Third-World “Sloggers” or Elite Global Professionals? Using Organizational Toolkits to Redefine Work Identity in Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing

Sharon Koppman (), Elisa Mattarelli () and Amar Gupta ()
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Sharon Koppman: Organization and Management Area, The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, California 92617
Elisa Mattarelli: Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia 42122, Italy
Amar Gupta: School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Organization Science, 2016, vol. 27, issue 4, 825-845

Abstract: Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an organizational response, based on the critical literature on top-down identity regulation, and an individual response, based on the positive literature on bottom-up identity construction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival data from three Indian information technology (IT) offshore outsourcing firms, we examine how organizational and individual identity processes work in tandem to address this threat. We find that firms do not resolve this threat by regulating employee identity directly as they claim, but instead provide workers with an organizational toolkit —a set of organizationally available cultural resources (e.g., frames and stories) and political resources (e.g., policies and procedures) that workers use selectively and strategically to construct positive identities. By bringing a toolkit perspective to identity processes, we contribute to theory and research on cross-level identity linkages, the strategic nature of identity processes, and the local context of global identity.

Keywords: identity regulation; identity construction; work identity; cultural toolkits; offshore outsourcing; global work; positive identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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