Last quarter I figured out that some of the questions that interest me fall under the category of Identity Work, the process through which people define their sense of self. A lot of it resides in the stories people tell about themselves. Or at least that's where researchers can find the material to study. The thoughts people have about themselves are not visible until something is done to bring them to the surface. So you get people to tell stories. One distinct possibility is that those stories involve a pretty significant level of mediation between what lies beneath. But the stories are rich, as we'll see.
A few weeks ago Billie Sandberg forwarded me the current issue of Organization Studies and pointed out that there were a couple of articles there to add to pile of research on Identity Work. A point she's making to all of us is that we should figure out what journals cover the kind of work that engages us and start paying attention to that.
One of the articles in this issue was lead authored by Andrew Brown from the University of Bath, who wrote a couple of articles I worked with last term in my first pass along Identity Work research. This one, co-authored with Michael Lewis and Nick Oliver has the title "Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans." The thing that interests them is how much the deans define themselves in their role as deans in terms of loss--of status as a scholar, of integrity, and of sense of well-being. This is a group you would think would identify themselves in terms of successes.
The truly remarkable thing for me was one point in particular--the stories of the loss of integrity. One of the common identity themes Brown et al found was that the deans agonize over the ways the job requires them to be less than completely honest. In many cases they find that they can't share all of the information behind a situation. Also, that the institution uses them and forces them into positions they are not comfortable with.
A quote from one of the interviews: "It’s necessary to justify decisions without being able to tell the whole story…sometimes I’m clutching at logic…I think that’s been one of the most difficult parts of the role is standing up and justifying the position without being able to justify… [it]…"
It seems to me like the research team passes over this material too easily. It's one of three common threads they see in these interviews, but to me this is remarkable and drives at one of the biggest challenges to organizational life, the ways in which it compromises its participants. Try as you might, when you start to take on managerial authority, you increasingly find yourself boxed in by the organization. Some mysterious convergence of factors produces decisions and dictates courses of action seemingly out of the control of the humans taking the action and voicing the words. This is precise testimony of this specific effect, and its fundamentally morally compromising character. For me, this single shared aspect of these stories can provide the entry point into the problem of structural moral compromise and of the collective as the effective agent.
Discussing their findings with this survey of UK deans, they suggest North American business deans might not have the same issues--the UK deans face a great deal of institutional ambivalence in institutions that treat business education as a sort of necessary evil but not a legitimate academic program. I'm not sure American deans experience quite that level of disregard from colleagues, But they do mention some evidence of health problems with business deans in the U.S. The citation they have is from the Nashville Business Journal--an article on Marty Geisel's death.
Marty was dean at Vanderbilt when I was there. He was very encouraging to me. He liked that we shared connection with the University of Chicago. I never felt as connected to Owen after his death. Marty was perfectly capable of being frustrated with the administration at Vanderbilt, but I don't think he would have described his identity in terms of loss. It seemed to me that he rather relished being dean. I'm not sure his end supports the points that Brown, Lewis and Oliver want to make. I wish they had had a chance to interview him.
Brown, A. D., Lewis, M. A., & Oliver, N. (2021). Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans. Organization Studies, 42(6), 823–844.
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