This collection explores the tensions between individual and collective identity and the resulting struggles; it analyses, by way of case studies in different workplaces, the discursive processes through which those struggles are enacted, negotiated, and sometimes solved. In conceptualising identity, the book takes a social constructionist perspective and views it as a process that is actively constructed in collaboration among interlocutors as interaction unfolds.
The book discusses four areas of identity struggles in workplace contexts. The first part, ‘Struggling to construct professional competence’, includes chapters by Judith Baxter, Angela Chan, Sophie Reissner-Roubicek, Olga Zayts & Stephanie Schnurr, and Elwys De Stefani & Lorenza Mondada. The chapters demonstrate that in order to maintain a professionally competent identity while negotiating with other professionals or lay people, challenges to professional identities are sometimes productive. This is because they help the professional whose identity is challenged to be capable of combining the dilemmas of several identities for the purpose of professional development.
The second part, ‘Struggling to (de)construct in-group membership’, is explored in chapters by Janet Holmes & Meredith Marra, Abha Chattherjee & Dorien Van De Mieroop, Seongsook Choi & Keith Richards, Louise Tranekjær, Marlene Miglbauer, and Jonathan Clifton & Van De Mieroop. This section demonstrates that in different geographical contexts such as New Zealand, India, and Scandinavia, sociocultural norms, gender ‘(in)visibility’, and ‘laughables’ are used to foreground or background shared identities. Then it shows that in interdisciplinary meetings, struggles for the epistemic rights of disciplines, while superficially divisive, are a unifying tool for interdisciplinary engagement.
The third part, ‘Struggling to combine (sometimes competing) expectations’, deals with efforts made by professionals to meet the expectations of their professional identity. Chapters by Bethan Benwell & May McCreaddie, Benson Oduor Ojwang, Agnieszka Sowińska, Maria I. Medved & Jens Brockmeier, Kieran A. File & Nick Wilson, and Anne Franziskus illustrate these struggles. In Botswana, in order to meet with clients’ expectations that they receive social recognition, nurses acknowledge patients as stakeholders. Additional chapters construct work as a community balance as indigenous women regain status in Canadian reserves, and multilingual resources are used to renegotiate on-going identity constructions in Luxembourg.
The last part, ‘Struggling to define identity boundaries’, looks at ways of enacting a professional identity in marginalised professions while negotiating the boundaries of the profession, discussed by Robin Burrow, Unity Nkateng & Sue Wharton, Gerlinde Mautner, Susana de los Heros, and Hans J. Ladegaard. In the UK, vets negotiate the boundaries of their profession with their patients’ owners, whereas in Botswana social workers spread knowledge of their domains while controlling the development of their profession's identity. Other chapters focus on space as important in identity constructions; they present the household as an atypical workplace where domestic helpers construct themselves as subservient but also as proud professionals.
The chapters of this book establish identity struggles as a reflection of knowledge, competing norms, and attempts to effect social change. Despite the fact that some of the data could be questioned, this collection has brought atypical workplaces under the spotlight.
