Organizing Difference in Organizations

Chapter 7: Identity and Difference in Organizational Life

Further defining how organizations can control and mold their members identities the book describes several practices such as directly defining, defining a person by defining others, providing for a specific vocabulary, explicating morals, knowledge and skills, group categorization, hierarchical location, making a distinct set of rules, and defining the context. Identities are created through things as different as simply being promoted to management, having a reputation for working well with others, or just having a nice office location. Through these things members of an organization will communicate differently with their peers or superiors.

By promoting hard working staff, moving offices, or forcing people to work in cohesive units an office helps to create and facilitate new identities. These attempts are not always successful and can result in some push back by the organization's members. Members may believe that they are more productive or better communicators than their superiors which can ultimately cause an organization-wide identity crisis. In the majority of places I have worked at this has become an issue. When members of the organization are promoted that are deemed by their peers to be undeserving or even worse manipulative and scheming, the result is a drastic loss in morale and the need for a reaffirmation of the organization's goals by management. It has been my experience that while an organization needs to be proactive in creating identities that are not based upon things like gender, race, or class it can go to far and stifle individuality or even just fail to identify the right people to raise up.