Dorien Van De Mieroop (editor) - Identity Struggles : Evidence from workplaces around the world

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam/Philadelphia

D.V.D.M.

S.S.

Introduction: A kaleidoscopic view of identity struggles at work

Part I. Struggling to construct professional competence

Part II. Struggling to (de-)construct in-group membership

Part III. Struggling to combine (sometimes competing) expectations

Part IV. Struggling to define identity boundaries

The idea for this book, and indeed many of its contributions, arose out of a panel that was presented at the International Pragmatics Conference in Delhi in 2013. While the focus of the panel was on bringing together western and non-western perspectives on the discursive construction, negotiation and legitimisation of valid identities, during the presentations and subsequent discussions it soon became clear that the identity issues we engaged in were much broader than our initial western/non-western dichotomy seemed to suggest. And so the idea for this collection on identity struggles in workplaces around the globe was born.

We are very grateful to all the participants presenters and audience of the initial panel at the conference, who have engaged so actively, and often quite passionately, with our questions around issues of identity. And also to all our contributors, who in their various chapters continue this discussion. We would particularly like to thank our authors for their patience throughout the editing process, and for their encouraging words and enthusiasm along the way.

A very big thank you also to Joelle Loew for helping with the formatting, to Jan Reynders for some expert computer advice and to Isja Conen for patiently and expertly answering all our questions while putting together this volume.

Since people arguably spend most of their time at work, workplaces are one of the most crucial sites for identity construction. In the workplace, individuals create a multitude of different identities for themselves and the people they work with and for. They not only portray themselves as particular kinds of professionals (e.g. as a nurse or a sports coach) but they also draw on and at times even foreground specific aspects of their other social identities (e.g. as a mother, a rugby fan or someone who likes chocolate cake). These various identities are, of course, not constructed in isolation but are closely related and interlinked with the identities of others, and they also respond to and take into consideration the specific context in which an interaction occurs. They need to orient to the norms and expectations not only of the immediate working environment (which can often be described as a community of practice ().

Due to this complexity and inter-relatedness of professional identities with other identities and the context in which they occur, there is a huge potential for struggle especially in a workplace context. In particular, since professional identities need to respond to the sometimes competing norms and expectations of the context and ultimately need to be accepted and legitimised by other interlocutors, the construction of a professional identity is often quite challenging. These identity struggles are typically carried out in and through discourse.

However, in spite of an increasing interest by recent discourse analytical research on the workplace as a site for identity construction (e.g. ), to date there is no systematic collection demonstrating the relevance as well as diversity of this research. This edited volume aims to address these gaps by bringing together cutting-edge research on a range of different identity struggles revolving around the issues of professional competence, in-group membership, (sometimes competing) expectations and identity boundaries. The various chapters in this volume provide case-studies of these different kinds of identity struggles in a wide variety of workplaces around the world, including medical, educational and relatively traditional white-collar business settings, as well as largely under-researched blue-collar workplaces and non-traditional contexts such as the domestic workplace, and the sports arena. They illustrate not only that identity construction is a crucial aspect of workplace interactions but also that it is not always a harmonious process and that people often have to deal with different kinds of struggles in their everyday working lives, relating to their various identities, both in and outside the workplace.