Organization and Identity

"Organization and Identity" provides an exploration of identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and as a key concept in the social sciences, particularly focusing on how ideas about identity can be applied to organization and management studies. The contributors to this volume use and develop recent philosophical thought on the nature of identity to ask questions about the key social divisions of gender, class and nation, such as whether we are able to write our own identity stories or do we remain bound by social constraints and inequalities.
The book fulfills three objectives: it confronts established notions and assumptions about identity and its relevance to organization and management; it looks critically and in detail at the performance of identity in different contexts; and it explores beyond current understandings of identity, asking whether identity itself is a concept which now only has a history. The essays in this collection bring approaches from contemporary philosophy intothe area of organization identity and critically assess their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion.

Exploring identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and in the social sciences, this book focuses on how ideas about identity can be applied to organization and management studies. The contributors, all respected authorities in the field, use and develop recent philosophical thought on the nature of identity, and question the key social divisions of gender, class and nation. Bringing approaches from contemporary philosophy into the area of organization theory, this book critically assesses their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion.

Contents. Notes on the Identities of Contributors. Acknowledgments. 1.Organizing Identity Part 1: Confronting Identity: Selves and Others 2. Now Where Was I? Questioning Assumptions of Consistent Identity 3. Theorizing Narrative-Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneutics 4. Self and Other in Everyday Existence: A Mystery nota Problem 5. Living a Story and Storying a Life:A Narrative Understanding of the Distributed Self Part 2: Performing Identities: Selves for Others 6. Career as a Project of the Self and Labour Process Discipline 7. Fetish Failures: Interrupting the Subject and the Other 8. The Mission Statement as Epideictic Rhetoric: Celebrating Organizational Identity 9. Other Work: A Dividual Enterprise Part 3: After Identity...?: Selves in Question 10. Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the Control-Resistance-Identity Triangle 11. Casting the Other to the Ends of the Earth: Marginal Identity in Organization Studies12. Making Global Subjects: Diasporic Identity as a Media Event13. Fluid Identities and Ungendering the Future 14. Identity Aesthetics: Asymmetry and the Assault on Order

Alison Linstead is Senior Lecturer in Critical Management and Director of the PhD programme in the Department of Management Studies at the University of York. She is the co-author ofThinking Organization(also with Stephen Linstead, Routledge 2005) and has published in several journals on issues including organizational change and poststructuralist feminism. Stephen Linstead is Professor of Organizational Analysis and Director of Research at Durham Business School. He has published widely on organizational aesthetics, language, philosophy, qualitative methodology, gender and sexuality and is the author of Text/Work (Routledge 2003). He is an Academician at the Academy of the Social Sciences and co-edits the journal Culture and Organization.