On the tacit side of organizational identity: Narrative unconscious and figured practice

Abstract

It is a paradox of research on organizational identity formation that it cannot take place without reliance upon the expressive acts people use, yet the experience of identity cannot be reduced to such expressions. People are more than they can tell. Drawing from a study of a communication agency and building on notions of self in pragmatism, anthropology, and narrative philosophy, I identify two chief dimensions of tacit organizational identity: (1) the narrative unconscious in the stories that people live by and (2) the related figuring of formative organizational practice, in particular regarding choice of and framing of projects. In the case of organization, an episode revolving around the presentation of the ‘New Bohemian Laws’ provides a window to explore both these dimensions. Implications include a refined methodological approach to identity research. It involves acknowledging ‘feelings of identity’, attending to poetics, tuning-in to refrains and styles, and pursuing a relational subjectivity.

Keywords:

• organizational identity
• narrative
• tacit
• pragmatism
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Editor Damian O'Doherty and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critique of this paper and John Doherty for his kind editorial assistance. I am also most grateful for useful discussions and comments on earlier versions of this paper by Kjersti Bjørkeng, Siv Heidi Breivik, Stewart Clegg, Joep Cornelissen, Douglas Creed, Jane Dutton, Bjørn Haugstad, Saku Mantere, Tyrone Pitsis, Carl Rhodes, Lance Sandelands and Knut H. Sørensen.

Notes

1. At first glance, James and Bourdieu may seem uneasy companions for theorizing. James' theme of self-as-subject can be taken for growing out of a concern for self-reliance and underpinning a form of voluntarism that overstates the individual space of agency to author one's life, while Bourdieu's concept of the habitus has been thoroughly criticized for a determinism that overstates social conditioning and homogeneity (e.g. Adams 2006). I see this tension between agency (self-authoring) and structuring (self-enacting) as necessary to uphold, but primarily follow the ontological orientation of James. Thus, with Wenger (1998, 289), I see habitus as the emerging property of interacting practices, within and outside the organization, rather than a generative infrastructure that exists independent of practice.

2. Drawing upon Aristotle and extending his concept of mimesis – how art imitates life and vice versa – Ricoeur (1984) talks of Mimesis 1 as the imitation of narrative in action in the sense that all action is pre-figured and embodies structural, symbolic, and temporal elements that are borrowed from culture. Mimesis 2 is the level of explicit emplotment as a sequence of events are configured into a story or connected to a story (narrative imitating action). Mimesis 3 marks the intersection of the world of narrative to the world of readers or listeners, as people return from narrative to action.

3. The exact wording of these laws varies only slightly between different sources. See, for example, Stokkan (1997, 9) as referred to by Sabo (2004) and http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohêmbud; last visited in May 2012.