This article aims to make a contribution to the literature by addressing an undertheorized aspect of sensemaking: its embodied narrative nature. We do so by integrating a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective of narrative and storytelling with a documentary case taken from a filmed tour of a sports team to illustrate the process of sensemaking around a specific event. We argue that we make our lives, ourselves and our experience 'sensible' in embodied interpretations and interactions with others. We suggest this occurs within contested, embedded, narrative performances in which we try to construct sensible and plausible accounts that are responsive to the moment and to retrospective and anticipatory narratives.

Elite professionals opportunistically employ threats to their work identities to author preferred selves. Predicated on understandings that identities are subjectively available to people as inprogress narratives, and that these are often insecure fabrications, we investigate the identity work of members of a UK-based professional Rugby League club. The research contribution we make is to demonstrate that professionals use identity threats as flexible resources for working on favoured identities. We show that rugby players authored identity threats centred on the shortness of their careers, injury, and performance, and how these were appropriated (made their own) by men to develop desired occupational and masculine identities. In so doing, we also contribute to debates on how professionals' identity discourse is an expression of agency framed within relations of power.

Organization theorists have predominantly studied identity and organizing within the managed work organization. This frames organization as a structure within which identity work occurs, often as a means of managerial control. In our paper our contribution is to develop the concept of individuation pursued through prefigurative practices within alternative organizing to reframe this relation. We combine recent scholarship on alternative organizations and new social movements to provide a theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of the prefigurative organizing practices and related identity work of an alternative group in a UK city. We argue that in such groups, identity, organizing and politics become a purposeful set of integrated processes aimed at the creation of new forms of life in the here and now, thus organizing is politics is identity. Our study presents a number of challenges and possibilities to scholars of organization, enabling them to extend their understanding of organization and identity in the contemporary world. Vignette 1: An introduction to the Midtown alternative sceneOn a cold and windswept evening in March we gathered at a small organic wholefood co-operative shop amongst insalubrious takeaways in one of the scruffier parts of Midtown. As we arrived, greetings were called, mugs of tea made, and soon 25 people were crammed into the room. Although a public meeting, many participants already knew each other. The 'formal' part of the evening began when those who had initiated the meeting, including Author 2, explained that they wanted to bring likeminded people together to forge closer ties and foster joint action. Each of us explained who we were, why we were there, and what group we belonged to (if any). This was 1 recorded on flip charts and minuted for later distribution. Although membership overlapped considerably, there were around twenty groups including environmental organizations, radical political parties, local activist groups, alternative food and craft retailing, arts and music groups; many belonged to several of these groups simultaneously.Most were young (between 25 and 40) and their appearance often reflected alternative youth sub-cultural norms -a 'hippyish' look for women, dreadlocks and goatee beards for men, although older attendees wore jumpers, t-shirts and jeans. Everyone seemed happy at a slightly ironic self-description of 'alternative', though deciding what this meant became a major debate. All agreed that it implied non-commercial and non-consumerist values with social/political/ethical aims and consensual democratic organizing. Concerns emerged about how difficult this was in practice, often due to lack of money or time.Despite the need for money, some argued that paid work or grants undermined autonomy and self-sufficiency. Whilst a few had full time jobs (usually in the public sector or with charities), many kept paid work to the minimum, desiring to live entirely 'off-grid'. Most wanted to engage with 'the community' to further political aims and t...

 In this paper we analyse two of the e-mail exchanges that had been posted on Royal Dutch/Shell's Web site in order to investigate how organizational identities are constructed through processes of description, questioning, contestation and defence. Organizational identities may be regarded as ongoing arguments between insiders and between ostensible insiders and outsiders, who deploy various persuasive techniques in their efforts to render hegemonic their versions of an organization's identity. Making plausible through persuasive rhetoric is a complex task, and requires a discourse analytic methodology and an analytical focus on whole utterances, in order to explicate how identity-as-argument is enacted. The research implications of our paper are twofold. First, by focusing on language as an opaque phenomenon, taken-for-granted ways of being persuasive are made strange and hence more visible. Second, our understanding of organizations as situated in ongoing, multi-focused arguments, illustrates a new way of conceptualizing the polyphonic, genre-relevant nature of institutional identities.

This paper analyses how graduate trainees in one UK-based private sector retail organization talked about being silenced. The paper illustrates how the trainees' constructions formed a set of discursive practices that were implicated in the constitution of the organization as a regime of power, and how they both accommodated and resisted these practices. Our case focuses on the trainees' discursive construction of normative pressures to conform, compliant and non-compliant types of worker, and explicit acts of silencing, together with their reflexive interrogation of the nexus of discursive constraints on their opportunities to be heard. Drawing on the analytical resources associated with the 'linguistic turn' in organization studies, our research is an exploration of the importance of language as a medium of social control and power, and means of self-authorship. It is also an attempt to locate 'silence' in putatively polyphonic organizations.'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.' (Wittgenstein, 1961: section 6.5) Silence, including not just the silencing aspects of communication but the expressive aspects of silence, is a key but neglected topic in organization studies. This paper analyses how graduate trainees in one UK-based private sector retail organization talked about being silenced. We suggest that the trainees' linguistic constructions formed a set of discursive practices that were implicated in the constitution of the organization as a regime of power. We also argue that, as reflexive and creative organizational members subject to multiple discursive regimes, the trainees not only accommodated but resisted what they interpreted as attempts to silence them. Our analysis draws on literatures concerned with silence (Jaworski 1997; Thiesmeyer 2003), and the institutionalization of provinces of meaning in organizations (e.g. Foucault 1977;Mumby 1987) to illustrate how individual participants' talk is subject to the hegemony of prevailing discursive practices (Gramsci 1971; Clegg 1989) and how these practices may be resisted (Ezzamel et al. 2001;Gabriel 1999).Our argument is that silence may be theorized both as a power effect (Clegg 1989) and as an aspect of impression management (Goffman 1959), and that one approach to its study is to examine how people linguistically construct Organization Studies 26(7):