Organizing Identity

This book makes a significant contribution to cultural economic approaches to organizational and economic life. Specifically it offers both a survey of the field, as well as a practical guide to doing 'cultural economy'. The text, which builds upon du Gay's earlier work, will engage with a range of debates from cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and management. It brings du Gay's style and originality to bear on the subject of culture and economy, and results in a book that will once more make a solid contribution to cultural studies.

"This book overturns the conventional thinking about organization and identity and puts in its place a wholly new theoretical synthesis. It is not just an extraordinarily incisive commentary on modern life but it is also a key to thinking about identity in new ways which will prove an indispensable guide as we move beyond social constructionism. Remarkable."
- Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Warwick

"I have to say that as usual I find very refreshing Paul du Gay's courageous and unconventional approach, a clarity of vision that I find very appealing."
- Professor Marilyn Strathern, University Of Cambridge

Like many other popular academic terms, identity has been asked to do so much work that it has often ended up doing none at all and, as a consequence, there has been a recent turn away from identity work.

In this book, Paul du Gay moves identity theory in a new direction, offering a distinctive approach to studying how persons - human and non human - are put together or assembled: how their identities are formed. He does through an engagement with a range of work in the social sciences, humanities and in organization studies which privileges the business of description over metaphysical speculation and epochalist assertion.

At the heart of the book is an approach to the material-cultural making up of persons that involves a shift away from general social and cultural accounts concerning the formation of subjectivity and identity towards an understanding of the specific forms of personhood that individuals acquire through their immersion in and subjection to particular normative and technical regimes of conduct.

The book is written for postgraduate students and researchers interested in debates about identity, subjectivity and personhood in a range of disciplines especially those in sociology, social anthropology, geography, and organization and management studies.

Introduction: Identity After The Moment of Theory
The Identity of Persons I
The Identity of Persons II
Which Is the Self in Self-Interest ?
Self-Service
Retail, Shopping and Personhood
Re-Instating an Ethic of Bureaucratic Office
Office, Ethos and Persona in Public Management
The Tyranny of the Epochal
Change , Epochalism and Organizational Casuistry
The Trouble with "Governance"
State, Bureaucracy and Freedom