Constructing Organizational Life: How Social-Symbolic Work Shapes Selves, Organizations, and Institutions

Across the social sciences, scholars are showing how people ‘work’ on facets of social life that were once thought to be beyond human intervention. Social categories such as class and gender, as well as aspects of ‘human nature’ such as emotions and sexuality, are now widely understood as socially constructed. This book proposes a perspective of social-symbolic work that integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people purposefully work to construct organizational life and the technologies, boundaries, and strategies that define their organizations. This perspective highlights the purposeful, reflexive efforts of individuals and networks of actors to construct the social world, and focuses attention on the motivations, practices, resources, and effects of those efforts.