The second question I want to address this week was one posted by Angie Greenhall. And she asked, how do you preserve your individual self? I like this question because it's actually kind of a sociological question, and that's my specialty, so I'm going to spend a little time talking about that from what I've learned. But she says, the professor gave some examples of how to preserve our individuality to protect non-work time, limit your emotional involvement with work, have non-work interests and identities. What are some of the ways you preserve your individual self while still having to survive in an organizational world? And a lot of you like Yana said it's pretty hard to preserve a self in demanding work conditions. But there are a variety of places you do see it with like programs of work-life balance, where you're preserving your external life and factors that reinforce it, like various things that can help you facilitate family life. That can make it easier. The health policies and the like, there are a variety of things, mental health policies, and the like. So there's a variety of things that organizations do afford that provide that balance, so you don't go crazy. I mean we all read a few years ago about these gamers, and I don't know if it was World of Warcraft or what, but these people who would basically play so much and work so hard at it that they would die at the computer. And it's feasible that work too can become chronic of that sort as well. And I think it's true that if we look at the work world and the kind of layers of culture put on, that there is kind of insidious control that we can envision. But it's throughout society, it's not just in a work setting. I mean, there are a variety of theories out there in sociology that talk about this is that culture is generated through the means of production. That's an old Marxist kind of literature out there. And I know people have normative views on that, but there's theories about it. And then there are even later Neo-Marxists, who, like the Frankfurt School, talk about how mass media becomes a secondary form of control, secondary cultures. And by that, they mean like when you watch TV, you notice like when you watch the Simpsons, the TV show will make fun of you, the viewer, for watching and for being complicit in the humor and being lazy on the couch and things like that. It's a second order kind of control even, it's layered. And we enjoy it, we enjoy this kind of cultural play. We see it, and even within organizations, the playing of a contrived self, the acknowledgement that isn't it funny that I'm playing this part. It's a second order kind of control. Or that we have ways of handling debate, like yes, we should debate this. Or that you don't like things that we have, let's make sure we talk about it, everybody's okay to have different views. That we have this process that can then assimilate these differences through kind of a dialogue that exists, and that's kind of considered to be a second order form of cultural control to some extent. And those exist out there all over the place. I even find myself using it with my kids now and then to kind of get them to comply in some cases. So I mean it's out there. It's a little insidious, and we see it. And organizations are using it more and more. That said, I think that we have to keep in mind that role distance is not just something people lower in the hierarchy of an organization will do. There is literature that suggests that only middle status individuals within firms are the most likely to conform and that you see maverick behavior at the top of status hierarchies, where you have to constantly innovate, you have to constantly show that you aren't just a tool. That yes, you have to be a representative of your firm, but you also have to be somewhat of a maverick, setting a new kind of stance or a new direction. Now of course, that doesn't mean you as a personal identity or distinctive, perhaps. But it could just mean that you, as a manager, are distinctive in a way. And then at the bottom of the status hierarchy, the argument is that the people at the bottom resist or rebel, and through that, they have some degree of cultural autonomy. Now, I think also the other thing to think about too is, so again, there are places where there is autonomy. The other thing to think about, though, is what is personal identity? How do we make a personal identity? And if we think about that, somewhat, we realize that quite often, it's made up of social identities. That I am a mixture of many social identitiesm I'm not just one social identity. And in addition, my personal identity entails kind of personal characteristics. Like, I like to think of myself as nice and funny. But those aren't social identities, per se. They may be stylized types. So that's kind of different. And there is literature that suggests as people develop, like as children develop, they initially adopt social identities. And they get older, they say well, I'm a funny friend, or I'm a giving friend, as opposed to just a friend. Or that I'm not just a football player, or soccer, whichever you prefer. That over time, I will become, I'm this style of football player, or soccer player, right? And so those kind of things do emerge over time that start to characterize more of a personal identify, it's your flare of that role. Now, other literature and even some that I've written with various students that are social theoretical talks about how, over time, society and its structures have changed, such that it used to be in the Middle Ages, in the Dark Ages, institutions were on top of each other, so everybody saw each other, right? So the king and queen lived in the same castle as various peasants, right? And everybody would kind of be exposed to each other relatively much. And over time, we started to have our work life somewhat separate from our home life. And in the modern world, right, there was some differentiation and division of labor so that you saw the segmentation of society. And then today, our work life never sees our home life kind of thing, they just don't overlap quite often. And we commute, particularly in developing countries with teleworking, right? You have this huge amount of segmentation, where there is an overlap, where nobody sees me as a dad, you only see me as a faculty member. And because of that, we start to have situated identities. We start to perform in certain settings, where we come together for momentary projects. And those kind of identities that we perform in these shifting conjuries of people are really situational, and they're not social identities. The thing that becomes consistent as we play across all these disparate contexts that are never overlapping, we start to think of ourselves as a stylized character. And so more and more, we base our identities, at least some of us are arguing on character displays, which are more about, think of it this way, we see Harrison Ford as a famous actor. And he's in all kinds of movies, where he plays a president or Han Solo or whatever, and he plays the same character, though. You notice that? He has instantiated a similar kind of style, and that character display isn't necessarily situated within a role, it's something the person has. And more and more, that's the kind of thing that we start to associate with a personal identity. And that's become increasingly so. That's the character kind of thing. So some of us are writing about the shift in the structured society and organizational society, that that's kind of shifting where the locust of what we consider as a personal identity is. And if you go back over the centuries, I mean, even back in Elizabethan era, not many people wrote journals or even diaries. And someone like Samuel Peeps, who was the Queen's admiral, was one of the first to write this personal diary of all his personal thoughts and feelings, where a sense of a personal identity was really had, individual identity of a person. And so, it hasn't been in existence, at least acknowledged and discussed, for very long if you think about it. And so these notions of self have shifted as well, and what they mean. And so that's kind of interesting, too, I think, that over time, these things have changed. So hopefully, I've kind of put some spin on this for you, and hopefully, we have a little better sense of the issues concerning individual selves within firms. And I've given this long kind of tangent into sociology about cultural kind of definition, as well as kind of notions of individual self that maybe will help you understand that there are places we can preserve a self. And perhaps our notion of self itself is changing, and so that we can kind of identify where and when we're actually acquiring it or not.
