Suchergebnisse

In the article I argue that a study of high contact sports, such as rugby league, can illuminate a discursive space in which the production of organized, docile, masculine, bodies, engaged in emotional labour are crafted and mobilized through disciplinary practices. Participants from a rugby league football club and their trainers have been interviewed and observed as part of a larger ethnographic study. The analysis provides a contrast to and develops understanding from studies of the organized female body, which have long argued that they are subject to disciplinary forces in the workplace (e.g. Trethewey, 1999), by illustrating how masculine bodies may also be made docile in particular organizational contexts. The article explores the organization of masculine bodies in professional sport as an example of the production of masculinity in a work environment. I conclude by suggesting that these masculine bodies are worked upon to be fit for organizational purpose in a similar way to how women's bodies are crafted to fit in male-dominated work environments. This is not simply through an imposition of more powerful ideologies but as simultaneous products and producers of the organized body. Furthermore, despite these efforts, the bodies become no longer fit for use with the passage of time. The erosion of ability due to injury and competition from younger, fitter, bodies ensure that their working lives are brought to an abrupt close.

Elite professionals opportunistically employ threats to their work identities to author preferred selves. Predicated on understandings that identities are subjectively available to people as in-progress narratives, and that these are often insecure fabrications, we investigate the identity work of members of a UK-based professional Rugby League club. The research contribution we make is to demonstrate that professionals use identity threats as flexible resources for working on favoured identities. We show that rugby players authored identity threats centred on the shortness of their careers, injury and performance, and how these were appropriated (made their own) by men to develop desired occupational and masculine identities. In so doing, we also contribute to debates on how professionals' identity discourse is an expression of agency framed within relations of power.

This paper analyses how graduate trainees in one UK-based private sector retail organization talked about being silenced. The paper illustrates how the trainees' constructions formed a set of discursive practices that were implicated in the constitution of the organization as a regime of power, and how they both accommodated and resisted these practices. Our case focuses on the trainees' discursive construction of normative pressures to conform, compliant and non-compliant types of worker, and explicit acts of silencing, together with their reflexive interrogation of the nexus of discursive constraints on their opportunities to be heard. Drawing on the analytical resources associated with the 'linguistic turn' in organization studies, our research is an exploration of the importance of language as a medium of social control and power, and means of self-authorship. It is also an attempt to locate 'silence' in putatively polyphonic organizations.

Purpose– Social media technologies are used by many organizations to project a positive image of their strategies and operations. At the same time, however, there are an increasing number of reports of slip-ups linked to poor situational awareness and flawed self-presentations on social media platforms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the triggers of inappropriate social media posts.Design/methodology/approach– Data were collected during a qualitative study of social media use in 31 organizations in the UK and interpreted using concepts from Erving Goffman's theory of impression management.Findings– The findings point to a series of demanding triggers, which increase the likelihood of insensitive and contextually inappropriate posts and also damage fostered impressions.Originality/value– The authors identify four triggers linked to inappropriate social media posts, namely: speed and spontaneity; informality; blurred boundaries; and the missing audience. The authors also discuss how extending the notion of what Goffman refers to as "situation-like" encounters provides useful insights into impression management on social media.

Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Organization Studies. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0170840616641983 ; Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world.

This article contributes to the study of gendered ageism in the workplace by investigating how the routine of day-parting in broadcasting participates in the social construction of an ideology of 'youthfulness' that contributes to inequality. Critical discourse analysis is applied to the final judgment of an Employment Tribunal court case where the British public service broadcaster, the BBC, faced accusations of discrimination on the basis of both age and gender. Three interrelated findings are highlighted. First, the ideology of youthfulness was constituted through discursive strategies of nomination and predication that relied on an inherently ageist and sexist lexical register of 'brand refreshment and rejuvenation'. Second, the ideology of youthfulness was reproduced through a pervasive discursive strategy of combined de-agentialization, abstraction and generalization that maintained power inequality in the workplace by obscuring the agency of the more powerful organizational actors while further marginalizing the weaker ones. Third, despite evidence that the intersection of age and gender produced qualitatively different experiences for individual organizational actors, in the legitimate and authoritative version of the truth constructed in the Tribunal's final judgment, ageism discursively prevailed over sexism as a form of oppression at work. These findings support the view that the intersection of age and gender in the workplace should be explored by taking into account different levels of analysis – individual, organizational and societal – and with sensitivity to the context. They also suggest that the notion of gendered ageism is still poorly articulated and that the lack of an appropriate vocabulary encourages the discursive dominance of ageism over sexism, making the intersection of the two more difficult to study and to address.

Stories people tell of going through change incorporate and react to others around them. Positions can be taken in stories that tend towards the monological, having a singular perspective and being somewhat sealed off from others. Alternatively, stories can tend towards the dialogical, a multiple, less certain and more interactive mode. We explore multiple stories of an organizational change and analyse a paradoxical situation that emerges. We argue that although the stories may have the appearance of being dialogical, they can be seen as co-existing but self-sealing, or anti-dialogic. We introduce an interruption to the story and discuss a possibility for challenging anti-dialogic positioning in change stories.