For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, while extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work.Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies (idealizing, reframing, and distancing) that are bound-up in junior architects' emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects' efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities.

In this article we explore what happens in professional formation when the locus of its meaning, as it has been formed, is increasingly contradicted by professional practice.Specifically, we explore the problematic nature of architects' professional identity that is constituted in terms of the primacy of design aesthetics, in contexts where practice denies this identification. We highlight the tensions between identity and practices and suggest that while architects' traditional self-identification enables perpetuation of the profession's identity, it challenges the profession's standing in its relations with other professions and occupations. We refer to this as a paradox of identity. Although much has been written about the profound changes occurring in professional practices and professional jurisdictions, scant attention has been given to the ways in which professionals shape their identities in the context of changing practices. We conducted a year-long ethnography of contemporary architects engaged in large and complex projects in order to examine both the architects' and the profession's identity. Our contributions are threefold. First, we conceptualize misalignments between professional identity and professional practice as identity paradox that has consequences for identity work among professionals. Second, we highlight how professional identity construction is organized around competing and paradoxical identification. Third, the paper contributes to sociological studies of architecture by generating insights about the identity work of architects engaged in large multi-organizational projects.

Sydney Business School. Trained as both an engineer and a social scientist, his research focuses on issues of strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation with a special interest in design thinking, emerging technologies, and the future of work. His research is industry involved and applied, looking at how organizations and managers navigate complex business environments at the intersection of strategy, design and technology. His work has been published widely in academic journals, books and industry reports.

In this article, we explore how time and temporality shape the identities of early career researchers as they learn to become academics. We engage in a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on how our shared identities as middle-class women and our divergences in age, ethnicity, familial status and sexuality shaped our embodied experiences of becoming academics. Drawing on the concept of queer time, we reconceptualise the becoming of newcomers as they learn (or do not learn) to belong to academia. We illustrate how queer time interrupts normative ideas of newcomer learning as progress, development and reproduction. We suggest that learning may alternatively be understood as ‘moments of friction’ and ‘moments of opportunity’ in which newcomers to the academy feel out of step, out of place and out of time. We conceptualise these moments as simultaneously painful yet productive of possibilities for learning to become an academic, differently.

Large-scale construction projects increasingly have powerful and knowledgeable clients as project owners with whom professionals, such as architects, must interact. In such contexts, clients may have a significant impact on the constitution of a coherent and stable professional identity. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 architects across four large multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs) located in Sydney, Australia, supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article explores how architects constitute their identity in interactions with clients. The findings led us to conceptualize professional-client interactions in terms of two overarching discursive strategies deployed by architects in attempts to manage clients that are powerful and knowledgeable: best for client and best for project. We illustrate the anxieties that architects experience and suggest that attempts to secure professional identity may result in (re)producing an enduring sense of anxiety with unintended consequences for project outcomes and organizational performance.