'I don’t know what I am doing!': surfacing struggles of managerial identity work

Recent work contends that management education provides an important space for managers’ identity work. However, it is also recognised that much of what is currently offered constrains rather than enables managers’ identity work. Against this background, I present material which provides important practical possibilities to managers for more realistic and helpful forms of identity work, and theoretically also add to the development of a more nuanced understanding of managerial identity work processes. Drawing on interviews with a range of managers, I offer rare empirical evidence which illustrates the ordinarily suppressed emotional struggles of the mismatch between social identities of manager and self identities. In this way, I contribute to current theoretical offerings to demonstrate the centrality of emotions to processes of becoming. In turn, I propose that exploration of these emotions offers management educators important possibilities for facilitating managers’ identity work

Disruption, dissonance and embodiment: Creativity, health and risk in music narratives

This article explores notions of creativity, health and risk, drawing on interviews with freelance musicians in the UK. The social context of insecure music work is explored along with hegemonic discourses of creativity in which hedonism, risk and sacrifice are connected. The study draws on narrative analysis in order to examine responses to disruptions that affect creative work. It also explores ongoing accounts of dissonance in music work. The research builds on the new musicology in exploring the cultural basis of creative ideals: these extend beyond the arts to influence many areas of social life. It highlights the way in which the exercise of aesthetic judgements, including judgements about the self, serve to include and exclude particular identities, valuing and diminishing their contributions. The study also builds on sociological debates concerning the regulatory functions of reflexivity and body management in the context of late modernity. Here, strategies of embodiment are also seen in relation to empowerment as challenges to hegemonic notions of creativity. Finally, the research builds on methodological debates surrounding narrative analysis, adopting a sociological approach that emphasizes the particular context of music work and identifies core narratives that reveal connections between everyday experiences and deeper cultural processes

Beyond the deliberative subject? Problems of theory, method and critique in the turn to emotion and affect

This paper explores some of the issues for policy scholars arising from the increasing attention paid to ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ in contemporary social science. One such issue is in the focus placed on detailed ethnographic methods and interpretive forms of analysis, and the problem this raises for drawing out connections to changing regimes of governing and wider shifts in policy and politics. A second lies in the modernist traditions of policy studies, traditions which privilege the rational actor and deliberative subject. This paper uses my own recent research to tease out some issues of method and of theory in conducting a research project that seeks to connect individual working lives to some of the major cultural and social change in Britain over the last 60 years. The paper begins by outlining the project and some of the issues raised in interpreting ‘emotion’, then goes on to show how I tried to link ethnographic data to wider questions of policy and power. The final section offers two different critical repertoires that have the capacity to link emotions and emotion work to analysis of shifting governmentalities and material conditions of work. Throughout my aim is to enhance the possibility of interdisciplinary conversations by introducing concepts and analytical framings from beyond the traditions of policy studies

Interaction, discourse and the subject

During the course of this paper, I examine the concepts of ‘discourse’ and the ‘subject’ in relation to social organization and action. The paper argues that these concepts represent a form of explanation that reduces the complexity of the social. Through a reconnection with processes relating to social organization and action, the paper argues that the current ‘deepening’ of subjectivity can be informed by sociological ideas. Indeed, the paper makes the claim that moves to develop the concept of subjectivity through ‘interiority’ and ‘relationality’ would benefit from a dialogue with interactionist ideas. The paper discusses three programmes of work that illustrate how subjectivity can be informed through a reconnection with interactionist sociology