Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual

TLDR

The paper examines how employees are encouraged to develop self‑images and work orientations aligned with managerial objectives, extending normative control themes and highlighting the processual nature of such control in tension with other identity claims, thereby opening space for micro‑emancipation. This paper takes the regulation of identity as a focus for examining organizational control. The study uses empirical materials to illustrate how managerial intervention operates to influence employees’ self‑constructions. The findings show that managerial intervention shapes employees’ self‑constructions in terms of coherence, distinctiveness, and commitment.

Abstract

This paper takes the regulation of identity as a focus for examining organizational control. It considers how employees are enjoined to develop self‐images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. This focus on identity extends and deepens themes developed within other analyses of normative control. Empirical materials are deployed to illustrate how managerial intervention operates, more or less intentionally and in/effectively, to influence employees’ self‐constructions in terms of coherence, distinctiveness and commitment. The processual nature of such control is emphasized, arguing that it exists in tension with other intra and extra‐organizational claims upon employees’ sense of identity in a way that can open a space for forms of micro‐emancipation.