Existing research on women’s construction of professional identities and, more specifically, on leader identities in the workplace, has traditionally focused mainly on western contexts. This article aims to extend this focus by investigating the position of women in the workplace in India. We do this by discursively analyzing audio-taped semi-structured interviews with women who are working in the corporate sector in India. The aim of these analyses is to present a number of case studies about the unique challenges that women (...) face at the workplace in the urban Indian context, especially when they take up leadership positions. The issues they grapple with are the collision of the traditional dominant discourses on appropriate female behavior and the new professional identities that these women wish to embrace. The paper discusses how these female professionals mainly construct two quite diverging identities: either as nurturing mentors or as aggressive professionals who are involved in activities traditionally viewed as “a man’s domain”. Conclusions are then drawn regarding how these professional identities acquiesce to, counter, or — as is the case in one interview — carefully mould, hegemonic discourses of femininity in India. (shrink)

In research interviews, interviewees are usually well aware of why they were selected, and in their narratives they often construct ‘default identities’ in line with the interviewers’ expectations. Furthermore, narrators draw on shared cultural knowledge and master narratives that tend to form an implicit backdrop of their stories. Yet in this article we focus on how some of these master narratives may be mobilized explicitly when default identities are at stake. In particular, we investigate interviews with successful female professionals from (...) diverse geographical contexts. We found that the interviewees deal with challenges to their ‘successful professional’ identities by drawing on categorical narratives or categorical statements. As such, the interviewees talk into being a morally ordered gendered worldview, thus making explicit gendered master narratives about their societies and workplaces. In general, this article shows that categorical narratives and statements can bring master narratives to the surface and that these can thus contribute to the narrators’ identity work. (shrink)

This article investigates the identity constructions of a former hooligan in two repeated narratives, obtained through interviews with a time lapse of six years. In both narratives, the interviewee constructs a similar heroic identity and opposes it to other categories such as cowards and followers. However, when relating how he became a hooligan, the interviewee presents himself as a follower. This contradiction with the heroic identity shows his struggle with group membership and that ‘identity work’ is an ongoing process. On (...) the other hand, the striking similarity between the identity constructions in both interviews supports the thesis of a rehearsed self in big stories, but I argue that this is also due to other reasons, namely the role of the same interviewer who co-constructs the interview but who is also an outsider, and the influence of previous ‘rehearsals’ of the story, both within the group of hooligans and in real life. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas, las organizaciones se dirigen hacia un enfoque más igualitario, conforme a los ideales del ‘New Work Order’, razón por la cual los modelos jerárquicos con un solo líder ‘poderoso’ se hacen cada vez menos aceptable. Por motivo de esta tendencia general, ha surgido un interés creciente por una conceptualización compartida o múltiple del liderazgo, como el ‘co-liderazgo’. Sin embargo, pocas investigaciones se han concentrado en la manera en que se establecen constelaciones del co-liderazgo durante la interacción (...) desde una perspectiva discursiva. Además, aunque este proceso del co-liderazgo se realiza sobre la base de recursos verbales y no verbales, el conocimiento sobre el desarrollo de este proceso queda limitado. En este artículo, incorporamos una perspectiva multimodal y, con el método del análisis del discurso, analizamos la constelación del co-liderazgo en una reunión de un movimiento juvenil. Para analizar los procesos del liderazgo en la interacción, los análisis se basan en los conceptos de la postura y la posición deóntica proximal y distal. Además, se investiga el papel de la epistémica en relación con la representación de los derechos deónticos. De los análisis, se desprende que, en esta reunión, hay una distribución clara de los derechos deónticos, a veces relacionada con la posición epistémica de los participantes. Además, el análisis muestra que el co-liderazgo siempre es un proceso esencialmente colaborativo en el que todos los participantes contribuyen. (shrink)

We study the life story of a former SS Leibstandarte soldier and we focus on the way the narrator deals with face threats by negotiating his identity constructions. The interviewee positions himself as a sportsman and an ignorant soldier, thus constructing denial of knowledge of and agreement with Hitler's ideology. These identities can be considered to be complementary, but they are built in quite different ways: the narrator explicitly presents himself as a sportsman, but mitigates his implicit construction of ignorance. (...) Given the social and historical context, this contrast in degree of explicitness is expected since the ignorance claim has been the subject of many previous discourses and debates of this subject. (shrink)