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Working identities? Antagonistic discursive resources and managerial identity

Department of Organization Studies, Bristol Business School at the University of West of England, caroline3.clarke{at}uwe.ac.uk

Andrew D. Brown

Organization Studies at the University of Bath, School of Management, andrew.brown{at}management.bath.ac.uk

Veronica Hope Hailey

Strategic Human Resource Management at Cass Business School at City University, London, veronica.hope-hailey.1{at}city.ac.uk

In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK-based engineering company drew in their efforts to construct versions of their selves. Predicated on an understanding that subjectively construed discursive identities are available to individuals as in-progress narratives that are contingent and fragile, the research contribution we make is threefold. First, we argue that managers may draw on mutually antagonistic discursive resources in authoring conceptions of their selves. Second, we contend that rather than being relatively coherent or completely fluid and fragmented managers' identity narratives may incorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms. Third, we show that managers' identity work constituted a continuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moral beings. Antagonisms in managers' identities, we suggest, may appropriately be analysed as the complex and ambiguous effects of organizationally based disciplinary practices and individuals' discursive responses to them.

Key Words: discipline • discourse • emotion • identity • managers • moral identity

Human Relations, Vol. 62, No. 3, 323-352 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0018726708101040


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