Organization and Identity

Alison Linstead, Stephen Linstead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134353675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Exploring identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and in the social sciences, this book focuses on how ideas about identity can be applied to organization and management studies.

The contributors, all respected authorities in the field, use and develop recent philosophical thought on the nature of identity, and question the key social divisions of gender, class and nation. Bringing approaches from contemporary philosophy into the area of organization theory, this book critically assesses their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion.

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 subfields.

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 const...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Confronting identity: selves and others
• Part II: Performing identities: Selves for others
• Part III: After identity…? Selves in question