Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation

Abstract

This article describes how people adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves that serve as trials for possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities. Qualitative data collected from professionals in transition to more senior roles reveal that adaptation involves three basic tasks: (1) observing role models to identify potential identities, (2) experimenting with provisional selves, and (3) evaluating experiments against internal standards and external feedback. Choices within tasks are guided by an evolving repertory that includes images about the kind of professional one might become and the styles, skills, attitudes, and routines available to the person for constructing those identities. A conceptual framework is proposed in which individual and situational factors influence adaptation behaviors indirectly by shaping the repertory of possibilities that guides selfconstruction.To learn how to make smart noises about money, I studied the two best Salomon salesmen I knew.... My training amounted to absorbing and synthesizing their attitudes and skills.... Dash and Alexander were as opposite as individuals as their respective choice of pseudonyms suggests, and their respective skills differed also.... The luckiest thing that happened to me during the period I spent at Salomon Brothers was having Alexander take me into his confidence.... Thinking and sounding like Alexander were the next best thing to being genuinely talented, which I wasn't.... It reminded me of learning a foreign language. It all seems strange at first. Then, one day, you catch yourself thinking in the language. Suddenly, words you never realized you knew are at your disposal. Finally, you dream in the language. -(Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker, 1989: 172-175). The socialization of newcomers to firms and roles has been a topic of great interest to organizational scholars (e.g., Becker and Carper, 1956; Louis, 1980; Oakes, Townley, and Cooper, 1998). As Michael Lewis's story illustrates, in assuming new roles, people must not only acquire new skills but also adopt the social norms and rules that govern how they should conduct themselves (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979). These display rules (Sutton, 1991) include a variety of symbolic elements such as the "appropriate mannerisms, attitudes, and social rituals" (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979: 226). Failure to convey impressions or images that are consistent with one's social role not only diminishes one's effectiveness in that role but may also cause the individual to lose the right to enact the role (Goffman, 1959; Leary and Kowalski, 1990). Acting the part; in contrast, facilitates passage through a firm's inclusion boundaries (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979) and gradually produces the internalization of corresponding identities (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934; Goffman, 1959). Understanding the social and psychological processes by which people construct or modify their professional image and identity thus becomes important. 764/Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (1999): 764-791 pe...

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