Search results for "identity"
showing 10 items of 1751 documents
Decreasing consumer animosity: The relationship between fast food businesses and social conflicts in Latin America and the Caribbean
2021
Consumer animosity represents discomfort towards foreign goods, services and brands originating in countries with which there is some kind of conflict; in this way, a better understanding of consumer behavior in respect of hostilities between countries is sought. On the other hand, the conflicts in Latin America and the Caribbean are often overlooked in the academic literature, which focuses on studying the major Western economies and the great Asian tigers, given their political, economic and military value; for this reason, consumer animosity studies are mostly conducted in these countries. This study seeks to contribute to the scarce literature on consumer animosity in Latin America, thr…
Vocational teachers in the face of a major educational reform: individual ways of negotiating professional identities
2009
This paper examines how vocational teachers negotiate their professional identity in the context of a major externally imposed curriculum reform. The focus is on the teachers’ orientations towards the reform in its initial stage. Sixteen Finnish vocational teachers were interviewed using open‐ended narrative interviews. The data were analysed in accordance with data‐driven qualitative analysis methods. From the teachers’ accounts, three main orientations towards the reform were identified: a resistant orientation, an inconsistent orientation and an approving orientation, each based on the teachers’ individual self‐positioning towards the reform. Each orientation is illustrated using two nar…
Work‐related identity in individual and social learning at work
2009
PurposeThe aim of this study is to investigate how workers' work‐related identity is related to various forms of workplace learning. The study also aims to show how changes in the organization affect both learning and the work‐related identity construction of employees.Design/methodology/approachIn‐depth interviews with four design engineers were conducted in 2000 and 2007 in Finland. Narrative analysis was used to construct four stories that were compared at two different points in time to find out what changes and development took place in relation to experiences of learning and work‐related identity.FindingsThe findings suggest that learning and work‐related identity are related to one a…
Emotions in leaders’ enactment of professional agency
2019
Purpose Although there has been an increase in workplace studies on professional agency, few of these have examined the role of emotions in the enactment of agency at work. To date, professional agency has been mainly conceptualised as a goal-oriented, rational activity aimed at influencing a current state of affairs. Challenged by this, this study aims to elaborate the nature and quality of emotions and how they might be connected to the enactment of professional agency. Design/methodology/approach Data are collected in the context of a leadership coaching programme that aimed to promote the leaders’ professional agency over the course of a year. The participants (11 middle-management lea…
Does job insecurity threaten who you are? Introducing a social identity perspective to explain well-being and performance consequences of job insecur…
2017
Summary This paper introduces a social identity perspective to job insecurity research. Worrying about becoming jobless, we argue, is detrimental because it implies an anticipated membership of a negatively evaluated group—the group of unemployed people. Job insecurity hence threatens a person's social identity as an employed person. This in turn will affect well-being and job performance. A three-wave survey study amongst 377 British employees supports this perspective. Persons who felt higher levels of job insecurity were more likely to report a weaker social identity as an employed person. This effect was found to be stable over time and also held against a test of reverse causality. Fur…
Understanding youth athletes' life designing processes through dream day narratives
2018
A number of studies have investigated career pathways in elite sport with retrospective designs, but few studies have explored how youth elite athletes construct narratives about their future lives and how their dreams and hopes relate to their careers in sport and other life contexts. We drew on career construction theory to understand youth elite athletes' dreams for the future and prominent life themes. Seventeen Finnish youth elite athletes (7 men, 10 women) in the first year of upper secondary sport school participated in the study. They were asked to make visual representations of their “dream days”, and these were used as aids for reflection in low-structured interviews where partici…
Meaningfulness in the work of language professionals
2022
This qualitative study explores the changes that a specific group of knowledge workers – language professionals in Finland – have undergone in their work and how they perceive the meaningfulness of their work as a result. The data presented in this article has been collected through group interviews and is part of a larger data set. To make sense of our data, we use thematic analysis and the framework of meaningful work presented by Rosso et al. For some of our research participants, the factors of meaningful work are present. For others, changes in work, such as platform work and outsourcing, have reduced autonomy and development possibilities. We conclude by discussing the implications of…
Cultural Identity in Everyday Interactions at Work: Highly Skilled Female Russian Professionals in Finland
2013
The dominant research strands into social interaction in culturally diverse workplaces have focused on issues of organizational efficiency and discrimination, and they have treated cultural identity as static, monolithic, and universally shared. This study aims to problematize this view. It is argued that our understanding of cultural workplace diversity could be extended through the integration of interpretive and critical interpersonal communication theorizing on cultural identity as dynamic and processual, constructed between and among people in everyday workplace interactions and in relation to larger social, political, and historical forces. This argument is illustrated by an analysis …
Multiple Forms of Professional Agency for (non)crafting of Work Practices in a Hospital Organization
2015
In recent working life studies, professional agency is seen as pivotal to the development of work communities and work organizations. This paper addresses professional agency during a practicebased intervention (work conference) in a Finnish hospital setting. To develop work practices, the intervention sought to create a dialogical space for the promotion of collective professional agency. Here, we present an investigation of the manifestations of professional agency and how they emerged within and between professional groups. We also elaborate how professional positions frame the emergence of different manifestations of professional agency. The audio and video materials from the interventi…
University Graduates’ Employability, Employment Status, and Job Quality
2016
We investigated whether a set of indicators of the employability dimensions proposed by Fugate, Kinicki, and Asforth (i.e., career identity, personal adaptability, and human and social capital) are related to university graduates’ employment status and five indicators of the quality of their jobs (pay, hierarchical level, vertical and horizontal match, and job satisfaction). We analyzed a representative sample of university graduates ( N = 7,881) from the population of graduates who obtained their degree from the University of Valencia in the period 2006–2010. The results showed that indicators of human and social capital were related to employment status, whereas indicators of human and s…