Andrew D. Brown is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bath. He has previously held faculty positions at the universities of Manchester, Nottingham, Cambridge and Warwick. His primary research interests centre on issues of identity, especially as they relate to sensemaking, narrative, and power. His work has been published in major journals including Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Human Relations. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization, and he is an Associate Editor for Human Relations.
Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses,... more Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad expectations for reviews and essays as a guide for authors and reviewers. As Editors of the journal, we do not wish to be overly prescriptive. After all, reviews may be integrative and focus on synthesis and integration to generate new concepts, frameworks and perspectives, or they may be more problematizing and contribute by identifying problematics, tensions and contradictions in a literature. Furthermore, consonant with its heritage, Human Relations invites scholarship from all research traditions across the social sciences that focus on social relations at work. It is a pluralistic, heterodox journal that will continue to publish a rang...
Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling are three conceptual fields in organization studies that... more Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling are three conceptual fields in organization studies that are clearly interrelated, yet these linkages remain open for development. The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore theoretically and exploit practically these inherent yet underdeveloped linkages between sensemaking, organizing and storytelling to further their individual and joint understandings.
In this paper, I analyse five approaches to identity work – discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, ... more In this paper, I analyse five approaches to identity work – discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio‐cognitive, and psychodynamic – and show how these are helpful in exploring the ways people draw on their membership of organizations in their constructions of self, processes generally referred to as organizational identification. Collectively, these approaches constitute a distinctive perspective on identities and identifications which suggests that they are ‘worked on’ by embedded social actors who are both constrained and enabled by context. In so doing, I draw attention to issues of agency and process, the always dynamic and complex, often fractured, and sometimes contradictory nature of identities and identifications, and raise a series of issues and questions for further research.
This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator&#... more This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator') drew on understandings of 'ethics' in order to make sense of their individual and collective selves. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and notions of ethics are conceived as discursive resources on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their self and organizational narratives. We show how conceptions of ethics were a rich vein on which organizational members drew to elaborate narratives that legitimated particular modes of working and which cohered an otherwise quite disparate community of individuals. The research contribution of this article is twofold. First, we discuss how a discourse focused on ethics may be a strategic resource for identity work. Second, we analyse how talk and writing about issues of ethics are implicated in relations of power and ongoing struggles for control over organiza...
5. Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examinat... more 5. Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System
While environmental benefits emanate from teams collaborating across high-speed broadband network... more While environmental benefits emanate from teams collaborating across high-speed broadband networks, there are also social side-effects. In this paper we investigate these consequences in terms of the communication processes of a distributed team collaborating on three computer game projects. We attend to a gap in extant scholarly understanding of distributed software team working with respect to the dynamics of offspring fragmented and collective sensemaking. We offer a conceptualisation of the social forces of multi-level sensemaking in a distributed ‘green’ game design context, as well as implications for theory and practice – how can ‘we’ be green and yet communicate effectively too?
ABSTRACT Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance ... more ABSTRACT Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance evaluation in an organizational setting. Drawing on a study of how university students prepared for examinations, it argues that one way people make sense of being evaluated is through metaphors that conventionalize reality and thus contribute to the maintenance of continuity in everyday social action. This is because metaphorical understandings assist people's effort to assign events and situations to familiar categories and thereby turn the 'unusual' into 'business as usual'. Moreover, metaphors are cognitive and more broadly power-laden social resources, which individuals and groups employ in determining how to make sense of and deal with potentially unsettling events such as performance evaluations.
The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical ... more The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical and practical importance. In a world suffuse with dynamic complexity in which unusual, unexpected and unprecedented events occur on a persistent basis, this challenges the relevance of the sensemaking perspective. We put forward a rebalanced model of sensemaking to make the sensable once again sensible, and open up the sensemaking perspective to understand learning as a process that is more than mere interpretation and attends to embodied sensemaking through adopting a thorough-going process approach. This way, we extend both the grasp and the reach of the sensemaking perspective to make sense of learning and to learn to make sense.
In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK... more In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK-based engineering company drew in their efforts to construct versions of their selves. Predicated on an understanding that subjectively construed discursive identities are available to individuals as in-progress narratives that are contingent and fragile, the research contribution we make is threefold. First, we argue that managers may draw on mutually antagonistic discursive resources in authoring conceptions of their selves. Second, we contend that rather than being relatively coherent or completely fluid and fragmented managers' identity narratives may incorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms. Third, we show that managers' identity work constituted a continuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moral beings. Antagonisms in managers' identities, we suggest, may appropriately be analysed as the complex and ambiguous effects of organizationally based disciplinary practices and individuals' discursive responses to them.
The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implica... more The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities’ processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves.
How is a conventionally structured bureaucratic public-sector organization that is highly standar... more How is a conventionally structured bureaucratic public-sector organization that is highly standardized, hierarchical, formalized, and specialised in its operations, nevertheless sufficiently mindfu...
In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and out... more In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes. We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an investigation into the disciplining of professional architects’ discourse about their selves, their organization, and their work. This article adds to debates on creative industries, demonstrating that creativity is deeply embedded in organizationally based relations of power.
How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Base... more How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we add to extant literature in two ...
Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses,... more Human Relations has long welcomed different types of reviews – systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual reviews, narrative reviews, historical reviews – and critical essays that are original, innovative, of high-quality and contribute to theory building in the social sciences. The main purpose of this essay is to sketch out our current broad expectations for reviews and essays as a guide for authors and reviewers. As Editors of the journal, we do not wish to be overly prescriptive. After all, reviews may be integrative and focus on synthesis and integration to generate new concepts, frameworks and perspectives, or they may be more problematizing and contribute by identifying problematics, tensions and contradictions in a literature. Furthermore, consonant with its heritage, Human Relations invites scholarship from all research traditions across the social sciences that focus on social relations at work. It is a pluralistic, heterodox journal that will continue to publish a rang...
Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling are three conceptual fields in organization studies that... more Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling are three conceptual fields in organization studies that are clearly interrelated, yet these linkages remain open for development. The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore theoretically and exploit practically these inherent yet underdeveloped linkages between sensemaking, organizing and storytelling to further their individual and joint understandings.
In this paper, I analyse five approaches to identity work – discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, ... more In this paper, I analyse five approaches to identity work – discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio‐cognitive, and psychodynamic – and show how these are helpful in exploring the ways people draw on their membership of organizations in their constructions of self, processes generally referred to as organizational identification. Collectively, these approaches constitute a distinctive perspective on identities and identifications which suggests that they are ‘worked on’ by embedded social actors who are both constrained and enabled by context. In so doing, I draw attention to issues of agency and process, the always dynamic and complex, often fractured, and sometimes contradictory nature of identities and identifications, and raise a series of issues and questions for further research.
This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator&#... more This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator') drew on understandings of 'ethics' in order to make sense of their individual and collective selves. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and notions of ethics are conceived as discursive resources on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their self and organizational narratives. We show how conceptions of ethics were a rich vein on which organizational members drew to elaborate narratives that legitimated particular modes of working and which cohered an otherwise quite disparate community of individuals. The research contribution of this article is twofold. First, we discuss how a discourse focused on ethics may be a strategic resource for identity work. Second, we analyse how talk and writing about issues of ethics are implicated in relations of power and ongoing struggles for control over organiza...
5. Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examinat... more 5. Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System
While environmental benefits emanate from teams collaborating across high-speed broadband network... more While environmental benefits emanate from teams collaborating across high-speed broadband networks, there are also social side-effects. In this paper we investigate these consequences in terms of the communication processes of a distributed team collaborating on three computer game projects. We attend to a gap in extant scholarly understanding of distributed software team working with respect to the dynamics of offspring fragmented and collective sensemaking. We offer a conceptualisation of the social forces of multi-level sensemaking in a distributed ‘green’ game design context, as well as implications for theory and practice – how can ‘we’ be green and yet communicate effectively too?
ABSTRACT Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance ... more ABSTRACT Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance evaluation in an organizational setting. Drawing on a study of how university students prepared for examinations, it argues that one way people make sense of being evaluated is through metaphors that conventionalize reality and thus contribute to the maintenance of continuity in everyday social action. This is because metaphorical understandings assist people's effort to assign events and situations to familiar categories and thereby turn the 'unusual' into 'business as usual'. Moreover, metaphors are cognitive and more broadly power-laden social resources, which individuals and groups employ in determining how to make sense of and deal with potentially unsettling events such as performance evaluations.
The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical ... more The processes by which people learn to make sense and make sense to learn is of both theoretical and practical importance. In a world suffuse with dynamic complexity in which unusual, unexpected and unprecedented events occur on a persistent basis, this challenges the relevance of the sensemaking perspective. We put forward a rebalanced model of sensemaking to make the sensable once again sensible, and open up the sensemaking perspective to understand learning as a process that is more than mere interpretation and attends to embodied sensemaking through adopting a thorough-going process approach. This way, we extend both the grasp and the reach of the sensemaking perspective to make sense of learning and to learn to make sense.
In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK... more In this article, we analyse the principal antagonistic discourses on which managers in a large UK-based engineering company drew in their efforts to construct versions of their selves. Predicated on an understanding that subjectively construed discursive identities are available to individuals as in-progress narratives that are contingent and fragile, the research contribution we make is threefold. First, we argue that managers may draw on mutually antagonistic discursive resources in authoring conceptions of their selves. Second, we contend that rather than being relatively coherent or completely fluid and fragmented managers' identity narratives may incorporate contrasting positions or antagonisms. Third, we show that managers' identity work constituted a continuing quest to (re)-author their selves as moral beings. Antagonisms in managers' identities, we suggest, may appropriately be analysed as the complex and ambiguous effects of organizationally based disciplinary practices and individuals' discursive responses to them.
The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implica... more The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities’ processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves.
How is a conventionally structured bureaucratic public-sector organization that is highly standar... more How is a conventionally structured bureaucratic public-sector organization that is highly standardized, hierarchical, formalized, and specialised in its operations, nevertheless sufficiently mindfu...
In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and out... more In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes. We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an investigation into the disciplining of professional architects’ discourse about their selves, their organization, and their work. This article adds to debates on creative industries, demonstrating that creativity is deeply embedded in organizationally based relations of power.
How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Base... more How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we add to extant literature in two ...
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