This is a compilation thesis consisting of three different articles with the purpose to explore the relationships between language practices, identity construction and learning in the context of the Vehicle Program, a vocational program in Swedish upper secondary schools. A feature of the particular setting studied here that sets it apart from the general education of auto mechanics in Sweden is that it was carried out in English. The study focuses on language practices within a community of practice where the norms for second language use, gender arrangements and identity work are negotiated in conversations between students and between students and teachers. The language practices are considered as talk-in-interaction, and identity construction and learning are understood as processes in socially situated activities. The study was conducted through an ethnographic approach, including observation, field notes, approximately 200 hours of video recorded interactions, and interviews with students and teachers. The recorded interactions were analysed using tools from conversational analysis and methods focusing on linguistic activities and interactional patterns. An eclectic approach combining linguistic ethnography, ethnometodological conversation analysis and socio-cultural theory of learning, in particular the concept of communities of practice, form the basis of the theoretical framework. The findings in study I highlight that language alternations are repeatedly used in the workshop as a meta-language to play around with language, which relates to emerging communicative strategies that also produces – and helps contest – local language norms. Study III suggests that teasing in students’ peer relations are not only disruptive, off-task behavior, thereby rendering them important only from a classroom management perspective. Teasing, this study proposes, should rather be seen as an organizing principle by which the students are able to position themselves in relation to an institutionally established language ideology. Study II focuses on how participants invoke and renegotiate conventional forms of masculinity tied to the ability of handling tools. Such micro-processes illuminate how gender is a constantly shifting social category that is done, redone and possibly undone. The findings suggest that new forms of auto mechanic student identities are formed that challenge current dominant discourses about what a mechanic should be.

The purpose of the thesis is to make a contribution to the development of an empirically informed theory of identity work in organisations on the basis of a gestalt paradigm. Since its emergence almost three quarters of a century ago, gestalt has been applied to therapy, personal development, leadership education and organisational consulting. Gestalt remains, however, fundamentally a paradigm, which preferentially projects onto and deals with complex and dynamic organisational phenomena at individual, dyadic or small group levels. It can be argued that, with its focus on phenomenology and awareness, the gestalt paradigm is predominantly methodological, with only ambiguous or weak links to explicitly articulated epistemology or ontology. A long-term professional, consulting relationship with a trade union branch enabled conducting action research in order to explore the constituents and dynamics of its organisational identity, prior to and following significant change. The subsequent dismantling and closure of the branch demanded an adjustment of research design. The new situation offered a unique opportunity to follow the existentially challenged organisation as its members reacted to and made sense of the closure. The research is contextualised in three analytical clusters: identity and identity work, gestalt paradigm, and trade unions as organisations, institutions and social movements. An ontology of the intersectional field is posited, and on this foundation, four statements, seen as fundamental conditions for identity work, are operationalised through six propositions explicating identity work in a gestalt paradigm perspective. Methodologically, the overall design is informed by a constructivist grounded theory approach, moving abductively - iteratively and even recursively - between inductive and deductive analysis and reflection. The empirical component of the thesis comprises participant observation, field notes, in-depth interviews during and subsequently two years after the closure, and memos. The data proved relevant and informative in terms of identity work in the organisation. The result of the research is a hypothesis about identity work in organisations, firmly anchored in and commensurate with a present-day revised gestalt paradigm, which contribute to a formal development of a gestalt organisational theory. The hypothesis states that: “Identity work in organisations is a dialectical positioning, both individual and collective, between the existential polar opposites of inclusion and exclusion. The processes through which identity work is enacted are cognitive, affective, and conative, instrumentally served by the contact boundary dynamics of egotisming, confluencing, projecting, retroflecting, introjecting, and deflecting. “ The empirical findings are considered robust, and the theory formulation meaningful. Acknowledging the specific circumstances of the study organisation and empirical design, however, a more general application of the hypothesis requires further research in diverse contexts for verification and possibly refinement of the gestalt theoretical concepts at the organisational level. The research results are of interest to gestalt practitioners who teach or work in or with organisations, and equally so for those interested in dynamic process perspectives in which attention shifts - whether at the level of the individual, group, or organisation - from static assessment of reified identity to real-time identity work; from structure to mutual interaction and influence, in order to balance the well-being of the human beings “in” and “profitability” of the organisation.

Although a growing number of scholars suggest that the construction of identity is an important form of institutional work, the complex interactions between identities and institutions remain under-explored. In particular, few studies consider how the affective aspects of identities may inform institutional work. This thesis examines the experiences of lawyers who volunteered to create and support a legal charity. As these volunteers grew to more than twenty thousand over fifteen years, the charity gradually centralized charitable work across law firms for the first time. In this way, it transformed the institution of pro bono work within the English legal profession. Drawing on this case study, this thesis employs a grounded theory methodology to generate a conceptual framework that connects emotion work, identity work and institutional work. This framework suggests that some professionals work to re-assert and ‘remember’ aspects of their traditional identities that compete with some contemporary demands. This can prompt identity contradictions that inspire reflection on professional practices. This identity work may also encourage professionals to evoke emotions of guilt that can imbue contradictions with enough significance to create a purpose for remedial institutional work. When enabled by meso-level processes, such micro-level work can reinvigorate traditional practices and accomplish institutional change.

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Lisa A. Melander / The number of women incarcerated within the American penal system has been increasing in recent years. Coinciding with this rise in the incarceration rate for women, there has been increasing concern regarding women parenting behind bars and how incarceration impacts a woman's identity as a mother. As such the purpose of this paper is to examine the connection between participation in contact maintenance programs at the Topeka, Kansas Correctional Facility and their resulting impact on identity work using a sample of 34 incarcerated mothers who participated in this contact maintenance program. Results revealed that through participation in contact maintenance programs incarcerated mothers begin to develop and sustain a more pro- social image of themselves as 'good mothers.' Foundational practices of parenting and the development and sustainment of the mother-child bond are reinforced to facilitate the development of a positive self-image and to lay the groundwork for successful parenting post- release.

Notre thèse s’intéresse au changement dans le contexte hospitalier. Il s’agit de l’étude du changement par l’approche néo-institutionnelle. Nous tentons d’expliquer et de décrire comment depuis une nouvelle structuration les effets organisationnels opèrent à la fois sur les comportements, les modes de pensée et les actions des acteurs peu ou prou impactés par ces modifications. 5 établissements hospitaliers publics en France sont analysés au travers d’une étude comparative de cas. Nous mobilisons une méthodologie de type qualitative pour mettre en lumière les déterminants de ce changement où les acteurs jouent un rôle central. Nous étudions plus précisément en quoi le travail identitaire des médecins chefs de pôle favorise l’institutionnalisation du pôle. Nous mobilisons le concept de travail identitaire issu de deux courants théoriques et proposons un modèle d’analyse du travail identitaire intégrateur. Nous percevons le travail identitaire comme un antécédent favorisant l’action entrepreneuriale du chef de pôle et par là-même l’institutionnalisation du pôle. Notre travail met en lumière le lien entre travail identitaire opéré et institutionnalisation du pôle dans deux cas sur cinq. Dans trois cas le travail identitaire n’est pas expérimenté. Nous décrivons à travers un modèle d’analyse quels facteurs favorisent le travail identitaire du chef de pôle. L’accompagnement du chef de pôle et l’expérience de ce dernier expliquent d’une manière importante pourquoi la transition identitaire opère dans deux cas sur cinq étudiés. / Our thesis aims to understand the change in French public hospital. Since the implementation of a new organizational structure, hospitals have to find a new way of handling care and collaboration among medical and administrative worlds. Then we ask how and why change is possible in some cases whereas in others it doesn’t occur? We use neo-institutionalist theory to seize micro events enabling institutionalization of the medical cluster. This theoretical stream puts that change can occur with entrepreneurial action lead by an institutional entrepreneur. We wonder if a change in role has an impact on the change itself. Particularly, we question the impact of identity work as an antecedent of institutionalization in so far as identity and role are components of the same individual structure. Hence, we propose an integrated identity model to describe identity work. Then we suggest the impacts between identity work and institutionalization. We measure institutionalization with its impacts on behavior, cognitive, and activity dimension. Thus, we tend to highlight the impact of identity work on institutionalization. We use a qualitative methodology as we try to understand the meaning for actors of this change. We study 5 cases as a unique case and compare them to stress their commonalities and differences in a generalization attempt. Our results show how identity work experienced by the medical chief enables institutionalization of the medical cluster. Identity work is experienced in two cases whereas in other three cases medical chiefs adopt an avoidance strategy and do not participate to institutionalize the cluster.

Background: Usage of temporaries in contemporary business is increasing due to demand for agile and efficient way of doing business. This trend has been rising especially when turning into 21stcentury. Growing group of temporary workers in different industries being mobile and under different circumstances than regular full-time workers. One professional group working with clients in temporal terms is consultants hired as project managers to lead customer projects in project-based organizations. These project managers switch context between businesses and try to adapt as soon as possible to new environments. The paper uses concept of liminality as a metaphor to describe these passages between projects which starts identity work and sensemaking process in individual. Purpose of Thesis:  The purpose of this thesis was to study how project managers cope with liminality using sensemaking and identity work as a point of view. Methodology: This is a qualitative cross-sectional study conducted through semi-structured interviews in order to gather primary data for further analysis and findings. The empirical data was gathered from a Finnish professional service company and consisted ten interviews of consultant project managers. Findings: The study presents a four-field matrix forming project manager archetypes as embodiments of variation how consultant project managers deal with liminality. Although, the group of people in the sample can be perceived homogeneous, it turned out that it contained heterogeneous characteristics regarding the research scope. The main differences found are illustrated through technical or social approach toward work, and whether sensemaking processes occurred in individual or collective manner. Therefore, the study was able to create four different form of archetypes: the realist, the connector, the performer and the moderator.

This study focuses on the identities of family farm operators and the challenges to maintaining viable farm operations in today’s agricultural economy. Employing a grounded qualitative approach, the author conducted 18 in-depth interviews with principal farm operators from Iowa and Tennessee. Using the insights of farmers from geographically different agricultural regions, this study notes how preserving family histories, socialization processes, and farming as a moral career inform operators’ understandings of themselves and the work they do. The analysis also focuses on how family farm operators contend with a globalized agricultural economy and the moral and ethical concerns of managing a farm. Farm operators implement various tactics and framing mechanisms for resolving and, in some cases, circumventing these challenging issues in order to maintain their farms, identities, and family farm legacies.

Med utgångspunkt i de senaste årens uppmärksamhet kring den svenska Polisen och de konflikter som uppstått mellan arbetsgivare och arbetstagare väcktes ett intresse att studera vad som låg bakom dessa problem. Det visade sig att merparten av de problem som uppstått grundade sig i att anställda uppträtt på sätt som inte ansågs gynnande för organisationen och dess förtroende hos allmänheten. Studien ämnar besvara frågor kring hur Polisen som organisation formar sina anställda med utgångspunkt i teorier om identitetsarbete. En kvalitativ undersökning genomfördes med studier av organisatoriska dokument och genom semistrukturerade intervjuer. De intervjuade består av personer verksamma inom den svenska Polisen. Dessutom intervjuades personer från svenska Polisförbundet, det fackförbund som organiserar närmast alla Sveriges yrkesverksamma poliser. I resultatet framkom indikationer på, utifrån de teoretiska begrepp som har valts för studien, att hur individerna formar sina identiteter är relativt individuellt. Dessutom tycks individerna påverkas mycket av sina kollegor, kanske snarare mer än av organisationens ledning.  Hur information förmedlas ut i organisationen framställdes dessutom som vag av de intervjuade. I diskussionen behandlas vidare hur identitetsstyrning tar sig uttryck inom Polisen samt på vilket sätt de anställda ser på arbetet med sina egna identiteter i relation till yrket polis. / During the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the Swedish police. This interest was triggered as the Police organization attempted to dictate what was appropriate when it came to employee behavior outside of work. This essay intends to answer questions regarding how police employees shape their own identities in order to accommodate the requirements of their profession. A qualitative method has been used, using documents and semi structured interviews. A total of eight people have been interviewed.  The results indicated that the organization, in some ways, want to regulate their employees. A few hands-on methods exist, they are however too vague to be regarded as present in the day to day work of employees. The police organization does not offer clear guidelines and it is up to the employee to determine their own individual identity. Overall, there is more impact on individuals behavior from colleagues than from Police policy. In summary, we will examine the Swedish police organization with reference to theories about identity work in organizations and in relation to the empirical data.

This thesis presents a critical analysis of the dilemmas of doing a PhD in the social sciences from the perspective of discursive psychology. It aims to contribute to qualitative studies of higher education, especially work in the sociology of education on social science doctoral research and training, and discourse analytic work on the dilemmas of education. It argues that there is a crucial bias in the literature on doctoral study. Much of the theory and research on doing a doctorate has been written and carried out by doctoral supervisors and established academic researchers, rather than doctoral students themselves. As a result, researchers have tended to study supervisor rather than student dilemmas and have left certain gaps in their studies, including the experiential dimensions of doctoral research, the discursive construction of postgraduate identities, and the patterns of ideology and power at play in doctoral student life. The present doctorate on doing a doctorate attempts to fill in these gaps, and at the same time introduces a distinctive critical, discursive, and reflexive take on postgraduate education. Detailed discourse analyses are carried out of in-depth semistructured interviews with PhD students in various psychology and social science departments in the United Kingdom. The analysis pays attention to the conversational, rhetorical, and ideological patterning of doctoral postgraduate discourse. In particular, it concerns the academic identity work done by the postgraduates, the ways in which they manage particular interactional, selfpresentational, and ideological dilemmas in their talk, and the different forms of power that are at play as they carry out their doctorates. In addition, a form of practical, analytic reflexivity is developed in the thesis, whereby the authors' own methodological and interviewing practices are analysed, along with text of the thesis itself. The general argument is that the topic of postgraduate academic identity proves a good case study for the investigation of some of the hidden dynamics of power, as well as the use of wider ideological values, in the construction of identities in contemporary institutional settings.

This study explores the learning trajectories of four senior managers at the Royal Mail as they confronted new demands at work. These four managers worked at the Royal Mail during the years prior to, and during its privatisation, when it was also undergoing an intense modernisation. Theoretically, I took a sociocultural approach, drawing on Vygotsky (1998), Edwards (2010), Holland et al. (1998), and Sfard and Prusak (2005), among others. I was also provoked by Alasdair MacIntyre's characterisation of the manager and his understanding of practice, which emphasises human ourishing. Data was collected through iterative unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and by work shadowing the managers. Methodologically, I developed a useful interview protocol to capture stories about work and a more nuanced understanding of what mattered to participants. I also built a conceptual framework that draws theoretically from a sociocultural understanding of learning and development, as well as from MacIntyre (2013) and Taylor (1989). e model emerged from the dialectics of theory and empirical data. The research shows that as the Royal Mail underwent organisational change, the managers had to navigate situations of misalignment between what mattered to them and what mattered to other members of the organisation. Such situations of misalignment brought about new demands. As they confronted the demands, the managers realised the need to close a gap between who they were and who they were expected to become. Gap-closing efforts were characterised as a process of learning and development that involved intense identity work. In the process, the managers had to work through a series of contradictions, which can be expressed in the form of questions: Who am I really? Who should I no longer be? Who do I resist becoming? And, who do I struggle to become? Gap-closing was given by a dialectic between the managers' commitments and identi cations, and the stories of what was good in the gured world of managing at the Royal Mail. Contrary to some of MacIntyre's suggestions, I found that the four managers in the study, Linda, Eric, Margaret and Julian did question themselves about some of the ends they pursued. ey also exhibited varying degrees of agency, and did establish a distance with the impositions of their institutional realities. In the eld, I found instances of moral debate, the exercising of virtues and the managers' very human efforts to live a worthy life and to ourish. Yet, I also found empirical grounds for some of MacIntyre's claims. As the managers navigated misalignment, they used an array of strategies intended to persuade others in a manipulative way, sometimes treating ends as given, and sometimes eluding moral debate. The study contributes to the literature of learning and development through its original theoretical approach that draws from both sociocultural and MacIntyrean ideas.