Caroline Clarke

It’s a Bittersweet Symphony, this Life: Fragile Academic Selves and Insecure Identities at Work

This article demonstrates the importance of studying insecurity in relation to identities at work. Drawing upon empirical research with business school academics in the context of the proliferation of managerialist controls of audit, accountability, monitoring and performativity, we illustrate how insecurities in the form of fragile and insecure academic selves are variously manifested. Emerging from our data were three forms of insecurity—imposters, aspirants and those preoccupied with existential concerns, and we analyse these in the context of psychoanalytic, sociological and philosophical frameworks. In so doing, we make a three-fold contribution to the organization studies literature: first, we develop an understanding of identities whereby they are treated as a topic and not merely a resource for studying something else; second, we demonstrate how insecurity and identity are more nuanced and less monolithic concepts than has sometimes been deployed in the literature; and third, we theorize the concepts of identity and insecurity as conditions and consequences of one another rather than monocausally related. Through this analysis of insecure identities, insightful understandings into the contemporary bittersweet experiences of working in academia, and specifically in business schools are developed that could prove fruitful for future research within and beyond this occupational group.

Careering through academia: Securing identities or engaging ethical subjectivities?:

This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individualistic strategy designed to moderate the pressures of excessive managerial competitive demands. Emerging from our data was an increased portrayal of academics as subjected to technologies of power and self, simultaneously being objects of an organizational gaze through normalizing judgements, hierarchical observations and examinations. Still, this was not a monolithic response, as there were those who expressed considerable disquiet as well as a minority who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work. In analysing the careerism and preoccupation with securing identities that these technologies of visibility and self-discipline produce, we draw on certain philosophical deliberations and especially the later Foucault on ethics and active engagement to explore how academics might refuse the ways they have been constituted as subjects through new managerial regimes.

Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies

The aim of this article is to review a selection of the literature on identity at work in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) in order to raise critical questions concerning what we see as the dangers of a certain amnesia and myopia. Insofar as some of the contemporary literature neglects to engage with the historical and multidisciplinary past and present, there is a tendency to leave common-sense understandings of identity unexamined, thereby reproducing everyday preoccupations with securing the self. By contrast with such rational individualism, we seek a more embodied understanding of identity, where it is a means of building our ethical engagements and capacities for community living. By failing to problematize identity, there is little recognition of how attempts to secure the self are invariably self-defeating if only because they are necessarily contingent on the other who is unpredictable and uncontrollable. The main contribution of the article is to show how this failure to interrogate identity is far from benign since it often results in reinforcing everyday preoccupations with the self that can turn into narcissism, and deflect and curtail alternative practices of embodied engagement. We trust that our deliberations will be helpful in advancing the ‘road less travelled’, where studies advance beyond taking identity for granted, and move instead towards more embodied understandings of ethical engagement.

Addressing disillusionment among young vets

WE have been following with interest recent articles on the existing state of the veterinary profession in relation to demographic changes, veterinary well-being, professional identity and disillusionment among young vets. Two of us have recently conducted research among practising veterinary surgeons across a range of different practice modalities (Clarke and Knights 2015a, Clarke and Knights 2015b, Knights and Clarke 2015) and our findings may both add to the discussion and contrast with some of the comments reported by Anthony Ridge in his article summarising a recent meeting at the House of Lords on disillusionment among young vets ( VR, October 15, 2016, vol 179, pp 375-376). It is interesting to note that recent graduates indicated career progression, insufficient pay and poor work/life balance together with a ‘lack of management and support by bosses’ as significant factors in causing disillusionment. Our research also recognises some of these issues as …

Going global, feeling small: an examination of managers' reactions to global restructuring in a multinational organisation

This paper is concerned with examining the reactions of managers to the process of global restructuring in a large, multinational food-processing company. Much extant research concerning globalisation has focused on the wider economic, political and social outcomes. Perhaps surprisingly, relatively little attention has been given to how globalisation is experienced inside organisations. This paper examines how country-level managers have been affected by the move to a new global structure in their organisation. We present evidence of these managers feeling disempowered by global reorganisation and of a largely negative impact on their feelings towards the organisation they work for.

Practice makes perfect? Skillful performances in veterinary work:

Is vetting a craft that must be learned owing to the limitations of scientific discipline, or simply a question of practice makes perfect? This question arose from our empirical research on veterinary surgeons (vets), who we found were often struggling with the divergence between the precise and unambiguous knowledge underlying the training and the unpredictability and imprecision of their everyday practices. These are comparatively underexplored issues insofar as the literature on vets tends to be descriptive and statistical, focusing primarily on clinical matters and associated human-animal interactions. Our cliché title has a question mark because while many vets remain embedded in the disciplined ‘certainties’ and causal regularities within their training, in practice this ordered world is rarely realized, and they are faced with indeterminacy where the ‘perfect’ solution eludes them. Vets often turn these unrealistic ideals of expertise back in on themselves, thus generating doubt and insecurity for any failure in their practices. In analysing vets’ experiences, we pay attention to the anatomical models of science, where linear causal analysis is expected to provide orderly and predictable outcomes or ‘right’ answers to problems, as well as notions of expertise that turn out to be illusory.

Living on the Edge? : Professional Anxieties at Work in Academia and Veterinary Practice

ABSTRACT Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of assessment, audit and accountability. We see these pressures and their effects as reflecting a commodification of service provision where the consumer (student or client) begins to redefine the relationship between those offering some expertise and those who are its recipients, partly achieved through the performative gaze of constant and visible rating mechanisms. Our empirical research also identifies sources of anxiety concerns in their attempts to achieve perfection against this background of uncertain knowledge and precarious contexts of the performative nature of professional expertise.

Essay: laboring under false pretences? The emotional labor of authentic leadership: Clashes, Convergences and Coalescences

This chapter is concerned with examining the relationship between emotional labor and authentic leadership. At first glance emotional labor, where the employee is expected to manage his or her emotions in the context of social interactions at work, and authentic leadership, where emphasis is on adhering to an authentic self, would appear to be contradictory notions. By exploring the underlying assumptions which inform each concept, the chapter considers the relationship between them in depth and examines their similarities as well as the contradictions between them.