Abstract
"What we do and the environment in which we carry our work impact who we are. Our personal self and our social self are co-constructed (Kreiner et al, 2006; Watson, 2008). In this dissertation I take a symbolic interactionist perspective focusing on “the relationships among individuals and how people create meanings and social relations” (Hallett et al., 2009: 488), as well as how “the construction and negotiation of meanings and identities by individuals” (Davies and Thomas, 2008) are processed. To investigate these processes, I carried a 12-month ethnography during which I followed two operational squads of police officers specialized in investigation and intervention. A great majority of the studies on identity work apprehends and explains the phenomenon within a narrative, ideational, and individual perspective (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Beech, 2008; Ibarra and Barbulescu, 2010, Snow and Anderson, 1989; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003; Watson, 2009). In this dissertation I propose a complementary approach that focuses on the embodied, carnal, and collective aspects of identity work. I contend that the construction of identities does not only occur at an ideational level but also at an embodied, carnal level that has been neglected in the literature. The body as a working tool and crucible of identity, and the body as a manifestation of resisting strategies appear as the cornerstone of identity work particularly in organizational settings that involve physical engagement, taint, and risk taking. The second dimension that is addressed in this study is the collective strategies that people developed to cope with and resist to identity tensions. I explain how at the group level, members craft and generate meanings and codes that are shared by the group and used as resources to buffer their preferred identity from threat. After a chapter presenting my ethnographic experience, I introduce this collective framework on the identity work approach. Whereas the literature on identity work has mainly focused on an individual perspective, I provide an overall view of the work setting of my informants in analyzing the triggers of identity tensions that lead them to engage in identity work at the collective level. My focus here is on what Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock (1987: 121) called subcultural identity work, the creation of “signs, codes, and rites of affirmation that become shared resources for identity-making” (ibid.). My informants built a “body of meanings, signs, and signifying practices that are distinct from, yet linked to, a larger culture” (ibid.). These shared elements help them to protect and secure their preferred identity, defined in this study as the “good cop” and threatened by the emergence of a new work ethos (Weber, 1968) conveying new codes and values. The chapter addresses the clash between the preferred work ethos of police investigators implying action, risk, autonomy, physical strength and mastery, as well as a symbolic and mythical dimension, and the new work ethos dictated by the procedural and bureaucratic system that slows down and sanitizes their work environment. The last chapter focuses on an identity work dimension that is often missing in the literature: the corporeal and carnal dimension. We contend here that the identity of police investigators is framed through and by the body, whether it is the police officer's body or the Other's body. Thanks to the appropriation of their body as an efficient tool and trough the distancing with the body of the Other, our informants deal with the taint associated with their occupation (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999; Bittner, 1970; Hughes, 1951; Kreiner et al., 2006). Furthermore corporeal identity work is manifested in particular physical spaces that police investigators appropriate to live their preferred identity. Drawing from Wacquant (2000) carnal sociology, we show that bodies are intelligent and transient assemblages of shared skills, enabling the creation of individual corporeal proficiency and its relation to the occupationally constituted power held by many police officers despite growing pressures to change their work image. Through their bodies, police officers define who they are and who they want to be. It is the main component to which they anchor meanings and practices that support their preferred identity and stabilize a work environment from which they feel more and more estranged. To sum up, this doctoral dissertation addresses the question of identity work at two different but intertwined levels: a collective level and a corporeal level. I also show that the nature of the methodology participated in the way findings were discovered and analyzed."