1986)—underpin many of the defining features of Western

civilisation Democracy, for example, is based on the concept of free-willed individuals exercising the ability and right to choose Under this conception, the individual is regarded as isolated, consistent and free from the influence of others Processes that transgress this rational isolation carry broadly negative connotations (Asch 1955; Janis 1982; Milgram 1974) except where appropriated for organisational ends such as in leadership (Bass 1990) However, under other modes of reading identity, considerable doubt is cast on the assumptions and presumed consequences of the first mode

The second mode that we wish to discuss holds that each person takes on a variety of social roles in response to the social situation and yet, to a greater or lesser extent, there is

a central ‘unifying’ conception of identity underlying this Such an approach is perhaps,

in its strong form, epitomised by writers in social identity theory for whom social identities (for example, group member, leader etc.) are distinct from the individual identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979), albeit in relation to it (Worchel and Coutant 2003) These social identities are adopted in response to the groups in which the individual

participates through a process of self-categorisation (Hogg and Terry 2000) Such a view

has clear consequences for theories such as leadership (Hains et al 1997) where the

influence of the group context becomes crucial to ‘good performance’ as a leader and yet still retains the concepts that the individual is the originator and guardian of this role as well as role performance remaining consistent across periods of time So, for example, a group leader self-categorises themselves as such and maintains this identification in most circumstances

Still within Mode 2, but taking a different approach, Goffman (1959) argues for a metaphorically theatrical self where different aspects of the self are activated in different interactions During interaction, actors draw on a pool of ‘scripted’ behaviour that pre-exists the actions of the individual The actor draws upon a range of cues in deciding the appropriate role to play, responding not only to the role taken by the other, but to the physical setting of the performance and the costume of the other players In the framing

of the encounter, the role and script may be dominant in forming perceptions over any idiosyncrasy of the individual person (Goffman 1961) Idiosyncrasies are socialised out

of the behavioural repertoire through feedback processes in which people learn to avoid behaviours, language and emotions that are inappropriate to the established norm (Shutz 1967) In this mode of reading, identity may vary both through individual volition and in response to circumstances and others People are complicit in role and identity-taking as part of their meaning-making about themselves and others (Berger and Luckmann 1966) People derive self-meaning from their roles and the reciprocation of others playing

complimentary roles (Truss et al 1995)

Within organisations, groups differentiated through hierarchical (Salaman 1979), cultural (Martin 1992), generational or occupational (Parker 2000) markers are commonly observed as discrete, but contested, territories As people cross boundaries, for example from worker to manager, or from trainee to professional, they are seen as having different characteristics and abilities This may be especially the case in networked organisations where people operate across traditional organisational boundaries and are required to be different when they cross the boundary (Williams 2002)

The second mode contrasts with the first in emphasising dynamism in identity and the role of others and social circumstances in the dynamics However, the dynamics are limited There is a crucial element of sameness throughout the changes Although an individual may take on different roles, and may gain new characteristics in new circumstances, it is still fundamentally the same individual Hence, the identity of the individual operates as a unifying conception which may change to a degree, and which will be perceived differently by others in different social circumstances

The third mode holds that an ‘individual’ is a carte blanche for multi-authoring Others are emphasised at least as much as the individual, and it is others who construct the nature of the individual So, for example, in an organisational setting, the workers may construct a manager as a noninvolving leader, whereas the manager’s superiors construct him/her as overinvolving In the ‘weak’ version of this type of perspective, the individual

is the recipient of characteristics imposed by others, or is, in a sense, a mirror that reflects the impressions of others In the ‘stronger’ versions, there is nothing but mirrors, which reflect other mirrors Alvesson and Deetz (1999) advance the argument that the Western conception of man has always been a myth which functions to suppress internal Freudian conflicts and disguise the privileged rationality and control of the self They argue that, in

increasingly fragmented societies, identities projected onto people are increasingly dynamic and indeterminate Identity here is less a process of an individual choice and

more a process of fabricating identity as a cultural artefact (Linstead 1993) that is

concerned with locating and fixing self in the language of the ‘other’ (Cooper 1989) These multiple points of identification are unlikely to culminate in a singular and consistent individual; rather, as Braidotti (1994) argues in respect of a woman’s identity,

it is the site of contradictory and overlapping experiences of self, derived from (and through) a range of categories such as class, race, age, sexual orientation and others To this list we may add the various roles that people are expected to act into such as mother, wife, daughter, breadwinner (Berger 1997) that carry both contradictions within-category and between-category Equally, managers are subject to institutional and individual demands such that fixity of identity in the midst of overwhelming insecurity sees managers adopt discourses from discursive resources (Watson 1995) that enable them to differentiate and secure ‘themselves’ (Thomas and Linstead 2002) In this mode, the source of identity is both a project of the individual and those in a position to exercise power, whether in terms of introducing control systems (Alvesson and Wilmott 2002), or

to effectively evade imposition of control (Ezzamelt et al 2001)

This mode of reading identity would hold that the first mode is a misrep-reservation People may perceive themselves to be conscious, in-control agents, but they are subject

to multifarious factors which move not only peceptions of them but them-selves The way

a person’s identity is enacted, not merely by themselves, but by others, becomes taken as real (Willmott 1993) and enters cyclical processes of social change and reinforcement (Beech and Huxham 2003) The self is out of control of the self and rather than being singular and unified, may contain difference and contradiction

Having set out the three modes of reading identity, we will illustrate their enactment in organisational talk drawing on data from two organisational settings

Methodology

We adopt an approach to narrative analysis that we regard as a subset of discourse analysis Our approach is interpretative (Hardy 2001) and we are concerned with how talk in the study organisations constituted individual and group identities The aim is to understand the social situation, in its complexity, through the multiple lines of narrative (Boje 2001) through which the actors in the situation, and we as researchers, make sense

of and attribute meaning to events, the self and others

Data were gathered using a variety of techniques Semi-structured interviews were conducted as focus groups with staff The groups were selected by function and volunteers were sought to participate Whilst this does lead to the potential for particular views to be privileged, the use of homogenous focus groups was intended to maximise the talk of participants to each other rather than to the researcher The groups were asked

to discuss what was going on at work, what changes they perceived and what they thought about them Individual interviews were also conducted These were typically with more senior staff who were unable or reluctant to join focus groups The same areas

of questioning were covered Lastly, the researchers spent time in the organisations chatting informally with staff and observing the way that staff interacted Most of the

data used below come from transcriptions of the interview and focus group data, although some comes from casual conversation with staff

The data were transcribed and analysed using a process expounded by Silverman (1993) The stories were broken down into generalisable narrative structures (Propp 1975) which were the underlying themes and types of actor (Jeffcutt 1994) The actors had ‘spheres of action’ informing categorybound activities (Berger 1997) which were part of the identity of the actors Within the narrative structures there was an ordering (sequence and choice between alternatives) of events and actions (Beech 2000) The analysis gave an indication of how different groups of actors perceived their own roles, identities and situations, and those of other actors The narrative of change amongst the organisational change-makers is represented below as a series of points in the plot Rather than trying to conflate these into a single monological account (Boje 2001), we have attempted to maintain the divisions and inconsistencies by presenting the different voices side-by-side in order to illustrate the co-present divergent appearances and realities (Beech and Cairns 2001)

The two organisations selected for study were both going through significant change

at the time They were both merging with other organisations and this was useful in the current study as it had the potential to highlight issues of identity Both organisations had new management teams who were trying to implement what they regarded as modern management practices, and in both settings there were various occupational groups The first organisation was a public-sector local governmental organisation The second was a private-sector media organisation

In the next section we seek to highlight some of the issues that arise with these alternative readings of identity by drawing on illustrative data from studies with the two organisations

SA organisation

SA was a local government organisation which had restructured and had a new management team The new team was seeking to introduce radical changes towards being more ‘business-like’ and to apply high-commitment workplace practices

Three narratives are presented on pages 29–32: new organisational leadership, to-leadership and far-from-leadership narratives They are conveyed by a number of actors and sometimes actors move between narratives For example, extracts from a focus group with senior managers are some-times in the leadership narrative and sometimes exhibit a slightly different perspective on the leadership discourse—in this case part of the close-to-leadership narrative Cross-cutting ties and contradictions between the narratives can be seen by reading across the columns

close-The plot summaries of the narratives can be represented as follows close-The new organisational leadership narrative starts with actors at the top of the hierarchy: the CEO and his directors Their attitude is to value newness and devalue compromise (‘We’ll shove all the old baggage out the door’) They were concerned to be action-oriented rather than words-oriented This was exemplified in the story of the directors having to confront the CEO, who despite feeling ‘slagged off had to act in accordance with the new

‘openness principle’ They characterised themselves as young, active and being ‘out there’ in touch with the workers