Identities, Discipline and Routines

TLDR

Identity work is not merely an expression of agency but also of power. The study examines how lawyers’ talk about time‑keeping and billing routines shapes and is shaped by their identities, offering an empirical and theoretical analysis of routines as both disciplinary and resourceful. Using a case study of a UK regional law firm, the authors analyze lawyers’ accounts of routine practices to reveal how routine discourse subordinates and constructs professional identities. The analysis shows that power is embedded in the discursive construction of routine organizing processes.

Abstract

This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances understandings of professional lawyers as autonomous knowledge-workers, and emphasizes instead the extent of their subjection to disciplinary processes. It shows that power is intrinsic to discursive constructions of routine processes of organizing. We examine lawyers’ accounts of their time-keeping and billing routine, and how these both fabricated their identities, and how individuals said that they confronted, shifted and perverted organizationally sanctioned systems of meaning. The research contribution of this paper is to examine empirically and to theorize how discourse about routines both disciplines and is a resource for identity work.