Making Space for Ambiguity: Rethinking Organizational Identification from a Career Perspective

This paper argues that organizational identification is more ambiguous than currently depicted in the literature, especially as people try to make sense of their multiple organizational affiliations over the course of their careers. Based on the detailed analysis of ex-consultants' career narratives, and especially the multiple, partly conflicting positioning practices through which they express proximity and/ or distance towards a past and present working context, this study provides a nuanced understanding of how ambiguous organizational identifications arise in the first place. Rather than problematizing these ambiguous identifications as undesirable for organizations and their members, the study aspires to make space for ambiguity and multiplicity by rethinking identification from a career perspective that is sensitive to aspects of temporality and change, thereby providing a more dynamic conceptualization of organizational identification in the contemporary workplace.