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Increasing numbers of studies are identifying ‘identity work’ in research participants’ efforts to establish, maintain, deny or change the identity positions being ascribed to self and other. However, as authors variously emphasize how far identity is negotiated between people, on the one hand, and how far it is determined by prevailing discourses and local ideational notions of who people are, on the other, we are arguably no closer to understanding how identity work gets done in everyday organizational talk. To address this issue we present a conceptualisation of identity work that contrasts these two aspects. Through an analysis of talk in a mundane, everyday, meeting we identify and illustrate five prevalent identity work forms. Taken together, these forms and the conceptualisation represent an important first-step towards developing a more nuanced understanding of the different ways in which people's identities are engaged in, reproduced through, and altered by their participation in their everyday routine organizing practices

Dominant, masculinised constructions of managerial identities are associated with expectations of being in control and strong, and not with vulnerability. Managers may conceal vulnerability and protect themselves through defensive identity work, and such responses may close down learning opportunities. We reconceptualise vulnerability and recognise its value for managerial identity and learning by drawing upon Butler’s theory of vulnerability. Analysing interviews with middle and senior managers and presenting our own reflexive learning, we address a lack of empirical accounts of managerial vulnerability. We offer three processes of relational vulnerability: (1) recognising and claiming vulnerability, (2) developing social support to share vulnerability with trusted others, and (3) recognising alternative ways of conceptualising and responding to vulnerability. Rather than defensiveness in the face of vulnerability constructed as weakness, the value of vulnerability lies in its openness and its generative capacity for alternative ways of managerial being and learning.

Although learning as a dialogic process involving critical self-reflexivity is well recognized, enacting management learning in and through research dialogue with participants has been given limited attention. This article fuses, from related research, relational social constructionist understandings of knowing, learning and research to produce a framework of research as a dialogic process of learning. The framework emphasizes the importance of being 'struck' for participant-centred self-reflexivity and management learning. The framework is illustrated by drawing on empirical material from a research project involving five managers' participation in a set of three research interviews. The research highlights the temporal and historical features of being 'struck' and the effect of recall in stimulating self-reflexivity and learning. The article also considers how participants and researchers may seize striking moments by illustrating direct and indirect ways of talking and acting which signal being 'struck'.

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