On Receiving Asylum Seekers: Identity working as a process of material-discursive interpellation

Abstract

This paper responds to recent calls to study how materiality is implicated in the process of subject positioning by grounding itself in a relational and performative ontology. By situating our analysis in Barad’s post-humanist view of discourse as material-discursive practice, and by drawing on the concepts of interpellation and hailing, we show how material-discursive practices at three different service sites of the Swedish Migration Board are profoundly constitutive of the manner in which asylum seekers and officers become hailed into various subject positions. In so doing, our study contributes to the development of a post-humanist understanding of how subject positions are enacted and governed within organizations. More precisely, we move beyond the conception of the intentional human and the non-intentional non-human in order to foreground the manner in which mundane material-discursive practices always and already condition (or govern) the possibilities for subjects (and objects) to be and to act, specifically and immanently. Thus we suggest that matter and soul are intertwined in ways that make their separation less convincing, if tenable at all.

Observing Materiality in Organizations

“…These techniques are commonly used in ethnography, which as a research method is well-recognized in all positivist, interpretive, and constructivist perspectives (Reeves Sanday, 1983;Yanow, 2012). For example, ethnographic techniques have been used in Zuzul's (2019) research on boundary objects as generators of conflict in an objectified approach; in Stigliani and Ravasi's (2018) research on aesthetic knowledge using Gioia's interpretive framework (e.g., Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013), and in the posthumanist research by Hultin and Introna (2019) on the impact of work environment on identity work.…”

Advancing a Baradian perspective on the field of identity work

“…In this article, I pick up on this invitation to further explore how the different resources at play contribute to the construction of identities. In this way, I aim to propose a conceptualization that goes beyond the ways in which different discursive elements influence processes of identity construction (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004) and echo extant literature that enables a performative perspective on discourse and materiality (Bergström & Knights, 2006;Harding et al, 2017;Hultin & Introna, 2019), and thus a more fluid understanding of agency, to the study of identity work. In doing so, I also draw upon insights from the field of organizational discourse studies (this will be described in the following section), and the analysis will demonstrate how discourse-materiality relationships are made present and agentic and elucidate the performativity, or materialization, of identities.…”

“…Thomas & Davies, 2005;Bergström & Knights, 2006;Ainsworth, Grant, & Iedema, 2009;Plotnikof, 2016), in this article, I propose to push this type of inquiry even further. In doing so, I consider discourse and materiality to be identity-ingredients/resources, constituted through each other, and thus transcending entity perspectives of discourse and materiality as ontologically separable elements (Hultin & Introna, 2019). This means that the relationship between multiple discursive-material and embodied resources is foregrounded and, specifically, I attend to the resources that can be said to produce, or perform, identity work.…”

“…This article, then, specifically seeks to contribute to processual and performative perspectives within identity scholarship (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002;Harding et al, 2017;Hultin & Introna, 2019) and furthermore responds to invitations (Alvesson et al, 2008) to push a research agenda on the co-constitutive 'play' between the diverse discursive-material resources in identity work. I commence by reviewing the literature on identity work within critical management and organization studies, touching only briefly on the various influences on conceptualizing identity, and connect this literature to perspectives on discourse-materiality relationship.…”

The negotiated order and electronic patient records: A sociomaterial perspective

“…Negotiated order; sociomateriality; social capital; electronic patient records; computerised physician order entry system; sociomaterial capital have had the emergence of what has become known as sociomateriality Scott (2008, 2013). In this work, the social and the material are co-constitutive, or intra-actional, which leads us to propose that including the more-than-human requires us to reconsider our existing understandings of the relationally enacted (re)negotiated order, and how it is accomplished in daily work practice (see also Hultin and Introna, 2018;Introna, 2013).…”