Browsing by Author "Kytömaa, Elina"

In this study I consider how the personnel of a professional organization narratively construct their identities in the context of the “new work”. A specific focus of the study is how the personnel discursively produce and negotiate their identities in their narratives. I approach identity through the concept of narrative identity, which is understood to consist of discursive, dynamic and constantly changing self-concepts that are rooted in cultural discourses and shared and produced in various identity narratives. The study is rooted in social constructionism, in which the reality is seen to be constructed linguistically in social practices. The theoretical framework consists of organization study, and theories relating to the change of work-life in the postmodern society. The key concepts of the study are identity work, narrative identity, social identity, social constructionism and the socalled new work. Identities have been studied in various academic fields such as educational sciences, psychology, sociology and economic sciences. Over the past decades, the narrative approach has become popular in organization studies, and it has been applied especially in the studies of identities. The majority of identity studies in knowledge-intensive companies have focused on manager identities and identification, while assistants’ identities remain a quite unexplored topic of research. The study is a narrative study in a professional organization specializing in demanding expert services. Seven assistants participated in the narrative-episodic interviews in the summer of 2018. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed mainly using discourse analysis influenced by membership categorization analysis as well as position analysis. According to the study, the major narrative resource is the social identity of assistants, produced mainly by making distinctions between assistants and other parties, mainly experts. The social identity of assistants is defined by low status. The narrators position themselves on the lowest level in organizational hierarchy. The social identity seems to carry stigmatized characters such as limited agency and sense of insecurity. Positive identities are contrcuted by positioning oneself as a member of an elite organization, by broadening the job description to include other duties than traditional assistant work, or through other means of individual differentiation. Identification with teams or experts as working partners may also produce positive identities. The organizational reality produced in the narratives reflects typical discourses in the context of the new work. The major discourse identified in the study is the discourse of constant individual development, which seems to be institutionalized in the recent bonus scheme reformation. The discourse involves contradictions that shape identity constructions in multiple ways.