Achieving Holism: Narrating Multiple Identities in the Moment and Over Time

Abstract

People’s multiple identities often wax, wane, and are transformed over their lifetimes, both as sources of personal meaning and as realities communicated to others. Yet, despite a research turn toward studying identities as multiple and dynamic, largely still missing is a cohesive view of people’s efforts to narratively integrate the sum of their many evolving parts. In this paper, we take a narrative perspective on the notion of identity holism to theorize how people build a meaningful whole by making narrative claims involving “4Cs”—credibility, coherence, continuity, and causality. Cutting across these claims are more abstract themes, or leitmotifs, of identity coalescence and coevolution, which are internally experienced as static and dynamic holism, respectively. We discuss how holism, and particularly dynamic holism, fosters personal authenticity, wisdom, adaptiveness, and resilience; the broader contributions of our theorizing to the literatures on identity and narrative; and implications for management and future research