Dec 31, 2008 - the boundaries of careers (such as during employment interviews). .... In this chapter, we examine excerpts from recorded conversations.
Part III
Positive Identities and Relationships in Groups and Organizations
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9 Identity Work During Boundary Moments: Managing Positive Identities Through Talk and Embodied Interaction Curtis D. LeBaron, Phillip Glenn, and Michael P. Thompson In a famous sketch by M. C. Escher, entitled “Drawing Hands,” two hands are holding pencils so that each draws the other into existence as they jointly emerge from the blank page. In this chapter, we regard identity as something that people do together, as a way of jointly coming into being. We notice that when positive identities emerge within organizations, they do so jointly in interaction. If they happen, they co-occur. Our approach is to look at identity “in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995). By carefully examining audio and video recordings of people in real conversations at work, we show how “small” verbal and nonverbal behaviors may have “big” consequences for who people are relative to one another and their organizations. A variety of interrelated observations stem from our field work, including: • Identities are prominent during boundary moments. Like the greens that grow in the cracks, identities spring to life at the boundaries of conversations (such as when coworkers meet and greet) and at the boundaries of careers (such as during employment interviews). Transitions are fertile places for doing—and for noticing—the identities of people within organizations. • Identities, including positive ones, are interactive accomplishments. No one creates an identity alone. Rather, identities are deeply and inescapably social, and positive identities may take a lot of social work. When positive identities emerge within our data, people seem rather busy: Their voices are animated with variation in volume, pitch, and rate; their bodies are engaged with other people and things through 187
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188 • Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations spatial maneuvers, facial expressions, and hand gestures; they show recognition, give appreciation, and ask questions; they play with language, laugh in overlap, and talk at length. • Positive identities involve knowing and relating. To locate positive identities within our data is to fi nd people who show knowledge of and affi liation with each other. Organizations sometimes make a distinction between knowledge work and relationship building, but within the boundary moments that we examine, the same behaviors often do both. For example, our data show that interviewers enact (and interviewees ratify) a positive identity by both (a) being knowledgeable about applicants’ fi le information, and (b) being helpful in how they pose questions that draw on that information. By looking at identity “in the wild,” we can point to specific behaviors and patterns of human interaction that foster positive identity. While we assume that our site-specific findings have relevance beyond the situations that we analyze, generalizability is not our goal. Rather, we have selected a handful of “virtuoso moments,” or episodes that “strike the observer as being carried out in a particularly felicitous manner” (ten Have, 1999, p. 40), the analysis of which reveals potential resources for human interaction and organizational work. We agree with Sacks (1984), who said that a “detailed study of small phenomena may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of objects they use to construct and order their affairs” (p. 24). What is positive identity? One answer is: Positive identity is what people constitute it to be in the moment. This answer is not a dodge—rather, it is an ontological and epistemological commitment. Our approach is to look at what actors themselves constitute and treat as positive, which brings empirical rigor to our methods for identifying positive practices, moving analysis away from the researchers’ subjective assessments and toward descriptions of the participants’ intersubjective practices. Within the recordings that we examine, people manage positive identities in the moment by showing that they know and relate to each other. Such identity work may profit organizations, as when displays of knowing foster workplace efficiencies, or when displays of relating enable people to be candid or creative. In this chapter, we share both our data and our reasoning, inviting readers to scrutinize and corroborate our claims.
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Identity Work During Boundary Moments • 189 In this chapter, we also use positive identity as an umbrella term. We recognize that a conversation or interaction may simultaneously index and inform various identity domains, both individual and institutional. For example, when an interviewer shows that she is knowing and affiliating, the interaction may be in the service of her individual identity (“a smart and friendly person”), her role identity (“a well-prepared and personable recruiter”), her organizational identity (“a manager who is intelligent and diplomatic”), her organization’s identity (“a firm that values its employees”), and more. We use the term positive identity to imply any or all of these, depending on the situated and constitutive work of the participants themselves.
POSITIVE IDENTITIES—SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE DO TOGETHER Research on identity within organizations has been conducted at various altitudes. At a macro level, identity refers to the central, distinctive, and enduring attributes of the entire organization (e.g., Albert & Whetten, 1985; Corley, et al, 2006). At a micro level, individuals derive a sense of identity as they view themselves as individuals in relation to the larger collective or organization (e.g., Ashforth & Johnson, 2001; Kreiner & Sheep, 2006). At a meso level, identity is rooted in interpersonal relationships, as when people compare their traits, abilities, goals, and performance within supervisor-subordinate or coworker-coworker relationships (Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Sluss & Ashforth, 2007). Resonant with symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934), notions of identity in relationship emphasize “the situation as the context in which identities are established and maintained through the process of negotiation” (Gecas, 1982, p. 10). We contribute to meso-level understandings by analyzing the identity work of people who are engaged in conversations. Snow and Anderson (1987) defined identity work rather loosely, as the “range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities.” We regard identity work more specifically, as the moment-to-moment behaviors whereby identities within organizations are interactively managed. Conversations within organizations are unavoidably situated within the social, material, and temporal unfolding of organizational activities. When
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190 • Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations people converse, they draw on their social and material surroundings to create, present, and sustain the identities of participants—including themselves. Furthermore, identity work is a bridge between macro and micro conceptions of identity: The individual identities that people interactively negotiate may also reflect on the organizations that they represent (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998). Meso-level views of identity relate closely to the notion of self or selves. Within organization studies, researchers have made different assumptions about self, depending on their positivist or constructionist leanings. On one hand, much of the organizational assimilation literature has assumed a stable self undergoing recruitment, socialization, and assimilation into an organization (see, e.g., Jablin, 2001). On the other hand, dramaturgical work in the tradition of Goff man (1959) does not assume a stable self but characterizes people as social actors who manage impressions and facework across situations (e.g., Dillard, Browning, Sitkin, & Sutcliffe, 2000). An early challenge to a monolithic view of self was Harre’s (1984) observation that within organizations people exist both in person and on paper, which he distinguished as a “real self ” and “fi le self.” A poststructuralist view depicts “a discursively constituted self, a self subjected to and by discourses of power in an increasingly complex, destabilized, and multi-vocal world” (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005, p. 171). In this chapter, we use the term “identity work” to describe how selves may be brought into play, toward the social constitution of individual identities, with organizational identities following in the wake. We regard selves as performed (Goff man, 1959), variable (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005), material (Harre, 1984), relational (Gergen, 1991), temporary (Ibarra 1999), and possible (Markus & Nurius, 1986). We see identities as a product of social interaction, a “relatively stable and enduring constellation of attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences in terms of which people define themselves in a professional role” (e.g., Ibarra, 1999, pp. 764–765). When positive identities emerge within an organization, they emerge together. As people interact in positive ways, the identity work of one person invokes and indexes the selves of others, with positive identities emerging in mutually constitutive, reflexive communicative action. Positive identities emerge not only from what people say, but also when and how they say it. Through the content of talk, people may treat or cast each other as recognizable, likeable and competent. Through the
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Identity Work During Boundary Moments • 191 unfolding structure of interaction, people may create opportunities for each other to perform and to succeed. While identity work is something that people continually do, it is especially salient at the boundaries of conversations (e.g., openings, closings, and transitions within activities) and at the boundaries of careers (e.g., hirings, firings, and job appraisals). We call these boundary moments, when people’s identities hang in the balance or when identities are particularly consequential to what is going on. Thus, our claims about positivity are grounded, not in some external measure such as organizational effectiveness, but in the displayed orientations and situated practices of people who constitute positivity. Consistent with the research agenda of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), we can claim that positive identities are happening because we can explicate social actors’ methods for doing them. That is, we treat positive identities as performed, and we document how people go about displaying and responding to each others’ behaviors in ways that mutually ratify positive (or negative) identity. They display to each other—and us as overhearers. Therefore, we regard organizational behavior as a kind of social chess, looking at the moves that people make but remaining agnostic about what they may be thinking or feeling.
RESEARCH METHODS—LOOKING AT IDENTITY WORK Our theoretical claims about identity work are supported by our research methodology: an empirical, qualitative approach, best known as conversation analysis (CA). With roots in ethnomethodology (Heritage, 1984), CA assumes that human interaction is orderly. What a particular behavior “means” must be understood contextually—that is, it accomplishes social action not only through its content but also through its placement or location within unfolding sequences of situated interaction. In other words, behavior is not inherently meaningful, but is made meaningful as people act in concert; what a particular utterance or gesture means or does depends on what others do in relation to it, such as before and after. Analysts routinely create detailed transcripts that highlight structural features of interaction, showing not only what words were spoken, but also when and how they were spoken (see Appendix).
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192 • Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations In this chapter, we examine excerpts from recorded conversations to show how positive identities may be interactively managed. First, we analyze telephone conversations that illustrate how identity work is especially salient and evident at the boundaries of communication events, such as openings and closings. Second, we analyze excerpts from videotaped employment interviews to show how identity work involves not only talk but also embodied forms of interaction such as posture, gesture, facial expressions, and the situated use of material objects and artifacts. Our data samples demonstrate at least a couple of trends in CA research. First, many conversation analysts have turned their attention from “everyday” conversation (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984) to organizational or “institutional” interaction (Drew & Heritage, 1992). CA enables researchers to address so-called “big” organizational issues (the macro) through careful analysis of “small” moments of human activity (the micro). Second, while conversation analysts have traditionally focused on talk such as telephone conversations (e.g., Drew, 2005), they are increasingly looking at embodied forms of interaction such as those that can be captured on videotape. Our analysis illustrates a growing recognition that “body parts are the first mediating elements in our interaction with the people and objects around us” (Duranti, 1997, p. 322); that “human action is built through the simultaneous deployment of a range of quite different kinds of semiotic resources” (Goodwin, 2000, p. 1489); and that “when people talk, they also locate their bodies, assume various postures, direct their eyes, perhaps move their hands, altogether behaving in ways that constitute an interactive event” (Jones & LeBaron, 2002, p. 499). Our research procedures may be summarized as four interrelated steps (adapted from LeBaron, 2005; Pomerantz & Fehr, 1997): 1. Collect the data. Researchers who are interested in identity may select a site where identity work is prominent and then record interaction as unobtrusively as possible. The employment interviews that we examine were recorded between 2001 and 2006 at two locations in the United States. We anticipated that when interviewers and applicants come into a room, meeting and talking for the first time, they would need to quickly establish who they are relative to one another and their organizations, with identities emerging in the wake. When writing this chapter, we drew additional examples
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Identity Work During Boundary Moments • 193 of identity work from our digital collection of naturally occurring interaction—that is, interaction that would have occurred whether PSOPUit was recorded. 2. Prepare to analyze the data. We listened and watched the recordings carefully and repeatedly, selecting moments where identity work was being done. We made detailed transcripts of those moments. Within our recorded telephone conversations, we could see identity work especially at the openings and closings of the calls. When we looked at employment interviews, we soon became interested in “challenging questions”—that is, when an interviewer calls on an applicant to account for a “problem” in his or her resume. Such moments are challenging because applicants must manage, impromptu, the discursive relationship between their fi le and their embodied performance in interaction with the interviewer. 3. Analyze the data. We identified social actions, described the packaging of those actions, and explicated how people’s actions accomplish relative status, roles, relationships, attitudes, knowledge states, and other aspects of identity within organizations. For example, when interviewers ask challenging questions, they talk and gesture in ways that locate a “problem” in either the fi le on the table or the applicant across the table. How the interviewer asks a challenging question has consequences—not only for the applicant’s subsequent answer but also for the identities that they are jointly negotiating. 4. Report research findings. Reports may highlight recurring patterns of behavior across moments, or document the complexities of a single case. Our purpose is to analyze a handful of excerpts that illustrate how positive identities within organizations may be interactively constituted through unfolding sequences of vocal and visible behavior. Through these steps, CA claims can be grounded in the empirical details of actual behavior that are recorded and made available to a scrutinizing audience. Although conversation analysts may avoid explicit claims about the generalizability of site-specific findings, they assume that patterns and practices found in one place will have relevance elsewhere, as part of what Goffman (1959) called the “interaction order” of social and organizational life.
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194 • Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations
IDENTITY WORK AT THE BOUNDARIES OF CONVERSATIONS Our examination of boundary moments begins with openings. The onset of an activity or communicative event is typically (perhaps necessarily) rich with information about the participants, their identities, and who they are in relation to one another. Such social “realities” are not preexistent and independent of openings; rather, they are invoked, brought into play and established through the subtle behaviors that interactively constitute openings. Kendon (1990) observed: It is by way of a greeting that friends acknowledge, and so confirm and continue their friendship. In the manner in which the greeting is performed, the greeters signal to each other their respective social status, their degree of familiarity, their degree of liking for one another, and also, very often, what roles they will play in the encounter that is about to begin (p. 154).
Through such interaction at the opening of an encounter or activity, participants quickly negotiate a way of being together. Their identity work is, of course, performed for each other’s view, which makes it possible for researchers to record and analyze it. For example, when people begin a telephone conversation, they quickly participate in a cultural routine that has been well documented by conversation analysts. The openings of telephone conversations involve turn sequences that signal availability (or not), display mutual recognition (or not), offer greetings (or not), make initial inquiries (or not), and move to a fi rst topic (Schegloff, 1968, 1979). Th rough small adjustments to the details of an opening, or through deviations from the cultural routine, participants can do identity work—indicating that they are intimates or strangers, that they have an organizational affi liation or not, that their call is casual or urgent, and so forth, all within the fi rst few seconds (Hopper, 1992; Schegloff, 1986). To illustrate, consider the following transcription of a telephone opening between two people (“Matt” and “Dale”),1 members of the same organization who quickly negotiate and display their friendship (see Appendix for transcription conventions). 1
All names and identifiers in our data have been replaced by pseudonyms.
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Identity Work During Boundary Moments • 195 Excerpt 1: “My Buddy” 1 (Ring)) 2 Matt: Hello 3 Dale: Hey 4 Matt: ↑He:y 5 Dale: He:y 6 Matt: What’s happening 7 Dale: Hey buddy↑ 8 Matt: Is this my buddy↑ 9 Dale: He:y you ain’t got no bud
