Identity and the Workplace: An Assessment of Contextualist and Discursive Approaches

Organizational scholars who study processes of employee identity but operating from a variety of otherwise disparate theoretical perspectives tend to agree on one thing: an employee‘s level of ―identification‖ with workplace-related entities is a powerful concept in understanding their experiences and behavior at work. As Albert et al. (2000) note, ―whether an organization, a group, or person, each entity needs at least a preliminary answer to the question ―Who are we?‖ or ―Who am I?‖ in order to interact effectively with other entities‖ (p. 13). This is particularly true for the critical organizational studies community in general and the Labour Process tradition in particular. Within the latter, an interest in employee identity traces all the way back to Marxian notions…