Identities as Organizational Practices: The Case of Informal Lunchroom Meetings

Identity has been widely acknowledged as playing a central role in various organizational processes, yet there is still a need to better understand the dynamics and functions of identity work in modern organizations. The present paper is centered within this concern, and examines identity as intersubjective by nature and as a member’s phenomenon. We do so by conducting a video-based investigation of an informal lunchroom meeting at a place of work, and analyze how divergent identities of a manager gets evoked and negotiated in constructing diverse alliances among colleagues. Our aims are to: 1) reveal the intersubjective, multimodal and embodied nature of identity work; 2) demonstrate identity work as organizational practices, used in order to accomplish specific actions; and 3) pose a question on the view on identity as a layered/leveled phenomenon

Strategy making as a communicative practice: the multimodal accomplishment of strategy roles

This paper deals with the communicative accomplishment of strategy practices and processes (Cooren et al., 2015; Pälli, 2017; Vásquez et al., 2017). We do so by investigating one significant activity within an organizational strategy making process, namely strategy meetings. Here, members of the upper management group create concrete drafts for the actual strategy document, and we focus on a specific action sequence where strategy actors propose changes to the strategy document. Specifically, we investigate how the participants subsequently deal with the proposal, how such interaction work facilitates the accomplishment of strategy roles, and how the interaction impacts the decision making process. Our study shows that strategy actors, when making these decisions, not only orient to an acceptance or rejection of the proposal but also to questions of entitlement (Asmuß & Oshima, 2012). This orientation involves multimodal resources, ranging from talk (Samra-Fredericks, 2003) to embodied and material resources. The study thus provides an empirical demonstration of the processual aspects of strategy work and their impact on strategic outcomes; further, it highlights the importance for practice studies to acknowledge communicative (verbal, embodied and material) aspects in capturing the complexity of strategy work

Negotiation of entitlement in proposal sequences

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this article examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles

Participation as a form of socialization: how a research team can support PhD students in their academic path

The dynamics related to how PhD students are progressively integrated into their own disciplinary community, and how they learn the academic profession, represent an underexplored topic in the panorama of higher education studies, especially when considering in-depth investigations of specific institutional settings. Learning the academic profession is a complex and long process, and the integration of a researcher into the disciplinary community represents only its last step