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Work and Play
Edited by Charalampos Mainemelis and Yochanan Altman
The fact that people tend to flirt only with serious things - madness, disaster, other people - makes it a relationship, a way of doing things worth considering (Adam Philips).
Despite a growing interest in identity processes in organizations, researchers still know little about how work identities change ([1] Albert et al. , 2000). Recent scholarship defines identity work as people's engagement in forming, repairing, maintaining, and strengthening or revising their identities ([60] Snow and Anderson, 1987; [64] Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). This way of conceptualizing identity's multiplicity and dynamism has provided much insight into strategies for coping with multiple, conflicting, and/or ambiguous identities ([4] Ashforth et al. , 2000; [5] Bartel and Dutton, 2001; [14] Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001; [54] Pratt and Foreman, 2000; [64] Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) and tailoring role identities to better fit their sense of self ([31] Ibarra, 1999; [37] Kreiner et al. , 2006; [55] Pratt et al. , 2006; [68] van Mannen, 1997). While clarifying how people manage discrepancies among their various personal and role identities, researchers largely assume identities as given, shedding little light on situations in which selves stand at a threshold between past and future.
In organizational life, people work at being certain things but play at becoming others. Imagine a person working at being a doctor. The image formed no doubt evokes diligence, efficiency, and duty - the "ought self." Now, imagine instead, a person playing at being a doctor. In all likelihood, the image had an element of fantasy and possibility (who do you want to be when you grow up?"). But, as psychoanalyst [51] Philips (1995) points out in the quote above, flirting with, or playing at, being a doctor is very serious because we play with things that matter. Play is a way of believing in a possibility and behaving as if it exists; yet it is flirtation because commitment to being a doctor is provisional, limited to the play episode. Conspicuously missing from research on "identity work," however, are conceptions of identity as playful or experimental.
Our objective in this paper is to propose an alternative but complementary notion, identity play, defined as people's engagement in provisional but active trial...