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Research article
First published March 2007

`Ethics' as a discursive resource for identity work

Martin Kornberger and Andrew D. BrownView all authors and affiliations
Volume 60, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726707076692

Abstract

This article analyses how participants in a not-for-profit service organization (the `Incubator') drew on understandings of 'ethics' in order to make sense of their individual and collective selves. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and notions of ethics are conceived as discursive resources on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their self and organizational narratives. We show how conceptions of ethics were a rich vein on which organizational members drew to elaborate narratives that legitimated particular modes of working and which cohered an otherwise quite disparate community of individuals. The research contribution of this article is twofold. First, we discuss how a discourse focused on ethics may be a strategic resource for identity work. Second, we analyse how talk and writing about issues of ethics are implicated in relations of power and ongoing struggles for control over organizations conceived as discursive spaces. In so doing, this article advances our understanding of ethics as discursively complex constructions, which require the micro-analysis of language practices in situated contexts for action.

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1.
1 `The Incubator' is a pseudonym.
2.
2 In order to preserve anonymity we are unable to specify the countries in which the Incubator operated.

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Published In

Volume 60, Issue 3
Pages: 497 - 518
Article first published: March 2007
Issue published: March 2007

Keywords

  1. discursive resource
  2. ethics
  3. identity work
  4. not-for-profit organization
  5. power
  6. resistance

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Martin Kornberger
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia [email protected]
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Andrew D. Brown
University of Bath, UK,[email protected]
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