Introduction

Abstract

The starting point for this book was a desire to open up our understanding of the relations between gendered organizations and personal identities: to explore the effects of gendered organizational life on our sense of who we are and how we live our lives. This book is at once, then, a book about both the large and the small, about the social and the individual and about the relationships between the two. Indeed, to be interested in identity is to take on one of the central preoccupations of social science, the nature of the relationship between people and their social world. It was changing ways of thinking about this relationship that launched us, quite a few years ago, on the theoretical and empirical enquiries that underpin this book. At that time, the notion that individual identity could simply be read off from social-structural location was being replaced by the concept of subjectivity within which it was argued that multiple and competing discursive constructions of who we could be would play themselves out between and within individuals. Work in this area was suggestive of the complexities involved in the construction of identity and highlighted the potential for differences between individuals in previously accepted social structural categories, such as man/woman or black/white, as well as within individuals themselves as they encountered a range of discursive possibilities. These theoretical developments around gender, as well as race and sexuality, stressed the fragmentary and fluid nature of subjectivities as we move through time and space, insisting that identities are constructed by, and embedded in, the different places, spaces and times of particular lives.