This edited collection presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The chapters consider how interactants do identity work and how identity is indexed (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse.

There is growing acceptance among pragmaticians that identity is often (de)constructed and negotiated in communication in order to impact the outcome of the interaction. Filling an important gap in current research, this book offers the first systematic, pragmatic theory to account for the generative mechanisms of identity in communication. Using data drawn from real-life communicative contexts in China, Xinren Chen examines why identity strategies are adopted, how and why identities are constructed and what factors determine their appropriateness and effectiveness. In answering these questions, this book argues that identity is an essential communicative resource, present across various domains and able to be exploited to facilitate the realization of communicative needs. Demonstrating that communication in Chinese involves the dynamic choice and shift of identity by discursive means, Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication suggests that identity is intersubjective in communication in all languages and that it can be accepted, challenged, or even deconstructed.

Career Exploration and Development in Childhood presents chapters from leading figures in the field of childhood career exploration and development. The first substantive edited collection of its kind, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of children’s career development. It provides cutting-edge theory, research and practice for understanding and fostering career exploration and development during childhood, across a wide spectrum of international settings. Divided into five sections that reflect the authors’ perspectives on critical aspects of children’s career development, chapters include relevant research, as well as the practical application of concepts, issues and strategies for career interventions with children. The book includes sequential sections on theory, research, contextual influences, assessment, and the facilitation of career exploration and development. Perspectives from both developed and developing world contexts consider traditional approaches to career education, as well as career development learning in childhood. The collaborations evident in the chapter authorship reflect the significant internationalisation of the field of child career development. The book synthesises key issues and presents innovative recommendations that will not only enhance our understanding of children’s career development, but will set the agenda for the future of the field. It will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of career development, career guidance, education, childhood, child development and counselling.

This interdisciplinary volume opens an innovative space for critical discussion, and production of new imaginaries within, feminist scholarship, analysis and feminist politics, about what is and has been meant by, involved in, required of, and what it means to be, a “wife.” Contributions within this volume together critically explore and tease out, intersections, overlaps, and distinctions between the social categories of wife and mother, and the link, and separate, labours of wife-work and maternal caregiving labour. This volume brings together diverse critical perspectives through creative contributions, personal narratives, and scholarly works. Chapters discuss critical theorizing about roles, representations, identities, and work associated with being a “wife.”

This book provides a systematic overview on issues and challenges related to work identity and identification at work in the ‘new’ South African workplace. It shares results and measures of a work identity research project that was conducted in a variety of modern South African workplaces. It looks at the concept of work identity in the light of a keen and growing interest in why people are becoming attached to, involved in, engaged with, or committed to their work. Still a relatively unexplored concept, built on the foundations of different identity theory streams, the concept of work identity provides a fundamental reconsideration of explaining engaging behaviours at work. Against the backdrop of a changing political and economic landscape and the impact these radical changes had on the South African workplace, the main research question of the project was the South African employees’ question ‘Who am I at work?’. In search of the answer to that question, the book explores the impact of South African employees’ life spheres and life roles on their choice of work-related identification foci. It further explores how identity work tactics and strategies are being used to develop and define their own work identities, resulting in the conceptualisation and development of a work-based identity measure.

Examining the theoretical connections between identity and diversity, this new book explores how diversity management practices can be better informed by an enhanced understanding of the relationship between the two fields. Highlighting the relevance of identity to diversity studies, the authors concentrate on three key areas: social identity theory; critical perspectives on identity; and poststructuralist understandings. With the aim of fueling future research, this insightful book outlines a detailed research agenda and offers practical suggestions. Not only useful to academics, this book also seeks to encourage policy-makers and HR managers to develop current practices and make more research-informed management decisions.

Movements for social change are by their nature oppositional, as are those who join change movements. How people negotiate identity within social movements is one of the central concerns in the field. This volume offers new scholarship that explores issues of diversity and uniformity among social movement participants.

The basic concern of border studies is to examine and analyze interactions that occur when two groups come into contact with one another. Acculturation and globalization are at the heart of border studies, and cultural studies scholars try to describe the possible interactions in terms of conflicts and resolutions that become the result of those possible encounters. The present book is a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented during the IV Crossing Over Symposium at Cleveland State University held in October, 2011, and it is a follow-up to our discussion on border studies. The main focus of this volume is historical, [inter]national, gender and racial borders, and the implications that all of them have in the construction of an identity.

Identities can potentially serve as powerful elements that both drive, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial actions. Entrepreneurial identity is a complex construct with multidisciplinary roots, and therefore there is scope to more fully enrich our theoretical understanding of identity and identity formation, at both individual and organizational levels, and their relationship to entrepreneurial processes, practices and activities. This book highlights two key features of contemporary research on entrepreneurial identity. First, to see it as a dynamic rather than a (relatively) fixed and unchanging feature, shaped by different life episodes. It is increasingly fluid, multilevel and multidimensional, comprising multiple subidentities rather than a univocal (and unchanging) self. As such, it has a profound effect not only on the way we feel, think and behave, but also on what we aim to achieve. Accordingly, it is vital that its dynamics are better understood, particularly in determining how actors behave in an entrepreneurial context. The book’s second focus is on identity work as the process through which entrepreneurial identities are formed and shaped, and the contributors demonstrate how the dynamics of identity formation relate to entrepreneurial outcomes in a range of individual and organizational contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.