Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on the analysis of 309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost fifty years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm's ongoing rhetorical history-here, the bulletins' repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm's past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)-sustains its identity. Thus knowing "who we are" might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget "who we were not."In press: Academy of Management Journal (Non-edited version) *Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Michael Pratt and the three anonymous AMJ reviewers for their guidance on this article as well as to Elena Corsi, Marina Dal Soglio, Vincent Dessain, and Kathleen Ryan for their assistance in data collection. We also thank
explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore twofold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a threepart framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of "becoming", "doing", and "relating". We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.
This study examines the U.S. commerce in human cadavers for medical education and research to explore variation in legitimacy in trades involving similar goods. It draws on archival, interview, and observational data mainly from New York State to analyze market participants' efforts to legitimize commerce and resolve a jurisdictional dispute.Building on literature on professions, the study shows that how goods are traded, not only what is traded, proves integral to constructing legitimacy, thus suggesting a practicebased view of moral markets. The professionals, including a group of "gatekeepers," construct a narrative distinction between their own commerce and an implicitly less moral alternative and geographically insulate their trades from the broader commerce; creating in effect two circuits. Yet the professionals also promote specific practices of trade within their circuit to help them distinguish their own pursuit from an alternative course of action. The study's findings shed light on the micro-foundations of market legitimization and on the role of morals in sustaining professional jurisdictions.• 3The notion that markets permeate society is nothing new; scholars have long noted the pervasiveness of markets in society (Zelizer, 1979;Hirschman, 1982; FourcadeGourinchas and Healy, 2007; Sandel, 2009). Yet the development of legal markets for "goods" previously deemed off-limits to trade, such as human life and death, has proven surprising and raised anew the question of morals and markets. Despite calls for banning commerce in many goods, particularly human anatomical goods like blood, cadavers, and organs (
R esearch has long shown that organizations shape members' identities. However, the possibility that these identities might also be desired and that members might benefit from this process has only recently been explored. In a qualitative study of a French aeronautic plant, I demonstrate how an implicitly negotiated leniency between management and workers around the use of company materials and tools, on company time, to produce artifacts for personal use, enhances workers' identities. This leniency applies to a select subset of workers and enhances their desired occupational identity. This practice produces an engaging form of control that relies on management's selective allocation of identity incentives. These findings document a previously overlooked type of control-one reliant on desired identities that engage rather than constrain. Desired identities, specifically previously enacted ones, constitute potent incentives for inducing efforts or actions.
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