Identities and Identity Work in Organizations

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 systematically explored concept ‘identity work’, and argues that it is one metaphor among many that may be useful in the analysis of professional and more generally work identities. Second, it focuses on five fundamental, interconnected debates in contemporary identities research centred on notions of choice, stability, coherence, positivity and authenticity. Third, it…