Abstract:
Contemporary changes in what constitutes work are producing
different kinds of people in organizations and thus workers can
be understood as engaging in ongoing identity work (Scheeres
2003; Solomon 2(05). In this chapter we examine how this is
played out in two workplaces focussing on one worker in each
organisation. The first workplace is a further education institution
that is increasingly commercialising its services. The second
workplace is a large manufacturing company that is moving
from being an autocratic hierarchical organisation to one where
all workers are deployed in teams as part of the new participative
management structures. Drawing on our ethnographic research
and discourse analysis we foreground some of the complexities
involved in worker-learner identity work, and in doing so problematise
the idea that this identity work is transparent and that
new identities are homogenous and easily produced. Further,
work as a source of 'learning self, and as meaningful and as
essential to self fulfilment (du Gay 1996; Usher and Solomon
1999) is seen as leading to a maximisation of people's capacities
in the workplace. This can be understood as a kind of identity
work that incorporates desires as well as disciplines. For
Foucault (1988), this entails the complexities of technologies of
the self and we use this theoretical idea to discuss how the two
workers govern or take care of themselves.
