Organization

The construction, performance, and regulation of identities in the online world have deep implications for individuals, organizations, and society, particularly as digital technologies become increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives. In the last decades, analyses of online identities’ processes have moved from the exploration of identity play, through identity performance, toward a growing identity regulation through algorithmic management and the monetization of personal data. Despite a significant tradition of critical management and organization studies literature on identity, online identities have to date received only scant attention. This Special Issue explores what critical management and organization studies can contribute to research on online identities. Drawing on empirical analysis of virtual forums, social media, and platforms, the six papers included here highlight the struggles that accompany identity processes in the online environment and their implications for workers, activists, and other organized selves. In this introduction, we contextualize these contributions with reference to online identities studies and metaphors of the internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. We comment on the contributions they make relating to the role of the body, and individual and collective dynamics in online identities processes. Following this, we propose critical ways forward concerning new forms of digital work, multiphrenic context collapse, and online references and sources of identity. We invite researchers to not only critically explore but also to engage with this brave new world that increasingly shapes our individual and collective selves.

For LGBQ employees, the disclosure and management of sexual identity in the workplace are likely to cause additional identity work. In this paper, we explore how such identity work is undertaken collectively by gays and lesbians on internet forums. Drawing on the literature on discursive identity work and social media affordances, we conduct a netnographic study of two internet forums, and analyse the ways in which these forums enable gay and lesbian employees’ identity work and guide their identity management processes. Overall, our study advances knowledge on sexual identity disclosure and management in three main ways. First, by shifting the focus from the identity disclosure accounts of individual gay and lesbian employees to online peer discussions around the topic, it sheds light on the broader context of identity management beyond the workplace. Second, our findings elucidate particular types of collaborative identity work – consulting, legitimating and questioning identity work – enabled by the affordance of interactivity of internet forums that inform and guide gays and lesbians’ identity management practices in organisations. Third, we identify and elaborate on specific discursive identity threats – the ‘falsehood’, ‘incoherence’, ‘exaggeration’ and ‘outdatedness’ of identity – which gay and lesbian employees are likely to encounter when reflecting on and performing specific identity management strategies, such as concealing or revealing their sexual orientation at work.

This paper explores how individuals living within high-stakes precarious categories navigate their identity within online spaces. Using Membership Categorisation Analysis, we investigate how categorical inferences are indexed by those individuals within online biosocial communities in everyday speech, as part of their construction of identities. More specifically, we analyse online interactions of women who have been identified as carrying a BRCA gene mutation in an online biosocial community. Our findings show how (1) the online spaces participate in constituting and sustaining a form of collective responsibility, where those who are within a high-stakes precarious identity category are expected to not only support and educate each other, but also monitor the compliance to category predicates, and (2) the tensions and conflict in making sense of, belonging to, resisting and sustaining a category membership often occur when there are clashes with the socio-moral order. Overall, this paper’s contributions are twofold, first, methodologically, the use of Membership Categorisation Analysis provides an insightful analytic approach to identities, online communities and their organisation. Second, the emerging tensions identified provide insight into the complex ways in which online communities offer a forum in managing precarious identity as individual and collective life intersect.

Some occupations are subject to more complex identity work processes than others. This rings true for those professional endeavours that are relatively poorly known and that cannot rely on institutions as a reference for identification, such as digital nomadism. Digital nomads can broadly be defined as professionals who embrace extreme forms of mobile work to combine their interest in travel with the possibility to work remotely. Building on a two-stage data collection process, this paper proposes a typology that characterises four archetypes of digital nomad lifestyle promoters’ narratives found online and show how these online narratives play a role in the process of identity work of other digital nomads. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we show that while the archetypes act as an important online identity regulatory force, they do so through dis-identification. Second, we explain how identity work for digital nomads involves evaluating discursively available subjectivities and propose a three-step reflexive process that entails (i) interpreting, (ii) dis-identifying and (iii) contextualising. We contend that our findings extend beyond the specific case of digital nomads and shed light onto the intricacies of work identity for ‘new’ occupations that are romanticised and monetised through social media and beyond.

Our study examines collective identity development in the early stages of a social movement as it narratively unfolded on Twitter during the 2019 October revolution in Lebanon. Based on a sample extraction of Twitter content from the first month of the revolution and using both thematic and narrative analyses, our study uncovers an entangled temporality where past, present and future strands of narrative time intervene in online identity narratives. Disentangling these digital narratives enabled us to identify three temporal-thematic categories that outline the contours of the emergent online identity: a revisited narrative past evoking collective nostalgia, a disruptive narrative present creating an urgent “presence in the now,” and a prefigurative narrative future that allows online members to collectively re-imagine and co-create their collective selfhood. Taken together, these findings support better understandings of collective identity emergence in digitally-mediated social movements in three different ways. First, building on the organizational literature on temporality in collective identity formation, we highlight how temporal narratives online support and accelerate a nascent collective identity through their immediacy and global reach. Second, by approaching narrated time theoretically and not chronologically, we address recent calls that challenge linear temporal narratives. We highlight how entangled temporality contributes to the emergence of a social movement’s online collective identity. Ultimately, from a methodological perspective, we offer an approach for “disentangling” digital temporality and propose (ante)narrative theory as a useful interpretive lens for better apprehending identity-relevant social media content.

The present study examined how identity is affectively organized online in an online men’s rights community, responding to calls to explore how sites like Reddit serve as spaces that host and support varied misogynist language and communities. We utilized scholarship of affective organizing and communicative constitution of organizations to study the identity construction through the social and communicative processes that facilitate and limit online communication. We analyzed 35,643 comments from a popular men’s rights community to interrogate how affective and gendered organizing contributed to identity construction using text mining, semantic network analyses, and qualitative analyses. Our findings revealed that affect was not merely prominent in the forum but served as a constitutive means through which the members of the men’s rights community constructed their identity individually and within their Reddit community. We advance an affect-centered approach within organizational communication scholarship, theorizing how masculinity is constituted through the interplay of affective contradictions, affective sensemaking, and affective identification.

This paper aims to address the dark side perspective on digital control and surveillance by emphasizing the affective grip of ideological control, namely the process that silently ensures the subjugation of digital labour, and which keeps the ‘unexpectedness’ of algorithmic practices at bay: that is, the propensity of users to contest digital prescriptions. In particular, the theoretical contribution of this paper is to combine Labour Process with psychoanalytically-informed, post-structuralist theory, in order to connect to, and further our understanding of, how and why digital workers assent to, or oppose, the interpellations of algorithmic ideology at work. To illustrate the operation of affective control in the Platform Economy, the emblematic example of ride-hailing platforms, such as Uber, and their algorithmic management, is revisited. Thus, the empirical section describes the way drivers are glued to the algorithm (e.g. for one more fare, or for the next surge pricing) in a way that prevents them, although not always, from considering genuine resistance to management. Finally, the paper discusses the central place of ideological fantasy and cynical enjoyment in the Platform Economy, as well as the ethical implications of the study.

In this essay, we draw on a personal experience of sexist cyberbullying unleashed, on social media, against one of our academic papers, to act up against increasing instances of cybersexism, in the academy. Reading our experience in the context of feminist insights on impurity and abjection, we assert the need to dismantle cybersexism targeting non-conforming academic knowledge, namely feminist. We also discuss the potentials of the cyberspace to provide opportunities for communal solidarity, as a source of empowerment for targets of academic cybersexism. Writing this text is an activist expression of voice and resistance, whereby we call our community to collective action and increased institutional support against sexism in academia, particularly in online spaces.

This article addresses feminist solidarity between a daughter and a mother in academia. We are respectively a PhD student and aspirant early career academic, and a senior academic, both identifying as feminists and engaging in forms of activism to improve gender equality. We take an autoethnographical approach, drawing from vignettes and conversational dialogues, focusing on feminist perspectives, activism, our contested identities, fears and hopes. We reflect on the challenges of living feminist lives whilst working in gendered university institutions and highlight strategies to enact feminism whilst trying to progress and maintain an academic career at different positions on the career spectrum. Our contribution is to highlight differential experiences and understandings of academic activism between daughter and mother, early-career academics and senior leaders, in order to enhance mutual understanding and action on feminist solidarity and praxis in the academy.

The COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world since the end of 2019 has been felt most immediately both as a health crisis and an economic, social and political crisis. Secondary impacts of social distancing and lockdown in many countries have put strains on people’s capacities to provide essential food and medicines for themselves and their families. In response, outside of centralised government and voluntary sector frameworks, local mutual aid groups have emerged around the world as a primary site of community resilience. Given mutual aid’s strong links to the anarchist political tradition, for example in its identification by Kropotkin as a factor in evolution, this article suggests that these new mutual aid groups can be understood best through the related concept of self-organisation. Tying anarchist approaches to mutual aid and self-organisation together, it is argued that cybernetics and Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) offer useful tools in helping both academic analysis and on-the-ground practice assess and improve the effectiveness of mutual aid in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis. The article offers a qualitative thematic analysis of anarchist and related texts published during the pandemic that reflect on mutual aid practice. In doing so, it highlights some of the challenges and tensions such self-organised mutual aid practice might face and proposes a participatory research agenda drawing on Beer’s VSM.