Understanding Identity and Organizations

An understanding of identity is fundamental to a complete understanding of organizational life. While conventional management textbooks touch on in-groups, cohesion and discrimination, Understanding Identity and Organizations offers instead a deeper, more nuanced understanding of why people, groups and organizations behave the way they do. With conceptions of identity perhaps less stable than they have ever been, Willmott, Whittle and Kenny make complex theoretical issues accessible to the reader through the use of lively examples from popular culture. The authors present an overview of the key issues, as well as an examination of cutting-edge research and topical forces currently redefining identity, such as globalization, the fair trade movement and online identities.

This text is a succinct, relevant and exciting overview of the field of identity studies as it relates to business and management and applied social sciences, and is an invaluable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of management on any course that has an identity component.

Andrea Whittle (BSc(Hons), PhD) is Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Newcastle University Business School. Before joining Newcastle University in 2013, she held a Chair in Organization Studies at Cardiff University. Andrea holds a first class honours degree in Natural Science from Durham University and gained her PhD in Sociology from Brunel University at the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology (CRICT). After an ESRC funded post-doctoral research fellowship at Said Business School, University of Oxford, Andrea joined Cardiff University in 2004.

Her research is driven by a passion for understanding the role of language in management settings and is informed by theories and methodologies from the fields of discourse analysis, narrative, discursive psychology, ethnography, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. She has conducted research on management consultants, identity, branding, organizational change, technology and strategy. Her research has been published in leading journals, including Organization Studies, Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly and Organization. She has also co-authored a SAGE textbook, with Kate Kenny and Hugh Willmott (2011) Understanding Identity and Organizations.