Managing responsible selves: Situated perspectives on identities and control at work

This dissertation builds a situated approach to studying how professional and managerial identities intertwine with control at the contemporary workplace. Drawing on narrative identity work literature and critical discursive perspectives on organizational control, I suggest that this line of work could benefit from a more detailed appreciation of how identities and control are performed and practiced in everyday work situations. Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical ideas on ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ offer a suitable analytical toolkit that, I argue, is currently underutilized in organization and management studies, especially regarding its sociologically sophisticated potential. To this end, I propose and elaborate a dramaturgical-narrational perspective on identities that focuses on how professionals and managers strive to increase their probability of presenting appropriate and desirable selves by influencing and stabilizing the dramaturgical conditions of their everyday work situations. However, I show how these efforts, while motivated by identity-narration, tend to contribute to organizational control by fixing and limiting everyday epistemic and normative discourse that frames routine work interactions and practices. Authoritative abstract discourses, rather than coercing or generating such practices, interactions, and subjectivities, provide potentially useful strategic resources for professionals and managers to promote such consensual dramaturgical definitions of their work situations. Such dialectical conception of control reflects Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. More specifically, I focus on how professionals and managers strive to construct, maintain, and defend ‘responsible’ selves. I suggest that ‘responsibility’ acts discursively as an integrative floating identity signifier, maintaining coherence and continuity of self-narration across varying work situations that might involve conflicting dramaturgical conditions. While the situated articulations of ‘responsibility’ might vary considerably, temporal and spatial separation of these instances of self-presentation enables their mutual contribution to an overall sense of responsibility. However, the generic connotations of being ‘responsible’ in the work cultures studied suggest muscularly individualistic assumptions of causation and agency, downplaying the complex, diverse, uncertain, unobservable, and uncontrollable aspects of actual work practices. Enacting ‘responsible’ self-narration in lived work contexts thus requires constructing and disciplining stable and one-dimensional dramaturgical scenes that enable controllable, observable, and predictable performances at work. Thus, ‘responsibility’ might be a key obstacle for emancipatory developments in organizational contexts.