Identities and organizing materialities - (N)ethnographic perspectives on identity work in organizations and social media

This dissertation examines the relationship between identity work and materialities that come to condition and shape identity work processes. It demonstrates that organizing materialities, as in various enabling and conditioning products and practices, including the ways in which individuals interact with and through them, are essential in understanding identity work and how identities are constructed and made sense of. It has been previously argued that acknowledging the entangled nature of identity work especially in terms of the material aspects, may especially illustrate how people resonate with their everyday surroundings, culture, and organizations. The findings are reported in four papers: the first paper studies discursive identity work of gay and lesbian employees in online discussion forums, which is facilitated by the affordance of interactivity, a product associated with those social platforms. It identifies three different types of collaborative identity work – consulting, legitimating, and questioning - and elaborates on identity threats that the employees encounter in their identity management and disclosure discussions. The second paper shows how microaggressions, as a resulting practice of hetero- and homonormativity, affect the identity work of a gay employee and their organizational belonging. The paper discusses the difficulty of reacting to discursive violence and theorizes the emergence of microaggressions as symbolic materializations of iterative gendered norms and assumptions. Additionally, it discusses the potential of autoethnography as a form of scholarly intervention, and a retrospective process of identity work to attend to past struggles. The third paper examines identity work in the context of Instagram beyond self-representational aspirations, by creating a collage of social media identity literature and poetics. The study especially looks at disorientations of Instagram as its organizing products that mediate the emergent becoming, and specifically investigates how various meaningful encounters in that context condition identity work. The fourth paper explores how relational vulnerability and writing differently may allow early career scholars to engage with their affective experiences of unproductivity and shame. It sheds light on the ways in which artistic methods, as practices of organizing around empathy, shape the identity work of PhD students in a neoliberal university environment. This dissertation makes three contributions to organizational research: It (1) theorizes and empirically demonstrates how various materialities related to organizing shape and condition the everyday identity work in organizations and social media in various ways, (2) illustrates how identity work emerges and unfolds in the co-constructive and disorienting context of online platforms and social media, and (3) uses autoethnographical methods and feminist way of writing differently to challenge normative regimes regulating academic writing and to demonstrate their potential in relation to identity work.