Positive Identity Construction in Diverse Organizations

This chapter develops a more comprehensive theory of positive identity construction by explicating proposed mechanisms for constructing and sustaining positive individual identities. The chapter offers a broad, illustrative sampling of mechanisms for positive identity construction that are grounded in various theoretical traditions within identity scholarship. Four classical theories of identity—social identity theory, identity theory, narrative-as-identity, and identity work—offer perspectives on the impetus and mechanisms for positive identity construction. The Dutton et al. ( 2010 ) typology of positive identity is revisited to highlight those sources of positivity that each classical theory explains how to enhance. As a next step in research, positive organizational scholarship (POS) scholars and identity scholars are encouraged to examine the conditions under which increasing the positivity of an identity is associated with generative social outcomes (e.g., engaging in prosocial practices, being invested in others’ positive identity development, and deepening mutual understanding of the complex, multifaceted nature of identity).

O texto se propõe a discutir a importância dos grupos musicais juvenis nos processos de socialização vivenciados por jovens pobres na periferia de Belo Horizonte, problematizando o peso e o significado de ser membro de um grupo musical no conjunto da vida de cada um. Tem como foco os integrantes de três grupos de rap e três duplas de funk, procurando analisar as suas experiências culturais e o sentido que tais práticas adquirem no conjunto dos processos sociais que os constituem como sujeitos. Significa compreender como eles elaboram as suas vivências em torno do estilo, e os significados que atribuem a elas, no contexto social onde se inserem como jovens pobres. A discussão aponta que os jovens rappers e funkeiros encontram poucos espaços nas instituições do mundo adulto para construir referências e valores por meio dos quais possam se construir como sujeitos. Os estilos rap e funk assumem uma centralidade na vida desses jovens por intermédio das formas de sociabilidade que constroem, da música que criam, e dos eventos culturais que promovem. Esses estilos possibilitaram e vem possibilitando a esses jovens práticas, relações e símbolos por meio dos quais criam espaços próprios, significando uma referência na elaboração e vivência da sua condição juvenil, além de proporcionar a construção de uma auto-estima e identidades positivas.

It has been well established that positive identity construction or reconstruction is important for positive rehabilitation outcomes after Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Such identities are constructed and communicated through interactional exchanges. In this study, the tools of systemic functional linguistics are used to investigate how language was used to create and establish identities for three participants with a severe TBI. Four conversations related to each participant with TBI were analysed. These included a casual conversation between a stranger and the participant, as well as ethnographic interviews with each participant, their closest family member, and the staff member that worked most closely with each at the residential facility. Topic analysis revealed that topics of anger and of aspirations were commonly discussed by participants and their caregivers, and a detailed analysis of identity construction within these exchanges is presented. The data highlights how lack of independence and autonomy is associated with anger, and how aspirations and goal setting may facilitate positive outcomes. In conclusion, language analysis methods can provide detailed information about how individuals with TBI communicate and negotiate identities. Such identities may not always match those projected by their caregivers. This research highlights implications for language interventions that promote identity development.

Organizations can benefit from being internally diverse, but they may also face significant challenges arising from such diversity. Potential benefits include increased organizational innovation, legitimacy, and strategic capacity; challenges include threats to organizational stability, efficacy, and survival. In this article, we analyze the dynamics of internal diversity within a field of politically oriented civic organizations. We find that “bridging cultural practices” serve as a key mechanism through which racially and socioeconomically diverse organizations navigate challenges generated by internal differences. Drawing on data from extended ethnographic fieldwork within one local faith-based community organizing coalition, we describe how particular prayer practices are used to bridge differences within group settings marked by diversity. Furthermore, using data from a national study of all faith-based community organizing coalitions in the United States, we find that a coalition’s prayer practices are associated with its objective level of racial and socioeconomic diversity and its subjective perception of challenges arising from such diversity. Our multi-method analysis supports the argument that diverse coalitions use bridging prayer practices to navigate organizational challenges arising from racial and socioeconomic diversity, and we argue that bridging cultural practices may play a similar role within other kinds of diverse organizations.

This study investigates the identity construction and negotiation of four preservice English language teachers enrolled at a state university in Turkey during COVID-19 lock down within the theoretical framework of positioning theory and explores their digitalised practicum experience. The data collected through learning journals written by each participant about their clinical experience on a weekly basis, online semistructured interviews conducted with each teacher candidate at the end of their practicum period and the researcher’s observations of participants’ teaching practices was subjected to qualitative data analysis with Atlas.Ti software to analyse it systematically. The findings revealed that the participants constructed multiple reflexive positional identities some of which contradicted with their teaching practices. It was also observed that the participants distanced themselves from their mentor teacher while claiming interactive positional identities which was associated with their personal interpretative framework. The study further provided findings about the relational aspect of positioning theory especially when the participants were attaching positional identities for their supervisor.

Despite the growing number of cross-cultural adolescents from immigrants and families formed through international/interracial marriages in South Korea, empirical studies investigating newcomer adolescents’ identity positioning in secondary education have been scarce. Drawing upon Ruíz’s (1984) framework for language policy and planning and Cummins’ (1986, 2001) empowerment framework for minority education, this article investigates how diversity is conceptualised in South Korea through a case study of multicultural education. Specifically, the article examines how newcomer adolescents’ linguistic and cultural identities are perceived by teachers and peers in two high schools. The findings revealed that diversity is dominantly viewed as an impediment to academic success for newcomer youth and is only appreciated once students are fully assimilated into Korean society. The concept of diversity as a resource and right and the notion of multicultural and multilingual identities in the Korean educational context are absent, or hidden, at best. Although there are examples where newcomer learners see diversity as empowerment and resources for their identity construction and positionality, this orientation has not been acknowledged in educational practices. The study calls for conceptualizing diversity as empowerment and resources as ethical lenses to move away from ethnocentric and deficit orientations.

Today, human resource management is being renewed in organizations and is gradually affirming its strategic role. The need for highly qualified managers will increase as more organizations globalize their operations. The research presented in this paper highlights the need for management who are sensitive to the concerns of multicultural employees. The effects of cultural diversity on organizational behavior are complex and powerful. Within this perspective, the definition of diversity in the USA and the goals in achieving a more diverse workplace will be discussed. This paper will also examine the different facets involved in managing and developing a diverse human resource base. Organizations take into account their human resource base before hiring employees. One factor they look at is the possible advantages and disadvantages of a multicultural and diverse organization. This paper will examine ways by which managers and employees can learn about diversity, understand it, and respect it on a day‐to‐day basis when dealing with people from other diverse backgrounds.

Over the past decade, authentic leadership has achieved increased attention in the literature, with an emphasis on the positive outcomes associated with this type of leadership. We now call for investigations into the possible dark side of authentic leadership. We propose that authentic leadership can in fact be detrimental in diverse workplaces. Specifically, we argue that task, process, relational, and status conflict are all possible outcomes stemming from authentic leaders who are dissimilar from their followers in terms of expertise, demographics, affect, values, and goals. The first component of authentic leadership is self-awareness, which activates perceptions of dissimilarity with others. Following this, we elaborate on how the other three components of authentic leadership—balanced processing, relational transperancy, and internalized moral perspective—each promote conflict in diverse organizations.

A becomes important in politics to degree that it points to real processes about which society cannot even reach agreement on how they are to be conceived or interpreted, much less resolved, or to events that introduce which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which society proposes to define itself. And perhaps there can be no genuine democracy unless society respects and provides room for emergence of questions of this type--questions raised problems and antagonisms that society generates. Indeed we may well ask: What is question of identity--the question of identity--today? --John Rajchman, Question of Identity (60) Almost every critic who has written on Audre Lorde has made argument that her work is transformational. AnaLouise Keating, who has written prolifically on Lorde, says that by speaking out [Lorde] begins constructing world she envisions; that is, she creates discourse enabling her to invent world in which those truths can materialize (157). (1) The majority of these arguments, however, have focused on Lorde's prose, and studies that do address her in large part approach it from angle of content only, rarely paying close attention to its form. While I agree that Lorde can produce or at least alternative language, particularly in midst of ever-strengthening hegemonic discourse of US liberal multiculturalism, (2) I argue that it is formal qualities of Lorde's poems and their use of what I define below as traumatic aesthetics that can be truly transformational allowing readers to become aware of limitations of dominant liberal multicultural discourse and its ways of representing identity and subjecthood. The poems speak to issues of political importance as defined Rajchman in that they are able to linguistically represent something which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which [US] society proposes to define itself (60). Communication requires entering into and utilizing that preexists speaker. She cannot communicate without recourse to commonly shared discourse, and if she is able to use it to communicate ideas, it is only because that is at point at which it can express those ideas. I would argue, however, that one of functions of lyric is to speak dominant rhetoric differently, to open up different forms of expression and description. This, of course, does not mean that it does not have its own formal and communicative rules, only that those rules are not same as everyday, often narrative-based, communication. I mentioned that little work has been done on formal qualities of Lorde's poetry. There are, however, few notable exceptions. Amitai F. Avi-Ram has studied Lorde's use ofapo koinou, figure of speech in which a single word or phrase is shared between two distinct, independent units, to draw connections between Lorde and modernist poets and to argue that she uses this trope to develop new language which allows for an alternative constitution of subject in poetry (193, 206, 207). Lexi Rudnitsky employs similar methodology, reading syntactic ambiguity of Lorde's work in relation to her multiple identity positions, but arguing that Lorde's disruption of traditional syntax and grammar has the pointed objective ... of complicating subject position, undermining monolithic categories of identity, and demonstrating that difference can be source of creativity (476). Finally, Sagri Dhairyam examines Lorde's fraught relation to modernist poetic forms both because she has inherited them from white male tradition and because they invite readers to perform their own interpretations of Lorde's identity--often resulting in limited and exclusionary readings. …

This chapter considers questions of identity during adolescence and in the transition to adulthood, noting that the latter often involves a parallel transition out of youthful delinquency. The focus is on narrative identities and developing sense of biography as revealed across a range of empirical studies. The author also begins to explore how young people exercise agency in their construction of life stories and narratives of self, particularly where they have few resources to enable them to present themselves ‘well’, and may also be designated by others as in some way ‘troubled or troublesome’. Difficult or fractured transitions may have knock on effects for developing positive adult identities and practices, and may trap some young people in a position where their ‘offenderhood’ is both internalised and externally reinforced in their social relations. The challenge is then how to offer meaningful opportunities for growth and early forms of generativity.

This paper looks at the stewardship duties of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the promotion of diverse workplace cultures across various organizations within the United States of America. In today’s diverse workplace across the world, organizations have wised up to the fact that Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives are strategic business imperatives for lasting organizational success. This paper looks at how the various HRM processes, including recruitment and selection, onboarding, leadership, and development, as well as performance management, may be used to support D&I efforts, leading to diverse and talented employees being welcomed and supported in organizations. Evaluating a variety of strategic D&I interventions, including unconscious bias training, the role of the mentorship program, and technology-supported monitoring, the paper shows that through HRM it is possible to manage the issues of cross-cultural D&I. On workplace diversity, it describes how organizations can create a culture that will not only increase the overall staff morale but also increase innovation as well as the overall performance of organizations. Moreover, the paper presents case studies that might illustrate how the HRM may become the key driver of successful D&I practices, cultural change, and business impact. The long-term advantages of D&I, which are better retention, creativity and relations with clients, are explained further. As highlighted in this paper, leadership support and the role of HR professionals in policing accountability remain key to the organizational change. This calls for commitment from HRM to ensure that D&I isn’t an afterthought in the business world but a major component that puts into practice organizational social responsibility and excellence. As a closing note, there is an appeal to HR professionals to embrace positive, evidence-based approaches to applied policies that contribute to Diversity and balance organization’s development.

ABSTRACTMulti-racial identity construction is understood to be fluid, contextual and dynamic. Yet the dynamics of multi-racial identity construction when racial identities are ascribed and formulated as static by governments is less explored in psychological studies of race. This paper examines the dynamics of racial identity construction among multi-racial Malaysians and Singaporeans in a qualitative study of 31 semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify the different private racial identity constructions of participants who were officially ascribed with single racial identities at birth. Participants reflected on the overwhelming influence of the state and significant Others in limiting their ability to express their multiple racial identities when they were in school, and highlighted their capacity to be agentic in their private racial identity constructions when they were older. This paper shows that across the life course multi-racial individuals possess (1) the ability to adopt different racial identity positions at different times, (2) the ability to hold multiple racial identity constructions at the same time when encounters with Others are dialogical, (3) the reflexivity of past identity positions in the present construction of identities.

Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity, by Olga M. Welch and Carolyn R. Hodges. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 144 pages. $14.95, paper. Standing Outside on the Inside sheds light on the experiences of a group of disadvantaged African American adolescents who participated in a university-sponsored enrichment program called Project EXCEL (Encouraging Excellence in Children Extends Learning). Authors Welch and Hodges first launched Project EXCEL as a pilot project to provide enrichment in reading, writing, and foreign languages to college-bound, African American juniors from a local inner-city high school. After two years, the program was expanded to include sophomores as well as European American students from a second inner-city high school. This book details the authors' action research documenting how students' experiences in Project EXCEL helped them develop an academic identity or, to use a term coined by the authors, a ethos. Whether participation in the program and the development of this ethos improved students' academic achievement, as measured by their grade point averages and standardized test scores, was the focus of this study. Welch and Hodges, both African American women who teach at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, used their own educational backgrounds and personal experiences to develop the hypotheses and research questions examined in the study. Welch (a professor of Rehabilitation, Deafness, and Human Services) and Hodges (a professor of German and Slavic languages, and chair of the University's comparative literature programs) come from very different social backgrounds. Despite this, the two note that they both developed academic identities grounded in traditional African American values pertaining to education, family, and community: We came to understand that education was to be seen as a possession which, driven by a personal sense of pride in achievement, could never be taken away. Furthermore, this education could be passed on to others directly through teaching and advising, and indirectly through serving as role models. Because this commitment to excellence and to the life of the mind was recognized as a permanent possession, it was internalized as a way of being free and as a key to freeing others. (p. 6) The introduction to Standing Outside on the Inside outlines the study's conceptual framework and research methodology. Chapter one provides an extensive review of related literature and an in-depth exploration of the key themes explored in this work. In it, Welch and Hodges focus on the failed promise of reforms designed to promote equal educational opportunity for African American students. They suggest that inherent in these reforms is a presumption of African American students' deficiency that marginalizes these students and casts them as outsiders in the educational process. They further suggest that the development of a positive academic identity or scholar ethos is vital if African American students are to achieve academic success despite the culture of oppression prevalent in urban educational settings. Chapters two, three, and four are the most informative, for they offer specific details about Project EXCEL and case examples of students' and instructors' experiences in the program. The vignettes Welch and Hodges present throughout these chapters illuminating these experiences are the strength of the book, and should provide most readers with a deep understanding of the concepts presented. For instance, in chapter two, the authors argue one of Project EXCEL's primary tenets: that a positive academic identity is a component of global self-concept and is central to high performance and achievement motivation. To make this point, they contrast the experiences of two students: one an African American male whom they believed had a great deal of potential but who was aloof and unwilling to contribute beyond the minimal requirements, and the other an African American female who lacked confidence in her abilities and who was described by her high school teachers as a diligent, but not gifted, student. …

Much to the consternation of many feminist researchers, teacher education programs have become largely silent about gender and the influence of gender discourses on teaching and learning. Stereotypical views of males and females can dominate teachers’ views of boys and girls, and they can be seen as essentially different—as binary opposites. This has implications for identity construction of children as they take up or resist the identity positions made available to them by the teacher. In this paper, the intersection of gender with culture/ethnicity is examined in the context of identity construction. Classroom-based data are considered in relation to a ‘sensible girls/silly boys’ binary, and the teacher’s positioning of a Chinese heritage boy and Korean heritage girl in a New Zealand primary classroom. We suggest that the teacher’s discursive practices based on unexamined assumptions, limited the identity positions available to the children in relation to gender and culture. We argue that teacher education has an important role to play in preparing teachers with a critical orientation towards dominant gender discourses, and an understanding of the intersection of gender with other discourses, such as culture and ethnicity.

This study investigates how students’ comments on social media have been conceptualized, analyzed, and theorized within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)-oriented scholarship. Employing a qualitative library research design grounded in an interpretivist–critical epistemology, the study systematically examines peer-reviewed literature to identify dominant analytical patterns, ideological tendencies, and methodological convergences in the analysis of student-related digital discourse. Rather than analyzing primary social media data, this research applies CDA as a meta-analytical framework to synthesize how power relations, identity construction, and social practices are discursively framed in existing studies. The findings reveal a consistent reconceptualization of students as active discursive agents whose online comments function as sites of ideological negotiation shaped by institutional, cultural, and technological forces. Recurrent ideological formations, including normalization of authority, resistance discourse, moral regulation, and identity positioning, are observed across diverse platforms and contexts. Methodologically, the literature demonstrates strong convergence around CDA principles, while simultaneously indicating limitations related to textual reductionism. This study contributes to digital discourse studies by offering an integrative theoretical mapping that clarifies how knowledge on students’ social media discourse is constructed and stabilized within contemporary CDA scholarship...