International audienceHow do corporations attempt to regulate the ways middle managers draw on discourses centred on ‘effectiveness’ and ‘ethics’ in their identity work, and how do these individuals respond? We analyse the discursive struggle over what it meant to be a competent manager at Disneyland, where middle managers were encouraged to construe their selves in ways that emphasized ‘being effective’ over ‘being ethical’, and managers responded with identity work that positioned them as searching for the practical wisdom (phronesis) to make decisions that were both effective and moral. The theoretical contribution we make is twofold. First, we analyse processes of identity regulation and identity work at Disneyland, highlighting divergences between corporate injunctions and middle managers’ appropriations of them, regarding what it meant to be a practically wise manager. Second, we discuss a phronetic identity narrative template, contestable both by organizations and managers, in which people are positioned as questing for the practical wisdom to make decisions that are both moral and effective, and phronesis as an image by which scholars may analyse identities and identity work. This leads us to a more nuanced understanding of middle manager identities and the scope they have to constitute their selves as moral agents

International audienceOrganizations are frequently subject to changes that promote new and/or (supposedly) trendy identities for their members. Various studies have sought to understand how such identity regulation processes are achieved through discourse, a fact that has led researchers to call for a more material understanding of this phenomenon. Through an in-depth ethnography of a transformation programme aimed at constructing a new social identity among project managers – that of internal consultant – we find that identity regulation is exercised through a sociomaterial process affording the performativity of the promoted identity, mainly through the consultants’ bodily performances. This is important because it shows how identity regulation is achieved through both (and intertwined) discourse and materiality

Institutional work translates actors' capacity to bring about change in an institutionalised practice through its creation, continuation or destruction. This research examines political institutional work in order to understand actors' activity in the regulative pillar of the institution. With its focus on the cognitive and normative institutional pillars, the existing literature has underestimated the regulative pillar's contribution to institutional change, ignoring part of its role in institutional change. We propose to examine the status conferred on this regulative dimension through a qualitative study of an institutionalised practice, the legal concept of Faute Inexcusable in France from 1898 to 2012. We use secondary data including legal data, contextualised with other sources, and interviews with two key actors in the field. We show the existence of a genuine "regulative dynamic"; beneath its apparent stability, the regulative pillar is in fact the setting for institutional struggles that lead institutionalised practices to evolve. We highlight sequences of institutional work in which various forms of political institutional work interact. This research advances understanding of institutional dynamics in the regulative pillar, casting light on actors and mechanisms that have so far gone unreported. The article thus contributes to a rehabilitation of the regulative pillar's role in neo-institutional theory.

This chapter reflects on identity construction as a political process in organizational theory. The authors provide a reassessment of the literature, arguing that such identity perspectives have developed around three pairs of (potentially) antagonistic notions, namely, structure/agency, language/materiality, and elites/shopfloor employees. First, they show how the pendulum has swung from studies that emphasize the power of structure in disciplining organizational participants’ identities, towards contributions that focus on agency in the reproduction or subversion of the dominant social order. Second, they argue that the attention of identity scholars, when investigating identity construction, has fluctuated between the power of language and the power of materiality. Third, they highlight that the initial view, which argues that elites exercise power over shopfloor employees by disciplining their identities, has been superseded by more nuanced approaches that take into account a much greater variety of stakeholders and recognize that individuals can be both subject to power and active subjects of it. The concluding section proposes several research avenues that aim to inspire organizational scholars interested in identity construction in relation to power relations.

Il existe actuellement un mouvement convergeant de formation des managers à la prévention des risques psychosociaux (RPS). Si le manager a un rôle important à jouer vis-à-vis de la santé mentale de ses subordonnés, il est toutefois dépendant d’une organisation et de modes de gestion dont découlent ses propres marges de manœuvre lui permettant de jouer ou non son rôle efficacement. C’est dans ce contexte que nous explorons les différentes formations existantes, afin de mieux en saisir le rôle et les effets auprès des managers. Nous montrons ainsi, au travers d’une recherche qualitative, le rôle et les limites de la formation des managers aux RPS.