The practice-based view of knowledge is recognized as an important epistemological perspective in the knowledge management literature. However, there is also a growing awareness that approaches adopting this view do not always consider issues of power. This article draws on Foucault's conceptual lens of power/ knowledge and discursive positioning theory to gain a better understanding of how and why practitioners contest, accept, and/or further each other's knowledge. The article applies its theoretical framework to examine knowledge sharing in a dispersed network of HR practice. The empirical example illustrates how organizational power/knowledge struggles affect dynamics of participation in networks of practice and generate knowledge sharing issues between geographically dispersed practitioners. Based on the study's findings and analysis, the article promotes a power-sensitive view of organizational knowledge sharing that recognizes the discursively constructed nature of relationships within networks of practice.
For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, while extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work.Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies (idealizing, reframing, and distancing) that are bound-up in junior architects' emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects' efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities.
Critical scholarship has challenged traditional assumptions of entrepreneurship as a ‘neutral’ economic activity; demonstrating instead how entrepreneurship is a cultural phenomenon. In particular, enterprise culture has been exposed as fundamentally masculinist, so that women entrepreneurs are said to be measured against gendered values and ideals. What remains relatively unexplored, however, are the ways the identity performances of women entrepreneurs on social media reflect and reproduce inequalities that extend beyond gender. In this article, we examine how highly privileged Australian women entrepreneurs perform their identities on Instagram. In applying intersectionality theory, our study finds that the entrepreneurs produced idealised feminine identities by leveraging the intersections of white, elite class, heteronormative, able-bodied power within a broader neoliberal discourse. In doing so, our analysis points to how romanticised ideals of women’s economic empowerment in digital spaces may obscure the perpetuation of systemic and structural oppression.
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