Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an organizational response, based on the critical literature on top-down identity regulation, and an individual response, based on the positive literature on bottom-up identity construction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival data from three Indian information technology (IT) offshore outsourcing firms, we examine how organizational and individual identity processes work in tandem to address this threat. We find that firms do not resolve this threat by regulating employee identity directly as they claim, but instead provide workers with an organizational toolkit—a set of organizationally available cultural resources (e.g., frames and stories) and political resources (e.g., policies and procedures) that workers use selectively and strategically to construct positive identities. By bringing a toolkit perspective to identity processes, we contribute to theory and research on cross-level identity linkages, the strategic nature of identity processes, and the local context of global identity
Combining primary survey data collected from a probability sample of U.S. advertising agencies and semi-structured interviews with advertising practitioners, I tested a novel link from class background to creative employment through a cultural process of matching people to jobs. Qualitative data show that shared culture, specifically ''omnivorous''-diverse and inclusive-taste and socialization, signals creative potential to employers and motivates people to pursue creative positions. Structural equation modeling reveals that omnivorous socialization and taste mediate the relationship between class background and creative employment: when middle-class parents expose their children to diverse leisure activities, this exposure has a positive indirect effect on creative employment. It may not actually make those children more creative, but such exposure makes them more likely to enter fields in which they will be viewed as creative. The findings highlight a new direction for research on creativity, contribute to the debate on the role of cultural capital in occupational attainment, and extend knowledge on the early origins of career choice.
Conflict in creative work is sometimes thought to emanate from the contentious personalities of creative workers. Drawing on several months of ethnographic field work at an advertising agency and semi-structured interviews with advertising professionals, I propose an alternate explanation for this antagonism, grounded in creative workers' and their market-oriented colleagues' competing definitions of good work. As an illustration of this larger struggle, I focus on the tension that arises during creative assessment. I find that while creative workers designate ideas as "creative" based on novelty and relevance, not all sources of novelty and relevance are considered legitimate. Sources that originate from outside their professional domain are dismissed as not novel (e.g., "overused") or irrelevant (e.g., "constraints"). Consequently, I suggest that creative assessment can be understood as a form of professional boundary work, a conceptualization with implications for our understanding of conflict in the creative workplace and the evaluation of creativity more generally.their helpful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. Earlier versions of this article were presented
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