Working identities? Antagonistic discursiveresources and managerial identity

Pre-proof version of: Clarke, C., Brown, A.D. & Hope-Hailey, V. 2009. Working identities? Antagonistic

discursive resources and managerial identity. HumanRelations, 62, 3: 323-352

AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the principal antagonisticdiscourses on which managers in a large UK-basedengineering company drew in their efforts to constructversions of their selves. Predicated on an understandingthat subjectively construed discursive identities areavailable to individuals as in-progress narratives thatare contingent and fragile, the research contribution wemake is threefold. First, we argue that managers may drawon mutually antagonistic discursive resources inauthoring conceptions of their selves. Second, we contendthat rather than being relatively coherent or completelyfluid and fragmented managers’ identity narratives mayincorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms. Third,we show that managers’ identity work constituted acontinuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moralbeings. Antagonisms in managers’ identities, we suggest,may appropriately be analyzed as the complex andambiguous effects of organizationally-based disciplinarypractices and individuals’ discursive responses to them.

1

Introduction

How coherent are organizational participants’ work-

identity narratives? A considerable literature suggests

that identities are subjectively available to individuals

in the form of self-narratives (Giddens, 1991; McAdams,

1996) which they ‘work on’ through internal soliloquies

(Athens, 1994) and interactions with others (Beech, 2008;

Goffman, 1959). Within management studies there is an

emergent consensus that, for their participants,

organizations are sites ‘for realizing the project of the

self’ (Grey, 1994: 482), and that within them ‘people are

continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining,

strengthening or revising the constructions that are

productive of a precarious sense of coherence and

distinctiveness’ (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002: 626). Much

of this work has been predicated on the assumption that

people satisfy their needs for self-esteem, self-

knowledge, and self-continuity by authoring self

narratives that are relatively coherent. Far less

attention has been paid to the practical difficulties

managers experience in assembling such narratives from

2

available discourses, some of which may have divergent

implications.

In this paper, we analyze the multiple antagonistic

discourses on which managers in a large UK-based

engineering company drew in their efforts to construct

versions of their selves as emotional beings, as

professionals and as moral managers who were also members

of a distinctive island community. We focus in particular

on three ‘antagonisms’ that characterized their self-

conceptions: they said that they were emotionally

detached yet emotionally engaged, that they were

professional but also unprofessional, and that they had

responsibilities for the business but cared for people.

This study is important because, despite notable

exceptions (e.g., Sennett (1998) Watson (1994)) ‘…there

are relatively few empirical studies addressing specific

processes of identity construction’ (Sveningsson &

Alvesson, 2003: 1164). Still less research has been

conducted on the dualities inherent in managers’ accounts

of their selves. The research contribution we make is

3

threefold. First, we argue that managers 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 assert that managers’ identity work constitutes a

continuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moral

beings subject to organizationally-based disciplinary

practices.

The remainder of this paper consists of four main

sections. First, we provide a brief review of the

literatures on discourse, identity, and narrative.

Subjectively construed narrativized identities, like the

organizations in which they are authored, are temporary

marshalling yards of power/knowledge that endeavour ‘to

endure in a congenitally failing battle with a

bewildering array of multifarious potential allies and

assailants’ (Lilley, 1995: 79). Second, we give an

account of our methodological assumptions, research

4

context, and methods of data collection and analysis.

Third, we analyze three principal sets of discursive

resources on which our participants drew in their

attempts to author acceptable versions of their selves.

Predicated on a view of language as a medium that both

makes possible and which limits understanding (Gadamer,

1982), and is thus best regarded ‘as a representational

technology that actively organizes, constructs and

sustains social reality’, we analyze how a community’s

discursive practices came ‘to form the instinctively

shared calibration points’ that defined themselves and

their ‘local reality’ (Chia & King, 2001: 312). Finally,

we discuss our findings and their implications for

further research and theorizing on identities in

organizations.

Discourse and Identity

Organizations, we maintain, are socially constructed

through acts of languaging which engender ‘situations,

objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and

relations between people and groups of people’

5

(Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 258). Work identities are

constituted within organizationally-based discursive

regimes which offer positions, or epistemological spaces,

for individuals and groups to occupy. Individuals’ self-

construed identities are analyzable as reflexively

organized and temporally informed narratives which are

‘productive of a degree of existential continuity and

security’ (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002: 625-6; cf. Giddens,

1991; McAdams, 1996). Considerable attention has been

focused on the pliability of discourse by individuals

engaged in identity work, leading to continuing, and

seemingly irreconcilable debates, regarding the extent to

which identities are chosen, or are the products of

social and institutional structures (Knights & Morgan,

1991; Eccles & Nohria, 1993; Webb, 2006). There is,

however, a consensus that while the power of discursive

practices affects everyone, because there are competing

discourses socialization into any one discourse is never

complete, and resistance to specific discursive regimes

is thus possible (Foucault, 1980, 1988).

6

A further set of debates centre on the extent to which

individuals’ narrativized identities are relatively

stable, coherent, and unified or changeable, fractured

and diverse (Gergen, 1992; McAdams, 1996; Worthington,

1996). Much theoretical work assumes that through

temporal and spatial emplotment people sequence, order

and connect discrete and often disparate memories into

self-narratives that are reasonably fixed and integrated

(MacIntyre, 1985; Polkinghorne, 1988): ‘…a narrative of

self provides the human subject with a sense of self-

continuity and coherence’ (Worthington, 1996: 13). Such

narratives, while always provisional and partial, are

said to make coherent individuals’ reconstructed past,

perceived present and anticipated future, rendering their

lives-in-time sensible in terms of beginnings, middles,

and endings. That is, although they are generally open-

ended, and often lack clarity, yet life stories are also

‘readable’ rather than confused, and promote feelings of

continuity rather than confusion. Indeed, McAdams (1996:

306) has argued that ‘The challenge of identity demands

that the modern adult construct a “telling” of the self

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that synthesizes synchronic and diachronic elements in

such a way as to suggest that…the Me is coherent and

unified…’.

Other theorists have argued that identities are often

disparate and fundamentally unstable. Gergen (1992), for

example, has questioned the ability of contemporary

Westerners to find unity and purpose in their lives amid

the constant change and wild multiplicity – multiphrenia -

of postmodern life. From this perspective, people are

theorized as telling, or having the capacity to tell,

many different identity stories in different contexts and

at different times, so that rather than a singular

overall life story people have instead a collection of

rather disconnected versions of their selves (Gergen

1992). While few management scholars have focused on

identity incoherence and its significance in

organizations, it has not gone un-noticed. Sveningsson

and Alvesson (2003: 1165) have argued that ‘…individuals

create several more or less contradictory and often

changing managerial identities (identity positions)

8

rather than one stable, continuous and secure, manager

identity’ (cf. Thomas & Linstead, 2002). Yet even they

maintain that these contradictions exist within ‘a

somewhat more stable, personal…narrative self identity’

(Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003: 1166). In this paper, we

analyze three sets of mutually antagonistic discursive

resources that managers drew on in constructing self

narratives: emotion/un-emotion; professionalism/un-

professionalism; and the business/people, each of which

has received prior attention from scholars.

Drawing on Goffman (1959) scholars have previously noted

that different organizations are characterized by

distinct ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979) or ‘display

rules’ (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1989) which are rooted in

occupational, organisational and societal expectations,

and structure how people manage and express their

emotions (Fineman & Sturdy, 1999; Harris, 2002). A wealth

of studies have shown how the expression and suppression

of emotion at work is bound-up with issues of power and

control, and in particular how ‘emotion’ is often

9

positioned as interfering with the rational goals and

success of organizations (Fineman, 1993, 2000; Putnam &

Mumby, 1993). Parkin (1993:179), for instance, has argued

that notions of ‘professionalism’ may be associated with

‘the suppression and denial of feeling and emotion’.

Perhaps most importantly for our study, understandings of

notionally ‘appropriate’ displays of emotion have been

linked to issues of gender and masculinity (Hearn, 1993).

Research indicates ‘that men in organizations often seem

preoccupied with maintaining a particular masculine

identity (Craib, 1998; Hodgson, 2003)’, (Collinson, 2003:

533). This is especially the case for engineers who tend

to create cultures which have been described as

exhibiting an ‘exceptionally dense, masculine web of

assumptions’ (Miller, 2004: 70).

A number of studies have shown how understandings of what

it means to be a ‘professional’ are important discursive

constructions by which, for example, medics’ (Haas &

Shaffir, 1987), lawyers’ (Granfield, 1992; Harris, 2002)

and funeral directors’ (Cahill, 1999) come to regard

10

themselves as unique and valuable. Other research has

shown that the label ‘professional’ is a mechanism that

‘allows for control at a distance through the

construction of ‘appropriate’ work identities and

conducts’ (Fournier, 1999: 281). In our study,

participants regarded themselves as professional managers

and aviation engineers. Considerable research suggests

that in employing the term ‘manager’ individuals

constitute themselves as rational economic actors who are

‘in control’ and who use analytical skills in order to

execute organizational strategies in pursuit of

managerial goals (Rosen, 1987; Watson, 2001; Sims, 2003).

This is particularly the case for managers who identify

themselves as engineers. Engineering is a stereotypically

masculine domain (Miller, 2002) whose culture focuses on

a material, objectively definable world, venerates

technology and machinery and, in the case of aviation

engineering, emphasizes danger, safety, physical

strength, dedication, technical ability and manual skill

(Mills, 1998: 177; cf. Dodson & Borders, 2006: 291;

Faulkner, 2007: 340).

11

It is well attested that the kinds of stories that a

person tells about themselves reflects the ‘local’ ‘world

of stories within which the individual lives, acts, and

narrates’ (McAdams, 1996: 298). Especially salient in our

case were the stories that actors oriented to regarding

their putative obligations to the business and to its

people (including their selves). Various studies have

illustrated how managers may draw on a ‘grandiose

discourse on management’ to emphasize the importance of

organisational survival (Sveningsson & Alvesson,

2003:1187), and to cast themselves as ‘saviours’,

essential for the continued success of their organization

(Lukes, 1974; Floyd & Wooldridge, 1997; Gratton et al.,

1999; Samra-Fredericks, 2004). The survival of

organizations is frequently represented by managers as

vital for its personnel and others who have what Watson

(2001) has termed ‘side bets’ in its long-term future,

and is often a convenient discursive resource used to

rationalize decisions and actions. Another stream of

research has made the point that managers generally have

12

a ‘dense and intimate knowledge’ of lower level employees

(Jackall, 1988: 124) and ‘not infrequently feel a degree

of allegiance not only to their careers and families but

also to their employees’ (Willmott, 1997: 1337). Further,

managers, like other employees, have also to manage their

own careers, and must broker concern for the

organization’s capital with their own employment security

(Willmott, 1997: 1347). The result is, frequently,

competition between discourses of control, caring and

self-aggrandizement (cf. Watson & Watson, 1999; Humphreys

& Brown, 2002a,b).

Antagonistic discourses centred on emotionalism,

professionalism and the conflicting demands of the

business and its people were important for managers as

they sought to define themselves as moral beings. In

contrast to MacIntyre’s (1985: 30) contention that

managers occupy morally vacuous identity positions (cf.

Friedman, 1970), a recent literature suggests that

discourses linked to ‘ethics’ are increasingly relevant

to individuals in the conduct of their work in

13

contemporary organizations (e.g., Jackall, 1988; Watson,

2003; Kornberger & Brown, 2007). As Knights and Willmott

(1999: 135) assert, the denial of personal morality in

organizational decision making is extremely difficult,

with only ‘the most brutalized or fanatical of managers’

being ‘capable of consistently denying personal

involvement in, and a degree of responsibility for, the

decision that he or she takes’. Our study is, in part, an

exploration of the ‘contextual, situational, [and] highly

specific’ (Jackall, 1998: 6) ways in which managers in an

organization constructed their selves as moral agents. We

analyze managers grappling with conflicting loyalties and

locally defined moral rules. Theirs, we argue, was a

quest for practical sagacity (Aristotle’s ‘phronesis’),

to develop the necessary homeopathic sensitivity and

reflexive maturity to make ‘good’ decisions subject to

their own judgement and the gaze of others (cf. Holt,

2006). In so doing, we draw on and contribute to prior

work which has shown how power is enacted in ethical

discourses, and how control is exercised and resisted in

managerial communities (Willmott, 1993).

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Research Design

This inductive study was conducted from an interpretive

perspective, or ‘inquiry from the inside’ (Evered &

Louis, 1981) in an attempt to produce a rich account of

the working lives of those employed at the aerospace

division of a large global engineering company (which we

refer to by the pseudonym ‘BCP’). Our primary interest

was in how people used discourse to engage in identity

work (cf. Keenoy, Oswick & Grant, 1997; Phillips & Hardy,

1997; Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003; Keenoy & Oswick,

2004). In conducting this research we were sensitive to

the need for critical self-reflexivity, not least to

challenge what have been identified as deep-seated

inequalities in the ethnographic relations between

fieldworkers and informants (Humphreys & Brown, 2002b).

Further, Denzin and Lincoln’s (1994: 576) identification

of ‘crises of representation and legitimation’ in case study work

has led us to recognize explicitly that fieldwork is a

creative endeavour and that researchers fashion texts in

artful ways (Watson, 1995) in order to attain a

15

particular audience affect. That is, not only is there

‘no fixed, final or monologically authoritative meaning’

in case study research (Marcus, 1994: 566), but ‘All

texts are personal statements’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994:

578). By writing this section permitting ‘the audience to

see [at least some of] the puppet’s strings as they watch

the puppet show’ (Watson, 1994: 78) we have attempted to

create a text that is both plausible and authoritative

(Van Maanen, 1988).

Research Context

In 2002 BCP had a turnover of £4 billion and employed

38,000 people in more than 30 countries. The organization

was concerned with a variety of tasks which included the

design, development and manufacture of automotive

systems, aerospace and defence products, as well as a

number of other subservient and associated services. The

data were collected in the aerostructures division of the

organization’s aerospace division, a specific context

which was notable for being vastly cyclical, with long-

term investment and uncertain returns.

16

BCP was considered by its employees to be a prestigious

place to work and to offer excellent salaries. Yet, the

older managers we interviewed spoke nostalgically about

the past and complained bitterly about constant

reorganizations, high levels of political in-fighting,

bullying, low morale, lack of trust and ‘powerlessness’.

‘Change’, broadly defined, was, said our participants, a

defining feature of the work environment, and during our

data collection period the site was managed by three

different individuals. There was evidently a culture of

‘presenteeism’, and many individuals claimed to work 13

or 14 hour daysi. Nevertheless, in an environment with

relatively few job opportunities, many employees

maintained that it was their moral duty to ensure that

the site was kept open ‘for future generations’.

Two aspects of our case study organization merit special

attention. First, BCP was based on a small island

separated by a few miles from the British mainland, and

had many of the characteristics typically associated with

17

relatively small, self-contained single-site businesses:

there was a strong sense of community, high social

cohesion, a blurring of boundaries between work and home,

and, arguably, a sense of ‘cloistered complacency’ (cf.

Child & Smith, 1987; Newman, 2005; Waller, 2006). Second,

there was a growing recognition that the division was

vulnerable to closure and individuals expressed concern

about their long-term job security. These fears had been

reinforced in 1998 when the division’s headquarters had

been relocated from the island to the mainland. Then, on

14th February 2002, the workforce of 1500 had been halved

(dubbed the ‘St Valentine’s Day massacre’), and a few

months later a further 100 people had been made

redundant. Downsizing, ‘an intentional proactive

management strategy’ (McKinley et al, 2000: 227) to

produce a ‘leaner, fitter organization with a multi-

skilled workforce’ (Littler & Innes, 2003: 78) has become

a more frequent and less novel event since the late

1980’s. Most relevant to our study is the research which

has explored the deleterious effects of such programmes

not just on those who lose their jobs – victims - but

18

‘survivors’, who often experience feelings of grief and

guilt (Armstrong-Stassen, 1998; Brockner, 1988; Reynolds-

Fisher & White, 2000).

Data Collection

All the data for this study were collected by the first

author between August 2002 and March 2004. Access to the

organization was granted for the purposes of research in

return for the promise of oral and written feedback. Our

principal data sources included 46 semi-structured

interviews of approximately 60 minutes duration conducted

with 10 managers (8 of whom were interviewed on three

separate occasions), 16 junior managers, 2 different site

managers, and 2 head office executives. All but one of

the interviewees were white males and described

themselves as ‘engineers’, and most had at least ten

years service. 95% were ‘islanders’, most had worked only

for BCP, and many regarded their work colleagues as

neighbours and friendsii. No one refused to be interviewed

or to answer any question that was asked of them. While

centred on issues of identity and processes of change,

19

our questions were designed to allow participants to talk

generally about their organization and themselvesiii. Each

interview was recorded on to an audio tape and fully

transcribed to yield an average of 8421 words of

transcript data, making a total interview data set of

370,565 words. In addition, the first author attended two

‘management’ and one ‘junior manager’ one-day workshops,

during which notes were made of what was said and copies

taken of the flip-chart material that was produced by the

participants. A larger number of informal conversations

(after which detailed notes were made) were undertaken

with employees. Further, a range of documentation

including marketing brochures and newsletters, and the

company’s web site, were also examined. An attempt was

made to persuade a small group of managers to engage with

the researcher in an e-mail dialogue, and 3 managers

i People said that they worked long hours, that they could be sent toattend meetings off-site with no warning, that they expected to receive work-related telephone calls when holidaying, and that it wasnot unusual to be called into work while notionally on vacation. ii Indeed, it was not unusual for several family members to be employed at BCP, and our interviewees included a father and son, and two brothers.iii For example, we asked: How long have you worked for this organization? Describe the pace of change here? What keeps you awake at night?

20

contributed a total of 20 e-mails containing additional

information over a 5 month period.

Data Analysis

In analyzing our data we focused in particular on

language as ‘perhaps the primary medium of social control

and power’ (Fairclough, 1989: 3) and on how discoursal

practices contributed to the reproduction ‘of existing

social and power relations’ (Fairclough, 1995: 77; cf.

Oswick, Keenoy & Grant, 1997; Grant, et. al., 2004). Our

approach was deconstructive, emphasizing the polysemous

nature of words and the arbitrariness of meaning. As Boje

(1995: 1007) describes it, to deconstruct is to ‘analyze

the relations between the dualities in stories – such as

the positive and negative, the central and the marginal,

the essential and the inessential, the insider and the

outsider – to show the ambiguity embedded in them and to

show the narrative practices used to discipline

particular meanings’. This resulted in the identification

of three sets of mutually antagonistic discursive

resources, i.e. apparently oppositional discourses. Our

21

analysis and labelling of these were, of course, the

result of reality construction processes and subjectively

construed by us, the research team (Cameron & Quinn,

1988; Jantsch, 1975). Further, we acknowledge that our

interpretation of these antagonisms as combinations of

discursive acts of subjugation and resistance is

testament to our ‘critical’ orientation to management,

work and organization (cf. Willmott, 2008).

A preliminary analysis of the data collected during the

first phase highlighted the importance of notions of

‘emotion’, ‘professionalism’, ‘concern for the business

and for people’ and ‘identity’ (among others), and we

focused on these in subsequent periods of data

collection. All our data were entered into NVIVO software

and sorted into multiple linked coded categories using

headings such as ‘rationality’, ‘community’ and

‘autonomy’. These codes were gradually embellished and

refined, and more sophisticated linkages between our data

and theory made and written-up. While our approach to

data analysis was inductive and rigorous we recognize

22

also that it reflected our idiosyncratic understandings

regarding what constitutes interesting first order data

from which to build theory. From this structured ordering

of our data we sought to produce contextually detailed

and polyphonic accounts of participants’ working lives

which incorporated meanings given by local actors ‘to

their actions, other people’s actions, [and] social

situations’ (Blaikie, 2000: 15). Our findings were

formally fed back to a group of self-selecting managers

who said that they resonated with their own views. It is

from these rich empirical documents that this paper has

been cullediv. The case study which follows may thus be

regarded as an evolutionary product of the reflexive

processes of improvisational bricoleurs (Levi-Strauss,

1966: 17) as we have attempted to author identity stories

both of the Other and ourselves (Humphreys, Brown &

Hatch, 2003).

Discourse and Identity at BCP

iv All our participants have been given pseudonymns, and job titles have been omitted to maintain anonymity.

23

The case data are presented in three main sections:

‘emotional detachment versus engagement’,

‘professionalism versus unprofessionalism’, and ‘concern

for the business versus concern for people’. Our

intention is to demonstrate, using illustrative quotation

material, the three most significant sets of discourses

on which our participants drew in their efforts to author

versions of their individual and collective work selves.

It is important to note that these discourses did not

stand apart from each other, but were enmeshed. The

result was a local discursive configuration unique to

BCP. This explains some of the seeming idiosyncrasies in

the following sections where, for example, ‘playing

politics’ - which may be interpreted as an aspect of

professionalism - is constituted as antagonistic to it.

Emotional Detachment versus Engagement

Consonant with other studies which have found that

managers are expected to exercise ‘iron control’

(Jackall, 1988: 47) interviewees’ maintained that in the

conduct of their duties they had always to remain

24

emotionally neutral. They said that BCP was ‘a masculine

society’ where ‘people don’t show emotion to you much’ (Bill,

Junior manager). However, employees seemed also to resist

hegemonic requirements to be unemotional, stating that

they felt passionately about aspects of their work and

were, on occasions, prone to emotional outbursts (see

Table 1). Often, when people did make what they construed

to be emotive statements, they also made comments that

qualified or mitigated them. James, a Manager spoke of

‘betrayal’ and ‘disappointment’ but then said ‘perhaps that’s just

me being all emotional’. Sam, a Junior manager, admitted to

feeling ‘sad’ but followed this up by saying ‘…sentimental

old fool aren’t I?’ Harry, another Manager, expressed sympathy

for a site manager who had been ousted, but then said ‘…

you might say I’m a silly bugger’.

Please insert Table 1 here

Emotional Detachment. People spoke disparagingly about

those they considered to be ‘pink and fluffy’ (Simon,

Manager) and of the idea of sharing emotions openly. As

25

Steve (Manager) said, the widespread use of the phrase

‘pink and fluffy’ as a pejorative descriptor ‘was a sort of

mark of the culture that we’re in. If you did anything which smacked of

consideration - that was immediately “pink and fluffy”’. These

attitudes, people said, were best exemplified with

reference to the supposed ‘need’ for redundancies which

was constituted as an ‘economic’ rather than a ‘moral’ or

‘personal’ issue: ‘…the rightness and the wrongness of it doesn’t

matter’ (Steve, Manager). All the managers agreed that,

in the conversations they had held with those being made

redundant, there was no place for emotion. Paul (Manager)

said that while ‘I’ve had a few guys sitting in here [office] crying’

and that was ‘difficult’, yet ‘you can’t get emotionally attached

because if you did you wouldn’t pay anybody off. The business would just

fold’. Many staff spoke about how they sought to distance

themselves emotionally from these processes: ‘…you detach

yourself from the emotion – it’s a job, you’ve got to do it. If you don’t do it,

somebody else will’ (James, Manager). In one of the workshops

the researcher heard a manager say to a Team Leader

called Philip whose team had just been disbanded ‘come on

Philip, let’s take the emotiveness out of the exercise’.

26

Emotional Engagement. There was a reflexive recognition

among participants that there were limits on the extent

to which they ‘had’, or indeed were able, to be detached

from work activities. Many managers and junior managers

said that BCP was, and had long been, a fear-filled place

where people felt threatened. As Joe (a Corporate

Executive) realized, ‘…people are scared about keeping their jobs so

they won’t [challenge superiors]’. A few individuals gave

accounts of how they or others had engaged in emotional

outbursts: ‘He [the site manager] said “nothing you’re doing at

home is more important”. I said “how the fuck do you know?” So I said “right,

you’ve pissed me off”. I went to see him, and I said, I was emotional then, “you

took the piss, don’t ever do it again…” (James, Manager). Here an

emotionally charged reaction is constituted as an

explicit act of resistance against what the speaker

interpreted as an unwarranted attempt to assert the

importance of work over his private life. Most statements

regarding emotional engagement in the workplace, however,

centred on the issue of redundancies, which those

involved described using terms such as ‘horrendous’

27

(Robert, Manager), and which many said was ‘the most difficult

[set of decisions] in your life’ (Harry, Manager). Even those

who said that ‘I could understand strategically why it

[redundancies] was done’ admitted that ‘I wasn’t totally pleased

with the decision’ (James, Manager). Others were more open in

their assessment of how this policy had affected them and

their work mates:

‘I went through all the emotions under the sun laying off some of mybest mates’ (Hugo, Manager), .

‘…the old flood waters started and I was really choked up then… therewas a couple of close mates, real close mates’ (Len, Juniormanager).

Some individuals did make it clear that they thought

there were issues of ‘human dignity’ to be considered,

argued that ‘sympathy has got its place, no doubt about it’ and were

critical of other managers whose attitude was uncaring to

the point of being ‘ruthless’ (Steve, Manager). There was

also some specifically voiced resistance to the programme

of redundancies among those tasked with implementing

them. James, a Manager, recounted an interaction with one

of his colleagues who ‘said “I don’t agree with it, I can’t see my

friends’ jobs going down the road”’ though even this individual

28

‘…ended up doing what has to be done’. In talking about their

emotional reactions managers sometimes expressed concern

regarding the kind of person their actions revealed them

to be. Making people redundant ‘…actually makes you feel

exceptionally hard… So there is this issue about being quite hard and ruthless

and unremitting’ (Steve, Manager). Yet being emotional was

most usually understood as a sign of ‘weakness’ (Bill,

Junior manager) – a failing to be admitted to only

grudgingly, often with seeming regret. Even those who

claimed to be emotionally engaged in the programme of

redundancies, also voiced discomfort with this: ‘I was too

close to it and I was too emotional about it’ (Lara, Junior manager).

Professionalism versus Un-Professionalism

One key discursive resource on which managers and junior

managers drew in talking about how they handled

themselves at work was ‘professionalism’, which was often

associated with ‘being strong’ and having a ‘hard image’

(Brian, Manager). As Mick, a junior manager said: ‘I think

that I am pretty professional in my approach’. Yet there was also a

recognition that people were often ‘unprofessional’ in

29

the sense that they tended to engage in political

intrigue, and that rather than being ‘strong managers’,

some individuals shirked their responsibilities: ‘I think

people still hide’ (Richard, Manager) (See Table 2).

Please Insert Table 2 about here.

Professionalism. There was a general consensus that

employees at BCP should act ‘professionally’: ‘I am being a

true professional’ (Simon, Manager); ‘I think you have to try and be

professional’ (Harry, Manager); ‘It worries me professionally that I

don’t want to fail in my job’ (Peter, Junior manager). Concern

with professionalism was particularly evident with

reference to the task of making people redundant, with

most commenting on the importance of ‘do[ing] it

professionally’ (James, Manager), and ‘…in a professional manner’

(Hugo, Manager). All the interviewees agreed that in

order to perform their job roles effectively they had to

refrain from displaying any undue emotion, and that this

was one important aspect of their professionalism: ‘…I

managed to keep professional when it came to the decision and the

30

judgement…. I do not think that it is professional to be sat there feeling a

lump in your throat… you have got to be quite strong and professional’

(Lara, Junior manager)v. The participants expressed

considerable pride in their managerial performances

during the implementation of the programme of

redundancies, and interpreted the putative ‘success’ of

their efforts as evidence for their professionalism: ‘…it

has actually been done, from an employer relations perspective, very

professionally… we have not had any strikes and we have not had tribunals,

and the actual process has gone quite well’ (Matthew, Head Office).

Un-professionalism. In many different ways, people

expressed the view that ‘this company is inherently unprofessional’

(Carl, Junior Manager). Un-professionalism was said to be

manifested in a complex mix of poor decision-making and

unsophisticated techniques for people-management: ‘It is piss

poor management; it really is bad, terrible people management, very bad. I

think that is something we suffer from internally in this company, very bad

people management’ (Victor, Junior Manager). Others

commented on the inclination of managers to fixate on

v As Jan, a Head Office executive said: ‘…being emotional is a sign of weakness and whatever the emotion is…it is just not really acceptable, and if you are like that you are looked at as a bit weird’.

31

issues of ‘monitoring and control’ and to be unwilling to

‘listen to the point of being ridiculous’ (Paul, Manager). There was

also, people said, a tendency for managers to abrogate

their responsibilities and to blame their juniors for

errors: ‘…people above you always tell you to delegate and when

something goes wrong they bollock you’ (James, Manager). The

managers were described as ‘…a bunch of political animals’

(Simon, Manager) who, rather than ‘a team’, were best

characterised as ‘…a group of individuals’ who… ha[ve] their own

agenda’ (James, Manager). As Terry, a junior manager

stated: ‘We are all meant to be working for the same company. You would

honestly think this is a shopping mall with 15 different shops on it and none

of them [departments] will have anything to do with each other’.

Concern for the Business and People

Our participants said that they wanted BCP to survive and

to be successful but that they also valued the people who

worked for the company and had sympathy for those

(including themselves) who were abused and exploited by

it. In such an environment it was, they said, often hard

to retain one’s personal integrity because the demands of

32

the business meant that they had to make decisions which

impacted negatively on people:

‘…we as a management team had to try to make sure that peoplewent out of here not feeling aggrieved. So there was the personal self-morally. We wouldn’t want somebody to go out feeling absolutely shit.But equally, we had to try and protect the business’ (Richard,Manager).

On the one hand people argued that the business ‘needs a

strong leader’ (Richard, Manager), and spoke approvingly of

the steps that they and others had taken in order to

manage effectively BCP. On the other, our interviewees

spoke candidly of the personal costs that they and their

colleagues had had to bear, and of their desire for a

more ‘people-oriented’ approach to management (see Table

3):

‘…basically that’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m burned out, I can’t keepdoing it [working long hours], it’s not fair to my wife and myfamily”’ (James, Manager).

‘I want out of this business, because it’s going to kill me in the end’(Harry, Manager).

Please insert Table 3 about here.

The Business. The managers, said that they felt a deep

affinity with BCP. They made three different but related

kinds of statements regarding their relationship with the

33

business: that they identified strongly with BCP;

considered it their duty to ensure the site remained open

for future generations, thus positioning themselves as

altruistically motivated; and that they were prepared to

take the ‘tough’ decisions required in order to ensure

that BCP was successful. Perhaps most noticeable were the

statements people made regarding their strong positive

identification with the company: ‘I do love this, genuinely love

this place for what it does and for what it’s done for me’ and people

work hard here ‘’cos you want to, you’ve got pride in it…’ (James,

Manager). Moreover, there was a general consensus that

those employed at BCP had a duty of care to ensure that

the company remained on the island: ‘…the future is not just for

me but for the island, my guys’ kids’ (William, Junior manager).

These sentiments translated into a willingness to do what

was ‘necessary’ to make BCP successful. As Roy, a Manager

said: ‘I have a responsibility here as a senior manager to make sure the

company survives’ and ‘I’d do anything to make sure this company is

successful’. Symptomatic of this concern for the business

was criticism of Kevin, a short-serving site manager, who

was said to be too much of a ‘people person, rather than a real

34

strategist’ (Hugo, Manager), a ‘nice guy’ who ‘lacked the drive’

(Paul, Manager) and was not ‘hard enough’ (James, Manager)

to preserve and protect the business.

The people. It was said that ‘…people are just as important as a

key for the success of this business’ (Simon, Manager), and everyone

we spoke to expressed concern for those who worked at BCP

and a personal responsibility for them: ‘…I have lived and died

for these people. I think the world of them…I lost two guys of heart attacks in

my department…you think “how much did I contribute to that”’ (Harry,

Manager). Some said that close bonds between co-workers

were, in part, a function of BCP’s island setting where

‘the loyalties come in even more’ (Clive, Junior manager). Many

people voiced strong attachments to others, and both

anger and sadness that they were not treated with more

respect: ‘…at the end of the day you are a number’ (Hugo,

Manager). There were even some explicitly phrased

statements of resistance based on people’s concerns for

others:

‘…you realize what you’re doing with people’s lives…. I don’t come towork to destroy someone’s livelihood, I come to support it and grow it.So that all adds on your conscience’ (James, Manager).

35

Further, many people expressed grave misgivings regarding

how they personally were treated at work and the

consequences for their private selves, describing

themselves as ‘powerless…absolutely powerless’ (Steve, Manager)

and ‘a willing slave’ (James, Manager):

‘…you basically weren’t allowed to do things unless they were done inthe way you were directed to do them ...we were stripped’ (Simon,Manager).

‘I think people are tired and I certainly am…. I mean I turn up hereat seven and I leave at half past-seven and it is just a case of having tobecause there are so many things going on’ (Hugo, Manager).

Discussion

To summarize, we have identified three sets of mutually

antagonistic discursive resources on which participants

drew, and analyzed how these were deployed in talk by

managers about themselves. In this discussion we have

three principal, and to some extent overlapping, aims.

First, we consider the significance of antagonistic

discourses for our understanding of employees’ work

identities. Second, managers’ understandings of their

selves as moral agents questing for ‘phronesis’

(practical wisdom) is discussed. Third, we analyze these

discourses as combinations of disciplinary practices tied

36

intimately to discursive acts of resistance. We then

briefly mention some limitations of our study before

drawing some conclusions.

Antagonistic Identities. This case suggests that organizational

participants’ work identities may be less coherent but

not as fluid as other researchers have claimed. Previous

research has demonstrated that employees are far from

passive, and indeed actively position themselves in the

way they story their lives (Sims, 2003) and draw on

different discourses as resources in creating a sense of

self. Yet most theorists have assumed that life

narratives must be ‘more or less coherent’ (McAdams,

1996: 301) or ‘relatively coherent’ (Watson, 2008: 129)

and that identity work occurs within the limits imposed

by the need to author reasonably unified versions of the

self (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003). As McAdams (1996:

306, 309) maintains: ‘The problem of identity is the

overall unity and purpose in human lives’ and ‘The main

function of the life story is integration’. Other

(postmodern) researchers have countered that identities

37

are assemblies of fragmented, forever shifting discursive

patterns and performativity effects. From such

perspectives, identities are not merely unstable, but

fluid compositions of subject positions which lack a

‘core’ cohering narrative able to orient, reassure and

support people (Butler, 1991; Collinson, 2003; Linstead,

2004).

Our study indicates an alternative understanding to both

these perspectives is (at least sometimes) required,

namely, that there are occasions when the many diverse,

competing resources available to individuals, are so

intense that contrasting perspectives are incorporated

into accounts of the self. A similar point has been made

by Starbuck (1988: 67) who has argued that not only are

large organizations ‘paradox tolerant’, but that within

institutions people tend to employ multiple competing and

often inconsistent sensemaking frameworks to explain

chronic problems and to rationalize inconsistent policies

and beliefs. That is, identities may be stable without

being coherent, and consist of core statements but not be

38

unified. People may function more-or-less adequately,

though perhaps not entirely contentedly, by incorporating

antagonistic understandings into their narratives of self

when their needs for self-esteem, self-knowledge and

self-efficacy must be met in the face of the

‘contradictions and multiplicities of modernity’ (Frosh,

1991: 5; cf. Giddens, 1991).

Through their talk, participants at BCP constructed

informal expectations that they and others should assume

identities as rational agents who ought ‘to mask all

emotion’ (Jackall, 1988: 47). This understanding of what

it means to be a competent manager is a reflection of

broader societal ‘hyper rational’ discourses which hold

that organizational employees should be logical, goal-

oriented and unemotional (Fineman, 1993; Putnam & Mumby,

1993). It was also bound-up with a taken-for-granted

conception of masculinity at BCP which held that actors

should be objective, analytical, strategic and tough and

which derided actions that might be construed as

empathetic, supportive, kind or caring (cf. Acker, 1992:

39

53; Collinson, 2003; Yeo, 2004). The injunction to be

‘unemotional’ may be understood as a technique of control

which encouraged individuals to disregard personal ties

or feelings of morality in pursuit of organizationally

prescribed goals. It was also key to the organization’s

political dynamics, as it disadvantaged those managers

deemed not to be essential to the future of the aerospace

division by encouraging them to accept meekly the terms

of redundancy offered to them, and not to seek legal

redress. Yet these ‘feeling rules’ were not

unproblematically hegemonic at BCP, where people also

maintained versions of their selves as emotionally

complex. The norms which regulated the expression and

suppression of emotion at work did not appear entirely

‘natural’ to all, and some people seemed to recognize

that an insistence that they remain unemotional was

unreasonable and possibly exploitative (cf. Waldron,

2000: 73).

Closely allied to prescriptions that employees ought to

be unemotional was an institutional discourse centred on

40

professionalism which implicated an understanding that

people should do their jobs ‘at an emotional distance…

with heavy sanctions against getting ‘too personally

involved’’ (Fineman, 1995: 131). The concept of

professionalism was instrumental in inscribing the

engineers into a system of expert knowledge which

constituted them as autonomous subjects responsible for

regulating their own conduct (cf. Miller, 2004). As

Fournier (1999: 287) has argued, through notions of

competence ‘…truth and knowledge are translated into a

code of appropriate conduct which serves to construct the

subjectivity of the professional practitioner’ (Fournier,

1999: 293; cf.Scott, 2008: 219). Yet, while as

professional engineers participants said that they

strived to be ‘strong’ and to ensure that resources were

strategically managed, they recognized also that they and

others were notably unprofessional. In short, while

‘professionalism’ is undoubtedly a ‘software of control’

(Fournier, 1999: 293), at BCP it was only partially

effective, with actors evidently recognizing that they

41

were not merely professional engineers but human beings

with anxieties to manage and careers to pursue.

In common with participants in many other business

organizations the managers we interviewed drew on and

contributed to a discourse centred on the importance of

the long-term survival of the firm (Knights & Willmott,

1999; Willmott, 1993; Thomas & Linstead, 2002; Watson,

2003). On a small island, with limited employment

opportunities, staff said that they had a ‘duty’ to make

the tough decisions required in order to preserve the

business for future generations. This, in part, helps to

explain why they were able to present (to themselves and

to others) the rationale for downsizing as a ‘legitimate’

business response to external economic factors, and so to

deflect blame and eschew moral culpability. Yet our

interviewees did not draw solely or unproblematically on

this resource in their definition of their selves. They

recognized that making people, some of whom were personal

friends, redundant was unpalatable, questioned their

supposedly ethically benign and morally neutral rhetoric,

42

and sometimes had trouble suppressing their family and

home life discourses in favour of organizational survival

and self-exploitative behaviour (cf. Thomas & Linstead,

2002; Watson & Watson, 1999). Unable to detach themselves

fully from the conflicts that downsizing aroused, actors

reported experiencing considerable distress on behalf of

others and great concern for their own job security.

Moral Identities. Most accounts of what it means to be a good

or virtuous person suggest that people’s accounts of who

they are require a degree of narrative unity or

continuity regarding their purposeful ‘quest for the

good’ (MacIntyre, 1985). Yet, as we have shown, accounts

of the self may be both unified and continuous and yet

also feature unresolved antagonisms. In conceiving of

their selves as moral agents, individuals at BCP faced

quite possibly un-resolvable identity challenges.

Individuals were aware of themselves as dispassionate,

professional and business-oriented and yet also

emotional, unprofessional and concerned for themselves

and other people. These two sets of contrasting self-

43

claims constituted seemingly distinct ideal-typical

models of what it meant to be a ‘good’ manager. The

former was powerfully sanctioned by organizational

policies, processes of monitoring and peer surveillance

which enforced processes of normalization and encouraged

in individuals techniques of the self that resulted in

them professing the desire to be unemotional,

professional and focused on what was best for BCP. The

latter was formed in resistance to organizationally-based

hegemonic claims regarding what it was to be a good

manager, and symptomizes the scope that people have to

realize alternative identities by drawing on discourses

that intersect within but are not easily marshalled by

organizations.

A reading of our data from a cognitive psychology

perspective suggests that managers at BCP should have

experienced dissonance - anxiety or discomfort - in their

efforts to broker the competing demands of antagonistic

discourses (Festinger, 1957). While this may sometimes

have been the case for certain individuals, most people

44

seemed relatively content to draw on all available

discourses in their accounts of their selves. This may be

explained, admittedly somewhat speculatively, in at least

two ways. First, being able to draw on both sets of

resources for identity work may have given people welcome

‘wiggle room’ to author different versions of who they

were in order to suit changing circumstances and distinct

audiences. Second, and relatedly, it might also have

helped individuals to maintain reasonably continuous

self-narratives to make use of a consistent set of

descriptors in which only the extent to which they

described themselves as emotional/unemotional,

professional/unprofessional and business/people-oriented

needed to be varied. In short, an ability to draw on

mutually antagonistic discursive resources may have

provided managers with the requisite ambiguity they

needed to represent themselves to themselves and to

others as morally virtuous, incidentally demonstrating

themselves to be politically adroit. It was not that

their identities as moral beings ever lacked saliency,

but that what counted as moral agency was not ‘fixed’ but

45

dynamic and - within constraints – discursively

negotiable.

Our findings thus contest suggestions that managers are

amoral agents concerned only with the efficient and

effective ordering of material and knowledge resources

within specific organizational offices (Friedman, 1980:

166; MacIntyre, 1985) and use notions of morality only as

rhetorical devices to facilitate policy implementation

(Mueller et al., 2003). As Watson (2001a: 15) asserts,

not only has management a moral dimension, it is ‘valued

soaked’. Managers at BCP were concerned to be ‘good’

citizens, and sought to balance accounts of their selves

by drawing from competing discourses which allowed them

to see and to assess policies and issues from different

perspectives (cf. Holt, 2006). In grappling with

antagonistic demands to be unemotional yet emotionally

engaged, neutral, rule-enforcing professionals but

politically astute and business-focused while caring

deeply for others and their own careers, managers at BCP

sought for the practical wisdom to define appropriately

46

their identities as moral agents. Their constructed

selves were an attempt to sustain a set of living

arguments that afforded scope for them to learn from and

to adapt to different insights, positions and

provocations in ways which were sophisticated, reflexive

and dialogical. In a potentially disappointing and

alienating environment they looked to make continuing

series of ‘smart compromises’ in order to persuade

themselves and others of the apposite purposes and

interests they expressed and pursued. Virtue though, like

identity, is never a finished product or end point, but

requires individuals to work continuously on its

elaboration and refinement from the discursive resources

made available to them in organizations.

Identity, Control and Resistance. Studies suggest that discursive

practices may exert pervasive controls over employees,

including managers, colonizing them from the inside to

create ‘engineered selves’ (Kunda, 1992), ‘designer

selves’ (Casey, 1995) or ‘enterprise selves’ (Brown &

Humphreys, 2006; du Gay, 1996 cf. Burrell, 1988; Deetz,

47

1992; Gabriel, 1999a; McKinley & Taylor, 1998). Other

research recognizes that while organizations may seek to

persuade people to invest more of themselves in their

work (Beynon et al., 2002), yet employees are not always

easily seduced by corporations, and the identity

prescriptions associated with organizational elites are

frequently contested and ridiculed by those targeted by

them (e.g., Alvesson & Willmott, 2004). It has been

suggested that people carve out social and psychological

space for themselves through, for example, camaraderie

and humour (Watson, 2001; Bolton & Boyd, 2003), counter-

narratives (Brown & Humphreys, 2006), irony (Trethewey,

1997) and cynicism (Fleming & Spicer, 2003). The point

is, as Webb (2006: 34) has elaborated ‘…organizations do

not determine identities’ and ‘Personal and social

identities cannot be read off from organizational

prescriptions but are crafted through practice’. Not only

are all participants in organizations active producers

of, as well as being subject to organizationally-based

discursive regimes, but subjectivity is a medium and

outcome of processes of resistance as well as control

48

(Ezzamel, Willmott & Worthington, 2001). This does not

mean that discourses which contradict one version of the

self are ignored by employees: rather, they may be

reflexively assimilated and deployed when required.

The organization as constituted by its participants was

an arena for the exercise of power which promoted

particular normative identities through language. The

tendency for people to adopt prevailing ‘display rules’

(Sutton, 1991) and to perform ‘appropriate mannerisms,

attitudes, and social rituals’ (Van Maanen & Schein,

1979: 226) in order to facilitate their passage through

organizations’ inclusion boundaries, and avoid losing the

right to enact desired social roles (Goffman, 1959), has

long been recognized. So too has the importance of extra-

organizational discourses in shaping local conceptions of

what it means to be a male engineering manager. In this

case, the putative needs for emotional detachment,

distanced professionalism and a business-focus were means

by which managers and junior managers were encouraged to

disregard bonds of kinship and friendship in favour of

49

loyalty to BCP and the pursuit of corporate strategies.

Hence their descriptions of themselves as ‘powerless’,

‘stripped’, no more than ‘a number’ and having little

choice other than to do the jobs asked of them. This

suggests a view of BCP as a set of disciplinary and

panoptic processes in which individuals participated in

their own and others’ subjection, subordinating other

possible selves to institutionally sanctioned identities.

Yet participants were also able to draw on a series of

counter-discourses and to represent their selves as

emotional, unprofessional and people-centred. In a

complex organization employees responded by incorporating

multiple discourses, and authoring complex and dynamic

self-narratives, in order to meet the conflicting demands

of local circumstances.

Limitations. We should note that our study, like all

research projects, has a number of important limitations.

The research methods that we have employed ‘are

ideological in that they produce, not just re-produce

meaning’, and have helped to construct ‘a particular

50

picture of humans’ at work (Tseelon, 1991: 299, 313). The

restrictions imposed by our critical framing of the data

are equally noteworthy. We could alternatively, for

example, have sought to analyze this case from a

psychodynamic perspective. Talk about emotional

detachment, professionalism and securing the future of

the business might then have been explained as ego

defense mechanisms (or perhaps symptoms of them) which

mitigated survivors’ anxieties associated with making

redundant ‘old friends’ and helped to bolster their self-

esteem (cf. Brown, 1997; Kets de Vries & Balazs, 1997).

The counterparts of these discourses may then have been

interpreted as indicators of the partial failure of

individuals’ ego defenses and their readiness to engage

with the consequences of their actions (Brown & Starkey,

2000; Gabriel, 1999b). Other readings of our data using

other theoretical resources were/are also, undoubtedly,

possible.

Conclusions

51

In this paper, we have analyzed how participants’

construals of their work identities were derived from the

organizationally-based discursive resources available to

them. This study has analyzed some of the discursive

antagonisms that make an individual ‘a struggling,

thinking, feeling, suffering subject, one capable of

obeying and disobeying, controlling and being controlled,

losing control and escaping control, defining and

redefining control for itself and others’ (Gabriel,

1999a: 179). Our analysis has revealed how processes of

organization and identity development entail what Parker

(1997: 117) has referred to as an unending process of

contested classifications in which deciding on what

counts as similarity and what counts as difference is the

key to individuation. In complex, ever-changing

organizations people are engaged constantly in identity

work as they deal with moral challenges and the

existential worries that accompany them. Reflexively

produced through processes of experiential learning, all

our selves are always, at least potentially, provisional.

Most significantly, we have shown that individuals’

52

narratives of their selves may not merely lack coherence

but incorporate antagonisms. Work identities are

contingent and perpetual works-in-progress, the fragile

outcomes of a continuing dialectic between structure and

agency. What is more, while identities are achieved

rather than ascribed, such identities may not always be

of our own choosing. Future research is required to

investigate how common antagonisms are in work identity

narratives, how individuals broker and adapt to their

competing demands, and what implications they have for

people’s functioning and identification in different

organizational settings.

53

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Notes

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