Discipline, caregiving, and identity work of frontline professionals: Talking about the acts of compliance and resistance in the everyday practices of social workers

Abstract

This article investigates how the identities of frontline professionals are (re)constructed in their talk about their everyday work activities. Based on a study of a mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, we illustrate that when talking about acting in accordance with their organizational policies, the social workers’ identities are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing the practices of documentation and regular meetings with their supervisors that constitute the routine processes of organizing. However, when discussing instances where they override the organizationally sanctioned rules, their identities are disciplined by the aspiration of fabricating a client-centred caregiver identity adopted from the dominant discourse in their profession. We, therefore, counterbalance the understanding that professionals’ identity work related to their deliberate micro-emancipation acts are merely an expression of agency and argue that their preferred resistant identities pertaining to their self-declared apparent deviation from the organizational order are also made within frameworks of disciplinary power. By delineating that both discursive conformity and resistance cut across the boundaries between acting in alignment with and against organizational guidelines, we unveil an underexplored complexity of conducting professional identity work associated with the interrelationships between practices of talk and action that has largely been overlooked in prior scholarship. We, therefore, offer an action-related analysis of discursive identity work that extends beyond the context of this study and informs future research.

INTRODUCTION

Professionals play a key role in contemporary societies and organizations. Professional identity, defined as ‘an individual’s self-definition as a member of a profession’ (Chreim, Williams and Hinings 2007: 1515) has, therefore, attracted the attention of scholars who were keen on understanding how these workers view themselves and enact their roles. The extant literature has addressed a range of important questions such as how professionals construct their identities (Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006; Ahuja, Heizmann and Clegg 2019; Wilson 2022), how they adjust their identities in career and role transitions (Ibarra 1999; Bresnen et al. 2019) and how they respond to contradictory identity prescriptions (Bévort and Suddaby 2016; Chen and Reay 2021). One strand of this literature has particularly focussed on hybrid professionals who are those that move into management positions and bridge both managerial and professional identities (see for a review Currie and Logan 2020). Another group of studies have considered frontline professionals who are simultaneously subject to existing/new managerial requirements and the demand for professional autonomy, and thus reconstruct their identities (Hendrikx 2017; Kyratsis et al. 2017; Chen and Reay 2021). However, the latter set has paid scant attention to how these identities are ‘tied to organizational processes and specific outcomes’ that embody power (Brown 2022: 1219).

Despite most professionals working in organizations and thus interacting with managerial structures in their daily activities, it has been argued that they predominantly tend to define themselves through delineating the intrinsic characteristics of their roles rather than affiliating closely with their employer organizations and that they constantly reassess the notions of who they want to be as members of a profession and try to align it with what they do (Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006; Reay et al. 2017). Given that role identities are formed and enacted in relationship to and interaction with other actors (e.g. colleagues, clients, and managers) who have certain expectations from established routine practices associated with a role in an organizational setting, it is not easy for individuals to change their role identities to match their desired professional selves that are primarily shaped around autonomy and self-regulation in performing their duties (Currie et al. 2012). Tensions, therefore, arise from the misalignment between disciplinary power that exists in organizational policies and practices that continually regulate identities on the one side and the identity demand stemming from the intention of enacting professionalism in the course of everyday work by professional organizational members on the other side. Considering that identity is conceptualized as an ‘ongoing reflexive accomplishment’ (Creed, DeJordy and Lok 2010: 1341), to understand how such tensions are managed, it is important to investigate the (re)construction of professionals’ work identities related to their day-to-day mundane activities, especially those that form practices around which the order of work in the organization is structured and maintained.

For this purpose, we chose Prime, a public mental health and addiction counselling service organization in Ontario, Canada. In line with the proliferation of New Public Management which introduced budget cuts and performance measurement to increase productivity and efficiency, many public sector organizations including social service providers were led to tighten the iron cage by employing a range of tactics and instruments such as adopting performance metrics as means of managerial control. This change proved to be challenging for professional services as managerial control falls into a fundamental contrast with professional autonomy which is a central value in professional fields (Noordegraaf 2015). The organization we targeted, however, was relatively small with a flat structure. The absence of a highly bureaucratic system and the lack of direct surveillance (due to the nature of social work practice) along with the varied nature of services required by clients that weigh against standardization of practice were the qualities that made us interested in investigating how the guidelines of the organization for practice were enforced and followed. Looking through an identity lens, therefore, we set out to explore how control and autonomy were exercised in the discursive construction of the everyday activities of frontline social workers (SWs).

The research contribution we make is twofold. First, by focusing attention on the identity work of frontline professionals we contribute to the studies of contemporary professional work. While a bulk of literature inspired by the concept of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 2010) has extensively explored the role of frontline professionals in public services, insufficient attention has been paid to their identity work. The existing identity literature has profoundly attended to the role of hybrid (manager–practitioner) professionals (Noordegraaf 2015) to explore how they facilitate organizing by communicating with the administration and their professional peers through a ‘two-way window’ (Croft, Currie and Lockett 2015). However, the identity work of permanent non-managerial professionals who are not confronted with new identity scripts resulting from either a changing work context (Ahuja, Nikolova and Clegg 2017; Yao 2022), a public policy reform (Hendrikx 2017), or the introduction of a new institutional logic (Kyratsis et al. 2017), especially with respect to processes of organizing has been poorly investigated (see for some exceptions Brown and Lewis 2011; Shams 2021). In addressing this gap, we also illuminate the underlying mechanism of responsible autonomy by highlighting the disciplinary power of the client-centred caregiving discourse in the field of social work and explicating how it regulates the seemingly resistant identities of SWs when they override policies. Second, informed by the Foucauldian conception of disciplinary power and consistent with the identity work perspective (Brown 2022), our insights contribute to the literature on identities in organizations by attributing identity work conducted by organizational members to their compliant/resistant actions that they talk about. Drawing upon the notions of decaf and espresso resistance (Barros 2018), which help move beyond the dualistic understanding of the discursive (re)production of micro-level conformity/resistance and thus appreciate the complexity of this process (Thomas and Davies 2005), we divide between two accounts of identity work: articulating (non)resistant identities while acting in congruence with the organizational guidelines and those when overriding instructions. Our analysis suggests that when talking about the act of compliance, the identities of SWs are disciplined by and appropriated from addressing specific organizational routine practices. However, when confessing to their intentional acts of resistance (mostly when facing equivocal circumstances), the aspiration of portraying themselves as caregivers introduces a disciplinary effect on their identities. By employing the concept of legitimacy judgement (Tyler 1997; Tost 2011) which helps examine how individuals evaluate the appropriateness of social entities, we identified moral, instrumental, and rational rhetorical devices that underpin the formation of caregiver identities by SWs. Our insights, thus, foreground an overlooked complexity of identity work processes. Recognizing and bringing together two complementary disciplinary structures through which control is exercised, we argue that the previous literature has oversimplified this intricate process by overlooking the role of proclaimed material actions in conducting identity work. Furthermore, we identified both conformist and resistant identities crafted by professionals in their talks about both compliant and resistant courses of action. In other words, we came across complying resistant and resistant complying frontline professionals. This finding contradicts the assumption that deliberate acts of compliance and resistance are consistent with identities that actors author when talking about them. We, therefore, suggest a way for taking such action-related practices of talk into account and assert that analysing identities in the light of the relationships between discursive practices and actions is critical for generating insightful implications and advancing theory.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The subsequent section conducts a review of the literature on professionals’ identity work and the dynamics of power relations. In the following section, considering that talking about organizational routines is found to be one of the key sources of disciplinary power in this empirical study, the literature on the relationships between power and manifestation of routines is discussed. The article then proceeds to introduce the research setting, data collection, data analysis, and findings. These sections are succeeded by an in-depth discussion that further explains how discussing routines and the aspiration of forging caregiver selves together introduce disciplinary power that regulates the professionals’ identities. The article continues with the identification of limitations and culminates in a short conclusion.

PROFESSIONALS, IDENTITY WORK, AND POWER

From the discursive perspective on organizing that regards discourse ‘as the primary vehicle through which social relations are produced and reproduced’ (Mumby and Stohl 1991: 315), identities are viewed as in-progress self-narratives that are subjectively available to individuals (Giddens 1991). Accordingly, identities, which are constituted within and derived from discursive regimes, are not fixed but are defined as self-projects that people continually work on to reflexively author versions of their preferred selves in a quest for ‘a degree of existential continuity and security’ (Alvesson and Willmott 2002: 625–6) as they struggle with questions such as ‘who am I?’ and ‘what should I do?’ in various social situations. This ‘identity work’, defined as people’s engagement in ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson 2003: 1165) is accomplished by individuals in both internal soliloquies and dialogue with others (Beech 2008). It has been argued that identity work in organizations is often triggered when people face identity prescriptions that are inconsistent with their views of themselves (Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006).

One major ongoing challenge in professional service organizations is that the nature of the job militates against hierarchical control. That is, while in the traditional principles of professionalism, the mechanisms of control are established by occupational domains, and the ‘protected treatment of cases—think of patients, students, pupils, clients— by autonomous yet committed professionals’ (Noordegraaf 2015: 187) is stressed, contemporary organizations have increasingly intended to delimit professionals’ autonomy. Since managing identity is a medium of organizational control, organizations have sought to regulate the work identities of professionals through introducing discourses that align them with the corporate objectives and transform them from autonomous actors into partly colonized employees (Alvesson and Willmott 2002; Bardon, Brown and Pezé 2017).

Identity regulation is the coproduct of organizational members’ identity work and organizational practices that constitute disciplinary power, which ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals’ (Foucault 1980: 39). This understanding of the mutually constitutive relationship between power and subjectively construed identities implies that to produce ‘organization members in a certain manner’ (Mumby and Stohl 1991: 316), their identities are formed through processes of surveillance and normalization that constitute them as subjects and render them docile (Thornborrow and Brown 2009), but also through technologies of the self, such as self-examination (construction of self as a measurable object) and avowal (construction of the self as a subject that can be verbalized, evaluated, and improved). Organizational members are, therefore, led by these means to ‘change themselves by acting on themselves’ (Covaleski et al. 1998: 298) and craft prototypically conformist selves by drawing on discourses that their organizations have made available (Bardon, Brown and Pezé 2017).

Nevertheless, the existence of resistance is indisputable. Most studies conducted in professional settings have reported on the resilience of professional identities in the face of managerial pressures (Chreim, Williams and Hinings 2007). Even with having the option of crafting conformist selves (Collinson 2003), professionals are also able to actively resist the identity positions offered to them in organizations by finding different ways of maintaining some aspects of professional values in their identity narratives (Olakivi and Niska 2017).

Resistance and compliance, however, have been mostly perceived as the outcomes of identity work and not as its determinants. Scholars have documented various types of discursive resistance accomplished through the demonstration of cynicism, scepticism, humour, and complaining about unfavourable identity prescriptions which have been labelled by some authors as decaf resistance (Contu 2008) as it ‘provides a fantasy of the autonomous subject who still, nevertheless, complies with the demands of the organization’ (Thomas 2009: 174). The number of studies that have gone beyond this form of resistance and considered identity work related to material acts of resistance—known as espresso resistance—is limited (Costas and Fleming 2009; Barros 2018). Recognizing this division is crucial because the potential repercussions of disrupting the constellation of power relations in the workplace through actions often outweigh the impact of more subtle transgressive behaviours such as parody and gentle critique that change very little (Contu 2008). In the same vein, this study delves into the performances of discursive compliance while simultaneously disregarding the rules in action, as well as material acts of compliance which we label decaf and espresso compliance, respectively.

The present study includes an analysis of identity work tactics related to situations where the actors talk about either complying with the guidelines of their organization or resisting by deviating from or overriding them in performing their mundane work duties. From this viewpoint, the acts of conforming to or resisting managerialism precede and trigger the identity work that aims at shaping conformist/resistant selves through talk. Identity work is, therefore, an integral part of complying with or resisting the managerial system of control.

When analysing the SWs’ practices of talk about complying with the organizational requirements in their daily work activities, despite observing different forms of decaf resistance, we found that the identities of the participants in our study are disciplined by and appropriated from certain routine practices. In the next section, therefore, we review the disciplinary power of routines, a concept that will be revisited later in the analysis section.

DISCIPLINARY POWER AND ROUTINES

Despite having been mainly conceptualized as relatively stable entities to which actors respond in a semi-automatic or mindless manner in the early management literature, recently from a process perspective, routines have been defined as ‘repetitive, recognisable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors’ (Feldman and Pentland 2003: 95). This approach suggests that routines are performed through a set of recurrent situated actions which are the ‘effortful accomplishments’ (Pentland and Rueter 1994: 448) of actors who choose their courses of actions in their everyday conduct (Feldman 2000).

Taking into consideration the agency that individuals exercise every time they enact routines and the diversity in their self-interests and abilities that may lead to different types of performance, researchers have questioned how routines unfold in ways that constitute recognizable patterns. This paradox that points at ‘pattern-in-variety’ (Cohen 2007: 782) has been addressed by the recognition of two inter-related aspects for routines that are reconciled in practice: ostensive, which refers to the ideal, abstract and generalized pattern that people identify across different performances (routine as agreed on), and performative that encapsulates a specific set of actions through which people execute routines (Feldman and Pentland 2003).

Although routines can change over time, it has been argued that as long as the participants can interrelate their performances in view of a shared ostensive aspect, ‘they can discern sameness in past performances and reproduce the routine in a similar way in the future’ (Dittrich, Guérard and Seidl 2016: 679). Therefore, established routines, which are rooted in a tacit collective agreement between organizational members can be described as ‘organizational truces’ that facilitate coordination between organizational members and thus guide the recurrent activities performed by individuals (Nelson and Winter 1982: 107–12). This understanding points at the reproduction of power relations by routines. From the structuration theoretical perspective of practice, routines are understood as mechanisms through which the hierarchical structures and relations of power are reproduced (Giddens 1984; Bryan and Lammers 2020).

Notwithstanding its importance, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between routines and power relations in general, and those with the subjectively construed identities of organizational members in particular. A noteworthy exception is the study of Brown and Lewis (2011) who addressed this gap by investigating the identity work conducted with respect to the time-keeping and billing routines of a group of lawyers in a UK-based law firm. We took the same approach in this study but went beyond their analytical framework and considered an action-related take on identity work.

Understanding how frontline professionals’ identities are (re)constructed in their talks about their organizationally based routine practices is particularly important because the diverse nature of cases they treat requires different courses of action that countervails routinization. Grounded in an understanding that professional identity and professional work are tightly connected (Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006; Chen and Reay 2021), addressing this issue increases our knowledge of how these organizational members continually navigate the persisting tension between the professional identity that supports their autonomous decision-making about their everyday practices and the managerial identity prescription that is associated with maintaining a standard routine that can be monitored and controlled.

RESEARCH SETTING

Our primary research question is how the subjectively construed identities of non-managerial frontline professionals are (re)shaped in talking about their everyday activities. To address it, aligned with a series of studies of identity work in organizations (Alvesson and Willmott 2002; Bardon, Brown and Pezé 2017), we adopted a qualitative research methodology and conducted our study in an Ontario-based social work organization called Prime (a pseudonym). This organization offers counselling services and subsidized housing to people with mental illness and alcohol/drug addiction. Social work services in Ontario exhibit a comprehensive range of funding structures, encompassing both publicly funded and private fee-for-service models, with a predominant prevalence of organizations adopting a hybrid approach. The subject of our examination pertains to an institution endowed with funding, where operational financial support has been provided by the Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) since 2004. The LHIN assumes the responsibility for the effective administration of health services within the province, stipulating individual contracts that delineate specific service-level variables, including the number of clients served, contact hours, and the cost per unit of service. To ensure adherence to prescribed service supply levels, indicators of effectiveness, and performance management metrics are vigilantly monitored every quarter in accordance with provincial guidelines (Ontario 2015). This regulatory framework has heightened the scrutiny of frontline service providers, compelling them to meet contractual goals via reporting and benchmarking (Ylvisaker and Rugkåsa 2022).

We had two rationales for choosing this case. First, the identity of social workers has provoked less interest in the literature of professional work compared to some other professionals such as doctors and accountants, and the existing literature on SWs’ identity has poorly attended to the formation of their identities related to their daily practices (see for a review Webb 2017). Second, unlike many studies of professionals that are conducted in large organizations such as hospitals and big accounting firms, Prime is a relatively small agency with a flat organizational structure. The diversified workforce together with the non-hierarchical structure that initially suggested a low level of bureaucratic control and thus a great degree of professional autonomy for SWs made this setting a worthy case for investigating how their identities were regulated, especially in the light of the LHIN’s demand for increasing efficiency while tightly controlling the budget. These qualities convinced us that studying Prime would provide a rich context that would potentially allow us ‘to replicate or extend the emergent theory’ (Eisenhardt 1989: 537).

DATA COLLECTION

The primary data source in our analysis is interviews; however, we also collected and analyzed some pertinent documents to gain deeper insights into the context within which the SWs’ identities are perpetually (re)shaped through talk. Our study encompassed a total of 22 interviews involving the executive director, two supervisors overseeing all SWs at Prime, and 19 voluntary participant SWs (Table 1). This number accounts for more than 85% of SWs working at Prime. Except for one case in which the interviewee (a supervisor) did not allow recording and therefore the interviewer took notes, the rest of these hour-long in-depth semi-structured interviews were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, yielding approximately 187,500 words. With the purpose of understanding how the SWs saw themselves in relation to their mundane work activities, the interviews included a range of open-ended questions such as ‘how do you perform your duties every day?’ and ‘how do you respond to the organizational demands for productivity/efficiency and that for providing a high-quality service to your clients as you see appropriate?’.

Additionally, we considered the information available on Prime’s official website as well as the LHIN’s policy documents. We also gathered the official forms and documents related to the Ontario Common Assessment of Needs (OCAN), which is a standardized assessment tool used in the community mental health sector that helps electronically collect the clients’ key information and determine the level of service needed for each client. It is generally administered upon intake and then again at discharge, or annually, depending on the type of service that a client is receiving. Moreover, we requested and received a blank sample report template of EMHWare, a computer application through which SWs submit OCAN, timesheets, and their detailed notes.

DATA ANALYSIS

In keeping with several other qualitative research that have investigated matters of identity in relation to disciplinary power that consider language as a medium through which power and control are exercised (Fairclough 1989) and a means that ‘filters experienced realities’ (Ybema et al. 2009: 304), we adopted a form of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990) that requires employing an inductive approach to data analysis (Thornborrow and Brown 2009; Bardon, Brown and Pezé 2017). We loaded the dataset into MAXQDA, a software package used for qualitative analysis, and started open-coding the text collected from all data sources. Our interest was not in identifying different types of identities per se, but we were keen on understanding how these identities were articulated in relation to processes of organizing. The process of searching for meaning embedded in the discursive practices of SWs led to the emergence of a wide range of codes such as ‘case tracking’, ‘boundary management’, ‘time management’, ‘compliance’, ‘helping clients’, ‘correction’, and ‘client satisfaction’.

Next, we tried to refine these themes into some broader categories. By comparing and contrasting the identified chunks of text our attention was directed towards the pivotal role of two interconnected practices of documentation and monthly meetings with supervisors in organizing the SWs’ work which revealed strong patterns in the dataset. By understanding the controlling dynamics of these repetitive practices, the disciplinary effects of routines emerged as a noteworthy concept in this context. We, therefore, focussed on exploring how the SWs’ discursive identities were shaped in relation to these practices, which cover a range of other routine activities such as case tracking and time management (i.e. they report on these activities through their documentation and meetings). The collected information from other sources such as the policy documents and the OCAN assessment tool provided a better understanding of the details of these routines. While striving to explore how these practices were constructed through talk, we realized that the related identity talks, regardless of being supportive to or critical of the organizational policies, were all pointing at instances of acting in accordance with those guidelines. This recognition led us to focus on the relationships between discursive identity work and action. While keeping the focus of analysis ‘at the level of identities and subjectivities’ (Thomas and Davies 2005: 683), we decided to consider the SWs’ talk about confronting the organizational rules in practice as well and created two separate categories on that basis. We categorized resistance into the decaf and espresso types (Barros 2018) with the former addressing discursive resistance activated by a practitioner while he/she acts in compliance with organizational requirements and the latter encapsulating those related to contravening the rules. Inverting the reflection of these concepts, we defined decaf compliance as a discursive practice aimed at aligning overtly resistant actions with organizational mandates, and espresso compliance as adherence to the rules.

During the interviews, in addition to expressing their adherence to the policies, almost all respondents highlighted several instances where, due to the unique circumstances of certain cases, they felt ambivalent about strictly following the organizational guidelines or acting differently. These responses led to the collection of 79 short stories of events where the organizational rules had been intentionally overridden by the SWs.

In the subsequent phase, aligned with a range of Foucauldian-inspired studies of disciplinary power in organizations (Thornborrow and Brown 2009; Brown and Lewis 2011; Bardon, Brown and Pezé 2017), we coded the data against some established themes such as ‘surveillance’, ‘avowal’, ‘normalization’, and ‘self-examination’. This analysis illuminated how, in the first category (talk about the act of compliance), the disciplinary power was embedded in the discussions about the identified routine practices. However, dissecting the data concerning resistance actions (talk about the act of resistance) proved more intricate. Initially perceived as overt resistance, we ultimately realized that the construction of rebellious identities was also subject to discipline, albeit in a distinct manner from the first category. Moving back and forth between the data and theory, we leveraged social psychology literature on judging the legitimacy of social entities (Tyler 1997; Tost 2011) to comprehend how the SWs evaluated/judged the special circumstances they encountered and how they determined who they were with respect to such conditions that prompted deviation from established guidelines. Our examination revealed three forms of judgement through which they crafted their resistant identities. Notably, we found out that while owning up to the breach of rules, they were paradoxically struggling to craft client-centred caregiver identities that are aligned with the main objectives of their organization, hence actively trying to present their selves as responsible organizational members. While labelling this discursive struggle as decaf compliance, we considered the disciplinary effects of aspirational identities to explain the relations of power in which this set of identity work was bound up. Consequently, the analytical framework that emerged from this inductive inquiry includes two complementary disciplinary structures that regulate the identities of SWs.

FINDINGS

We divide this section into two parts. In the first part, we discuss how the SWs’ identities are disciplined and appropriated from their talk about the routine activities of documentation and meeting with supervisors. We separately present our findings on the ostensive and performative aspects of routines. In the second part, we consider the practices of talk related to the act of resistance and demonstrate how the SWs’ identities were disciplined in a way that led to the fabrication of responsible autonomous selves.

Talking about the act of compliance

Talk about the routines (ostensive)

The SWs at Prime were called ‘case managers’, alluding that they had a certain degree of autonomy and were responsible for handling cases (i.e. clients) assigned to them. The everyday work they conduct typically included meeting with their clients and completing the related paperwork. Each SW was required to make a minimum of four contacts with clients each day. The details of these meetings along with daily timesheets and other assessment tools such as OCAN were required to be documented through a cloud-based software package called EMHWare. At Prime, this platform was used to track client information (such as file notes which would be entered for each client interaction), workflow management (to track how many sessions had occurred for each client), and appointment management (to see when and at what frequency clients were being booked, but also to track the day-to-day work hours of the employees). The ‘timesheet ha[d] to match up to seven hours and fifteen minutes a day’ (#SW12). All SWs insisted that their documentation was at the centre of what they do:

[our documentation] is monitored by the supervisors [through EMHWare]. It is used to report our numbers to the LHIN, which is our funder. If our notes are not up to date, they can’t send in the reports that they need (#SW6).

The disciplinary effect of talking about the ostensive aspect of the routine practice of documentation was evident as all SWs emphasized how their work was shaped around reporting on the details of their activities through the software:

We have to document our whole day…we have the purpose or focus of the meeting, what happened during the meeting, and then who is responsible for what at the end. We do that, and then if I do office functions, I have to say how long I did office functions for, case notes or if I do professional development, if I am reading something, so we have to break down our day into exactly what we do every hour (#SW16).

In addition to concerns about keeping their documents up to date, the SWs recognized the importance of including sufficient details in their reports to satisfy their supervisors’ expectations:

They count the number of contacts you have…and the documentation and the way we document, there is a lot more emphasis on that. [If you don’t meet the requirements] you get a couple of cautionary emails about it from your [supervisor], and then if it continues then you would be seen by one of the higher up managers (#SW14).

Although the software played an important role in organizing the everyday activities of SWs by facilitating documentation at Prime, they had monthly individual meetings with their supervisors in which their performances based on the documents they had submitted would be reviewed and commented on:

During the supervision, we will go through all the clients. We go through how much time I spend with each one…and see where they are at. (#SW8).

These two interlinked routine practices introduced a considerable degree of disciplinary power that regulated the identities of the SWs through both surveillance and technologies of the self. The participants clearly emphasized the importance of documentation and its alignment with the supervisor’s expectations in shaping who they are and what they do. Although the supervisors are absent from the meetings between the SWs and their clients, knowing that the reports would be reviewed by them and then discussed during the monthly meetings, the SWs were continuously seeing themselves under the supervisors’ gaze:

There is a lot of micromanaging. Every little nit-pick [is] going through files. I feel that my manager goes through my notes with a fine-tooth comb, and if I don’t make a phone call or do whatever, she will bring it up at supervision, which is fine, because sometimes I am not always on the ball because I sometimes get distracted with my work (#SW11).

Seeing their selves under surveillance and knowing that they would be held accountable, they were careful that their notes contained sufficient details of their work and were not just a box-ticking exercise. #SW5, for example, when discussing the requirement for reporting on making four contacts a day stated: ‘any of it can be a text message or phone call, but also, you know you have your case management with the supervisor monthly, so you have to stay on top of it with the clients …I have to respond to my supervisor. I’m what I’ve done with my load, so I can’t just sit back and make a couple of calls a day and [say]my job’s done’.

The SWs, therefore, were continuously engaged in a self-examination exercise through which they monitored themselves to ensure that they were aligned with what was expected from them in terms of having their documentation up to date as well as having properly documented the necessary details. Although the submission of notes and timesheets would immediately make the SWs and what they had done visible to their supervisors, what would happen in the supervisory meetings, we realized, was also significantly important to the SWs:

There is a two-page list that she goes through with the clients’ files on the computer… if there isn’t enough information, she’s requesting that the case notes be a bit longer and it’s all facts, the when where why kind of things… (#SW3).

Before I would go into the supervisor meeting, I would double-check that whatever was talked about last month, is that something that I have gone through. There are expectations there. There are things that she will give every time (#SW8).

It was clear that the supervisory meetings combined with the documentation introduced a disciplinary effect in the sense that the SWs would both directly and indirectly (through talk and text) confess an account of their selves to their supervisors and get corrected. Although a few experienced SWs argued that the purpose of these meetings was just to get some directions and one of them stressed that ‘I believe my supervisor is there to guide me, but not to discipline me and not to shape me’ (#SW3), most others, especially junior and mid-career practitioners emphasized that they were receiving important feedbacks, their strengths and weaknesses were being highlighted and that the meetings would help them to enhance their performance. They, therefore, discursively constructed their selves as subjects that could be evaluated and improved:

I like managers who can teach me something, and I am open to being challenged by examining myself, too. I do like to review my work with [my supervisor] so I have a clear plan (#SW14).

These two routine practices also functioned like a normalizing technique that made the SWs visible and led them to constitute their selves as objects that could be measured against the organizational objectives. By conforming to these practices, therefore, the SWs were infused with the organizational values and talked about their selves in terms specified by the organization:

My notes are almost completely up to date. I am always - any minute I have, I am documenting (#SW6).

My documentation…my supervisor has said it’s remarkable. My OCANs are probably the best she’s ever seen (SW3).

Through this discursively constituted system of avowal that facilitated the process of normalization, most SWs crafted conformist selves. There were, however, five participants who criticized the way the practice of documentation was enacted. For example, SW11 constructed a resistant self by talking against the organizational norms in principle:

I don’t think there should be a standard practice for [the number of daily contacts and reporting on that], because I know my clients and I know when I need to see them.

All of the SWs in the latter category, however, declared that they would abide by the organizational rules in practice. These findings demonstrate that most identities the SWs construed were disciplined in their talks about the ostensive aspects of their routine practices. However, there was a small group of them who activated decaf resistance in conducting identity work through criticism while acting in alignment with the policies.

Talk about the routines (performative)

The performative aspect of documentation practice took various forms. Although all of the SWs continuously completed their paperwork, they made some changes in the frequency of their submissions and in prioritizing some other tasks over documentation from time to time. The most pressing issue at Prime, according to the SWs, was striking a balance between spending sufficient time with their clients and keeping their documents up to date or meeting the requirements that they had to report on. For instance, depending on the needs of clients it was not always possible to make exactly four contacts in a day. The SWs, therefore, clarified that they would consider the priorities based on their professional judgement of the clients’ needs and then schedule meetings with them accordingly. Most of them, however, argued that they would make sure that the average of their contacts (in a week) meets the requirement of four contacts a day. Some of them had dedicated 1 day (or a few evenings) in a week to their documentation and would not book any clients on those days. When falling behind the submission deadline, some had to make some immediate adjustments.

There are times where I will cancel, or where I have to cancel out an afternoon and tell my clients: sorry, I got data, it’s due… so I can’t meet with you, I am so sorry (#SW16).

Streamlining documentation, therefore, was a tactic that would make them more flexible to arrange meetings with their clients. It was, however, not always free of challenge and the SWs could face the opposite demands of attending to the needs of a client and completing their documentation. Although it was the organization’s preference to always have all the notes up to date, the supervisors had a good understanding of the practical challenges associated with that task. They would, therefore, tolerate a week (sometimes 2 weeks) of delay in submitting notes. Longer delays (up to a month but no longer) could also be accepted providing that the SWs could negotiate to defend their cases:

I will rarely turn down a client who is in a crisis situation or something. I would rather deal with my manager asking me why I am behind in my notes, and she really understands (#SW18).

Unlike documentation, the SWs did not have a lot of leeway with the monthly supervisory meetings. Some of them, however, stated that they would not simply accept the recommendation of their supervisors if they did not agree with her on a particular case and would try to discuss and convince her during the meetings. Overall, in their talks about enacting the organizational routine practices of documentation and supervisory meetings, the SWs engaged in some forms of identity work through which they struggled to maintain their professional values (e.g. autonomous decision-making, running professional judgements) while respecting the organizational requirements. Their small departures from the routines in practice were all within a tolerable range and they crafted their identities as professionals who were in charge of addressing the needs of their clients while being mindful of their supervisors’ expectations. The findings in this section resonate with the definition of decaf resistance, as the resistant identities the SWs shape are not in sharp contrast with the organizational policies and they, nevertheless, follow the guidelines.

Talking about the act of resistance

In this section, we discuss the identities that the SWs constructed when talking about instances where they declared that they purposely override the policies of their organization. The overridden policies included those related to documentation and time management but also many of them were about the rules around SW–client boundaries. By coding the stories of such actions reported by the SWs and their explanations of why they had deviated from the rules, we came to realize that their arguments were grounded in their evaluations of the social situations they had faced and their individual assessments of the legitimacy of their actions in those particular contexts. Except for a couple of events which the main reason for breaking the rules was personal, the rest were grouped into three categories of legitimacy judgement: instrumental, moral, and relational. This categorization is informed by the social psychology literature on judging the legitimacy of social entities (Tyler 1997; Leach, Ellemers and Barreto 2007; Skitka, Bauman and Lytle 2009; Tost 2011). We found out that these practices of talk were all oriented towards, and therefore disciplined by the aspiration of, crafting the SWs’ desired professional selves as caregivers. First, we present one example for each account of judgement and then discuss how the identities construed through these discourses were disciplined.

The first category included those events in which the SW’s action was motivated by moral considerations: they argued that they had acted against the organizational regulations because their perception of the situation suggested that it was the right thing to do. The logic underlying these judgements was their belief in certain social values and codes of ethics, which has been labelled by social psychologists as the moral dimension of social judgement (Leach, Ellemers and Barreto 2007; Skitka, Bauman and Lytle 2009). For instance, #SW10 talked about a client who needed to go to the hospital, but due to some mental issues would refuse to do so:

We do have a policy that if a client calls and you suspect [they] are sick, you’re not supposed to meet with them. I did [it] to take him to the hospital. Technically I should have had him gone by ambulance, but he wouldn’t have gone. I feel like, morally, this person needed medical assistance, and I took him. I put myself at risk of getting sick, but … It’s just difficult seeing people suffer.

In this case, the SW draws on her humanitarian ethical concerns to justify her action. Morality, thus, provides a basis for her to justify deviation from the guidelines of the organization.

Another account of judgement that emerged from our data included those events where the SWs reflected on the instrumental aspect of their experience: subverting the policies because they believed that the task at hand would be handled more effectively. From this perspective, a social entity is regarded as legitimate when it leads to a favourable outcome with the available resources (Tyler 1997). This group also discussed overriding different policies ranging from boundary management to prioritizing some clients over others. #SW3, for example, told us about a client who had informed her that she was moving to a new apartment on a Friday afternoon, and she had gone to help her:

[The client] was so overwhelmed. She has severe physical problems and she literally collapsed within two hours because it was too much for her. Guess who finished unpacking so that she had the food in the fridge and the bed was made? I did all that. On that day, there was two clients that didn’t get checking phone calls… I broke the [rules] and this is what I was called for [by my supervisor], but I told her here’s the situation. When it comes to my client’s needs and circumstances, that’s what’s going to determine how much time I spend with them. It goes by what is needed at that time by an individual I’m supporting… I am a care provider.

In this case, the SW spent extra hours with a client doing something that was not a part of her responsibility and came at the cost of ignoring some other clients. She narrated her professional identity as someone who decided to prioritize a client over others based on her pragmatic evaluation of the situation (i.e. vulnerability of the client and her immediate needs), the availability of resources and the utility of her action. She also stresses on being a care provider implying that her interpretation of her role is that she is supposed to and has the liberty to make decisions based on how much and what type of care her clients need.

Finally, the third category belonged to relational judgements. From this perspective, an action is socially legitimate when it affirms one’s social identity, corresponds to their status within a group (e.g. community of SWs) and bolsters ‘their feelings about themselves and their self-worth’ (Tyler 1997: 325).

As social worker[s], we can’t accept gifts and we don’t give gifts…However, [last] Halloween I had made up little bags to give out to the kids, but I had tons of left-over baggies that I made up, and I wasn’t going to throw it out or keep it for myself, so I gave it to my clients (#SW12).

Defending her action, she posited ‘because we are social workers and professionals, but we are also human beings, … [I was always interested in] being in the helping and caring profession, working with people. Yeah, that’s how I came to be here today’. In her identity talk, therefore, she elaborated that she was an SW who would not see acting out of humanitarian concerns as contradictory to the values associated with her role even though it was against the policies. Accordingly, despite violating the rules, acting benevolently to help clients in a certain situation was deemed as legitimate behaviour. Furthermore, by taking pride in what she had done and stressing on being an SW and a human at the same time, she seemed to claim respect and a sense of self-worth that affirmed her status as an SW who cares about people’s dignity even beyond her professional jurisdictions.

It is important to note that these categories are not mutually distinct and may sometimes overlap (Tost 2011). The identified accounts of judgement, as Tyler (1997) argues, are all identity-based and have implications for the actors’ identities. From the identity work perspective, the identities that the SWs narrated in their talks about the situations of emancipating from the organizational policies were influenced by their understanding of what it meant to be an SW under those circumstances. In their situated judgements, they were struggling to address the questions ‘what works best in this case?’, ‘what is the right thing to do?’, and ‘what is my role in this interaction?’. Hence, their discursive practices revealed that their judgements of the social situations they had encountered and the courses of action they had taken were directed by their perception of the ideal versions of their professional selves. In their judgement talks, they constructed their selves as compassionate professionals whose main concerns were assuring that the clients under their care were well treated. Not only were their narratives charged with motifs of caring and empathy, but also through the moral, relational and instrumental rhetorical devices, they actively intended to present their behaviours as caring acts and portray themselves as caregivers.

Several researchers have previously argued that the effectiveness of social work depends on the relationships between SWs and their clients to establish appropriate levels of intimacy and that the concept of care is at the centre of this interaction (Lloyd 2005; Alexander and Charles 2009; Mackay and Zufferey 2015). Accordingly, identification of SWs with their caregiving roles in a way that ‘one’s individuality is suppressed, sense of self is lost, and the role-based identity is elevated above other important considerations’ has also received attention in this literature (Wu and Pooler 2014: 237). These researchers argue that the SWs’ deep engagement with clients, the weighty implications of their judgements and the pressure to fulfil client needs and expectations are the influential factors that lead to adopting a caregiver identity, a condition that stays continually triggered (see also Siebert and Siebert 2005).

In the above examples, #SW10 put herself at risk to help her client go to the hospital out of caring for the client’s wellbeing; #SW3 prioritized a vulnerable client over others because she realized that the client needed her help/care more than others in that situation, despite being aware that she would be reproached by her supervisor for violating the organizational rules; and #SW12 overrode the policies and gave Halloween gifts to her clients to make them happy and considered it as aligned with her role prescriptions because she believed that social work is all about caring for people. The common theme observed in these practices of talk is the demonstration of selflessness and altruistic professional selves whose decisions and actions are primarily guided by their care for their clients in ways that they see appropriate. The SWs’ agencies are, therefore, enacted towards narrating a caregiver identity. A caregiver, from this vantage point, is an individual who ‘offers personalised attention to his/her [clients] and is willing to go beyond the call of duty in dispatching his/her responsibilities’ (Gabriel 2015: 316). Except for one SW who mentioned the perceived rudeness of a particular client as the reason for refusing to give him a service, all others leveraged the concept of caregiving in justifying their disobedient actions. The client-centred caregiver identity, therefore, seemed to be an objective and a desired state to which the SWs were aspired. As such, their identity work was disciplined by the desire of articulating their selves around the notion of care in situations of overriding policies.

It is essential to note that the caregiving discourse is open to interpretation and the subjects are able to ‘pervert and subtly shift meanings and understandings’ when making reference to it (Thomas and Davies 2005: 687). In the instance of #SW3’s deviation from guidelines, the supervisor’s perception of caregiving seemed to imply equal attention to all registered clients. Consequently, leaving some unattended to assist a single client was seen as a breach of rules. However, SW3 enacted her professional autonomy to situationally judge the needs of her clients in context and therefore prioritized one over others. Despite these differing viewpoints, caregiving emerges as a potent discursive device that all SWs have at their disposal to negotiate some leeway in performing their roles.

DISCUSSION

The main contribution this study makes is to identify separate mechanisms through which the work identities of frontline SWs were fabricated in their talks about their everyday activities when discussing how they continually act under organizationally sanctioned guidelines, and when addressing their purposeful considerable deviation from those rules. We showed that in talking about two routine practices around which work was organized at Prime, the SWs exercised power (when talking about the ostensive aspects of routines) and authored conformist selves, but also enacted a limited degree of agency (when talking about the performative aspect of routines and when criticizing the policies) to perform some types of decaf resistance. However, when talking about disobeying the policies in practice, while construing resistant identities by acknowledging breach of rules, their perceptions of work selves were regulated by the aspiration of narrating a caregiver identity which is rooted in the dominant discourse of the social work profession.

As summarized in Table 2, these findings delineate different types of resistance and compliance observed in the identity work undertaken by SWs: espresso resistance (overtly shaping a resistant identity by acknowledging actions taken against the guidelines), decaf resistance (adhering to organizational guidelines but crafting a resistance identity by criticizing the policies or acknowledging small deviations when implementing them), espresso compliance (acknowledging compliance with the organizational policies and embrace the subject positions offered) and decaf compliance (admitting to rule violation but narrating a conformist identity by aligning actions with the caregiving objectives of the organization).

Our analysis revealed that Prime, in the absence of a hierarchical span of control, had introduced an alternative regime of control and surveillance enforced through two repetitive practices of documentation and supervisory meetings that disciplined the SWs’ identities in line with the organization’s interests. These two routine practices constituted a process of subjugation that ensured self-monitoring on the part of the SWs. In addition to being rendered visible by submitting their daily notes, in the meetings with their supervisors the SWs had to confess their accounts of selves in relation to how they had dealt with their clients. The supervisors would then correct their identity narratives by questioning their actions and providing advice. Although the supervisory meetings occur once a month, the SWs were mindful of what would happen in those sessions, similar to their concerns about the details of the reports they had to submit every day. Therefore, they were writing their daily notes in view of the expectations in the upcoming meetings. These two interlocking practices, thus, functioned as a panoptic-like technology of power which ‘penetrates right to the very core of each member’s subjectivity’ (Sewell and Wilkinson 1992: 284). Talking about the ostensive aspects of these routine official practices (in principle) rendered the SWs docile and transformed them into active subjects of their own regulation through processes of self-assessment (continually evaluating their performances against the objectives of Prime), avowal (expressing support for the practices of documentation and supervisory meetings), correction (through reporting to supervisors in regular meetings), and normalization (enforced through having to report on making four contacts a day and filling up 7.25 h timesheet). The SWs, therefore, were led to produce their selves by drawing on the discursive resources that were made available to them by their organization and author conformist identities in pursuit of obtaining a ‘state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ in their organizational lives (Foucault 1998: 18). In their talks, they forged accounts of selves as aligned with the organization’s expectations of properly documenting and reporting on all details and keeping their supervisors updated through written notes as well as oral conversations. There were a few SWs who, while complying with the rules, tried to ‘pitch themselves in opposition to identity positions offered to them’ (Thomas 2009: 174) by criticizing the principles of these practices and thus activated a decaf resistance. These individuals enacted their agency to craft a semi-autonomous professional identity of an actor who can step out of the organizationally defined role and provide an independent definition of what it means to be an SW and how an SW’s activities should be monitored.

A greater degree of agency, however, was observed in the SWs’ talks about the performative aspect of their practice. In these talks that centred on how they innovatively rearranged their work schedules and altered the priorities of the tasks assigned to them, they demonstrated their abilities in freeing their selves from the tight identity templates provided by the organization and partially breaking out of the managerial hegemony imposed upon them. While following the guidelines, the SWs argued that they slightly bend the rules when needed to balance out the demands of keeping their documents updated and handling their arguably heavy workloads. Despite liberating their professional selves from the normalizing processes introduced by the organization and portraying non-colonized organizational members who participate in their own formation, these identity narratives were also oriented towards crafting conformist selves. The changes they made to the policies when enacting them in practice, despite not being fully aligned with written guidelines, were within an acceptable range and the SWs and their supervisors did not regard such activities as rule-breaking.

In talking about the act of resistance (clearly acknowledging an intentional breach of organizational rules) the SWs discussed instances of facing equivocal circumstances where they had decided to override the policies by making judgements based on their practical understanding of the conditions and the exigencies of the situation. Knowing that disciplinary power exists ‘in every perception, every judgement, every act’ (Deetz 1992: 37), we analyzed their discursive struggle over who they thought they were when acting against the guidelines. We came to realize that in these identity talks, the SWs construed their selves in ways that highlighted their care for their clients. In doing so, through running instrumental, moral, and relational forms of judgement they crafted their selves as ‘active, choice-making subject[s]’ (Kuhn 2009: 682) who autonomously and reflexively exercise their practical wisdom in choosing a course of action that they believe is most appropriate. The rationale behind, and confidence in their situational decisions, as evident in their discourse, were rooted in an understanding that a standardized code of practice does not necessarily produce the best result in all situations and that an SW is in a position to decide what works best. Through such an argument, they set the scene to narrate a resistant yet notionally legitimate identity. That is, while denoting deliberate deviation from guidelines and forming resistant identities, they paradoxically regarded themselves as conformists to the main objectives of the organization that revolve around caring for clients. The legitimacy that they indirectly claimed for their actions and the associated identities were grounded in the conception that client-centred caregiving is the dominant discourse in which their supervisors, their organization, and themselves are all immersed. This is evident from the Prime’s mission, vision and values statement which strongly emphasizes helping and caring for clients beyond their illness, and the LHIN’s service accountability agreement that indicates the provision of a patient-centred service as one of their key objectives. Additionally, Prime’s managers argued that what makes them most satisfied in their jobs is ‘seeing clients getting the help they need’ (#Supervisor2), ‘[to]see that a client is doing very well’ (#Supervisor1), and ‘[being able to] make changes for the betterment of the people we serve’ (#Executive Director).

Olakivi and Niska (2017) showed that managerial and professional principles may sometimes overlap which gives room to multiple interpretations of the actors’ actions. Likewise, in this study, we found out that the aforementioned values overlap around the concept of caring, which is interpretable when translated into practice. This permits the SWs to take it for granted and incorporate it into their identity narratives to present themselves as the champions of caregiving which is an identity cherished by all other organizational stakeholders. The notion of client-centred caring, therefore, provided an alternative discursive resource that the SWs drew on to define subject positions at the intersection of managerialism and professionalism, and creatively ‘(co-)author their subjectivities’ (Kuhn 2009: 684) in crafting selves that despite falling outside of the organizational iron cage for colonized identities (Deetz 1992), could be considered as legitimate.

Despite the actors agentially playing with discursive resources, their choices were made within the frameworks of power as the domination of caregiving discourse in the professional field of social work has constituted a regime of power/knowledge that provides a calculable arena which leads SWs to regulate their own conduct when overriding guidelines. Power exercised in the process of authoring aspirational identities that shape the actors’ subjectivities related to their decisions and actions outside the organizational codes of conduct is of an insidious and seductive nature which has been labelled as ‘soft coercion’ (Courpasson 2000: 154) as it stimulates actors to behave in a certain way (Thornborrow and Brown 2009). Through the means of education (Mackay and Zufferey 2015; Bagdonaite-Stelmokiene et al. 2016) and practice as well as discourses promoted and training offered by their organization which are centred on caring for clients, the SWs are socialized into a culture that ‘embrace the caregiver identity as their ideal self’ (Wu and Pooler 2014: 238). All the participants in this study demonstrated heliotropic tendencies by arguing that the most rewarding aspect of their jobs was helping people, and most of them posited that caring for people was the main reason that they were attracted to this profession in the first place. The earnest desire to articulate their selves as caregivers, thus, transformed them into self-managing subjects who evaluate the appropriateness of their actions (in the areas of contravening the policies) in the light of their aspirational identities and ‘become the principles of [their] own subjection’ (Foucault 1977: 203).

While adhering to the notion of client-centred caregiving has disciplinary effects on the SW’s identities, it seems to be a loosely defined fluid discursive resource located at the intersection of professional and managerial discourses that can be mobilized and appropriated by both managers and frontline SWs. Social work is argued to be more embedded in applied practice than in organizational or even professional knowledge and structure, theoretically and practically diverse and generally characterized by humanist values of assisting, supporting, and enabling those who suffer from social inequalities (Parton and Kirk 2010). Accordingly, the professional values are instantiated in the everyday ‘dialogical engagement [of SWs] with those who are positioned as clients’ (Hyslop 2018: 21). Therefore, the relative ambiguity and interpretability of the caregiving notion that encapsulates the central values and ethos of the profession is an inherent feature of social work practice.

This understanding surfaces the dialectic of agency and structure. Previous scholarship has elaborated on the multiplicity of discursive resources and domains, their tensions, overlaps, and possibilities of drawing different interpretations that enable people to form their identities in ways that they choose. Yet there is a consensus that this agency is not unfettered, and the identities are negotiated within relations of power (Brown 2022). Likewise, the current study suggests that the combination of the SWs’ tendencies to present themselves as resistant to the organizational control system in some situations and simultaneously conformist to its objectives by resorting to their caregiver identities produce a space that can be referred to as an area of controlled resistance in which centrifugal and centripetal forces meet each other allowing deviation from policies within a certain range. That is, while choosing to draw on the caregiving discourse to forge a subjectively construed resistant yet legitimate professional identity, the boundaries of the deviation from the managerial requirements are set by the conventional understanding of caring for clients in their work context. Except for one case, none of the SWs in this study referred to other potentially available discursive resources such as personal priorities or work fatigue to justify their acts of resistance. This observation implies that the caregiver identity serves as both a lever to subvert the rules and as a mechanism of control constituting autonomously responsible subjects. Such a recognition is consonant with the viewpoint that choice-making subjects may also be considered as effects of power (Foucault 1977).

LIMITATIONS

Similar to all research projects, this study exhibits some limitations. First, as a qualitative analysis with a limited number of participants, the results are not generalizable, not even in the universal context of social work practice. We believe the findings, however, are illuminating and invite researchers to examine their uniqueness by studying other social work organizations and other professional settings. Second, the range of tolerance for decaf and espresso types of resistance may vary from one organization to another. Third, the stories of acting against organizational policies are all self-declared, suggesting that there may be other deviations from the guidelines that were not reported. We do not argue that our analysis exhaustively covers all different aspects of the SWs’ organizational lives and encourage future research to shed extra light on the everyday work of frontline professionals including SWs.

CONCLUSION

This analysis does not intend to divide between practices of talk related to routine and non-routine activities, but rather, offers an alternative framing for understanding discursive identity work with respect to acts of compliance and resistance, which has been overlooked in the literature. We showed that, in our case, discipline was enforced through discussing the execution of organizational routines when abiding by the rules and through seeking to form an ideal professional self when subverting the organizational order. Therefore, consistent with the acknowledgement that professional discourses may embody disciplinary power (Fournier 1999), we contend that control is not the sole property of organizations, but pervasive professional discourses (the caregiving discourse in this case) may also introduce disciplinary effects that account for responsible autonomy. Moreover, while in previous scholarship, talking for and against organizational guidelines has been conceptualized as compliance and resistance, our study, by focussing on talking about action, portrays a more complicated picture than previously imagined. That is, additional to resistant and conformist identities that professionals construe consistent with their actions, we found that they may articulate resistant identities when discussing the act of compliance and narrate conformist selves when talking about the act of resistance. This understanding challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that discursive and purposeful material practices are aligned in authoring self-conceptions. Our insights, therefore, suggest that previous studies in this area have failed to encapsulate the action-related complexities of reflexively crafting preferred versions of work selves through talk. To address this issue, this study postulates an analytical framework that juxtaposes two complementary disciplinary mechanisms by which the identities of frontline professionals are regulated and invites future research to produce finer-grained understandings of identity work processes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the journal editor, Daniel Muzio, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful input. Additionally, we are grateful to Andrew Brown for his invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

REFERENCES