Narratives of Organizational Identity and Identification: A Case Study of Hegemony and Resistance
An ethnography of identity and identification at Westville Institute, a pseudonymous UK higher education institution with about 7,000 students and 290 academic staff, during a long campaign for university status that had still not succeeded when the paper was written. Humphreys and Brown suggest that identity, individual and collective, and the identification that binds people to organisations, are constituted in the personal and shared narratives people author to make sense of their world, and that narrative identities are power effects. They read the senior managers' efforts to author a single identity narrative, centred on the organisation's need for and desert of university status, as hegemonic acts required for legitimation, hegemony in a sense they derive from Gramsci, taken-for-granted domination that, in Clegg's words, mobilises the active consent of dominated groups.
The data, 42 semi-structured interviews from 1997 and 1998, observation over fifteen years and many documents, were gathered solely by one of the pair, who worked there. Drawing on Elsbach (1999), the paper sorts the responses into four kinds. Identification was likeliest among senior staff, and appeared in some new staff and in older staff whose identification rested on a reconstructed past. Dis-identification showed as staff took refuge in their subject groups and disparaged senior managers, and as some female staff distanced themselves from an almost exclusively male management. Schizo-identification marked staff committed to their students and to vocational and professional training who dis-identified with the new research demands, and research-active lecturers who dis-identified with the administrative loads that kept them from research. Neutral identification marked long-serving lecturers who had ceased to identify without having yet actively dis-identified, part-time lecturers and most support staff. One lecturer describes the common room ceasing to provide coffee, so that everyone buys a kettle and stays in their room, and now just turns up, teaches and goes home.
The narrative's success was, Humphreys and Brown suggest, limited by at least two factors: it tried to overwrite established narratives centred on teaching and student learning rather than integrate them, and the Institute sat in an institutional environment that offered less authorial discretion than the managers had supposed. That the story was variously ignored and contested they read as a symptom of the considerable flexibility ordinary employees often have to create their own interpretation; organisational identity is, in Scott and Lane's words, contested and negotiated rather than simply authored from the top. The bridge to psychological safety is ours: people withdraw into their subject groups and their rooms when the official story does not fit their own, and neutral identification reads as a quiet relative of silence. Built from Tom's scan of the published article, transcribed by OCR.
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