Religious Social Identities in the Hybrid Self‐presentations of Sikh Businesspeople

Abstract

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. The paper focuses on two important social identities in participants' self-presentations -those derived from religious (Sikh) and western business discourses -and identifies powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices within interview settings, the authors explore how participants resolve, accommodate or reject these discursive tensions while attempting stable and coherent hybrid self-presentations. They identify several different forms of hybridity, including what they term 'equipollence', which occurs when two equally powerful, contradictory discourses are incorporated in self-presentations, producing potentially irresolvable intersections and leading to a lack of coherence. Contributions are made to the literatures on religion and work, hybrid identity work processes and social identities.

The Other side of ‘us’: Alterity construction and identification work in the context of planned change

“…Change impacts different groups in different ways, and people will variously construct Others, depending on what is at stake, and thus might also use several varieties of othering concurrently within the same micro-situation. These processes are complex and ambiguous as social actors draw shifting circles of identification (Ellis and Ybema, 2010), construct hybrid identities (Purchase et al, 2018) and sometimes also enact contradictory identities in social interaction (Brown, 2017).…”

“God at Work”: Engaging Central and Incompatible Institutional Logics through Elastic Hybridity

“…Incompatibilities intensify when religious norms meet market expectations from different institutional systems (Gümüsay, 2017), even in seemingly mundane instances, such as the insistence on professional over religious attire at work (Purchase, Ellis, Mallett, & Theingi, 2018). They further escalate around an organization's core; its purpose, products and practices.…”

Hybrids, identity and knowledge boundaries: Creative artists between academic and practitioner communities

“…Hybridization denotes a recombination process that breaks down domain boundaries. Hybrid identity work involves the mixing and crossing-over of two different identities so that elements of both are encapsulated within one’s self-space (Marotta, 2008; Purchase et al, 2018). It denotes the cognitive and behavioural tactics undertaken by individuals to negotiate their hybrid selves by selectively recombining identity resources of the associated social domains.…”

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