Across the social sciences, scholars are increasingly showing how people
'work' to construct organizational life, including the rules and
routines that shape and enable organizational activity, the identities
of people who occupy organizations, and the societal norms and
assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. The idea
of work emphasizes the ways in which people and groups engage in
purposeful, reflexive efforts rooted in an awareness of organizational
life as constructed in human interaction and changeable through human
effort. Studies of these efforts have identified new forms of work
including emotion work, identity work, boundary work, strategy work,
institutional work, and a host of others. Missing in these
conversations, however, is a recognition that these forms of work are
all part of a broader phenomenon driven by historical shifts that began
with modernity and dramatically accelerated through the twentieth
century.
This book introduces the social-symbolic work perspective, which
addresses this broader phenomenon. The social-symbolic work perspective
integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people
purposefully and reflexively work to construct organizational life,
including the identities, technologies, boundaries, and strategies that
constitute their organizations. In this book, the authors define
social-symbolic work and introduce three forms - self work, organization
work, and institutional work.
Social-symbolic work highlights people's efforts to construct the social
world, and focuses attention on the motivations, practices, resources,
and effects of those efforts. This book explores eight distinct streams
of social-symbolic work research, drawing on a broad range of examples
from the worlds of business, politics, sports, social movements, and
many others. It provides researchers, students, and practitioners with
an integrative theoretical framework useful in understanding
social-symbolic work, a survey of the main forms of social-symbolic
work, a rich set of theoretical opportunities to inspire new studies,
and practical methodological guidance for empirical research on
social-symbolic work.
