bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Overhead Projector as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Pias Claus
Published: February 2020

This chapter describes how the overhead projector develops into a projection tool which first experiences broad cultural acceptance through its use in schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first theories of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) emerged, promising increased productivity and innovation through research organization in small, interdisciplinary teams. The overhead projector then was regarded as a medium that reinforces interactivity and collective thinking in such small groups via dynamic transparencies, explicitly separated from 35mm slide projection as a medium of organization of a passive crowd of isolated spectators. In the course of digitalization, this idea of organization then turns into its opposite: PowerPoint, originally developed for the production of transparencies for overhead projectors, became a presentation tool through the coupling with projectors, which organizes a passive crowd of spectators in front of static slides like the 35mm slide projection before. A large part of PowerPoint’s epistemological criticism today stems from this form of medial organization.
Battery as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Müggenburg Jan
Published: February 2020

This chapter is dedicated to batteries as media of spatio-temporal organization. In a first step, the history of (rechargeable) batteries is summarized with special regard to their influence on the emergence of digital cultures. This is followed by a systematic discussion of their ambivalent role between expansion and destabilization of electrical networks, which in digital cultures manifests itself in the phenomenon of duration or range anxiety. Finally, it is argued that this ambivalent organizational mediality of batteries (including their ecological consequences) is inseparably linked to their perception as humanistic technology.
Price Book as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: O'Doherty Damian
Published: February 2020

This chapter examines an old but persistent and contemporary media genre known as the ‘price book’, ostensibly used for the purposes of building construction, surveying, and project management. Drawing on ethnographic research, the chapter explains the analytical development of conceptual resources that allow research to explore the price book as a market-making device. Occupying a difficult and unreliable reality, the book is found to occupy a founding or foundering role in the production and reproduction of organization by virtue of which it amplifies ontological contingencies and volatilities that have largely been missed in organization and media studies.
Search Engine as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Ridgway Renée
Published: February 2020

Search engines have become the technological and organizational means to navigate, filter, and rank online information for users. During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in Europe, the ‘pre-history’ of search engines were the ‘bureau d’adresse’ or ‘address office’ that provided information and services to clients as they gathered data. Registers, censuses, and archives eventually shifted to relational databases owned by commercial platforms, advertising agencies cum search engines that provide non-neutral answers in exchange for user data. With ‘cyberorganization’, personalized advertisement, machine-learning algorithms, and ‘surveillance capitalism’ organize the user through their ‘habit’ of search. However, there are alternatives such as the p2p search engine YaCy and anonymity browsing with Tor.
Smartphone as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Whyte Jennifer
Published: February 2020

This chapter considers the smartphone as organizational force. Its effects are to blur the boundaries between work and home; to involve different constituent actors and forms of power (bypassing traditional organizational gatekeepers); and to raise new forms of service and exclusion. The smartphone is a small device that impacts large-scale organizing. A site of interaction between the individual and organizing, it raises questions of power, trust, transparency, work–life balance, self-monitoring, surveillance, and self-expression. It is associated with the rise of new, less-regulated forms of work and social movements. Organizational scholars need to further unpack its implications for organizations and organizing.
Wiki as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Jemielniak Dariusz , Rodak Olga , Raburski Tomasz
Published: February 2020

This chapter discusses wiki in the context of the debate over seemingly ‘democratizing’ properties of Web 2.0 technologies. Basic features of wiki cannot be easily identified: it can be described as a technology of organizing primarily textual information, in a web-like hyperlinked environment, in which parts can be easily edited by one or multiple users. Tracing the origins of wiki reveals in-built social norms, stemming from the hacker culture, and the idealistic pursuits to democratize the Web. However, in practice wiki technology supports not only innovative open collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, but also proprietary systems of organization of knowledge, largely strengthening existing power relations in organizations. Employing the concept of technology affordances, the authors outline how organizational consequences of wiki depend on the social context of its implementation.
Telegraph as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Flyverbom Mikkel , Madsen Anders Koed
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores the magic invention of the telegraph. As the first technology to detach communication from slow, physical means of transportation, the telegraph ushered in new ways of communicating and organizing. It also raised questions about competition, control, and politics that are not so different from the ones we struggle with in relation to present-day technological transformations. The telegraph, just like later technological innovations, invites us to think about organization, institutionalization, and social ordering in new ways. By revisiting ideas from the so-called Chicago School—a group of sociologists seeking to make sense of the telegraph and other technological inventions—this chapter connects the past and the future of technology and social ordering.
Bicycle as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Michels Christoph , Steyaert Chris
Published: February 2020

The bicycle is an almost iconic study artefact that assembles the technological with the social, the organizational with the cultural, and the geographical with the political. This chapter traces how the bicycle was invented and transformed through a variety of uses, and how it increasingly is considered a ‘vehicle’ for ecological transformation through challenging urban affects. Instigated by technological developments and the integration of social media, bicycles are inscribed with new possibility and strong hope to realize sustainable scripts and policies. This anticipation of a true pedalling revolution implies that we all become ‘velocipedes’ again—using our feet to gain speed.
Cloud as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Peters John Durham
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores the cultural productivity of the ontological elusiveness of clouds. Vaporous entities without a clear material or formal existence, clouds carry great freights of significance. Few phenomena are quite so packed with meaning. Despite their reputation as flighty and insubstantial, clouds have carried a wide range of discourses, practices, arts, and media for a very long time. The term ‘cloud’ has earned its place as a keyword in digital culture because of its widespread recent use for server-based online data storage, but the nearly instant and universal acceptance of this term today has a much longer legacy, which this chapter traces.
Bitcoin as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Introna Lucas , Pecis Lara
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores how Bitcoin promotes itself as an open, democratic, decentralized, and collaborative community that can bypass untrustworthy financial institutions. Whilst notions of trust in traditional forms of institutions, such as banks, have been affected by the 2008–9 financial crisis, the push towards alternative monetary systems by cryptocurrency communities seems to offer the perfect promise of decentralization and transparency. Yet, following Luhmann’s articulation of system trust, the complex functioning of Bitcoin calls for rethinking how trust in the system is understood both in relation to the trust posed in the neutrality of algorithmic action and governance, but also in others, such as the ‘wisdom of the crowd’.
Card as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Krajewski Markus
Published: February 2020

Cards in all their varieties played a crucial role in pre-digital information processing and were only partially replaced at the start of the twenty-first century. Starting with Conrad Gessner’s early use of cards and catalogues as bibliographical compiling tools, this chapter takes a closer look at the distinguishing features of these allegedly antiquated information carriers, which functioned as handheld representatives, manageable paper-based proxies, or paper personae. Be it index cards, visiting cards, or even playing cards: they afford not only the organization of information, but also mobility, portability, flexibility, modularity, representativity, transitivity, manageability, updateability, legibility, and combinability.
Copper as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Rossiter Ned
Published: February 2020

As a form of elemental media, copper offers a prism through which to analyse and conceive the organization of contemporary geopolitics. Surveying the history of ‘copper modernity’ in Chile, the chapter considers the implications of copper in neuronal networks, stockpiling in China’s warehouses, and techniques of financialization, and as a component part in computer hardware and cable infrastructure. In studying the catalysing potential and transformative effects of copper, the chapter develops a method of spectrum thinking.
Chair as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Toraldo Maria-Laura , Mengis Jeanne
Published: February 2020

This chapter examines the chair as both a mundane, physical object with the role of ‘seating a person’ and as a cultural artefact with a history of use, of handcraft, of design, and even of artistic representation. It suggests the chair’s agency is only partly given by its specific materiality, but is also shaped by the manifold historic, artistic, craft, design, and architectural contexts in which it has been placed. By tracing these material and discursive relations, the chapter shows how the chair enables and shapes organizational life by both visualizing absence and thus creating a longing for presence and by affirming social positions and elevating power.
Organization Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Identities
Authors: Rumens Nick
Published: February 2020

This chapter examines how and why sexual identity remains a fruitful site of scholarly research in the organizational literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. Despite the vast attention that is now lavished on identities in organizations generally, LGBTQ+ identities have, at least until now, been relatively ignored in the organizations and identities literature. Accordingly, this chapter historicizes LGBTQ+ sexualities and identities, providing insights into why identity is such a prominent concept in the broader literature on LGBTQ+ sexualities. The theoretical diversity in how LGBTQ+ sexualities have been conceptualized in terms of identity is considered. The core sections of the chapter review some of the principal concepts and scholarly contributions within research on LGBTQ+ identity disclosure (e.g. personal motives and organizational factors that influence how and when disclosure occurs) and identity management (e.g. management strategies and the identity implications of the normalization of some LGBT+ sexualities). Knowledge gaps are exposed and avenues for future avenues of research are signposted.
Emotions and Identity
Authors: Winkler Ingo
Published: February 2020

Processes of identity work and identification are neither purely cognitive nor just behavioural matters but intersected by emotions. In providing an overview of current developments, this chapter seeks to highlight the variety of approaches available to identity researchers interested in emotions in organizations. It describes the various conceptual perspectives that identity scholars adopt in order to fruitfully incorporate emotions into their study of identity in organizations by, for example, highlighting the affective aspects of social identification, understanding emotions as discursive resources, and addressing emotional labour as a form of identity work. Discussing areas for future research the chapter investigates how emotions connect the individual and the social, the role of emotions in organizational members’ responses to social influences on their identities, and the emotional aspects of identity work.
Identity Regulation and Globalization
Authors: Boussebaa Mehdi
Published: February 2020

This chapter reflects on some of the implications of globalization for identity regulation, with specific reference to the multinational enterprise (MNE). The chapter first elaborates on the MNE as an organization and shows how globalization in this corporate context results in identity regulation being stretched across nations and, in turn, mediated by country-specific discourses and institutions. The chapter then situates such processes in the wider political-economic context of (neo)colonialism. It shows how MNEs have been, until recently, mostly headquartered in the ‘West’ and how a growing proportion of their work is performed in countries that were once under colonial rule and which remain, to varying degrees, subject to (neo)colonial influences. In this context, identity regulation becomes enmeshed with not only national discourses/institutions but also (neo)colonial power relations. The chapter concludes with a call to integrate globalization—and by implication (multi)nationalism and (neo)colonialism—into the research agenda of identities-focused organization studies and suggests some avenues for future research.
Theorizing the ‘I’ in Institutional Theory
Authors: Lok Jaco
Published: February 2020

Recent critiques of organizational institutionalism have pointed to its increasing loss of focus and coherence. Yet, this criticism has not affected ongoing efforts to integrate insights from the literature on identity and organizations into institutional theory. In this chapter the author argues that these attempts at increased theoretical integration are unlikely to be productive, as long as institutional theory continues to be treated as one coherent theoretical perspective. Through an analysis of four fundamental shifts in the (implicit) theorization of actor-hood since the late 1970s, the author identifies five alternative institutional theories that currently coexist within organizational institutionalism. It is only when we accept this internal fragmentation of institutional theory that it becomes possible to relate different theories of identity to it more congruently.
Identity Saves the World?
Authors: Pratt Michael G.
Published: February 2020

Identity dynamics in organizations have been associated with critical organizing processes and outcomes, especially those that centre on attachment and conflict/cooperation. As such, a deeper understanding of identity dynamics may help us better understand how organizations function (and malfunction), and ideally help us make organizations better places to work. This chapter briefly reviews where identity research has been and where it is now. The bulk of the chapter suggests three paths or ways to move forward in our research: (1) moving towards fuller (versus relatively ‘empty’) conceptualizations of identity; (2) moving towards wholes versus parts in identity dynamics; and (3) moving towards viewing ‘identity in ensemble’ rather than ‘identity as star’. Each movement suggests a richer and deeper understanding of identity, providing the requisite variety necessary to tackle better core organizational problems.
Lacan, Identities, and Organizations
Authors: Kenny Kate
Published: February 2020

Lacan’s ideas shed light on why and how we are influenced by social structures including the organizations for which we work. This chapter explores how his insights have informed studies of identities in organizations, along with the obstacles to, and potentialities for, further research. The chapter begins by locating Lacan’s work in organizational identification scholarship, specifically the psychoanalytic approach, before offering an interpretation of concepts including signification and subjection. Two more-or-less distinct trajectories of Lacanian approaches to organizational identification are presented: one focuses on the micro-level of employees’ engagements with their organizations, the second examines the appeal of macro-level discourses regarding work and capital. Next, specific concepts inherent in a Lacanian approach to organizational identification are outlined including: affect, ‘going beyond’ subjection, gender, and finally methodological implications for empirical research. The author then discusses future ‘impossibilities’ for the study of organizational identification, and problematizes the use of Lacan’s approach in explorations of identity work. The chapter concludes with some future directions for research.
Performed Identities
Authors: Beech Nic , Broad Stephen
Published: February 2020

Through their performances, professional performance artists construct self-identities. They put themselves into their work, for example in autobiographical songs or through developing a distinctive style, and over time they become known for the content and tone of their performances. In addition, private aspects of who they are can become part of their public persona and audiences relate both to the art that is produced and the story of the person producing it. This chapter examines the nature of artistic performers’ identity construction through a dramaturgical lens, the construction of artistic biographies and the precarious nature of identity and performance as audiences and co-performers change. The authors consider some implications of this analysis for potential areas of focus for identity research and for modes of undertaking such research.
The Liminal Playground
Authors: Ibarra Herminia , Obodaru Otilia
Published: February 2020

Liminality is the individual or group experience of being betwixt and between states, roles, and/or identities. For both individuals and organizations, liminal experience is pervasive, often permanent, intrinsically problematic and a crucible for innovation and growth. Yet advances in our understanding of liminality in organizational life have remained fragmented, uninformed by empirical research in adjacent fields of scholarly inquiry or theorizing at different levels of analysis. This chapter aims to bring together disparate research and theorizing on liminality’s contemporary manifestations to conceptualize liminality as a creative process that affects the renewal and adaptability functions that are so vital to personal and organizational thriving.
Paradoxes in the Pursuit of Positive Identities
Authors: Sheep Mathew L.
Published: February 2020

Why do people work so hard to establish and grow an identity that is positive? Individuals in their work organizations engage in ongoing identity work to establish and sustain positive identities in pursuit of life, energy, viability, well-being, and growth. However, the pursuit of positive identities does not altogether negate the negative, nor is it a simple, linear path to growth. It is often a complex process, riddled with contradiction and tension, with aspirational identities paradoxically unfolding in a persistent tension with their opposites that can be residuals from past history and/or emergent from current crisis or perceived future threat. The literature exploring positive identities (part of a larger stream of a ‘positive’ turn in psychology and organizational scholarship) has grown steadily over the past two decades. The novel focus of this chapter is to explore the paradoxical, tensional aspects of and tactics involved in positive identity work, highlighting current perspectives, criticisms, and ways forward in research.
Hybrid Professional Identities
Authors: Currie Graeme , Logan Katey
Published: February 2020

Focused upon occupational professionals in an organizational context, and their transition towards being a managerial or commercial hybrid, the authors of this chapter debate whether such a transition represents progressive or regressive professionalism. They balance consideration of agency enacted by the individual professional, with that of the institutional challenge transition constitutes. They highlight the extent to which the individual professional can enact agency is influenced by their status. A powerful professional may be able to blend, buffer, or decouple competing institutional logics, and so remain in control of the transition to retain their autonomy and even aggrandize their status. Simultaneously, organizations may gain from more efficient and effective utilization of resource across the wider client population. If transition towards hybrid professional identity is thus seen as desirable by both organizations and professionals, then organizational support is required, in large part to socialize the incoming role holder towards the demands of the new role through liminal spaces, specifically networks, education, and mentoring. Nevertheless, in their analysis, the authors caution taking an overly optimistic view of hybrid transition. Lower status professionals may experience reduced levels of personal control through interventions that foist on them managerial or commercial identities. In short, we need to take a more nuanced view of professional responses to hybrid transitions.
Identity, Image, and Brand
Authors: Kärreman Dan , Frandsen Sanne
Published: February 2020

This chapter highlights how organizational images and efforts to manage those images through branding influence the identities of individuals within organizations. The authors discuss the ways in which individuals’ identity projects are regulated, challenged, or supported by images and brands. They argue that identity is a particularly important concept for understanding organizing in today’s ‘brand society’, with individuals’ identities intertwined with corporate efforts of branding. Managing distinct and attractive images at both the collective and individual levels means that less prestigious, even stigmatized images may be important identity threats that impact individuals’ processes of identity work. The authors examine how previous literature has theorized the interplay between individual identity, image, and branding, arguing that the implications of branding for individuals’ construction of identity in organizations must be assessed critically.
Strategy and Identities in Organizations
Authors: Langley Ann , Oliver David , Rouleau Linda
Published: February 2020

This chapter reviews the literature on strategy and identities comparing three perspectives on their nature and mutual relationships. The first ‘entitative’ perspective considers both strategy and identity as elements that organizations, groups, and individuals ‘have’. The second ‘narrative’ perspective treats both strategies and identities as stories. Finally, the third ‘work’ perspective adopts a processual lens and views strategy and identity as constructed in interaction. While the entitative and narrative perspectives are well-established, the authors suggest that the most promising avenues for future research lie with the ‘work’ perspective, which offers a more fluid and dynamic vision of the nature of strategy and identity and their interaction. This perspective will also benefit from methodological innovations that can capture naturally occurring interactions.
Human Identities, Identity Work, and Organizations
Authors: Watson Tony
Published: February 2020

A conversation in which we hear an individual ‘working on their identity’ in negotiation with a researcher is used to develop a broadly applicable conceptual scheme for the study of identities and organizations. The crafting of concepts is an essential part of all scientific endeavour but it is often done less well than it might in studies of identity-related issues in organizations. To improve the quality of conceptualization in this area the organizational sociologist must be clear and explicit about their methodological assumptions. A valuable way of doing this is by adopting a Philosophical Pragmatist epistemology focusing on ‘the way the social world works’ alongside an ontological processual/relational conception of the nature of organizations and the nature of human beings. Working within these assumptions, a four-fold conceptual scheme is put forward, this encouraging researchers to examine the interplay between self-identity, social-identities, identity work, and personas. A typology of social-identities (sociological discursive phenomena) is also presented to increase the power of the basic scheme, all of this being intended to be helpful to researchers interested in the relationship between human identities and organizations.
Agile Identities
Authors: Coupland Christine , Spedale Simona
Published: February 2020

Recent growth in interest in identities is linked to societal changes, including an unprecedented degree of freedom in the industrialized West (Bauman, 1988; Ritzer, 1999; Sennett, 1998). Choice suggests autonomy but it also burdens us with responsibility and anxiety. The aim of this chapter is to explore how the ‘capitalistic’ conception of freedom associated with agile identities affects life at work. Agility implies that individuals are able, indeed are deemed responsible for becoming—or failing to become—the ‘right’ type of employee/organization member. The notion of ‘agile identity’ proposed here, with its emphasis on the fragile obverse of the agility coin and its reminder that identity is not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but is fundamentally embodied, allows these tensions to be explored critically. The authors problematize the nature of current demands for agility at work, and invite reflection on issues of power and resistance. They ask, ‘How can the exploitative ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, surreptitiously operating through overtly benign and humanistic mantras such as “liberation management”, effectively be resisted?’ They suggest that the notion of identity—with its ambiguous and fluid character—has become the ideological prop of the new spirit of capitalism. Thus, scholars need to be vigilant in how they ‘talk’ about identity in scholarly debates and strive to articulate concepts that help understand the workplace while also supporting critique. ‘Agile identity’ is the authors’ contribution to these efforts.
National Identity in and around Multinational Corporations
Authors: Koveshnikov Alexei , Tienari Janne , Vaara Eero
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on national identity in and around multinational corporations (MNCs). The authors offer three conceptualizations of national identity and demonstrate how it may be studied in MNCs. First, they argue that organizational actors (re)construct their national identities via references to, and associations with, particular ideologies and worldviews. These are rigid constructions, which are deeply rooted in actors’ place in and fundamental views about the world. Second, national identity is (re)constructed through group-level relations vis-à-vis relevant ‘others’ in the specific organizational context. Such constructions are relatively stable but they are relational in the sense that they are rooted in actors’ identification with their cultural group. Finally, national identities are (re)constructed by organizational actors through mundane everyday relations and interaction. These are fluid and temporary constructions contingent on the immediate interests of those involved and the social dynamics of specific interactions. Based on their conceptualization, the authors outline avenues for future research to understand better the changing roles and implications of national identity in modern organizations.
Applying an Intersectional Perspective to Identity Foci at Work
Authors: Atewologun Doyin , Kutzer Roxanne , Doldor Elena
Published: February 2020

In this chapter, the authors advance thinking on examining the key identity targets through which individuals derive a sense of self in the context of work. They focus on four organizationally situated targets or foci: ‘manager’, ‘leader’, ‘follower’, and ‘team’. These identity targets are examined along two axes: fluidity versus stability, and content versus context. Additionally, the authors advance scholarship on individual-level identity foci by advocating the value of an intersectional perspective and drawing on key notions from intersectionality literature. They define an intersectional perspective as an approach that pays conscious attention to multiple positionality and power in conceptualizing, theorizing, and analysing identities and identification. By drawing on exemplars from current studies and offering suggestions for future scholarship, they show how adopting an intersectional perspective prompts further questions and provides additional lenses for analysis and theorizing, ultimately deepening our understanding of the processes by which individuals make sense of themselves in the context of work.
Identity and Power in Organizational Theory
Authors: Bardon Thibaut , Pezé Stéphan
Published: February 2020

This chapter reflects on identity construction as a political process in organizational theory. The authors provide a reassessment of the literature, arguing that such identity perspectives have developed around three pairs of (potentially) antagonistic notions, namely, structure/agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. First, they show how the pendulum has swung from studies that emphasize the power of structure in disciplining organizational participants’ identities, towards contributions that focus on agency in the reproduction or subversion of the dominant social order. Second, they argue that the attention of identity scholars, when investigating identity construction, has fluctuated between the power of language and the power of materiality. Third, they highlight that the initial view, which argues that elites exercise power over shopfloor employees by disciplining their identities, has been superseded by more nuanced approaches that take into account a much greater variety of stakeholders and recognize that individuals can be both subject to power and active subjects of it. The concluding section proposes several research avenues that aim to inspire organizational scholars interested in identity construction in relation to power relations.
Gender Identity
Authors: Fotaki Marianna
Published: February 2020

Identity is an important topic in organization and management scholarship. However, gender identity is often referred to only in passing, while in-depth theoretical engagement with the concept is rare. This is despite heated debates among feminists and polarizing discussions on gender and acceptable gender identities in many countries. Yet, given current conversations on the multiplicity and fuzziness of identities and identifications in work organizations, much can be gained from such engagement. This chapter considers these issues through a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminist lens inspired by the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger along with Rosi Braidotti and post-colonial feminists’ ideas, to develop relational identity of gender. Their conceptualization of identity as fluid, malleable, and defined in relation to the other, it is argued, may enrich our understanding of identities in organizations. The notion of gender identity as a provisional and unstable construct that unfolds relationally also has broader ethical and political implications for re-envisioning new modes of cohabitation on an equivalent basis. Such an approach might contribute to forging both a new politics of identity, and practical programmes that address organizational injustice and social inequalities.
On the Scope and Limits of Identity
Authors: Alvesson Mats , Gjerde Susann
Published: February 2020

This chapter addresses problems tied to when identity is used in organization studies in broad, slippery, and loose ways, with weak empirical support. The chapter shows limitations in the current over-expanded use of identity by looking at identity through a hembig-lens (i.e., when a concept is hegemonic, ambiguous, and big). The authors argue that identity needs to distinguish itself from and relate itself to similar concepts such as role and culture, rather than replace or be conflated with these. With the use of a simple typology—‘spot-on’, ‘stretch’, and ‘fake’—they explore previous empirical identity studies and reflect upon when these studies seem to be about identity and when other concepts, perhaps less fashionable but more to the point, would have been more fitting. The chapter suggests two main remedies in the form of theoretical scrutiny and methodological antidotes to address the current challenges in identity research in the hope it will inspire more insightful identity studies in the future.
Making Sense of Myself
Authors: Vough Heather C. , Caza Brianna B. , Maitlis Sally
Published: February 2020

A considerable body of work uses a sensemaking lens to understand identity processes in organizations. From this perspective, identities are constructed and maintained as individuals attend to, bracket, and draw on cues to enact meanings about who they are. At the same time, however, theories of identity have also been called upon to explain sensemaking. This is not surprising, since sensemaking is grounded in identity construction. As such, the two literatures have multiple, sometimes complicated, points of intersection. In this chapter, the authors explore the complex relationship between identity and sensemaking. They begin by articulating the assumptions that a sensemaking lens brings to identity. Next, they detail several ways in which the relationship between identity and sensemaking has been described in the existing literature. Then, they propose an understanding of the relationship between identity and sensemaking that integrates and extends previous research. The authors conclude by suggesting avenues for future research focused on the interplay between identity and sensemaking.
Leadership and Identities
Authors: Ford Jackie
Published: February 2020

Recognition that leadership identities are competing, multiple, contradictory, and complex challenges dominant and uncritical suppositions about identities in leadership studies. Recent research on the production of leadership identities and the importance of looking beyond the individualistic and charismatic leader enables insight into the relational and intersubjective processes through which leadership is performed. Research by critical leadership scholars over the last two decades highlights the significance of interpersonal relationships and the powerful effect that interactions between leaders and led can have on lives and identities at work. Contemporary research on what has become labelled ‘relational leadership’ has the potential to offer more radical approaches, but this has yet to be realized. This chapter, located within feminist psychosocial theorizing, sheds light on leadership identity challenges at a time of considerable economic crisis, social uncertainty, and political repositioning. It further explores the question of whether these relational promises can now be realized in practice such that new forms of leadership and followership identities can be enacted that create workplaces that are more egalitarian and benevolent.
Membership Categorization Analysis
Authors: Whittle Andrea , Mueller Frank
Published: February 2020

This chapter’s analysis of a New York Times op-ed article reveals how moral reasoning was undertaken in relation to three identities: the identity of Trump as an incumbent of the role of President, the identity of the writer, and, third, the identity of the collective group of Senior Officials. The moral accountability of Trump was articulated through a set of category predicates normatively associated with Presidents and category predicates normatively associated with Republicans. To have an identity is to be cast into a ‘typification’ or social type with an associated set of expectations about one’s role, relationships, and responsibilities within a culture or social structure. The chapter argues that the ethnomethodological approach underpinning membership categorization analysis (MCA) asks ‘How is identity done, managed, achieved and negotiated in situ?’ Indeed, MCA asks how people draw on and use social identities, in talk or text, in getting their everyday business done. This way of approaching the study of identity is different to other approaches that start with theories of self, or discourse, or power. To conclude, MCA enables us to analyse how, when a social category is used, the person being described is also being judged according to the set of normative expectations associated with that category.
Career Identity
Authors: Hoyer Patrizia
Published: February 2020

This chapter calls for the endorsement of a ‘career perspective’ when theorizing identity in organizations. It argues that especially the concept of ‘career identity’ can be instructive for settling an ongoing controversy among scholars concerning temporal aspects of ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ in narrative identity construction. Since continuity and change are integral to the career notion, a career perspective helps to explain the under-explored coexistence of dynamic and at the same time stable dimensions of identity. This insight is particularly relevant in light of the changing relationships between organizations and their employees, where career paths are increasingly becoming more discontinuous and therefore unpredictable, protean, and boundaryless. Moreover, the chapter argues that a career perspective on identity helps to raise critical questions regarding how widely dispersed career imperatives influence people’s career choices, and how these imperatives can be resisted.
Bourdieu and Identity
Authors: Carter Chris , Spence Crawford
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores what the conceptual artillery of Pierre Bourdieu might do for identity studies. Five key identity papers are read through the conceptual prism of Bourdieu in order to identify critical junctures where identity and Bourdieu might meet. Beyond this, new areas of methodological inquiry are identified for identity studies from a Bourdieusian perspective. Specifically, it is argued that identity studies could be enriched by methodological expansion both backwards into history and outwards towards the meso and macro levels of field and society. In practical terms, this implies that identity studies pay greater attention to three key issues: history, field, and class.
Romantic Love for a Reason
Authors: Brogaard Berit
Published: February 2020

In contemporary and historical contributions to the philosophy of love there has been considerable resistance to three claims concerning romantic love: (1) Romantic love is assessable for rationality, (2) romantic love is love for a reason, and (3) romantic love is reason-responsive. This chapter argues that these three ideas are intimately tied together. It offers justification for all three claims on the basis of more general considerations of the nature of emotions and evidence in support of the claim that romantic love is best rendered a complex emotion that when felt is truly multimodal. It attributes the property of causing certain internal qualities (e.g., a quickening of the heartbeat) that are experienced through interoception to a person identified through some perceptual or cognitive faculty (e.g., a sight of the beloved). Along the way it identifies some of the main ways in which romantic love differs from other kinds of love, such as friendship love and parental love.
Slave Trade, Manumission, and Citizenship in Ancient Rome and Brazil: A Comparative Perspective
Authors: Joly Fábio Duarte , Marquese Rafael de Bivar
Published: February 2020

The chapter analyses in a comparative way the interconnectedness between slave trade, manumission, and the granting of citizenship to former slaves in Roman and Brazilian slave societies. Due to the absence of a strict line of continuity between the Roman and modern worlds, the comparison is made mainly in formal terms. While Brazilian slavery was part of a capitalist world economy where slave trade and anti-slavery ideologies coexisted, Roman slavery developed in the Mediterranean area where slavery and other forms of compulsory labour were never subjected to anything but occasional criticism. Although placed in different material, political, and ideological contexts, both slave societies followed similar paths that show the necessity of an examination of the long-term interconnection of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic world systems and its multiple layers of time.
Against Roman Rule
Authors: Goldhill Simon
Published: February 2020

This article examines certain types of narrative from rabbinical sources and how they relate both to forms of social life and to expectations of Greco-Roman narrative, genre, and normativity. It situates them within the context of the writings of Hellenistic Judaism and to the adoption of Greco-Roman models by what becomes the dominant religious authority of the Christians. It also explores the particularity of the textual world of the Talmud as an issue of the construction and performance of subjectivity and concludes by highlighting the importance of the connection between narrative and lived experience for rabbinical writing and for the construction of the subject’s positionality within it. It argues that the Talmud reveals a defeated national group reforming its community in interaction with—and often in fierce and fearful contention with and gestures of separation from—dominant Greco-Roman culture, and from other Jews, more assimilated to that dominant culture.
Contact-Induced Linguistic Change
Authors: Grant Anthony P.
Published: February 2020

Contact-induced linguistics change (or CILC) has been a feature of all known languages, ancient and modern, and has manifested itself in a great number of ways, which have on occasion interacted; the matter involves a great deal more than the mere transfer of cultural lexicon from one linguistic system to another, although this is probably the most widespread form of CILC and the easiest for linguists to exemplify. Drawing examples from a wide range of languages, but especially those in which CILC has been important, this chapter discuses themes, techniques, tendencies, and a selection of the major works in contact-induced linguistic change in its many forms.
Mixed Languages, Younger Languages, and Contact-Induced Linguistic Change
Authors: Smith Norval
Published: February 2020

Many languages have been described as mixed languages, which together with pidgins and creoles can be classified as younger languages, because they have developed from preexisting languages. Several kinds of mixed languages are distinguished here on predominantly sociolinguistic (rather than on purely structural) grounds, and features are compared across mixed languages. Some of these languages are used as the major language of their respective speech communities, whereas other languages are used for specific purposes within a speech community, which othewrwise employs non-mixed languages. It is shown that although many mixed languages show a wide range of social or structural similarities, there is no single template which can be employed to describe all stable mixed languages.
Language Contact in the West Chadic Language Goemai
Authors: Hellwig Birgit
Published: February 2020

Goemai is a West Chadic language of Northern Nigeria, which is at the heart of the Jos Plateau Sprachbund. This chapter explains the ways in which it has been influenced by other languages, especially Niger-Congo languages, but also Hausa and English. This expansion has been especially important in terms of lexicon, although the importance of metatypy cannot be discounted either since the language forms part of a Sprachbund with both Chadic and non-Chadic languages.
Language Contact in Khmer
Authors: Haiman John
Published: February 2020

This chapter discusses the influence on Khmer, an Austroasiatic language which is the official language of Cambodia, of a range of languages. Some of these are contiguous, such as Thai and Vietnamese. Others have been brought into the Khmerosphere as a result of cultural influence, namely Sanskrit, Pali, arguably Malay, Cham and Mon, and latterly (since the nineteenth century) also French and English. Some of these languages, notably Vietnamese and Mon, are genealogically related to Khmer as well. This influence has mostly been lexical but has also exerted features of change upon Khmer structure, including elements in the morphological sphere.
Contact-Induced Change and Phonology
Authors: Klein Thomas B. , Ng E-Ching , Grant Anthony P.
Published: February 2020

This chapter discusses aspects of CILC involving phonetics and phonology, exemplifying the wide range of possible phenomena, involving cases of transfer of fabric, transfer of pattern and of both. These examples are taken from a wide range of languages from around the world, and the chapter ends with brief case studies from two Austronesian languages, Chamorro (which has acquitted mid-vowels through contact) and Hainan Cham (which has readjusted its phonology to many features of Hainan Min Nan Chinese, including comprehensive adoption of lexicla tone). It is clear from the material presented here that the range of possibilities of change in the phonologies of languages which has been actuated by contact-induced change is almost limitless.
Language Contact in Paraguayan Guaraniˊ
Authors: Gómez Rendón Jorge
Published: February 2020

Paraguayan Guarani (PG) is a Tupian language spoken as an official language along with Spanish in Paraguay and with non-official status in Brazil and Argentina. While Paraguay shows unusual percentages of societal bilingualism compared to other Latin American countries, PG is in a diglossic relation to Spanish, with the latter language being the prestigious one in every case. PG differs from contemporary indigenous Guarani varieties and historical Jesuitical Guarani regarding the presence of Spanish in its lexicon and grammar. The century-long contact with Spanish influenced Guarani at phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical levels. PG should not be viewed as a monolithic mixed language, not only because it is comprised of a series of mixed lects that may or may not evolve in the direction of a bilingual mixed language, but also because the level and type of mixing of PG mixed lects are not characteristic of bilingual mixed languages to the extent that they do not show the genealogical lexicon-grammar split. Historically, PG has become a discursive strategy for the creation and negotiation of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural identities in Paraguay.