This paper takes the regulation of identity as a focus for examining organizational control. It considers how employees are enjoined to develop self-images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. This focus on identity extends and deepens themes developed within other analyses of normative control. Empirical materials are deployed to illustrate how managerial intervention operates, more or less intentionally and in/effectively, to influence employees' self-constructions in terms of coherence, distinctiveness and commitment. The processual nature of such control is emphasized, arguing that it exists in tension with other intra. and extra-organizational claims upon employees' sense of identity in a way that can open a space for forms of micro-emancipation. (Less)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-6486.00305

Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual

Discourse is a popular term used in a variety of ways, easily leading to confusion. This article attempts to clarify the various meanings of discourse in social studies, the term's relevance for organizational analysis and some key theoretical positions in discourse analysis. It also focuses on the methodological problem of the relationship between: a) the level of discourse produced in interviews and in everyday life observed as `social texts' (in particular talk); b) other kinds of phenomena, such as meanings, experiences, orientations, events, material objects and social practices; and, c) discourses in the sense of a large-scale, ordered, integrated way of reasoning/ constituting the social world. In particular, the relationship between `micro and meso-level' discourse analysis (i.e. specific social texts being the primary empirical material) and `grand and mega-level' discourse (i.e. large-scale orders) is investigated.

Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse Analysis

This is a case study of managerial identity work, based on an in-depth case of a senior manager and the organizational context in which she works. The article addresses the interplay between organizational discourses, role expectations, narrative self-identity and identity work. Identity is conceptualized in processual terms as identity work and struggle. The article illuminates fragmentation as well as integration in the interplay between organizational discourses and identity. It aims to contribute to a processual oriented identity theory and to the methodology of identity studies through showing the advantage of a multi-level intensive study.

Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation, discourse and identity struggle

In this article I develop a framework for thinking about the research interview, and I critique dominating neopositivist and romantic views on the interview. I suggest eight metaphors that offer reconceptualizations of the interview, drawing upon recent theoretical trends on language, the subject, and discourse, and develop a reflexive theoretical framework. The article provides new ways of dealing with interviews, along with implications for fieldwork interaction with subjects, interpretations of empirical material, and research questions possible or suitable to address based on interviews.

Beyond Neopositivists, Romantics, and Localists: A Reflexive Approach to Interviews in Organizational Research

It is increasingly recognized that what makes a theory interesting and influential is that it challenges our assumptions in some significant way. However, established ways for arriving at research questions mean spotting or constructing gaps in existing theories rather than challenging their assumptions. We propose problematization as a methodology for identifying and challenging assumptions underlying existing literature and, based on that, formulating research questions that are likely to lead to more influential theories.

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Generating Research Questions Through Problematization

This paper examines the promise of Foucault as a vehicle for addressing subjectivity and organizations. It questions the supposed non-essentialism and nondualism of Foucauldian work, and argues that such work has difficulties in theorizing agency, and the relation between self and discourse. Though the paper is critical of previous attacks on the anti-materialistic stance of Foucauldian work, it nevertheless suggests that Foucauldian studies have been unable to adequately theorize 'material' relations, and that they have so far provided an inadequate basis by which to develop an ethics of either individual or collective change. In developing this critique, the paper largely focuses on Foucauldian work rather than the text of Foucault himself, though some attention is paid to Volumes 1 to 3 of The History of Sexuality. Feminist work is also employed in order to illustrate the limitations of Foucault in theorizing the self and subjectivity.

Tim Newton

Papers

Theorizing Subjectivity in Organizations: The Failure of Foucauldian Studies?