Identities at Work PDF Download

Author: Alan Brown
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402049897
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This book examines continuity and change of identity formation processes at work under conditions of modern working processes and labor market flexibility. By bringing together perspectives from sociology, psychology, organizational management, and vocational education and training, it connects the debates of skills formation, human resources development, and careers with individual’s work commitment and professional orientations.

Author: Andrew D. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192561944
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 944

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Book Description
Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of theory related to identities accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. In times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and fluid, the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed and less certain, making identity issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has been given to processes of identity construction, often styled 'identity work'. Research has focused on how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This has resulted in a burgeoning stream of research from discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives that most often casts individuals' efforts to fabricate identities as intentional, relational, and consequential. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities - their relative stability or fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not), and how they are fabricated within relations of power - combined with other conceptual issues continue to invigorate the field. However, these debates have also led to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. Yet as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis has significant potential to generate multiple compelling streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.

Author: George A. Akerlof
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140083418X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How identity influences the economic choices we make Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities—and not just economic incentives—influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people—facing the same economic circumstances—would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration—and of Identity Economics. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions—at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures—and much, much more. Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity—their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be—may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.

Author: Dawn R. Norris
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813573823
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Our jobs are often a big part of our identities, and when we are fired, we can feel confused, hurt, and powerless—at sea in terms of who we are. Drawing on extensive, real-life interviews, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health shines a light on the experiences of unemployed, middle-class professional men and women, showing how job loss can affect both identity and mental health. Sociologist Dawn R. Norris uses in-depth interviews to offer insight into the experience of losing a job—what it means for daily life, how the unemployed feel about it, and the process they go through as they try to deal with job loss and their new identities as unemployed people. Norris highlights several specific challenges to identity that can occur. For instance, the way other people interact with the unemployed either helps them feel sure about who they are, or leads them to question their identities. Another identity threat happens when the unemployed no longer feel they are the same person they used to be. Norris also examines the importance of the subjective meaning people give to statuses, along with the strong influence of society’s expectations. For example, men in Norris’s study often used the stereotype of the “male breadwinner” to define who they were. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health describes various strategies to cope with identity loss, including “shifting” away from a work-related identity and instead emphasizing a nonwork identity (such as “a parent”), or conversely “sustaining” a work-related identity even though he or she is actually unemployed. Finally, Norris explores the social factors—often out of the control of unemployed people—that make these strategies possible or impossible. A compelling portrait of a little-studied aspect of the Great Recession, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health is filled with insight into the identity crises that unemployment can trigger, as well as strategies to help the unemployed maintain their mental strength.

Author: Pia De Silvestris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000161013
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Every human being about to be born is loaned a provisional identity. This identity is embodied in the name they are given, as an invention, internal need, or generational obligation, parental fantasy or delusion. Both the person receiving and the person bestowing the name—and, with it, the provisional identity—are unaware of all this. Interweaving theoretical reflections and clinical histories, Pia De Silvestris illustrates the dramatic nature, the profundity, and the cryptic complexity of the challenges posed by this difficult identity—challenges she has faced repeatedly throughout her psychoanalytic career. She sees the role of transference in psychic and relational life as a "continuous search for the origin", a force that develops continuously through a variety of exchanges and investments, which seek, on the one hand, to weaken the bond to the original object and, on the other, to preserve it until death. Throughout the book’s chapters, we see how it is precisely the product of the transference experience that permits the joint work of identity construction to begin. Transference is always the outcome of an experience of fulfilment and an encounter with the other; and it is desire of the other that promotes the search for the self.

Author: Herminia Ibarra
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422160653
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into RealityWhether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities.Through engrossing stories—from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist—Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can: Explore possible selves Craft and execute "identity experiments" Create "small wins" that keep momentum going Survive the rocky period between career identities Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition Make time for reflection—without missing out on windows of opportunity Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us.

Author: Shirley Ardener
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857458868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In both professional and academic fields, there is increasing interest in the way in which white-collar workers engage with institutions and networks which are complex social constructions. Covering a wide variety of countries and types of organization, this volume examines the diverse ways in which individuals' ethnic, gender, corporate and professional identities interact. This book brings together fields often viewed in isolation: ethnographies of groups traditionally studied by anthropologists in new organisational contexts, and examinations of the role of identity in corporate life, opening up new perspectives on central areas of contemporary human activity. It will be of great interest to those concerned with practical management of institutions, as well as those of us who find ourselves working within them.

Author: Stephanie Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Creative workers have been celebrated internationally for their flexibility in new labour markets centred on culture, creativity and, most recently, innovation. This book draws on research with novice and established workers in a range of specializations in order to explore the meanings, aspirations and practical difficulties associated with a creative identification. It investigates the difficulties and attractions of creative work as a personalized, affect-laden project of self-making, perpetually open and oriented to possibility, uncertain in its trajectory or rewards. Employing a cross-disciplinary methodology and analytic approach, the book investigates the new cultural meanings in play around a creative career. It shows how classic ideals of design and the creative arts, re-interpreted and promoted within contemporary art schools, validate the lived experience of precarious working in the global sectors of the creative and cultural industries, yet also contribute to its conflicts. 'Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work' presents a distinctive study and original findings which make it essential reading for social scientists, including social psychologists, with an interest in cultural and media studies, creativity, identity, work and contemporary careers.

Author: Paul du Gay
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803979284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The realms of consumption have typically been seen to be distinct from those of work and production. This book examines how contemporary rhetorics and discourses of organizational change are breaking down such distinctions - with significant implications for the construction of subjectivities and identities at work. In particular, Paul du Gay shows how the capacities and predispositions required of consumers and those required of employees are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Both consumers and employees are represented as autonomous, responsible, calculating individuals. They are constituted as such in the language of consumer cultures and the all-pervasive discourses of enterprise whereby persons are required to be

Author: Laura Morgan Roberts
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1633698025
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Rethinking How to Build Inclusive Organizations Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations? Inspired by and developed in conjunction with the research and programming for Harvard Business School's commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the HBS African American Student Union, this groundbreaking book shines new light on these and other timely questions and illuminates the present-day dynamics of race in the workplace. Contributions from top scholars, researchers, and practitioners in leadership, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and education test the relevance of long-held assumptions and reconsider the research approaches and interventions needed to understand and advance African Americans in work settings and leadership roles. At a time when--following a peak in 2002--there are fewer African American men and women in corporate leadership roles, Race, Work, and Leadership will stimulate new scholarship and dialogue on the organizational and leadership challenges of African Americans and become the indispensable reference for anyone committed to understanding, studying, and acting on the challenges facing leaders who are building inclusive organizations.