Oddity as commodity?:The body as symbolic resource for Other-defying identity work

While studies on the work people undertake on their ‘identities’ in professional contexts tend to focus on inner conversations between different possible selves, this paper considers the impact of ‘inherited’ prescriptions and expectations on such inner conversations and the entwining of identity work with historic conditions written onto the body. It does so by studying performing artists with dwarfism. Taking into account their long history of stereotypical roles within the entertainment sector and their visibly ‘different’ body which guarantees to solicit the gaze of others, this study considers identity in terms of the corporeal positioning of the self of artists whose position on stage is often morally disputed, both inside and outside the community of people with dwarfism. Analysing how people use their Othered bodies as a symbolic resource for identity work, we describe three different ways of engaging in embodied identity work: identity ‘ethicalization’, through stereotype- avoiding bodywork, ‘queering’, through stereotype- provoking bodywork, and ‘distancing’, through stereotype- acting bodywork. Each strategy is an attempt to redress the incoherence between preferred (personally aspired) and ascribed (historically inherited) identity. By analysing how people preserve an aspirational self and defy the image of being Other, this study contributes to existing debates by highlighting the role of history and the symbolic use of ‘oddity’ as an instrument in embodied identity work. In addition, it offers a reflective note on the problem of ‘academic exoticism’ through the sensitization of Other bodies and on the potential of able-bodied allyship to attenuate the lack of disability knowledge in management and organization studies.</p

Engaged yet excluded: The processual, dispersed, and political dynamics of boundary work

What happens when people try to ‘transcend’ organizational boundaries and engage with so-called outsiders? Current boundary-work literature does not fully account for the processual, dispersed, and political dynamics triggered by such efforts. To address this shortcoming, this article builds on an ethnographic study of a professional care provider’s attempts to engage local citizens within one of its care homes. We analyze how actors negotiate the parameters of outsider engagement – that is, how they interactively (re-)erect and (re-)efface boundaries between actors (Who is engaged?), issues (What is their engagement about?), and positions of authority (Does local engagement affect central decision-making?). We contribute to extant theorizing by, first, explicitly scrutinizing boundary work’s temporal and spatial dynamics. Testifying to the importance of analyzing temporal sequences, we show how attempts at transcending boundaries intensified boundary work on multiple organizational platforms. Paradoxically, inclusionary efforts evoked exclusionary effects (and vice versa) as actors came to contest and, eventually, redefine ‘appropriate’ insider–outsider relations. Second, our analysis highlights how the political effectiveness of an inclusive and non-hierarchical approach still, ironically, depends on ongoing hierarchical support and managerial enforcement. Third, our article makes a case for the adoption of long-term, multi-sited methodologies when studying the everyday dynamics of boundary-work processes

All of me: art, industry and identity struggles

Work is an area in which we spend a large part of our lives, and in which we invest a lot of our ideas about who we are in life. This might involve ideas about building a career, professional aspirations, the social relations we build in the workplace, status, and so on. Who we are, what we are capable of, and how we fit in are central questions posed to us already when we enter an organisation, via a recruitment and selection process based on an applicant profile and a job description. As such, it should come as no surprise that identity is a major part of our working life, and that those who study work and organisation consider it important to examine (see also Coupland, chapter X, this volume). But how does identity come into the work of creative and independent workers? How do identity issues affect those in the music sector, who often work autonomously? For them, there is no clearly delineated identity carved out within a formal organizational setting. At the same time, however, identity can play an especially significant role for them, since their output is often seen as an extension of the inner world of its creator(s) and a symbol of their identities, both by creators themselves and by audiences or consumers. Like any product of our professional, artistic, or commercial endeavours, for a singer-songwriter making and performing music is a project of self-realization. Probably, this is why a conversation about a person’s artfully designed creations tends to turn into attempts to make sense of his or her self – what they find essential about themselves, how they view themselves in relation to others, how they present themselves to the outside world, how they are being seen by their ‘audience’, and what produces pride or doubts about their ‘selves’. In this chapter we draw close to workers’ lived experience and sensemaking efforts by adopting a perspective that places identity questions centre stage. We illustrate our identity perspective on work and management by delving into the music industry and, specifically, by using examples from interviews with Ben Talbot Dunn, a singer-song writer who performs his work mainly as part of a band, Open Swimmer. Analysing this singer-songwriter’s identity work offers a window onto some of the recurrent dilemmas in the music industry and in people’s identity work more generally. In his account, we can explore different aspects of his identity talk, different roles to which he aspires, and different narratives along which they are structured. In our analysis, we will look at a number of tensions that emerge from his identity accounts, which we place within the context of a romantic ideal dominating discourse in the (independent) music industry that emphasises ‘art for art’s sake’ and denounces commercialism. First, however, we briefly introduce our approach to identity and identity talk

The Hofstede factor: the consequences of Culture’s Consequences

For many scholars and practitioners in the field of cross-cultural management, Hofstede’s work has provided a foundation for theory and practice. In this chapter, we briefly describe its main characteristics, explore its impact, and critically discuss its limitations. We then sketch the outlines of a critical, interpretive approach to studying national culture and cultural differences in organizational settings which is more sensitive to culture change and conflict; individual agency and social context; as well as power issues and organizational politics. After offering an illustration, we close our chapter with a few reflective thoughts and ideas for future directions

From What to Where: A setting-sensitive approach to organizational storytelling

Extant literature on organizational storytelling assumes storytelling to be context-bound, but does not empirically detail or theorize how storytelling might differ across organizational settings. In the context of members’ everyday work lives, organizational storytelling research tends to focus on the content of stories and not on the actual telling. By addressing this omission, this paper makes three contributions. First, we offer a generic framework for analysing storytelling in situ by zooming in on the situated occurrence of storytelling through a focus on four questions: (1) What makes an event tellable? (2) What triggers its telling? (3) What form does the storytelling take? (4) What work does it do? By using ethnographic data gathered on storytelling in everyday police work, we empirically substantiate this framework. Our second contribution, then, is to show how a setting-specific approach to studying storytelling may help to flesh out a fuller, more grounded account of story life in organizations. Finally, we propose a typology of different forms of setting-specific discourse – meeting-room talk, workstation talk, canteen talk and closed-door talk – which allows researchers to further sensitize organizational research to the situated nature of organizational discourse

Monologue and Organization Studies

In this essay, we propose that recent work in management and organization studies is typically inclined to understand organization and organizing as dialogic in form. Dialogicity is characterized by dynamic interlocution on the part of active human sense-makers and, in our critical reading, evokes a romanticized social landscape that fails to reflect the more prosaic features of organizational life. To address what we see as certain limitations of the dialogic view, we introduce a complementary point of reference: that of monologic organization. This perspective provokes reflection on those situations in which meanings are predetermined at the outset and communication consists of the strictly controlled, routine reproduction of formal scripts. We draw on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Serres to reclaim monologic as a pertinent view of organization and its processes. Finally, we provide micro-, meso- and macro-level examples to illustrate and discuss the heuristic potential of a monologic view