Week 10 — Identity
Identity is a common theme in my own research, and I’m looking forward to reading what you all have to say on the topic this week. I’m going to focus on the Weick reading in this post, but first a really short overview of what you’ll find in the textbook chapter.
Chapter Summary (super short)
The chapter is about identity and difference and their roles in organizational life. The book proposes 4 approaches to understanding identity and difference:
- organizational practices and performances — products of identity regulation and identity work, organizations offer resources and boundaries for their members to construct identities
- essential or fixed aspects of the self — identities are determined for us by some feature of ourselves or our situation
- organizational features that influence members — organizations also have identities, and those identities influence what their members are able, encouraged, and willing to do
- products of social and popular narratives — media that we consume (e.g., films, books) influence the meanings we assign ourselves
These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive and may not be an exhaustive list. A straightforward list like this hides a few important features of identity, most notably its multiplicity and/or intersectionality. By that I mean that each of us (whether individuals or organizations) hold multiple identities simultaneous, and something about the intersection of those identities (e.g., student, friend, person of color) has consequences for our actions and how we and others make sense of ourselves. For me, the intersections of the identities mom, scholar, and queer are often difficult territory — what’s best for my family, my job, and my community are not always the same thing. You could write in your blog post about an intersectionality that impacts you.
Weick’s take on the Mann Gulch disaster
We’ve encountered Karl Weick before when we were introduced to his theory of sense-making. You’ll recall that his main assumption is that people act first and later attempt to explain the meaning of those actions. In the reading for this week, Weick examines the Mann Gulch wildfire disaster in attempts to understand how organizations unravel. The 15 smokejumpers who were deployed to suppress the fire had never worked together as a team, had an ambiguous authority structure, and expected a familiar type of fire. When they encountered a fire much hotter and bigger than they had experience fighting, and without a clearly defined role structure or established trust to fall back on, the men were unable to understand their situation in a way that allowed them to save their lives. They lacked radio or other devices that would enable them to communicate with one another, and their leader did not share additional information he had about the intensity of the fire or the winds near it. For our purposes this week, his discussion of role structures and tools are most salient.
The concept of role is interesting in an identity discussion because it usually refers to a specific identity that both the person who holds it and those around her recognize. In the case of the Mann Gulch firefighters, the leader’s role was usually occupied by foreman Wagner. His behaviors in that role set the tone for the team — eating dinner signals something about the severity of the fire, starting a fire and telling them to “drop their tools” confuses the firefighters. Their position in the firefighting organization (rank-and-file) and identities as fire-fighters and “professional adventurers” encourage them to follow their leader, to use special resources available to firefighters, and to think like a firefighter.
When the leader role becomes confused (by Dogde, Hellman, and Navon) or confusing (mostly by Dodge), the firefighters are left without a reference for their organizational identity. They are no longer able to use their relative position in the hierarchy to tell them what to do — their leader is either missing or his commands don’t seem to make sense, so they are no longer followers. What kind of leader tells you to jump into a fire? At that point, the team started to break down. Then, when they start turning away from the fire and are told to drop their tools, the last markers of their identity as firefighters are threatened. As Weick says, “If the retreating people are then also told to discard the very things [their tools] that are their reason for being there in the first place [to fight a fire], then the moment quickly turns existential” (p. 637; [text in brackets is mine]). Here we have an example of a life-threatening identity crisis. Firefighters don’t normally retreat from fires; they don’t usually start fires (as Dodge did), and they certainly don’t discard their tools.
So, on the run, faced with the apparent collapse of their team, and the prospect of losing their tools, the firefighters become not a team of firefighters but endangered individuals. Their inability to reconcile these situational changes and their identity as firefighters literally killed many of them. Those who survived were able to make salient other aspects of their firefighter identities — experience and knowledge (in Dodge’s case), geographic awareness and teamwork (in Sallee and Rumsey’s case). Dodge knew that once burned, the area he lit on fire would not light again, providing a small place for his team within the larger fire. His teammates were unable to understand his actions (lighting a fire) because they were already confused by their retreat and misunderstanding of the severity and behavior of the fire. Sallee and Rumsey were somehow able to recognize an alternate escape route that was either invisible or looked unavailable to the others.
Because the group had never worked together before, their identity as an organization was fragile and was unable to withstand the strain of the Mann Gulch circumstances. What other examples of identity fragility can you think of? When might strong, resident identities be as dangerous a new, fragile ones?
Ideas for your blog post
- What’s your typical response when someone asks you, “tell me a little about yourself”? You’ve probably heard this during an interview or on the first day of class, maybe even on a date. Analyze your response as a outsider. What does your response say about you? What sense making processes are evident in your answer?
- Find an example of a personal or organizational brand meltdown and describe how the person or organization used different elements of identity to construct the brand and how the meltdown undermined the brand. Here are some ideas to get you started: Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong, The Duggars, Subway and Jared Fogle.
- What about an identity shift in an organization? Analyze a time when a brand changed its identity — what led to the change, and how was it accomplished? Some ideas to get started: Freeform (formerly ABC Family), the Republican or Democratic Party (historically, not just this election cycle), Pabst Blue Ribbon.
- Have you experience an identity-threatening experience? It need not be life-threatening like the Mann Gulch disaster. How did you respond? How did you make sense of yourself when your identity was being challenged (whether by you or by others or by your circumstance)?
