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Organizing for individuation: alternative organizing, politics and new identities

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posted on 2016-04-04, 10:11 authored by Patrick Reedy, Daniel King, Christine CouplandChristine Coupland
Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Organization Studies

Volume

37

Issue

11

Pages

1553-1573

Citation

REEDY, P., KING, D. and COUPLAND, C., 2016. Organizing for individuation: alternative organizing, politics and new identities. Organization Studies, 37 (11), pp. 1553-1573.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by SAGE Publications

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/

Acceptance date

2016-03-11

Publication date

2016-05-13

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Organization Studies. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0170840616641983

ISSN

1741-3044

Language

  • en

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