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Identity @ work. Why research around Identity @ work? Interest in mobilisation of labour Insufficient explanatory power of the compulsion to sell one’s labour Gap between specification and requirements of actual jobs Essential demand for self-initiating workers. Identity @ work.
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Identity @ work • Why research around Identity @ work? • Interest in mobilisation of labour • Insufficient explanatory power of the compulsion to sell one’s labour • Gap between specification and requirements of actual jobs • Essential demand for self-initiating workers.
Identity @ work • Identity as entity • internal cognitive processes • Identity as roles and scripts • Learned as part of a social role or script (Mead) • Acting ‘I’ self-aligns with learned ‘me’.
Identity @ work • Identity as subject position (extension of ‘scripted’ selves) • A. subjectification- identity as regulatory ‘fiction’. • Human beings = folds in social plane. • Practices stabilise such ‘infoldings’ e.g. ways of visualising, categorising, normalising (Rose, Foucault).
Identity @ work • B. Identity as ‘identification’ (Hall) • Why identify /dis-identify when summoned? • Fear (existential anxiety), desire (psychodynamic characters). • Tension between surface (Rose) and depth (Hall).
Identity @ work • So why do we engage with work identities; call them our ‘own’? • B. Precariousness leads to defensive identity securing strategies (Knights and Willmott) • Capitalism’s mechanisms intensify this by splitting us off from one another (free labourers) • Vulnerability induces defensive search for seemingly secure identities intensified by hierarchies, bizz cycles, surveillance.
Identity @ work • B. Infantile vulnerability establishes patterns (e.g. splitting and projection) enacted in (later) symbolic world (Hollway) • When confronted with contradictory and unwanted feelings men and women/ manager and managed split these up and project through discourse (language’s binary structures) onto the ‘other’. • Structure requires partners/groups to ‘play the game’.
Identity @ work • The research question: Why do people (esp. women) take up (new sector specific) managerial positions? • Significant work load increase, little financial reward, tension with existing identities/relations. • Because it’s there! Heroic individualist the lot of them?
Identity @ work • Data: ‘Seemed a natural progression’ (Really?What else?)‘Gives sense of purpose’, ‘going forward’ • Defensive search for security against ontological precariousness? • Data: ‘Have to be seen to have ambition’ (seen by whom, internalised ‘fathers’, self?) • Defensive search for security through splitting and projection of unwanted aspects of the self onto real or imagined other (i.e. those that lack ambition)? • Comments?