Organizations must continually work toward positioning themselves to develop a favorable identity with various audiences. Many organizations operate in complex environments with two or more potentially opposing logics—orientations that guide their mission, activities and relationships (Wallace, 1990). As organizations communicate and enact their logics, representations that appeal to some can be less favorably perceived by others. Police departments currently operate in such an environment causing them to manage these tensions in their communication for recruitment. This dissertation includes two phases to examine the depiction of opposing institutional logics in police department (PD) recruitment videos. These studies explored the nature and relationship of the community-oriented policing (COP) and traditional enforcement (TE) logics, integrating an institutional logics perspective (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999) with a tensional approach (Putnam et al., 2016). The purpose of Phase I was to determine whether police recruitment videos could be categorized into either TE, COP, both or neither. Do videos representing police logics demonstrate identifiable patterns? In Phase I, a codebook was developed incorporating audio, visual, thematic, and narrative elements. 312 PD recruitment videos were coded and analyzed. The analysis confirmed that the videos predominately demonstrated either the COP logic, the TE logic, or both. This last group demonstrated institutional complexity by attempting to present their department with more than one logic. My analysis yielded six primary themes for the COP logic (personalized engagement, self-differentiation from field, demonstrations of community-centric policies, internalization of COP as a process, and diversity as strength) and four primary themes for the TE logic (exciting storytelling, officer heroics, incomplete COP, and hierarchical orientation). In Phase II, I sampled three videos from each of the COP and TE categories, and two videos from the mixed –-to investigate how the logics that often are in opposition to each other appear to interact when depicted in the same video representing the attitudes and behaviors of a PD. I found that, at times, videos presented a dualistic approach by grouping activities/units that pertained to one or the other logic and then presenting them before moving on the activities/units that represented the other logic in the department. This acknowledges that both logics exist but treats them as dualistic—present but separate. Other departments were noted to treat the logics as dialectics, by simultaneously presenting both logics—not as oppositional—but as choices that officers were expected to make, which were not necessarily mutually exclusive. I found several strategies for how videos demonstrate the interplay of the logics, illustrating the importance of scene sequencing for narratives, humor for presenting counternarratives, and department orientation for conceptualizing the relationship between the logics. I identified three ways to represent multiple logics: 1) vacillation which draw in turn from either logic, 2) chunks which split and lump the logics into separate sections, and 3) attention-getters which present a drastically different introduction than the rest of the video. These results demonstrate that departments strategically use humor, cinematography, music, sequencing, as well as carefully selecting the actors to represent their department in various ways to attract the attention of potential recruits. The implications for theory and practice are discussed, before I turn to a review of the limitations and future directions for research in police recruitment and work.

As institutions decline and digital networks take frontstage in activist efforts, the role of formal organizations is changing in ways that implicate the sustainability and success of activist involvement. Historically, formal organizations have played a critical role in activism and social movements by helping to overcome the free-rider problem (Olson, 1965) and by serving as breeding grounds for civic leaders (Skocpol, 2003). One way they accomplished these aims was through the use of transformational repertoires, or “deep organizing” activities aimed at cultivating bonds among participants and developing novice activists into leaders. Today, however, involvement in formal civic organizations has declined and movement activism is increasingly organized through distributed networks. Networked movements rely more heavily on transactional repertoires, or activities rooted in cost-benefit analyses aimed at increasing participation through relatively shallow strategies. As a result, they can be fleeting and do not necessarily produce seasoned leaders who become stewards of their communities. In this changing landscape, the organizations that do persist often incorporate hybrid strategies, engaging members through a combination of both formal and informal structures (such as bureaucracy complemented by a distributed network). Existing research suggests that hybrid organizations may present interesting opportunities for negotiating oppositions (Jay, 2013). Thus, in addition to incorporating multiple structural types, hybridity may enable members to negotiate other oppositions such as the tension between transactional and transformational repertoires and the tension between volunteer and professional leaderships. I explore these possibilities through a two year long ethnographic study of an emerging hybrid grassroots organization, Resistance United (RU). Findings suggest that tensions relating to structures, repertoires, and leaderships intersect and influence the structuration process in RU, including the ways members constitute their involvement in the organization and reflexively adapt structures to meet their needs and goals. Though RU follows some patterns that have previously been observed in civic and social movement organizations, such as the tendency toward formalization and professionalization (which in turn pull toward transactional repertories), I also illustrate new possibilities relating to hybridity including the potential for volunteer resistance to punctuate the cycle of increasing professionalization and the possibility that intersecting tensions afford unique opportunities for negotiation. I discuss the role that formal organizations continue to play in cultivating civic leaders even in a networked society and present considerations for both grassroots organizations and their members.

Changes to the way work is performed over the past several decades due to economic recessions, unstable job markets, and global turmoil facilitated by COVID-19 call for research into the way today’s young adults idealize, evaluate, and select careers. Informed by the theory of vocational anticipatory socialization, this study surveyed university students through a series of open- and closed-ended questions to investigate how they think about “making a living”. This project also explores the career frameworks young adults use to evaluate potential careers, compares them to the ability, enjoyment, and goal frameworks identified by Jahn and Myers (2014), and takes a step towards validating a career frameworks scale. Content analysis of open-ended responses indicate that compensation, work-life balance, making a difference in society, company or workplace culture, stability, and continuous learning opportunity are common motivating factors in career or job selection. Content analysis also identified ability, enjoyment, goal-identity, and goal-lifestyle frameworks informing young adults’ career pursuits, which differed in form and frequency from Jahn and Myers (2014) original work. Confirmatory factor analysis did not confirm predicted components, but exploratory factor analysis revealed emergent factors. Several theoretical and practical implications are discussed as well as limitations and suggestions for future research.

Using interview data collected at three non-profit organizations, this study investigates how employees share knowledge gained from former organizational roles in their current workplace and the implications of doing so for their organizational membership. This study examines the communicative practices that employees use to negotiate roles that incorporate their expertise into their work and recognition by others for doing so. Results reveal that the functional domain where individuals were positioned shaped the ways in which their knowledge and skills were communicated and recognized as expertise by others. These findings show that employees actively work to craft favorable positions in the workplace rather than merely adjusting to their formal job description. Moreover, this study contributes to organizational socialization research by highlighting employees' agency to take part in their own socialization and the impact of others' perceptions based on their functional role.

Rideshare workers who drive for companies such as Uber and Lyft experience tensions in their occupational identity. These tensions are a result of rideshare drivers being denied the benefits and security of employee status (such as healthcare or unemployment) while also being denied the freedoms of independent contractor status (such as the ability to set their own labor rates). These tensions were especially prevalent in California during the November 2020 election because Proposition 22 was an initiative to determine whether rideshare drivers would be legally classified as employees or independent contractors. Although some rideshare drivers ruthlessly defended their right to be independent contractors and urged voters to vote “yes” on Proposition 22, others considered employee classification a route to better working conditions, higher pay, benefits, and much needed legal protections. In this case study, I utilized a qualitative content analysis of rideshare forums on a counterinsitutional website to showcase a) how trolling behaviors were pervasive in rideshare online discourse; b) how trolling impacted sensemaking about the rideshare professional identity; c) how trolling paradoxically united while divided rideshare drivers; and d) how drivers exercised control over one another. The study found that trolling was used by drivers to make sense of their occupational identity and create in- and out-groups on the platform. Additionally, downward social comparisons in intergroup interactions were used as a control mechanism amongst drivers. Implications and future directions are also discussed.

The ways that people construct their identities at work organize their social actions. Considering that so much of people’s work increasingly involves technology, a significant body of research has focused on what people do with and through technology to construct distinct and desirable identities. But emerging developments in artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible for technologies to be part of identity construction in a way that has not yet been explored: by acting autonomously on behalf of the people who use them. Individuals’ growing reliance on intelligent machines in their work requires reconceptualizing identity construction as a process that people share with technologies themselves, which I call a joint action perspective of identity construction. I argue that two capabilities of AI technologies—their capability to learn from aggregated data and their capability to make decisions autonomously—shape identity construction processes when these technologies mediate people’s interactions. I explored these possibilities by conducting a comparative field study of two AI scheduling technologies created by different companies. I followed these technologies from development into use by working professionals to investigate how the capabilities of AI scheduling technologies shape how they are involved in identity construction and with what consequences. Through a set of three studies, my findings illuminate how people’s outsourcing of work to AI scheduling technologies that facilitate communication and communicate on their behalf shape their identity construction. In the first study, I showed that AI scheduling technologies carry out new work practices on users’ behalf, shaping how they enact identities, which users accepted or resisted depending on how these practices were presented and whether they helped users enact identities to which they had aspired. In the second study, I showed that communication partners can form impressions of AI agents that communicate on users’ behalf, which sometimes were transferred to partners’ impressions of users’ identities when communication partners did not have a strong relationship with those users. Users worked to manage their own and communication partners’ relationship with AI technologies in order to maintain or construct desirable identities for themselves. In the third study, I showed how one AI technology made it difficult for users to enact multiple identities, because the AI technology was optimized only for a narrow range of outcomes and limited users’ flexibility to draw on different identities at different times. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for individuals’ identity construction in the age of intelligent machines.

Gaining access to diverse knowledge and expertise is often the primary motivation for collaboration among different professionals and organizations. Extant approaches have focused on communication dynamics during collaborative processes—where participants have already accepted the value of one another’s knowledge/expertise—and narrowly presumed transfer-integration as the successful outcome of collaboration. I argue that gaining a more complete understanding of collaboration requires investigating how collaborators’ knowledge/expertise are differently implicated in their communicative efforts to break in, maintain, and leave collaboration. Further, conceptualizing collaboration as a cyclic process adds complexity to current theories by considering how collaborators’ communication impacts and is impacted by their previous and/or future collaboration. I support these arguments by providing evidence from field studies of long-range regional planning, which involves collaboration among various organizations to bring diverse inputs for envisioning the distant future of their region. Through a set of three studies focusing on different components of a collaboration life cycle (the beginning, middle, and end), the findings reveal communicative dynamics that enable and constrain productive engagements among diverse organizations with distinct knowledge/expertise.