Andrew Brown

• MA, MSc, PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Bath

Identity construction has been widely studied, garnering scholarly attention from different epistemological and methodological traditions. Especially research on the identity construction process of identity work has prospered in recent years. Identity construction is a fascinating field of study for management scholars with important implications...

Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad e...

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities' processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, t...

Within organizations there is reciprocal interplay between identity construction and learning. Processes of learning are enabled and constrained by identity practices; concomitantly, the possibilities for learning are shaped by the identity positions available to individuals. There is a dynamic between the impositions of organizations and people’s...

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribu...

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering fabricate and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers worked on identity narratives as helpers, heroes and hurt. The primary contribu...

In this paper, we draw on Foucault’s concept ‘governmentality’ to show how a cohort of middle-aged senior managers who engaged in competitive endurance sports fabricated (avowed) ‘heroic’ leader identities drawing on this repertoire of discursive resources. Neoliberalism constitutes a form of governmentality which encourages people to regard themse...

There is an emergent identity work perspective that draws on multiple intertwined streams of established identities and other related theorizing. This perspective is characterized loosely by five broad sets of assumptions: (i) selves are reflexive and identities actively worked on, both in soliloquy and social interaction; (ii) identities are multi...

This article explores performative enactments of gender at work in a UK‐based Search and Rescue voluntary organisation, QuakeRescue. Based on ethnographic research, we analyse how gender is performatively constituted in this male‐dominated setting, focusing in particular on how hegemonic masculinity is enacted through bodies, physicality, and techn...

Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of identities-related theorizing, accumulated across the arts, social sciences and humanities over many decades, continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. Moreover, in times which are more reflexive, narcissistic and liqu...

The future of research on identities in and around organizations is ours to make. Sifting through the chapters of this handbook gives indications of what the immediate future may look like and the issues that might figure large in identities theorizing. Substantial attention is paid by contributors to: (i) our changing times and their implications...

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired iden...

This paper investigates how leaders construct ‘loss’ identity narratives which defuse the scope for external attack and sustain self-meanings. We draw on a sample of 31 United Kingdom business school deans, who although often depicted as multi-talented, high-status achievers, are also targets for criticism and have high rates of turnover. Our study...

Identities scholarship, in particular that focused on self-identities, has burgeoned in recent years. With dozens of papers on identities in organizations published in this journal by a substantial community, doubtless with more to come, now is an appropriate juncture to reflect on extant scholarship and its future prospects. I highlight three key...

How are people’s identities disciplined by their talk about humour? Based on an ethnographic study of a New York food co-operative, we show how members’ talk about appropriate and inappropriate uses of humour disciplined their identity work. The principal contribution we make is twofold. First, we show that in their talk about humour people engaged...

In this paper, I analyse five approaches to identity work – discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic – and show how these are helpful in exploring the ways people draw on their membership of organizations in their constructions of self, processes generally referred to as organizational identification. Collectively, th...

What does a reading of Karl Weick’s work add to our understanding of strategy? To address this question I first outline some of the principal ideas that inform the Weick-inspired sensemaking perspective − sensemaking, organizing and enactment. Second, drawing on Martin (2014) these concepts are applied in order to analyze the West’s strategy failur...

How do corporations attempt to regulate the ways middle managers draw on discourses centred on 'effectiveness' and 'ethics' in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond? We analyse the discursive struggle over what it meant to be a competent manager at Disneyland where middle managers were encouraged to construe their selves in ways...

What are the power/identity implications of the increasing Englishization of non-Anglophone workplaces around the world? We address this question using an analytical framework that combines a focus on micro/meso-level processes of identity regulation with attentiveness to the macro-level discourse of English as a global language. Drawing on reflexi...

The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical and practical importance. In a world suffuse with dynamic complexity in which unusual, unexpected and unprecedented events occur on a persistent basis, this challenges the relevance of the sensemaking perspective. We put forward a rebalanced model of se...

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 clu...

‘Sensemaking’ is an extraordinarily influential perspective with a substantial following among management and organization scholars interested in how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’. Organization Studies has been and remains one of the principal outlets for work that seeks either to draw-on or to extend our understanding of sensemaki...

Identities, people's subjectively construed understandings of who they were, are and desire to become, are implicated in, and thus key to understanding and explaining, almost everything that happens in and around organizations. The research contribution that this review paper makes is threefold. First, it analyses the often employed but rarely syst...

This is a world suffused with dynamic complexity in which the past no longer stands as a sensible guide to the present. This poses problems for sensemaking as people seek to redeploy concepts in order to ward off blind perceptions and redirect perceptions to ward off empty conceptions. It also prompts a reappraisal of the link between sensemaking a...

We analyse how men incarcerated in Helsinki Prison managed through talk their stigmatized identities as prisoners. Three strategies are identified: ‘appropriation’ of the label ‘prisoner’; claiming coveted social identities; and representing oneself as a ‘good’ person. The research contribution we make is to show how inmates dealt with their self-d...

The strategy-as-practice project would benefit from greater consideration of narratological concerns. Narratorship, the formulation and performance of narratives, is an important strategy practice; narratives (stories) are key tools of strategists; and narratological perspectives generally may usefully inform strategy research, leading to less scie...

We analyze the relationships between identity work and internal legitimacy. Based on an in-depth case study of prisoners in Helsinki Prison, we focus on how their identity work affirmed and contested three kinds of institutional legitimacy – pragmatic, moral and cognitive. The research contribution we make is to show that some forms of identity wor...

In this article, we present an overview of the literatures on organizational identity and organizational identification. We provide overviews of four major approaches to organizational identity: functionalist, social constructionist, psychodynamic, and postmodern. The literature on organizational identification, by contrast, exhibits greater consen...

This paper analyses how a case for institutional change is made through rhetoric in an individual text. Drawing on Aristotle's three types of rhetorical justification, logos, pathos and ethos, we make three contributions. First, we show that the multiple competing logics which often dominate a field can become incorporated into key texts. As a resu...

‘Identities’ (organizational managerial, professional and occupational) are currently a key focus for research in management and organization studies ( [Alvesson et al., 2008], [Brown, 2001] and [Ybema et al., 2009]). While the rise to prominence of identity has many antecedents, it has in part been associated with the metaphor of ‘liquid modernity...

Highlights ► Detailed analysis of a legal service partnership is used to explore the distinctive characteristics of professional service operations management. ► We examine customer interactions, service customization, process throughput and variability, professional employee behavior and managerial interventions. ► Professional–client exchange is...

Simplexity is advanced as an umbrella term reflecting sensemaking, organizing and storytelling for our time. People in and out of organizations increasingly find themselves facing novel circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity. To make sense through processes of organizing, and to find a plausible answer to the question ‘what is the...

This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances understandings of professional lawyers as au...

Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance evaluation in an organizational setting. Drawing on a study of how university students prepared for examinations, it argues that one way people make sense of being evaluated is through metaphors that conventionalize reality and thus contribute to the maintenance...

Identity issues are under-explored in construction management. We provide a brief introduction to the organization studies literature on subjectively construed identities, focusing on discourse, agency, relations of power and identity work. The construction management literature is investigated in order to examine identity concerns as they relate t...

Organization Studies is closely associated with European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) and its traditions. The essays in this Special Issue are deliberately not 'celebratory’ in the sense of providing cheerful and empty accolades of times past. On the contrary, the themes and debates raised and discussed reflect murmurings frequently heard...

In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes. We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an inve...

This article analyses how multiple organizational identities are constructed through rhetoric to maintain and enhance the legitimacy claims made by organizations. Our theorizing is founded on an investigation of the 43 geographically based English and Welsh constabularies. The research contribution of our study is threefold. First, we show that off...

Change spawns stories and stories can trigger change. Stories can also block change and can define what constitutes change. In this Introduction to the special issue, the special issue editors explore some of the current debates on stories and organizational change, introduce the articles that are included in the issue, identify some prominent them...

This paper analyses how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit-the British Parachute Regiment-were disciplined by the organizationally based discursive resources on which they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, we argue that preferred self-conceptions (i.e. desired identities) are mechanisms...

In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK-based engineering company drew in their efforts to construct versions of their selves. Predicated on an understanding that subjectively construed discursive identities are available to individuals as in-progress narratives that are contingent and fragi...

This article analyses the agreed and discrepant sensemaking of members of a project team. Embedded in a narratological approach to sensemaking research, we argue that before scholars may be able to understand in detail how agreements are reached and action becomes coordinated,we need first to take seriously the proposition that sensemaking occurs i...

Publishing is an industry, and a very competitive one. Today more than ever, academic journals strive to be recognized as the most influential in their area, and this is shaped by somewhat strange, and often perverse, measures such as citation indexes and impact factors. Organization Studies plays this game: to be read, to spread the ideas expresse...

In this article we examine accounts of emotional experiences in one organization. Drawing upon data from interviews across a range of employees, we analyse aspects of emotion, identity and power. Adopting a constructionist perspective we use a method of discourse analysis to analyse how participants constructed emotions according to tacitly underst...

This paper analyzes how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit - the British Parachute Regiment - were disciplined by the organizationally-based discursive resources on which they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, we argue that desired identities are mechanisms for disciplining employees' i...

This paper analyzes how participants' preferred conceptions of their selves are disciplined by the organizationally-based discursive and material resources on which they draw. Our paper is principally an in-depth case study of the subjectivities of men who were serving, or who had served, in an elite military unit - the Britis Parachute Regiment. I...

This paper analyzes the British Parachute Regiment to show how participants' preferred conceptions of their selves were disciplined by the organizationally-based discursive resources on which they drew. All soldiers' self-conceptions (officers and enlisted men included) were shaped by understandings of themselves as professionally tough, and their...

This article presents the results of an inductive, interpretive case study. We have adopted a narrative approach to the analysis of organizational processes in order to explore how individuals in a financial institution dealt with relatively novel issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The narratives that we reconstruct, which we label ‚i...

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the importance and utility of the notion of organizational culture for scholars and practitioners in the field of information studies. It presents a theoretical and empirical examination of the effects of culture on communication and information in organizations. First, the concepts of organizational cultur...

This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator') drew on understandings of 'ethics' in order to make sense of their individual and collective selves. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and notions of ethics are conceived as discursive resources on which individua...

This paper analyzes the retrospective stories of a four person team responsible for developing a new computer game for mobile phones. Our theorizing is based on an in-depth, two year, case study. The research contribution this paper makes is threefold. First, it outlines and discusses some of the analytical issues at stake in the adoption of a stor...

This collection of essays arose from a call for papers issued by Organization Studies in 2004 to celebrate and critically engage the scholarship of Karl Weick; to carry forward his thinking into new contexts and take stock of recent developments in the themes, issues and theories that have preoccupied Weick in his more than 40 years of scholarship....

Recent research suggests that implementing information systems presents considerable difficulties and that many implementations are total or partial failures. This paper argues that what both practitioners and students require are richer and more acceptable models of information systems implementation. Accordingly, case study data concerning the in...

From a narrative perspective, organizations' identities are discursive (linguistic) constructs constituted by the multiple identity‐relevant narratives that their participants author about them, and which feature, for example, in documents, conversations and electronic media. By defining collective identities as the totality of such narratives I dr...

This paper analyses how three distinct cohorts of workers in a recently merged UK-based College of Further Education understood their group and their organization's identities. We focus in particular, but not exclusively on how the groups' shared understandings of 'place' informed their identity accounts. Identities are theorized as being constitut...

We may usefully interrogate individual texts in order to expose them as exercises in power that serve hegemonic and legitimation functions. To illustrate this argument I analyse the account of the collapse of Barings Bank given in the Report of the Board of Banking Supervision, and juxtapose this with other versions of the events given by investiga...

Given the rapid expansion of narrative approaches in management and organization theory in recent years, this paper investigates the contribution of this literature to the understanding of organizations and processes of organizing. The paper tells the story of the development of narrative approaches in organizational theory. Narrative's contributio...

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of organizational identity through an analysis of shared identity narratives at the UK‐based specialist tour operator Laskarina Holidays. Design/methodology/approach – Predicated on a view of organizations as linguistic constructs, it is argued that individual and collective identities a...

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 prac...

In this paper, we reflect on the use of fictional source material and fictional formats in organization studies in order to explore issues of responsibility in the writing of research. We start by examining how research using fictional narrative methods has worked to radically destabilize distinctions between what is real and what is fictional. In...

In this paper we analyse two of the e-mail exchanges that had been posted on Royal Dutch/Shell's Web site in order to investigate how organizational identities are constructed through processes of description, questioning, contestation and defence. Organizational identities may be regarded as ongoing arguments between insiders and between ostensibl...

Across 48 experimental groups, those that scored higher on group self-esteem attributed perceived positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors. Groups provided more elaborate rationalizations about perceived negative outcomes and less elaborate rationalizations about perceived positive outcomes. They also espoused...

This article analyses the Cullen Report into the Piper Alpha disaster in order to research how public inquiry teams represent their efforts to make sense of events as authoritative. It is argued that inquiry reports are highly convention-governed sensemaking narratives that employ various forms of verisimilitude in order to bolster their authority....

This interpretive study of change in a U.K.-based college focuses on the divergent understandings of senior managers and two distinct cohorts of their subordinates in a postmerger situation. The authors found that the senior managers told a narrative of epic change, whereas the two subordinate groups both authored recognizably tragic narratives. Th...

This article outlines a narratological approach to understanding how middle managers and senior managers in a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital made sense of the introduction of a series of interventions, led by senior managers. The research contribution this article makes is fourfold. First, it illustrates the role of individual and group...

In this article, we extend and refine Van Maanen's metaphorical insight that ethnographers learn interpretive skills `more akin to learning to play a musical instrument than to solving a puzzle' by focusing on the parallels between ethnography and jazz. Our central argument is that ethnographers are engaged in a dual quest for self-identity and emp...

This paper presents a discourse analysis of a report of a tribunal of inquiry in order to further our understanding of inquiry team sensemaking. The subject of the paper is the report of the Allitt Inquiry into attacks on children on Ward 4 at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in the UK. Premised on an understanding of the report as an exercise in sen...

This paper offers an interpretation of the collective identity-narrative of a Turkish faculty of vocational education. Particular attention is focused on the importance of nostalgia in acts of collective self-authorship. Nostalgia, it is argued, is key to the understanding of the dynamics of individual and organizational identity-construction in se...

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–na...

This paper focuses on issues of identity and identification in a UK-based institution of higher education (Westville(1) Institute). It is suggested that identity, both individual and collective, and the processes of identification which bind people to organizations, are constituted in the personal and shared narratives that people author in their e...

The general assumption of consonance between belief and action in individual and organizational behaviour has meant that relatively little attention is paid in the organizational literature to how individuals and organizations respond to allegations of belief/act discrepancy. In this article we identify three forms of response to such allegations,...

Organizations are prone to ego defenses, such as denial, rationalization, idealization, fantasy, and symbolization, that maintain collective self-esteem and the continuity of existing identity. These defenses are dysfunctional when they militate against necessary organizational change. Maladaptive identity defense mechanisms can be mitigated th...

This paper presents a discourse analysis of a report of a tribunal of inquiry in order to further our understanding of inquiry team sensemaking. The subject of the paper is the report of the Allitt Inquiry into attacks on children on Ward 4 at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in the UK. Premised on an understanding of the report as an exercise in sen...

This paper offers an interpretation of an information technology (IT) implementation through an analysis of group narratives. A focus on narrative is valuable because it facilitates recognition of the extent to which interpretive research involves the creation and ascription of meaning in ways that require authorial reflexivity. An analysis based o...

Episodes of failure provide an interesting arena for the observation of alternative interpretations of organizational events. The social psychology literature suggests that individuals tend to attribute failure to external forces and that this may be due to selective perception, which may be motivated by the preservation of self-esteem and/or image...

This article presents a case study of IT implementation in a hospital trust which highlights the problems between clinicians and management in the UK health service. Using the work of Strauss et al., it analyses the different meanings attached to the implementation of IT and how they impact upon the actions of stakeholders. The conclusion is that t...

Study of the integration of operations through the application of computer technologies has focused on the manufacturing sector. In looking at the difficulties found in operating these technologies, increasing emphasis is being placed on their organizational aspects. These have been examined in depth by Ebers and Lieb, who concentrate on the social...

The theory of narcissism can be employed usefully to analyze the dynamics of group and organizational behavior. Just as individuals seek to regulate their self-esteem through such ego-defense mechanisms as denial, rationalization, attributional egotism, sense of entitlement, and ego aggrandizement, which ameliorate anxiety, so too do groups and org...

Over the last decade there have been significant changes to the traditional purchaser-supplier relationship within industrial organizations. This has involved reforming old-style purchasing relationships, which relied on several alternative suppliers competing mainly on price, to the preferred single-sourcing relationships, with accompanying mutual...

While organizations are composed largely of people who follow orders, followers and followership skills are a neglected area of research. Presents the results of a survey of followership types at three UK companies: the Halifax, a regional electricity company and Thorntons. Suggests that an organization’s culture determines the dominant leadership...

This paper focuses on the political processes through which legitimacy was sought for a large information technology system by its sponsors and key supporters. It is suggested that this was accomplished by means of a niche marketing campaign in which key stakeholder groups were fed radically different explanations regarding the motivations which pr...

Focuses on the problems of transferring western models of management to other cultures with specific reference to the UK and Egyptian technical education sector. Using Hofstede's framework, a cultural overview of UK and Egyptian public sector education principals is provided. Reveals substantial cultural differences between the two groups suggestin...

Although there continues to be considerable debate about the factors which determine success in new product development, there is considerable agreement regarding the core elements of best practice (including factors such as market knowledge, marketing skills, top management commitment, organizational flexibility). However, in new product developme...

Examines how and why some major UK purchaser and supplier organizations have increasingly sought to become partners. Drawing on detailed case studies of Rank Xerox, Hoover, ICL and British Rail discusses the dynamics of partnership sourcing, and analyses and exemplifies the costs and benefits to both partners and suppliers. Suggests that both partn...

This paper focuses on the micropolitical behaviour of a group of four individuals who were able to gain acceptance for their interpretation of events as a project unfolded through symbolic action, myth making and control over the flow of information. It is suggested that these devices were resorted to in order to create a facade of project-risk min...