Identities, Digital Nomads and Liquid Modernity

Sumati Ahuja

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Natalia Nikolova

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Stewart Clegg

University of Technology Sydney, Australia&

Nova School of Business and Economics, Lisboa, Portugal

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Identities, Digital Nomads and Liquid Modernity

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the identity implications for people who inhabit the liquid world of organizations. We draw upon Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity and suggest that traditional conceptions may constrain new ways of thinking about identity and identity tensions in increasingly liquidly modern organizational contexts. We focus on literature that discusses identity-tensions in the workplace and the responses of individuals as they seek to negotiate and/or manage these tensions. In so doing, we draw attention to how the nature of liquid modernity challenges existing conceptions of identity work and raise issues and questions for further research.

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Introduction

At the dawn of the epoch of the capitalist revolution Marx and Engels (1848) noted that it

meant the continuous revolutionizing of production, which Schumpeter (2006) later termed

creative destruction, producing a context of ‘everlasting uncertainty’ (Dow and Lafferty,

1998). Today, that uncertainty stretches as far as many young eyes can see: the immediate

future looks precarious and itinerant for those that are less advantaged, as they chase what

opportunities may be on offer while for those more privileged by higher education an

immediate future of debt and a continuation of the student lifestyle, beckons (Harris, 2018).

In such conditions, questions of secure identity may be somewhat problematic.

The concept of identity addresses fundamental questions such as ‘who am I?’ and ‘how

should I act?’ (Coupland and Brown, 2012: 1; Alvesson et al., 2008; Alvesson, 2000).

Identity is a central lens that individuals use to make sense of and enact their environments

(Lepisto et al., 2015; Barbour and Lammers, 2015). The workplace is an evident choice for

the study of identity since people spend much of their adult life working in organizations.

While performing work, people are necessarily engaged in reproducing and transforming

identities (Mallet and Wapshott, 2012; Wright et al., 2012). From a discursive perspective,

identities are constituted through language use (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2004; Brown, 2015;

Coupland, 2001; Fournier, 1998) and (re)produced in complex social interactions (Brown,

2018). Researchers argue that people strategically draw upon an array of discursive

resources defined as ‘concepts, expressions, or other linguistic devices drawn from

practices and texts, that explain action while also providing a horizon for future practice’

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(Kuhn, 2009: 684) in a bid to author ‘preferred versions’ of their selves (Brown and

Coupland, 2015: 1331). They do so because they are ‘motivated by the desire to construct

an identity that is privately and/or publicly evaluated as worthwhile or significant in some

way’ (Dutton et al., 2010: 267). In this view, workers are ‘far from passive in the face of

discursive pressures’ (Watson, 2008: 125). Sveningsson and Alvesson (2003: 1164) for

instance, show how managers actively draw on various available discourses as they seek to

create a coherent ‘sense of self’. Of particular note is that positively construed work

identities affirm individuals’ own self-concept to guide action (Ashforth et al., 2008),

promote motivation (Ellemers et al., 2004) and improve worker well-being (Grant et al.,

2014; Horton et al., 2014).

People actively construct work, professional and/or occupational identities in organizational

settings (Van Maanen, 2010) as they strive to be ‘able to exercise creative potential within

the constraints imposed by social structures’ (Coupland et al., 2008: 331). By focusing on

identity construction in situated social contexts the importance of ‘identity work’ is

highlighted. Identity work is the process of ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening

or revising the constructions [of self-identity] that are productive of a precarious sense of

coherence and distinctiveness’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 626). According to Brown

(2017: 297) identity work is a key explanatory concept because it emphasises ‘the

experience of agency’ (Gecas, 1986: 140, emphasis in original). Identity requires

individuals to engage in ‘repeated work to be sustained’ (Anteby, 2008: 203) since ‘identity

is a social product that requires validation and anchoring in the (relatively) stable social

world’ (Pagis, 2016: 1084).

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Identity work is conceptualized as a coping mechanism that is triggered by changing

professional and organizational contexts (McGivern et al., 2015; Kreiner et al., 2006;

Chreim et al., 2007; Reay et al., 2017; Pratt et al., 2006). Although individuals actively

construct versions of workplace identity in a bid to resolve such tensions (Wright et al.,

2012), identity work is also shaped by complex social interactions with others – identity

regulation. As such, identities are both disciplined and/or resisted (Alvesson and Willmott,

2002; Thomas and Davies, 2005; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009; Brown et al., 2010) and

the ‘constitution of identity serves as a locus of control for individuals within contemporary

organizations’ (Bardon et al., 2012: 352).

The stable anchor points for constructing one’s identity are, however, being replaced by

constantly changing structures, norms, processes and discourses. With the advent of what

Bauman termed ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2013), changes in technology (Zuboff, 1988),

employment relations (Osterman, 2014), and authority structures (Barker, 1993) are

transforming roles, responsibilities, and interactions in organizations. What it means to

work continues to change as accountability systems (Suddaby et al., 2009), work

organization (Muzio and Ackroyd, 2005), managerial roles (Thomas and Hewitt, 2011),

and technology use (Barrett et al., 2012; Turco, 2016) evolve. The ongoing dynamics in

these rapidly changing, liquid workplaces shape identity and identity work in new ways. In

this chapter, we discuss how the nature of identity is changing under liquidly modern

conditions and consider the implications of these changing conditions for individuals in

their attempts to manage their workplace identities. We then outline directions for future

research.

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From modern to liquid life

The presentation of self in everyday life takes place in many arenas, on many stages, with

different audiences (Goffman, 1959). Notions of identity stability (that is, stable views of

who we are) and identity coherence, understood as ‘unified versions of self’, are becoming

decoupled as life becomes more liquid. In pre-modern society, identity was a performance

invariably scrutinized by lifelong companions as life was lived in the gaze of the close

community. With the advent of modernity and its mobility, as bodies became more able to

move from spaces in which they were known to spaces in which they were not, the

performative elements of identity became more central. One could project, to audiences

unaware of one’s past identity, the presentation of being something other than that which

one had been known to have been in the sight of the limited audiences of pre-modern

communities. Still, identity for most people was anchored in spatial proximities of family

and work life: the modern person was expected to create a career and a career was largely

an organizational artefact, as Weber (1978) elaborated. Modern man was organizational

man (Whyte, 1956) and many modern women hardly expected a career in the organization;

to do so would have been in breach of both norms and in some cases, regulations

(http://www.striking-women.org/module/women-and-work/post-world-war-ii-1946-1970).

The zenith of modern organizations had already passed by 1990 when Bennet (1990) wrote

about The Death of the Organization Man. The rise of a bureaucratic managerial class was

a phenomenon of the high period of modernity, in the post-World War Two world,

especially in America. As she notes, corporations hired middle managers at an

unprecedented rate through the 1960s and 1970s, with the pattern shifting dramatically after

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the emergence of neo-liberalism in the 1980s. At roughly the same time that public sectors

were being urged to abandon bureaucracy and adopt private sector efficiencies, the decline

of bureaucratic corporations was being charted by Davis (2016), who noted that the number

of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between 1996 and 2012.

These corporations were, as he says, once an integral part of building the middle class,

offering millions of people a strong and stable identity based on lifetime employment, a

stable career path, health insurance and retirement pensions – the civil benefits of well-

designed bureaucracies – the latter two especially important in a non-social democratic

society with minimal citizenship rights, such as the United States. Many famous corporate

names from the past have become bankrupt and those that survive mostly employ a lot less

people than was the case. Davis (2016) argues this decline in corporate jobs is a root cause

of contemporary income inequality as well-paid jobs in career bureaucracies with clear

routes to promotion were eviscerated. By the late 1980s modernity was fading and with it

dreams of a career as an organization man or even, towards the latter end of this period of

modernity, woman (Kanter, 1977). One consequence is that identity now is no longer so

publicly constrained by past performativity: audiences change as jobs change and

opportunities for new identity projections present themselves.

For those professionals that remained within an organizational world, albeit one that was

changing with a rapidity scarcely imaginable in the 1950s, there are opportunities and

‘occasions when the many diverse, competing resources available to individuals, are so

intense that contrasting perspectives are incorporated into accounts of the self’ (Clarke et

al., 2009: 341). For example, professionals such as doctors working in National Health

Services (NHS) are becoming ‘hybrid workers’, simultaneously professionals, bureaucrats

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and enterprising entrepreneurial subjects creatively using budgeted resources (cf. Bardon et

al., 2012). Indeed, contemporary organizations that flourished in the liquid times of post-

modernity increasingly became ‘hybrid settings’ that presented significant opportunities for

individuals’ creativity in performing their ongoing sense of self. Doctors became managers;

academics were urged to be entrepreneurs and some entrepreneurs even became celebrities.

This has broader implications for organizations because ‘[w]hen work identities are highly

valued, strong, salient and held in common by numerous colleagues in close proximity

[such as prototypical professionals – doctors and lawyers], management becomes in

varying ways problematic’ (Van Maanen, 2010: 4). Management thrives on plastic identity,

on malleability that was often projected as being in conflict with the established

professions, once cast in an image that was one of resistance to fads and fashions

(Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Ramsay, 1996) centred instead on a stable and enduring

professional identity that valued ethics and vocation (Perrow, 1986; Du Gay, 2000). In

liquid times, however, established conceptions melted somewhat: even the professions do

not remain immune.

As organizations became ever more fluid and liquid, the old corporations of modernity

ceased to be citadels guarding careers for middle managers; the nature of professional work

was also undergoing rapid change. The professionals of dominant sociological imagination

(Parsons, 1939), were becoming managed in professional service firms that were attuned to

the liquid corporate life in which they flourished; one of mergers, acquisitions, floats for the

lawyers, of city-building briefs for the architects, of more and more technologized medicine

for the clinicians. These professions were organized into corporate forms that were a part of

the overall fluidity and liquidity of organizational identity (Gioia et al., 2000).

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Bauman’s Liquid Modernity

Bauman describes the metaphor of liquid modernity as an ‘era of deregulation,

individualization, frailty of human bonds, of fluidity of solidarities and of seduction

replacing normative regulation’ (Bauman in, Jacobsen and Tester, 2007: 313). For Bauman,

we live in a ‘society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster

than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman, 2005: 1).

For individuals negotiating liquid modernity the identity of the worker becomes a site of

struggle in which ‘many and varied fragmentary discourses and practices seek to

interpellate the subject’ (Bardon et al., 2012: 361). This is because work that had equated

with a lifelong career, in the sense of an unfolding, a linear progression of working, often in

the same or very similar organizations, has had its meaning liquefied (e.g. O’Mahony and

Bechky, 2006). Liquefying modernity has eroded the relations associated with being

employees, such that the deployment of both employment contracts and capital has become

more fluid, less secure and more unstable. Individual identities become a major arena for

struggle since organizations in which investments in people are easily liquidated, with no

long-term implications, constitute ever more liquid ways of organizing. In these contexts,

entrepreneurial subjects may propel themselves from being local identities to cosmopolitan

personalities, thus setting new norms of identity for others to struggle to emulate or exceed.

There are ethical, political, identity, and organizational consequences of increasing

liquidity. People in liquidly modern organizations are forever reassembling their identity as

the liquid state changes. Ethically, this means that ethics and ethics discourses become

resources that individuals use to create, and project selected identities internally and

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externally. Ethics becomes a commodity and ethical boundaries can be liquidly negotiated

(Kornberger and Brown, 2007). The focus shifts to a person’s public image rather than their

moral commitment (Clegg and Baumeler, 2010), and public image is constantly constructed

and reconstructed through a multiplicity of stories including through a range of social

media platforms. Moreover, the preoccupation with one’s own identity and public image

makes one insensitive to others’ suffering (Bauman and Donskis, 2013) thus further

isolating people.

Politically, power too becomes liquid. There is a shift towards synoptical power where ‘the

many will be watching the few watching them, and constantly adjust their self accordingly:

that is how the authentic self becomes viscous, made up in mirrored imagery of the sense of

the appropriate self seen in the significant others transferred to the surface of one’s

subjectivity’ (Clegg and Baumeler, 2010: 1727). For Bauman, domination is about

multiplying options while simultaneously increasing the opacity and ambiguity of choices.

This ‘domination-through-uncertainty’ leads to a ‘state of ambient insecurity, anxiety and

fear’ (Bauman and Haugaard, 2008: 112). As Clegg and Baumeler (2010: 1716) argue, in

liquid modernity ‘domination focuses on the possibility of keeping one’s own actions

unbound, uncertain and unpredictable while stripping those dominated of their ability to

control their moves’.

In terms of identity, liquidity is marked by the immediateness of the self in the moment.

Identity work focuses on the self-management of one’s identity vis-à-vis a range of other

actors encountered in different contexts. As Clegg and Baumeler (2010: 1728) argue,

liquidity ‘marks an extreme privatization of ideologies of work adapted to local

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circumstances’. Such a liquid, multiple and shifting identity has a number of implications

which we discuss further below.

Organizationally, there is little in the way of central control that is steering events (Bauman,

2000; Bauman, 2007). Deregulation, individualization, weakened human bonds, increased

fluidity of solidarities, and the drift from normative regulation to seduction are all key

features of the liquid condition identified by Bauman (in Jacobsen & Tester, 2007, p. 313).

Leadership becomes increasingly transactional as the art of the deal merges with algorithms

to deliver it, whether for housing, transport or dinner. Organizations prohibit long-term

planning and offer precarious, open-ended contracts where workers have to constantly

prove they deserve to remain part of the organization (Bauman and Haugaard, 2008). As

Bauman explains ‘“Being loved” is never earned in full, it remains forever conditional, and

the condition is the constant supply of ever new proofs of one’s ability to perform, to

succeed, to be again and again ‘one up’ on the others. The job is never finished… there is

no time to rest on laurels, laurels wilt and fade in no time, successes tend to be forgotten the

moment after being scored, life in the company is an infinite string of emergencies’

(Bauman and Haugaard, 2008: 118).

Strategies of identity work in changing organizational contexts

Individuals can be more or less successful in managing identity tensions. Identity dilemmas

can be resolved in one way through identity adaptation since, ‘people seek to salvage their

sense of self by resolving tensions and restoring consistency’ (Beech et al., 2016: 506).

Pratt et al. (2006) focus on how junior doctors ‘customize’ their identities as they struggle

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to enact desired professional identities (e.g. surgeon). Ibarra (1999) theorizes that junior

professionals – consultants and investment bankers – adapt to new roles as they transition

to enacting professional practice by experimenting with ‘provisional selves’. Hackley and

Kover (2007) suggest that advertising professionals constantly negotiate their identities in

order to align their self-concepts with external groups and institutions.

Recent research argues that it is normal for organizations and their members to face

competing demands (e.g. Jarzabkowski et al., 2013) that may spark a range of reactions,

both constructive and destructive (Schad et al., 2016). Amidst evermore complex

environments people have been theorized as seeking to ‘balance stability and change’

(Kreiner et al., 2015: 982) through identity work. In these contexts, yesterday’s secure

identity may not be so serviceable for tomorrow; that is, contemporary careers require

individuals to reinvent themselves several times which ‘creates opportunities to exercise

more agency in crafting one’s work’ (Petriglieri et al., 2017: 4). Here, conceptualizations of

‘identity elasticity’ (e.g. Kreiner et al., 2015) are particularly useful in understanding how

workers cope with the ever-changing nature of contemporary organizations. This

perspective challenges dichotomous understandings of identity as ‘either/or’, ‘fluid/stable’

and fragmented/coherent. In this view, navigating ongoing tensions (i.e. identity work)

involves ‘both/and’; that is, simultaneously stretching while holding together social

constructions of identity. Ongoing and persistent tensions ‘undergird the social construction

of identity’ (Kreiner et al., 2015: 983). For example, professional workers struggle to

balance their multiple and often antagonistic identities of being simultaneously

professional/unprofessional, emotional/unemotional and/or moral (Clarke et al., 2009). As

Berger et al. (1973: 78) point out ‘[o]n one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory,

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liable to ongoing change. On the other hand, a subjective realm of identity is the

individual’s foothold in reality. Something that is constantly changing is supposed to be ens

realissimum. Consequently, it should not be a surprise that modern man is afflicted with a

permanent identity crisis’.

Strategies of coherence

Amid the tensions caused by changing work environments, a considerable body of

literature on identity work has argued that identity work strategies (e.g. Ibarra, 1999; Ibarra

and Barbulescu, 2010; Pratt et al., 2006; Wei, 2012) and tactics (e.g. Beech et al., 2012;

Kreiner et al., 2006; McInnes and Corlett, 2012) enable professionals to ‘affirm’ positive,

albeit provisional (Ibarra, 1999) or transitional (Pratt et al., 2006) identities. An overarching

identity work strategy discussed in the literature is identity reconciliation work. In their

study of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) ministers, Creed et al. (2010: 1336)

argue that the lived experience of institutional contradictions and marginalization – which

they suggest are ‘tensions that bespeak a deeper contradiction’ – are resolved through doing

identity reconciliation by aligning with and appropriating available discourses that resolve

personal experiences of contradiction and marginalization. In particular, as actors attempt

to re-establish a coherent sense of self they may deny or reject institutional contradictions

through processes of identity reconciliation. The resolution of tensions is seen to secure

identity claims and is a crucial motivator for individuals’ identity work (Alvesson, 2010;

Brown, 2015). Individuals strive to maximize satisfaction and minimize frustrations when

constructing their identities and are ‘motivated to construct identities characterized by

feelings of self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging, efficacy, and meaning’

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(Vignoles et al., 2006: 307). Identity emerges in ‘specific moments of identification that

provoke awareness of the self’ (Pagis, 2016: 1084) and it is these moments that create a

sense of stability and coherence to a person’s self-image and/or workplace identity that

delimit individuals’ choices, decision making and scope for agency.

Strategies of fragmentation

More recently researchers have begun to question the resolution oriented and self-

affirmatory nature of identity work, arguing that considerable exposure to ongoing identity

struggles may lead to a fragmented performance expressing insecurity, critical and self-

depreciative aspects of identity (Beech et al., 2016; Ybema et al., 2009). Sociologists argue

that identity needs to be anchored in the social world (Pagis, 2016; Berger et al., 1973)

because ‘identity cannot be validated in a vacuum, and significant others play a leading role

in the process of validation’ (Pagis, 2016: 1085). Traditionally, identity was grounded,

literally. One grew up, lived, worked and died in communities, to which one was, for good

or ill, emotionally attached, through pursuits such as observing religious and seasonal

rituals. In the first throes of industrialism people were thrown together into new

communities of urban density where the social bonds were likely to be those of work and,

as industrial society developed, supporting sports teams and sharing some minimal

schooling. Significant others moved through the various scenes of everyday life; as

industrial society developed, they did so neither in concert nor coherently. Old rhythms of

life were lost. As life becomes lived in liquid times in more temporary forms of organizing,

in projects where teams cohere then disappear, before another team and another project fill

the void, the opportunities for less than coherent or concerted signals enlarges. Unlike life

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in bureaucracies where forms of career lock-step might be expected, such that one never

works inscrutably to others, in more liquid organizational conditions of projects and

temporary organizations, one moves in and out of different foci in different projects,

embedded in different arenas rather than one organization. Multiple, shifting and often

contradictory notions of self in the workplace are more likely to flourish in these conditions

(Alvesson et al., 2008). For example, Wright et al. (2012) demonstrate that sustainability

specialists enact different identities in diverse work situations such as ‘green change agent’,

the ‘rational manager’ and the ‘committed activist’. More recently, Caza et al. (2017) argue

that individuals with multiple work identities start by segregating these, as suggested by

Wright et al. (2012), eventually aggregating these identities by creating a permeable link

between them. Usually, empirical studies of identity work suggest that such ‘identity

struggles are transitory’ (Beech et al., 2016: 508) and identity work is seen as a mechanism

for coming to terms with everyday uncertainty and instability. According to these studies,

identity work enables individuals to come to terms with the tensions they face; i.e., as a

mechanism that enables the creation of a temporal identity stability. However, under

conditions of liquid modernity, this conceptualization of identity work is increasingly

restrained and questioned.

Strategies for managing identity tensions in the context of liquid modernity

In most of the literature on identity, identity work has been viewed as self-affirming, as

actors seek to actively preserve a sense of ‘authentic self’ (e.g. Costas and Fleming, 2009)

or ‘serve as trials for possible [new] identities’ (Ibarra, 1999: 764). However, notions of

authenticity are challenged by the changes associated with liquid modernity such that,

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identity construction becomes even more contextually specific and time-bound. For

example, seasonally employed tax preparers in the US – who are not Certified Public

Accountants, adopt a professional identity through their interactions with clients (Galperin,

2017). These studies challenge long held assumptions that workplace identities are tied to

the organizations for whom we work and shed new light on how identities are being

constructed in a changing world of work (Barley et al., 2017).

The pre-eminence of individualization of identity in a liquidly modern world in particular,

makes the maintenance of a coherent workplace identity vital yet, highly problematic

(Bendle, 2002). In other words, the problem of identity in liquid modernity revolves around

‘which identity to choose and how to keep alert and vigilant so that another choice can be

made in case the previously chosen identity is withdrawn from the market or stripped of its

seductive powers’ (Bauman, 2001: 147). Fragmentation thus creates an unprecedented

sense of insecurity by emphasising ‘an inherent contradiction between valuing of identity as

something so fundamental that it is crucial to personal well-being and collective action, and

a theorization of “identity” that sees it as something constructed, fluid, multiple,

impermanent and fragmentary’ (Bendle, 2002: 1-2).

In terms of the impact on identity, increasing liquidity is marked by an enhanced awareness

of the immediateness of the self in the moment. Solid social relations grounded in an

organizational career are no longer the anchor for identity and identity work. Instead,

‘people have to turn to their own resources to decide what they value, to organize their

priorities and to make sense of their lives’ (Heelas, 1996: 5). Not surprisingly, identity

tensions become manifest for workers who are subject to hybridized and liquid

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organizational realities. Pagis (2016) describes these tensions as a ‘self-made identity

paradox’: people strive to self-define their identities, in a constantly changing social

context. The result is that individuals ‘remain chronically disembedded, on the move,

searching out and choosing their flexible identities as they go from the vast array of options

available, all the while feeling incomplete, insecure and unfulfilled’ (Atkinson, 2008: 6).

While this signals greater freedom and flexibility for people to adjust their identities

making them much less dependent on social structures and expectations, at the same time, it

creates a constant insecurity and a state of precariousness not experienced previously

(Atkinson, 2008; Beech et al., 2016). As Brown (2018: 4) points out, organizational

participants face existential, social, economic and psychological insecurities with the

consequence that identities are ‘situational, sociologically and psychologically complex,

rarely consistent and generally fluid’. So how do organizational participants manage

tensions associated with these insecure and fluid identities?

In an increasingly liquidly modern world, uncertainty abounds, requiring workers ‘to

abandon loyalties without regret and to peruse opportunities according to their current

availability’ (Clegg and Baumeler, 2010: 1720). The liquid state is characterized by

‘increased ambiguity and uncertainty at the level of individuals’ (Power et al., 2009: 301).

In terms of identity, liquidity is marked by the immediateness of the self in the moment

such that ‘[o]ne symptom of individualism in liquid modernity is the search for “identity”’

(Ybema et al., 2009: 299). In developing this line of thinking ‘[b]ecoming liquid means

taking on the identity assumed to be desired, required, or needed in the here-and-now of

presence’ (Clegg and Baumeler, 2010: 1728), which has implications for identity to be

flexible and adaptable at short notice.

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In such conditions, modern selves have to be perpetually constructing and reconstructing

their projections of self, forever reassembling the pieces of their own identity, refining

themselves day after day (Bauman, 2005). As Petriglieri et al. (2017: 5) note, the advent of

liquid modernity has brought more identity options and more frequent identity changes to

workplaces. They point out that such circumstances present people ‘with a remarkable

opportunity to become autonomous, unique, and fulfilled, but the pressure to be all those

things can be daunting’ (Baumeister, 1997: 208). Inadequacy in this new liquidity involves

an inability to acquire the desired image to which one aspires such that workplace identity

may have become a matter of choice, with choice being a matter of improvisational ability

and access to the resources available to sustain it. Yet, ‘how people experience and deal

with those opportunities and pressures remains relatively unexplored’ (Petriglieri et al.,

2017: 5).

Gedalof (2000: 342) suggests a ‘nomadic’ model of identity as means of imagining how

things could be in an ‘imagined community’ (complexity of culture) and importantly, as a

way of respecting multiplicity of identity. In a liquid world where jobs and careers are

becoming short-lived and people change their workplace several times, there are no stable,

defined and distinct communities; instead, identities stretch to accommodate different

places, relationships and interests becoming like lines without a start and an end. In this

conceptualization nomadic identity could be one based on change as a defining

characteristic. Gedalof (2000: 343) suggests the nomadic subject would be always ‘only

passing through’. For Grimshaw and Sears (2008: 268) ‘global nomads’ the management of

multiple selves is an important aspect of identity that may also lead to a ‘confused sense of

identity’.

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Such confused states of identity are further exacerbated by the increased virtual reality of

work environments. Identity is no longer merely a face-to-face matter; individuals have

digital persona whose virtual projections they have to manage as much as they have to

manage their embodied selves in situated of everyday interactions. Such projections are

especially important in a world where jobs are found online, often by specialist HR brokers

matching digitally expressed criteria for project participants to portfolios projecting

capabilities, competencies and careers in virtual spaces, temporary projects and self-

managed practices. The opportunities for slippage escalate as the presentations of self-

multiply and cracks in the façades of personae accumulate. Webb (2001: 589) suggests that

the virtual world is an ‘inherent series of paradoxical tensions’ because while ‘virtual

environments help constitute identity’ through an image (avatar) and textual narrative they

also make differentiations problematic. This is because participants appear to resemble each

other as ‘avatars’ making differentiating one entity from another difficult. Moreover, the

increasing use of digital forms of communication such as e-mails and apps enabling

collaboration means that even the slightest error in communication can have consequences

for identity: while a face-to-face conversation may be recalled (and denied) it has little

materiality compared to a digital trace that flourishes virtually. Identity can be undone by

careless words or by forwarding messages that compromise opportunities to create and

build identity.

We suggest that conceptualisations of identity work that stress reconciling contradictions

and tensions in a bid to 'affirm' workplace identities do not account for the complex

challenges individuals face in liquid modernity. In the liquid workplace, identity

construction is shaped by ‘tension between human needs for validation and similarity to

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others (on the one hand) and a countervailing need for uniqueness and individuation (on the

other)’ (Brewer, 1991: 477). For example, recent research has demonstrated that individuals

construct and enact contradictory identity elements by accommodating paradoxical identity

attributes (Cuganesan, 2016; Ahuja et al., 2017). These studies show that identity tensions

are persistent and interrelated albeit contradictory (Lewis, 2000). Notably, these studies

highlight that opposing tensions need not be resolved but rather are accepted and/or

embraced (e.g. Jarzabkowski et al., 2013) in processes of identity work (Ahuja et al., 2017).

In a recent study of managers undertaking a MBA Petriglieri et al. (2017: 30) did not find

evidence for the integration of identities reported by other studies. Instead, they emphasise

the importance of the pursuit of portable selves as a strategy that ‘binds people to

institutions they do not expect to remain members of and reduces conflicts and

contradictions within both the self - as between achievement and discovery aims - and the

institution - as between instrumental and humanistic ideologies’. According to the authors,

portable selves are identities that enable individuals to be ‘both here and there’ (Petriglieri

et al., 2017: 33 emphasis in original). By exploring paradoxical identities in times of liquid

modernity, we position identity work as not simply either/or but as much more complex;

we suggest that individuals accept paradoxical and ongoing identity tensions that may not

be resolved through identity work.

The nomadic self and liquid identity

In a liquid world the presentation of self becomes an ever more problematic task. The

audiences, the arenas, the stages, the dramatic personae, the performances become ever

more multiple and with multiplicity the opportunities for identity work to be compromised

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escalate. In the large organizations of the post-war era, people were managed through their

career aspirations. An inability to fit in, to comport oneself in the appropriate way, or to

simply blend in, especially in terms of politics and gender, was a sufficient reason for a

person’s career aspirations and fitness for available opportunities to be questioned and

restricted. Whyte (1956) observed executive behaviour that was risk-averse because no

single individual was responsible for any decision. Consequently, career progression meant

authority and a career for life, as long as one kept one’s nose clean and one’s identity

unblemished.

In an era characterized by volatility, relentless change and fuzzy boundaries, distinctions

between organizations and their environments as objective determinants seem to be fading

into irrelevance as business strategy focuses on creating new environments rather than

adapting to existing ones. In these new contexts local practices transform globally available

resources and professionals move between projects in a world that is post-organizational in

at least two ways; first it is one that deviates from the norms of an organizational society

premised on Weberian characteristics such as organizational careers, transforming into a

society where experts use organizations as temporary platforms; second, the organization,

as a specific entity defined by those activities it envelops, is seemingly decomposing,

fragmenting, opening, reforming and deforming, globally. Control, once vested firmly

within organizational pyramids, is becoming distributed across a network of actors,

including new media and their users. The private sphere of management control as a peak

activity enveloped in a tangible and specifically modernist form is dissolving, as are

specifically demarcated zones of professional competence. Employees, including

21

professionals, are becoming globally sub-contracted, matrixed and fragmented. Boundaries,

choices and control are all shifting in the direction of increasing fluidity and plurality.

Symptomatic of this rise is the fluid flexible office with no fixed places, where one

decamps wherever, armed only with a laptop. At its furthest extreme there are space

leasers, such as WeWork1, founded in New York in 2010, which now leases space on a

large scale in major global cities. ‘The basic deal is simple enough: you can either pay to

put your laptop wherever there is space, or stump up a little more for a more dependable

desk or entire office – and, in either case, take advantage of the fact that, with operations in

20 countries, WeWork offers the chance to traverse the planet and temporarily set up shop

in no end of locations’ (Harris, 2018). Harris (2018) has noted the ‘blurring of work and

leisure, and the fading-out of any meaningful notion of home’ especially among ‘among

rising numbers of networked homeworkers – translators, CV writers, IT contractors, data

inputters – whose lives are often a very modern mixture of supposed flexibility, and day-to-

day insecurity’ that characterizes the new fluidity and liquidity of working life. WeWork is

expanding into WeLive,2 already active in New York and Washington, which offers the

same fluidity as Airbnb in ‘a range of tiny studio flats and slightly bigger dwellings, built

around communal areas, kitchens and laundrettes – in the same building as WeWork office

space’ (Harris, 2018).

Many of the jobs in the future are likely to be created and filled by digital nomads. Digital

nomads are young people armed with a laptop and connected to Wi-Fi who can move

1 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/mar/23/wegeneration-work-rest-and-play-together-in-adam-neumanns-empire2 https://www.gq.com/story/inside-welive

22

around globally doing their work wherever the fancy takes them – usually to warmer places

that are less expensive to live, with good beaches and surfing, such as Portugal (Bloom,

2018). To do so they can use Internet based services such as Roam.3 Roam offers flexible

‘co-working and co-living’ spaces for $500 plus a week, enabling digital nomads to wander

the world, mixing living and working.

Lisbon is the capital of cool in digital terms in Europe. Some nomads housesit for a few

months and then move on to another opportunity to do it again, elsewhere, or perhaps using

Airbnb. Compared to the organization man, commuting from his suburb to the office on a

daily basis, presenting the same version of their self to commuters, co-workers, neighbours

and family alike, today’s digital nomads, as the furthest extreme of virtual work and

identity, have far less cues from co-presence. They can, literally, remake their identities on

the move. And should they indulge in processes of procreation, it need not tie the liquid

professional and their offspring down:

It is a token of the surreal future some people want to push us towards that WeWork may have the beginnings of an answer to that question, albeit for the few people who can afford it. The company has recently spawned an educational offshoot called WeGrow4 (so far focused on a private elementary school in New York) that teaches kids a range of skills including mindfulness and “conscious entrepreneurship”. But the idea is apparently to put WeGrow schools in WeWork properties across the world, so digital nomads can carry their disorientated offspring from place to place and ensure they have just as flimsy an idea of home as their parents do (Harris, 2018).

As Harris concludes, rhetorically, ‘you may well read this stuff and wonder: whose utopia

is this?’

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/magazine/when-youre-a-digital-nomad-the-world-is-your-office.html4 http://wegrow.com/ - a conscious entrepreneurial approach to education

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Conclusion

This chapter suggests that in an era in which workplaces are changing rapidly, opportunities

to research new forms of identity work are significant. Our focus is on how identity work

can be conceptualized in an increasingly liquid era characterized by volatility, relentless

change and fuzzy boundaries. At the most liquid extreme, digital nomads present a plurality

of identities virtually that enable them to live life on the move, shifting from assignment to

assignment, city to city, never staying anywhere long enough to put down roots and create

an identity in the conventional way; through a career, a tax file number, a settled abode and

the looking glass self (Cooley, 1902) that their co-workers see. Established notions of

identity in management theory, such as the idea that employees will strive to produce a

‘reflected best-self’ (Roberts et al., 2005) as a stable identity seem incongruously out of

date. Managing the self digitally, through projected identities, not only destabilizes existing

notions of the career but also throws the notion of identity work as a search for stability into

question. As Marx and Engels (1848) realized so presciently, the fate of our times is a

future of ‘everlasting uncertainty’, one of melting solidities, liquid possibilities, shifting

identities and fragmented forms of life (Lafferty & Dow, 1998). Organizations as we have

known them may well not survive as disassembling institutions peel off action from being

the object of organization to transactions brokered digitally, through algorithms, artificial

intelligence and blockchain, tendencies that provide innumerable opportunities for further

research into the increasingly liquid condition of identity, modernity and social ordering.

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