Brown and Coupland (forthcoming) Identity Threats.pdf (391.38 kB)
Identity threats, identity work and elite professionals
journal contribution
posted on 2015-07-03, 13:37 authored by Christine CouplandChristine Coupland, Andrew D. BrownElite 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 club. The research contribution we make is to demonstrate that professionals use identity threats as flexible resources for working on favoured identities. We show that rugby players authored identity threats centred on the shortness of their careers, injury, and performance, and how these were appropriated (made their own) by men to develop desired occupational and masculine identities. In so doing, we also contribute to debates on how professionals’ identity discourse is an expression of agency framed within relations of power.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Organization StudiesVolume
36Issue
10Pages
1315 - 1336Citation
COUPLAND, C. and BROWN, A.D., 2015. Identity threats, identity work and elite professionals. Organization Studies, 36(10), pp.1315-1336.Publisher
SAGE Publications (© the authors)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015-07-30Notes
This paper was accepted in the journal Organization Studies [© Sage] and the definitive version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0170840615593594ISSN
0170-8406eISSN
1741-3044Publisher version
Language
- en