Identity Work (session 1220)

When:  Aug 3, 2021 from 17:30 to 19:10 (FR)
Training Warrior-Cops or Guardian-Officers? Law Enforcement Agencies’ Leadership Styles Matter
Author: Darryl Rice; Miami U.
Author: Jamila Maxie; U. of North Texas
Author: Paul Prosper; Colorado State U. Global

In effort to enhance our understanding of the historical and currently problematic relationship between law enforcement agencies and Black communities in the United States, we seek to extend the research on the warrior-cop vs guardian-officer conceptual framework by leveraging management and organizational psychology literatures. Specifically, we integrate leadership style and institutional resentment theories to develop and test a model to examine how law enforcement agencies’ authoritarian leadership style (LEA ALS) and law enforcement agencies’ ethical leadership style (LEA ELS) impact law enforcement agency (LEA) resentment via Black people’s perceptions of abusive police behavior. In a field study of African-Americans and people of African or Caribbean descent in America, we find that while LEA ALS is positively related to Black people’s perceptions of abusive police behavior, LEA ELS is negatively related to Black people’s perceptions of abusive police behavior. In turn, Black people’s perceptions of abusive police behavior is positively related LEA resentment. Consequently, Black people’s perceptions of abusive police behavior mediated the relationship between LEA leadership style and LEA resentment. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research are discussed.




The ‘Entreprenoorial’ Journey: Exploring the Liminal Identity transitions of Female Entrepreneurs in
Author: Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo; London School of Economics and Political Science
Author: Ishan Jalan; Nottingham Trent U.
Author: Nida Sheikh; London School of Economics and Political Science

This research contributes to critical entrepreneurship studies by exploring the entrepreneurial journey of female entrepreneurs in rural Pakistan. Despite increasing advocacy for supporting female entrepreneurs in developing countries, female entrepreneurship remains an atypical outlier with entrepreneurship being conceptualised from an androcentric western perspective. In this paper, we propose to use a liminal identity perspective to explore the challenges female entrepreneurs participating in a Pakistani Government program called ‘Entreprenoors’ experience during their transition into entrepreneurship and how they manage that transition. Our qualitative analysis of nineteen female entrepreneurs’ in-depth interviews shows how the Entreprenoors’ evolving identities, fluid legitimacy and limited resources can give birth to and shape subsequent entrepreneurial activities. It is in these liminal transitions that entrepreneurial identities and creative entrepreneurial practices and micro-businesses emerge. Our results expand current understanding of the process of entrepreneurial identity development in liminal conditions, especially among non-western female entrepreneurs and contribute to exploring alternative ways of managing the entrepreneurial journey.




Identity Work, Meaningfulness and Volunteers
Author: Sarah Louise Weller; U. of the West of England
Author: Andrew D. Brown; U. of Bath
Author: Caroline Clarke; The Open U. Business School

What identity narratives do those engaged in dangerous volunteering work on and how do they help satisfy their quest for meaningful lives? Based on a three-year ethnographic study of QuakeRescue, a UK-based voluntary, search and rescue charity, we show that volunteers constructed identities drawing on discourses of ‘helping’, ‘heroism’ and ‘hurt’. The primary contribution we make is to analyse how meaningfulness (the sense of personal purpose and fulfilment) that people attribute to their lives, is both developed through and a resource for individuals’ identity work. This approach permits analysis of how organizationally based actors attribute significance to their lives through authorship of desired identities which are sanctioned and supplied by societal discursive resources and embedded in and constitutive of local communities. In our case, the helper and hero identities dangerous volunteering offered members were seductive. However, their pursuit often had ambiguous and sometimes, arguably, negative consequences for volunteers who had seen action overseas, and our study adds to understanding of how organizational members’ quest for meaningful identities may often falter and sometimes fail.



Transformational change in a hospital: Agency, structure, temporality and history in leadership
Author: Jette Ernst; Roskilde U.

The paper sets out to build an understanding of how managers experience and navigate difficult organizational transition in the establishment of a new acute care department. Applying Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas and focusing on the intimate connection between political processes, historical conditions of the field and local attempts at change implementation, the study pays attention to power and agency in leadership. The study applies a longitudinal research design and focuses on the experiences of leaders in conducting their leadership in the context of field level change and development. The paper analyses leaders’ feelings of powerlessness as hysteresis that develops in a mismatch between field and habitus at a particular moment in time and demonstrates that leadership emerges and is made possible or impossible in relation to institutionalised capital and political objectives in the field. The study has important implication for the way in which we can understand leadership agency and the results may hold useful lessons for policy makers and leaders across private and public sectors.




Sandwiched Between Neoliberal and Gendered Identities: Urban women entrepreneurs in India
Designated as a “Best Paper” for CMS
Author: Vijayta Doshi; Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur

Based on interviews and focus-group discussion among urban women entrepreneurs in India, I find that women entrepreneurs acquire a neoliberal agency through entrepreneurship. However, soon their accounts reflect an underlying tension as they admit facing gender constraints while previously denying them. I theorize their conflicting narratives using the idea of sandwiched between a neoliberal and gendered identity. Being urban and middle-class, they can acquire a neoliberal agency, however, they find it difficult to maintain the same given the continuous gender constraints that they tackle. Thus, their subjectivity continuously adapts and resists to both the neoliberal identity and gendered identity. I discuss the implications of the findings for research and practice.

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