Chapter published in:
Identity Struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 69] 2017
► pp. 57–78

Juggling “I”s and “we”s with “he”s and “she”s

Negotiating novice professional identities in stories of teamwork told in New Zealand job interviews

| University of Warwick
Teamwork is perennially among graduate employers’ most wished-for competencies, and how candidates respond to teamwork questions can be pivotal to success or failure. This chapter addresses novice interviewees’ struggles to construct professional competence in line with the normative expectations of the competency framework. Drawing on a corpus of 30 graduate interviews collected in New Zealand, the analysis highlights the discursive struggle to balance individual and team identities in orienting to achievements and difficulties, explored in terms of Bamberg’s (2011) three identity dilemmas: sameness/difference, agency/control, and constancy/change. It reveals how identities are talked into being in the tension between the “we” and the “I”, in attributing blame and in acknowledging a learning outcome, which are crucial to constructing an employable identity.
Keywords: teamwork stories, identity dilemmas, professional identities, graduate employers, competency framework
Published online: 26 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.04rei
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Greenbank, Emily & Meredith Marra
2020. Addressing societal discourses: negotiating an employable identity as a former refugee. Language and Intercultural Communication 20:2 ► pp. 110 ff. Crossref logo

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