Identity gatekeeping in New Work Order organizations

Abstract

While much has been written on the transition of organizational life into the New Work Order (NWO) and the effects this has had on employees in language-centered economic spaces, few studies have attempted to tease out how these NWO-expectations have affected less language-centered workplaces. In this article, I focus on such a workplace, namely a medical lab, and I tease out processes of what I call ‘identity gatekeeping’. With this term I refer to the fact that NWO-employees are expected to be knowledge-workers whose identities need to be aligned with organizational expectations. As such, these identities become a crucial object of intra-organizational gatekeeping. Focusing on three performance appraisal interviews and using a social-realist discourse-analytical approach, I demonstrate how the superior’s interactional identity negotiations either mold or silence dissident identities depending on the employee’s future professional aspirations. Finally, the implications of these interactional negotiation processes for NWO-ways of working are discussed.