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The Work-Force (People)
In this section, we focus on people, the self, diverse individuals and fluctuating identities colliding and collaborating on the job. We will address the key issues of pluralism, of individual autonomy, of hybrid selves, protean and fluctuating identities, of group and collective identities such as race, gender, sexuality, age or ethnicity. We will distinguish between reification and alienation as we seek to further shed light on the meaning of the word diversity. In that, we will explore primary and supporting identities within an understanding of reactive vs. proactive identity formation at work.
New
trends in society at the individual level (self -identity) are also changing. Businesses experience the individual in multiple ways, from the employee to customers and suppliers. One of many set of changes and transitions affecting employee identities and personalities is the de-linking of marriage, family, heterosexuality and sexual expression. HR and diversity practitioners need be especially cognizant of these self-identity trends.
Self
identity is when one understands the self in terms of one’s biography, to know
what one is doing and why, to be a self-reflexive project. The less
tradition and the more choices one has in post-modernity, the more individuals
have to negotiate lifestyles among a diversity of options. Habermas makes the
following arguments in the Post-National Constellation (2001): The
post-modern period is one of a reckless monetarization of private life
(everything is up for sale) that poses a growing risk for the individual
without resources. We feel caught between great existential paradoxes. For
example, the moldability of careers (the end of the industrial job for life)
leaves many with a heightened sense of job insecurity and unemployment risk.
The individualization of possible life projects (who else do you want to
be as you continue to grow up?) leads to a compulsory mobility (moving
from office to office, city to city, position to position) and to a lack of durable
social ties. The pluralization of lifestyles leads to a sense of fragmentation
and a loss of social cohesion. Postmodernism’s flight to freedom is experienced
as a flight into uncertainty and fear. More and more, industrialized societies
are becoming sexually liberated supermarkets of personal fantasies, where we
consume each other’s identities rather than reproduce identities from within
ourselves, generating new emerging persona types such as the white rap artist Eminem,
the hip hop gangsta, the whigger, or the Madonna-like sex commodity. These
identities are more complex, less secure, more adaptive, yet more anxious. In
the developed post-industrial world, we construct a growing plurality of
identities that undermines much of the former nuclear family’s and
nation-states’ role in creating national identities.
Unlike
above, for the majority (80+% of the world’s population) who live outside of
the rich nodal points of the information economy, the search for meaning takes
place, then, in the reconstruction of defensive identities with their fixed
principles (“my Islam/Christianity/Judaism, my nation, my group, my race”,
etc). It is self-construction born of communal resistance to globalization and
the anxieties of a world spinning out of (their) control and understanding.
Defensive identities can ossify into fundamentalist identities.
HYBRIDITY, CREATIVITY & ENCHANTMENT
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