By introducing positioning theory to the analysis of organizational identification, in this paper I attempt to move its current conceptualizations out of a domain that is problematically associated with functionalist and cognitive framings. Instead I suggest a critical-discursive understanding of organizational identification which takes note of the limiting, complex and potentially shifting attachments that people can have towards an organization. More concretely, by showing six positioning practices that former management consultants engage in for expressing different forms of identification towards a past or present working context, this paper indicates the emancipatory potential that lays within these positioning practices as they invite different subject positions that either help to reinforce or escape imperatives for organizational identification.
By exploring post-exit identity constructions of former management consultants, this paper challenges the idea that identity regulation is ultimately resisted with the termination of an employment contract. Based on 30 auto-biographical interviews with ex-consultants working in a new organizational contexts, the paper will examine how these former consultants are able to liberate themselves from discursively constructed elite identities of the past in order to create a new image of self. The analysis will document what can be called a post-exit identity struggle, reflecting a creative interplay between conflicting discourses of 'nostalgia' and 'positive re-orientation' that interpellate professional (post-exit) identity constructions
This dissertation investigates notions of continuity, complexity and conflicting desires in the identity construction of ex-consultants, especially as they make sense of a past career transition: away from the strongly identity-shaping work environment of a management consultancy towards a different working context. For this purpose 30 life story interviews were conducted with former management consultants who now work in one of the following organizational contexts: academia, financial services, industry, NGO, inhouse-consulting or own start-ups. In order to explore how the identity construction of ex-consultants and their related self-image shifted (or not) in the course of a past career transition, three distinct discursive analyses were conducted, each focusing on a different aspect of the phenomenon. The first analysis emphasizes the notion of continuity by critically exploring how discourses of elitism are carried from the consulting context into the new work environment. It highlights the context-spanning effects that these discourses may have on the professional identity construction of ex-consultants even in the post-exit arena. The second analysis complicates this narrative around continuity by highlighting aspects of complexity and multiplicity in the identity construction of ex-consultants. It emphasizes that in instances of career change, a range of different and potentially conflicting forms of identification may be invited, thereby offering different subject positions.
As if to reconcile these seemingly opposing findings of the first two analyses, the third analysis investigates the co-existence of conflicting desires for coherence (continuity) on the one hand and ambiguity (complexity) on the other. With an interest in why this is emotionally important, the analysis suggests that particularly in times of career change people may be motivated to consciously or unconsciously preserve both, coherence for a sense of self-continuity and ambiguity for a sense of openness. Each of the three analyses is based on a different discursive understanding of identity, namely a Foucauldian-inspired understanding of identity, an understanding of identity through positioning theory, and thirdly, a narrative understanding of identity. By problematizing some underlying assumptions of these frameworks, the study develops and refines current conceptualizations of discursive identity construction.
This chapter addresses the question of why some people may be more successful than others at creating an alternative identity in the course of a career change. Taking a narrative perspective, the author draws particular attention to a variety of transition narratives which function as legitimizing resources for people to distance
themselves from previous self-concepts, while at the same time allowing them to experiment with new sources of meaning and to create alternative identities.
The analysis, of how former management consultants narrated the story of their career shift, focuses on four particular transition narratives(re-invention, alteration, re-enactment and stagnation) which help to account for some of the variation observed in career change experiences. The analysis also reveals a good indicator of how successful speakers will be in achieving alternative identity constructions in a new work environment: the radicalness of the career change and the contextual resources those speakers can call on to tell more or less compelling transition narratives. Thus we see that choices around a career change are dynamic and
relational, as they are socially constructed in dialogue with others.
