Identity work from the Global South: towards a pluriversal research agenda on identitiesAbstract
Over the past two decades, the study of identities in and around organizations has consolidated around a vocabulary that includes identity work, identity regulation, identity play, and identity threat. This article argues that this vocabulary, while useful, is neither neutral nor universal. It rests on an epistemology and an ontology from the North, which take as their starting point a bounded, individual self. Drawing on the notion of the coloniality of being and on conceptions of the person originating from Southern traditions, the article rereads this vocabulary and proposes a research agenda organized around three axes: relationality, coloniality, and pluriversality. Each axis shows how a perspective from the South redefines central concepts in the field and points to concepts that have yet to be developed. The article makes three contributions: it makes visible the situated character of the vocabulary of identities; it mobilizes African, Latin American, and Asian authors as analytical tools rather than as illustration; and it presents a research agenda.
Keywords:
identity; identity work; global south; coloniality; pluriversality
Resumo
Ao longo das últimas duas décadas, o estudo das identidades nas e ao redor das organizações consolidou-se em torno de um vocabulário que inclui o trabalho identitário, a regulação identitária, o jogo identitário e a ameaça identitária. Este artigo argumenta que esse vocabulário, embora útil, não é neutro nem universal. Ele repousa sobre uma epistemologia e uma ontologia do Norte, que tomam como ponto de partida um self individual e delimitado. Recorrendo à noção de colonialidade do ser e às concepções de pessoa oriundas de tradições do Sul, o artigo relê esse vocabulário e propõe uma agenda de pesquisa organizada em torno de três eixos: relacionalidade, colonialidade e pluriversalidade. Cada eixo mostra como uma perspectiva do Sul redefine conceitos centrais do campo e aponta para conceitos que ainda precisam ser desenvolvidos. O artigo apresenta três contribuições: torna visível o caráter situado do vocabulário das identidades; mobiliza autores africanos, latino-americanos e asiáticos como ferramentas analíticas, e não como ilustração; e apresenta uma agenda de pesquisa.
Palavras-chave:
identidade; trabalho identitário; sul global; colonialidade; pluriversalidade
Resumen
A lo largo de las dos últimas décadas, el estudio de las identidades en las organizaciones y en torno a ellas se ha consolidado alrededor de un vocabulario que incluye el trabajo identitario, la regulación identitaria, el juego identitario y la amenaza identitaria. Este artículo sostiene que dicho vocabulario, aunque útil, no es neutral ni universal. Se asienta sobre una epistemología y una ontología del Norte, que toman como punto de partida un self individual y delimitado. Recurriendo a la noción de colonialidad del ser y a las concepciones de persona provenientes de tradiciones del Sur, el artículo relee ese vocabulario y propone una agenda de investigación organizada en torno a tres ejes: relacionalidad, colonialidad y pluriversalidad. Cada eje muestra cómo una perspectiva del Sur redefine conceptos centrales del campo y señala conceptos que aún están por desarrollarse. El artículo presenta tres contribuciones: hace visible el carácter situado del vocabulario de las identidades; moviliza a autores africanos, latinoamericanos y asiáticos como herramientas analíticas, y no como ilustración; y presenta una agenda de investigación.
Palabras clave:
identidad; trabajo identitario; Sur Global; colonialidad; pluriversalidad
INTRODUCTION
Identities, understood as the accounts that people construct of who they were, who they are, and who they wish to become, occupy a prominent place in organization and management studies (OMS). Around them, the field has developed its own vocabulary, which includes identity work, identity regulation, identity play, and identity threat. This vocabulary organizes much of the recent research on socialization, leadership, careers, resistance, and the meaning of work (Alvesson et al., 2008; Felix et al., 2024; Ybema et al., 2009). The field itself, however, recognizes a limit: Brown (2022) observes that research on identities is marked by myopia, insularity, and ethnocentrism.
Four reviews gave shape to this field. Brown (2015, 2017, 2022) gathered scattered strands into an identity work perspective, and Ashforth and Schinoff (2016) described the process through which people come to define themselves in organizations. Together, these reviews fixed a common vocabulary and a synthesis of the state of the art. It is this vocabulary that the article takes as its object.
The central argument is that this vocabulary is less universal than it appears. It presupposes a particular kind of subject: a bounded individual, the owner of an inner life, who reflects on the self and works on his or her identity. This is the modern conception of the person formulated in the North (Taylor, 1989), and the empirical base of the reviews comes, for the most part, from North America, Europe, and Australia (Wickert et al., 2024). The field’s vocabulary is therefore situated in a particular epistemology and ontology, even though it presents itself as a general description of who people are.
The Global South offers a starting point for reexamining this assumption. The term does not name a region on the map, but a political and epistemic position that contests the North’s dominance in the production of knowledge (Connell, 2007; Santos & Meneses, 2019; Srinivas, 2023). A growing body of work asks that organization studies contextualize and decolonize their concepts (Banerjee, 2022; Bruton et al., 2022; Filatotchev et al., 2022; Muzio, 2022). Among the forms of domination that decolonial thought describes, the coloniality of being concerns subjectivity and the recognition of the person (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), which makes it directly relevant to the theory of identities.
The aim of the article is twofold: to show that the vocabulary of identities is situated, and to build, from the South, an agenda that redefines it. The article offers three contributions. First, it makes visible the situated character of this vocabulary, distinguishing what is general in it from what reflects a particular conception of the person. Second, it mobilizes African, Latin American, and Asian authors as analytical tools, and not as illustrations of exotic contexts. Third, it places the research agenda at the centre, organizing it around three axes that redefine the field’s core concepts and point to concepts still to be created.
As for the approach, this is a conceptual article, not a systematic review. Its procedure is that of problematization (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011): rather than mapping the whole literature to find gaps, it examines the assumptions of a consolidated body of theory and confronts them with an external standpoint. The corpus brings together the four reviews, the literature on the Global South and decolonial thought, and a scattered set of studies that have already examined identities in contexts of the South. The concepts from the South used below were chosen for their relevance to the assumptions under examination, and not to represent all of the South’s traditions.
THE VOCABULARY OF THE FIELD
The concept of identity work comes from Snow and Anderson (1987), who defined it as the range of activities through which people create, present, and sustain personal identities. Organization studies then built a broader vocabulary around it. Identity work refers to the continual effort through which people form, repair, and revise their sense of who they are at work (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003; Watson, 2008). Identity regulation describes the way organizations try to shape the selves of their members (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Identity play names the experimentation with possible identities, especially during career transitions (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010). And identity threat concerns how people respond when their sense of self is put at risk (Petriglieri, 2011).
Four reviews organized this vocabulary. Brown (2022) characterizes the identity work perspective through five assumptions: selves are reflexive and actively worked on; identities are multiple and rarely coherent; they are constructed within relations of power; they are not well described as positive or authentic; and they are part of the processes of organizing. Brown (2017) distinguishes five approaches, the discursive, the dramaturgical, the symbolic, the socio-cognitive, and the psychodynamic, and Brown (2015) had identified debates around choice, stability, coherence, positivity, and authenticity. Ashforth and Schinoff (2016), in a more psychological register, describe how the individual, faced with cues from the organization, interprets who to become, orients toward a desired self, builds narratives, and seeks social validation.
This vocabulary is coherent and productive. It rests, however, on a particular base. The research that supports it was carried out, for the most part, in organizations of the North, and deals mainly with professionals and employees of formal firms (Wickert et al., 2024). More important, the vocabulary presupposes a specific idea of the person. In all four reviews, the unit of analysis is the individual, the owner of an inner life, who reflects on the self and works on his or her identity. This idea corresponds to the modern conception of the person in Western thought (Taylor, 1989), and is not shared by other traditions. Thus, even when the field sets aside the language of authenticity, as Brown (2022) does, it keeps the individual as its starting point. It is this individualist assumption, and not only the concepts derived from it, that a reading from the South calls into question.
The South is not absent from organizational research. A body of work, tied to critical and postcolonial management studies, has already examined identities in contexts of domination. Prasad (2003) gathered postcolonial analyses of organizations; Frenkel and Shenhav (2006) showed how postcolonial thought repositions central categories of the field; Ibarra-Colado (2006) described the coloniality that marks organization studies in Latin America; Boussebaa and Brown (2017) analyzed the identity regulation tied to the imposition of English; and Jimenez-Luque (2021) studied identity as a resource of resistance in a subaltern group. This work, however, remains scattered and largely absent from the reviews that consolidated the field. The article takes it as a point of departure.
A LENS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
The Global South is treated here as a political and epistemic category. Santos and Meneses (2019) place it within the epistemologies of the South, the knowledges produced in struggles against colonial domination, which Western science tends to disqualify. Connell (2007) shows that social theory tends to be produced in the metropolitan centres and merely applied to the peripheries, treated as a source of data. Srinivas (2023) observes that, in organization studies, the Global South names both an exclusion and the possibility of raising questions from within it.
This discussion connects to Latin American decolonial thought, which analyzes coloniality as a structure that persists after the end of colonial administration. Quijano (2000) describes the coloniality of power, the classification of the world’s population by the idea of race; Mignolo (2020) examines the coloniality of knowledge, the imposition of Western epistemology as the single standard; and Maldonado-Torres (2007) formulates the coloniality of being, the effects of domination on experience and on the very condition of being a person. Fanon (2008) had already described how the colonized subject has his humanity placed in doubt and depends on the recognition of the other. It is this dimension, that of being and of recognition, that structures the reading proposed below.
To this diagnosis, decolonial thought adds an ontological claim. Escobar (2018) uses the term pluriverse to name the coexistence of many worlds and many conceptions of what exists, against the claim of a single world. Much of this discussion rests on relational ontologies, in which the person is not a separate entity but is constituted in relation to others. The resources the article mobilizes come from distinct traditions: ubuntu, from Africa; conscientização, from Brazil; buen vivir, from the Andes; and the Asian critique of coloniality. They do not form a single voice of the South. Lee (2023), indeed, warns that idealizing the South and treating it as a homogeneous bloc reproduces the very error one seeks to correct, and Spivak (1999) recalls that speaking for subaltern groups can silence them. For this reason, the contrast between North and South is used strategically, not as an opposition between two closed blocs (Hamann et al., 2020).
A RESEARCH AGENDA: REFRAMING THE VOCABULARY OF IDENTITIES FROM THE SOUTH
This is the central part of the article. The agenda is organized around three axes, each a principle from the South that redefines a set of the field’s concepts. The first, relationality, recasts the idea of the person and of identity work. The second, coloniality, recasts regulation, authenticity, threat, and identity play. The third, pluriversality, recasts the theory of identity itself and opens space for new concepts. Table 1 summarizes the argument; the text that follows develops each row. It is worth repeating that the contrast between North and South is heuristic: it serves to make visible what is situated, and not to oppose two essences.
RELATIONALITY: THE PERSON BEFORE THE INDIVIDUAL
The first axis redefines identity and identity work. The identity work perspective takes the individual as its unit and assumes that the individual is already a person who reflects on the self. Several traditions reverse this order. In ubuntu, present in African contexts, a person becomes a person through other persons (Ramose, 1999). Menkiti (1984) carries the idea further: personhood is not a starting point, but something acquired over a lifetime, in degrees, through incorporation into a community. Nkomo (2011) shows how these African conceptions of the person and of leadership were erased or stereotyped in organization studies. In the Andean buen vivir, the subject is likewise defined in relation to the community, and to the land that sustains it (Gudynas, 2011; Peredo, 2019).
Two consequences follow for the field’s vocabulary. The first affects the notion of identity work. If the person is made in relation, identity work ceases to be an enterprise of the individual upon the self and becomes a collective process, in which the community grants and withdraws the condition of being a person. In Freire’s (1970) reading, becoming a subject is likewise a collective process, one of shared critical awareness, and not a solitary act. Brown (2015) mentions Mauss’s (1985) category of the person, but does not develop the idea. The second consequence affects time. Ashforth and Schinoff (2016) describe the construction of identity as a path of the individual, in the present, toward a desired self in the future. In relational conceptions, identity also includes ancestors and future generations, and time is not organized around the project of a single person. Studies of Indigenous organizations show how kinship and ties to land structure the sense of self in a way that loosens the distinction between individual and collective identity (Cutcher & Dale, 2023; Salmon et al., 2023).
An example helps to see what is at stake. Cutcher and Dale (2023) study an Indigenous organization in which kinship relations define who belongs and who answers for whom. They show the friction that arises when this logic meets audit culture, which requires identifiable individuals accountable one by one. What the identity work perspective would read as each member’s identity appears, there, as a position within a web of obligations. To describe this with the current vocabulary forces a translation of the collective into the individual, and it is precisely this translation that is lost.
A concept of its own is therefore needed, and it can be specified. We would call personhood work the process by which a community constitutes, sustains, and at times withdraws the condition of being a person from its members. The definition has four elements. Its agent is the collective, not the individual: the community does the work, and the member undergoes it. Its object is personhood, a status that admits of degrees, rather than identity, a self-description. Its temporality is longer than a biography, because the community that confers personhood includes the dead and the not yet born. And its criterion is external: personhood is measured by the fulfilment of obligations to others, not by the inner coherence that the identity work literature takes as the mark of a settled self. The concept is not covered by its nearest neighbours. Relational identification (Sluss & Ashforth, 2007) describes how an individual defines the self through role relationships, but the individual remains the unit and the author. Collective identity describes the identity of a group, not the making of persons by a group. Personhood work names the second process, for which the field currently has no term. Empirically, it becomes visible at identifiable moments: naming ceremonies, initiations, marriages, funerals, and, at the other end, sanctions, shunning, and expulsion, in which a community formally adjusts someone’s standing as a person.
These specifications discipline the research agenda. A first line would study organizations in which the moments just listed are organizational events: Indigenous associations in the Amazon, quilombola organizations in Brazil, burial societies and stokvels in South Africa, comunidades campesinas in the Andes, and Aboriginal community organizations in Australia and Māori collectives in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Banerjee & Tedmanson, 2010; Henry & Pene, 2001). The question is not what identities members hold, but how the collective confers and withdraws standing, and what happens when this collides with individualizing devices such as audits, individual contracts, and performance reviews, extending the friction Cutcher and Dale (2023) describe.
Evidence that the unit is truly the collective would include who is entitled to speak about a member’s self, whether accounts of who I am are given in kinship terms, and whether elders or assemblies hold decision rights over matters the Northern literature treats as private. A second line would investigate ancestors and future generations directly: succession in communal and family enterprises where the dead remain members, consulted through ritual or invoked in decisions. The narrative method here must change its question. Ashforth and Schinoff (2016) ask, in effect, who do you want to become; the relational counterpart asks whom do you answer to, and over what span of time. Comparing the time horizons of these narratives with those in the Northern literature would show whether identity’s temporality is a variable rather than a constant. A third line would compare ubuntu and buen vivir on three specific dimensions: what confers personhood (incorporation into the human community, in Menkiti’s account, against reciprocity with community and land, in the Andean one), what withdraws it, and what place the non-human occupies. The point of the comparison is to prevent the South from becoming a single conception. In all three lines, the methodological problem is that the standard instrument, the one-on-one interview, presupposes the very unit in question. Studying a self whose unit is the collective requires collective forms of data, such as assemblies, councils, and circles, and the community-based methodologies that Indigenous scholars have developed (Smith, 2012), including shared authorship over the account produced.
COLONIALITY: POWER, LANGUAGE, AND RECOGNITION
The second axis redefines identity regulation, authenticity together with threat, and identity play. Begin with regulation. In the literature, it is the organization’s effort to shape the selves of its members (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Read through coloniality, regulation begins before and outside the organization, in hierarchies of race, origin, and language. Poster (2007) shows how call centre agents in India are led to take on American names and accents, in a control that operates on national identity. Boussebaa and Brown (2017) describe how the imposition of English disciplines the selves of workers in the South. Seyama-Mokhaneli and Belang (2024) show how leadership coaching programmes regulate identity according to standards that treat whiteness as the norm. In Poster’s case, agents learn to talk about the weather and the sport of cities they have never visited. The organization regulates these identities, but it does so by carrying out an older hierarchy, in which the client in the North decides which voice is acceptable.
We would call this colonial identity regulation, and three marks distinguish it from the regulation Alvesson and Willmott (2002) describe. First, the referent of the norm lies outside the organization: the standard being enforced belongs to a client, a market, or a professional model located in the North, and the organization transmits it rather than authors it. Second, it operates through markers that precede employment, such as race, accent, name, and nationality, rather than through membership categories the organization creates. Third, it follows the worker across employers, because it attaches to a position in a colonial hierarchy rather than to a job. These marks yield an empirical test: regulation that changes when the worker changes firms is organizational; regulation that persists across firms, and maps onto race and language, is colonial.
Authenticity and identity threat also change. In the North, authenticity refers to a true self, and threat is the risk to that coherent self (Petriglieri, 2011). From the South, the matter becomes one of recognition. Marques et al. (2026) show how Indigenous groups must negotiate their authenticity against stereotypes imposed from outside, which define what counts as truly Indigenous. Here the threat does not come from an inner incoherence, but from misrecognition: the refusal, by the colonial order, to admit certain people as fully persons (Fanon, 2008; Maldonado-Torres, 2007). We would call this misrecognition threat, and it differs from Petriglieri’s (2011) concept on three points. The target is not the coherence or value of a given identity, but the person’s standing as a full subject. The source is not a discrete event, such as a rejection or a failure, but a durable order that precedes any particular encounter. And the responses differ: where threats to coherence invite the individual coping tactics Petriglieri catalogues, misrecognition invites passing, mimicry, collective contestation, or withdrawal into spaces of counter-recognition. This last difference is testable: responses to misrecognition should be more often collective than responses to coherence threats, because the injury is shared by a category of persons rather than suffered by one.
Identity play is the third concept recast. In the North, it describes experimentation with possible identities, an exercise usually available to subjects with resources and security (Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010). Under domination, this play takes another form. Passing as another, imitating the colonizer, inhabiting a double identity, all of this ceases to be free experimentation and becomes a tactic of survival and, at times, of resistance. The concept of mimicry captures this ambiguous play, in which imitating the norm can either conform or subvert (Bhabha, 1994). Jimenez-Luque (2021) describes how a subaltern group uses its own identity as a resource to challenge the dominant order.
The research lines of this axis follow from the definitions. The first would use the empirical test above in global value chains: compare, within the same firm, teams that serve Northern clients with teams that serve domestic or Southern ones, holding the employer constant so that what varies is the colonial referent. The materials of regulation, accent-training curricula, client style guides, naming policies, and quality-assurance forms, are documents and can be collected; call centres in India and the Philippines, offshore software teams in Latin America serving North American clients, and global professional service firms (Boussebaa & Brown, 2017) are the obvious sites. The second would treat mimicry as a variable rather than a theme, asking under which conditions imitation of the Northern norm conforms and under which it subverts. Candidate conditions are the audience (the client in the North against peers in the South), the stakes of failure, the presence of collective backing, and the degree of exaggeration, since parody begins where faithful imitation ends (Bhabha, 1994). Following workers longitudinally as they master the norm would show whether mastery itself opens the space for irony. The third would study disputes over authenticity in which the criteria are set by others: state certification of indigeneity, fair-trade and artisanal labels, ethnic tourism, and entrepreneurship programmes that require applicants to prove they are authentically Indigenous (Marques et al., 2026). Certification criteria, application files, and appeals provide a paper trail in which misrecognition threat can be observed operating through bureaucratic instruments, rather than inferred from retrospective accounts.
PLURIVERSALITY: SITUATED KNOWLEDGE AND NEW CONCEPTS
The third axis redefines the theory of identity itself. If the field’s vocabulary is situated, then none of its categories is the last word, and others may be needed. To acknowledge the plurality of conceptions of the person is to accept that concepts are missing. Missing, for example, are categories for the identity constituted in misrecognition, for collective and ancestral identity, and for the experience of those who move between worlds with different conceptions of the self. Lee (2023) describes his own trajectory through five places, from Northern Europe to Southeast Asia and Kazakhstan, and shows how the identity of someone who moves between worlds does not fit the fixed categories that both the North and a certain decolonial critique offer.
For this last experience, too, a concept can be proposed. We would call it identity translation: the labour of carrying a self across conceptions of the person that do not map onto one another. It differs from the hybridity of postcolonial theory in that its object is not a mixed identity but the ongoing work of conversion, done by people who must be a relational person in one world and a bounded individual in another, often within the same working day. Border thinking has long described this position (Anzaldúa, 1987; Mignolo, 2000); what is missing is its translation into a concept the identities literature can use. Migrant workers who return to communal obligations at home while being audited as individuals abroad, and Indigenous managers who move between assembly and boardroom, are its natural subjects.
The axis also specifies how new concepts should be built and judged. The procedure matters as much as the result. One path is to begin from terms in Southern languages that have no English equivalent, ubuntu itself being the proof that such terms carry theory, and to keep them untranslated while their meaning is built from cases, instead of introducing them as local illustrations of Northern constructs. Another is shared authorship: if concepts are built from communities’ self-understandings, the communities are co-authors of the concept, not informants for it (Smith, 2012). Judgement must change accordingly. A concept from the South should be assessed by whether those it describes recognize themselves in it and by what new questions it makes visible, not by how well it converges with the constructs of the North (Barros & Alcadipani, 2023).
Two research lines follow. The first would document, in organizations of the South, identity experiences that today can only be described by analogy with concepts of the North, following the procedure above, in order to propose concepts of their own. The second would examine the translation the field itself imposes: comparing the drafts Southern authors submit with the versions Northern journals publish, and interviewing those authors about what they cut, would show concretely what is lost when questions from the South are rewritten in the dominant vocabulary (Barros & Alcadipani, 2023; Ibarra-Colado, 2006). This axis thereby recasts the question of who produces theory: to develop concepts from the South is not only to study new contexts, but to admit other places of theorizing (Alcadipani et al., 2012).
Bringing the axes together, the field may need at least four concepts it does not yet possess. Personhood work, for the process by which a collective confers, sustains, and withdraws the condition of being a person. Colonial identity regulation, for the control over the self whose norm originates outside the organization and travels through race, language, and nationality. Misrecognition threat, for the experience of having one’s standing as a full person, rather than the coherence of one’s self, placed in doubt. And identity translation, for the labour of moving a self between incommensurable conceptions of the person. None of them replaces the existing concepts. Each covers a phenomenon that the current vocabulary describes only by translation, and with loss. To develop them is an empirical task as much as a theoretical one, and depends on studies carried out from the South, with the people of the South, and not only about them.
REFLEXIVITY AND ETHICS IN RESEARCH
The proposed agenda also changes the position of the researcher. The identity work perspective recognizes that identities are built within relations of power, but deals less with the relations of power that run through research itself. Studying identities in the South from institutions of the North carries the risk of using these contexts merely as a source of data, with no return for the people studied (Bothello & Bonfim, 2023), and the risk of misrepresenting marginalized communities (Chowdhury, 2023).
Reducing these risks calls for some choices. It is worth making explicit the position from which the researcher observes, including his or her training and the categories used, which helps to separate what belongs to participants from what belongs to the researcher. It is worth establishing forms of collaboration and co-authorship with researchers and actors of the South. And it is worth adopting a reflexivity that examines even whiteness and the assumptions of those who do the research (Allen & Girei, 2024). At the same time, one must avoid idealizing the South, since treating its traditions as pure or superior is another way of not taking them seriously (Lee, 2023).
CONCLUSION
This article examined the vocabulary with which organization and management studies describe identities, and argued that it is neither neutral nor universal. The four reviews that consolidated the field offer valuable perspectives and concepts, but ones that rest on an epistemology and an ontology of the North, whose starting point is the bounded individual, the owner of an inner life who works on the self.
Drawing on the coloniality of being and on conceptions of the person that come from the South, the article reread this vocabulary through three axes. Relationality recasts identity and identity work, shifting the unit from the individual to the community that makes persons. Coloniality recasts regulation, authenticity, threat, and identity play, showing that they are, before anything else, matters of power, language, and recognition. Pluriversality recasts the theory of identity itself and opens space for concepts that are still missing.
The impression the article seeks to leave is easy to state. Concepts such as identity work, identity regulation, identity play, and identity threat do not describe the person in general, but a particular person, that of the North. Perspectives from the South, such as ubuntu, conscientização, buen vivir, and decolonial critique, do not merely offer new contexts of application: they redefine these concepts and suggest that others still need to be created. To recognize this does not weaken the field. It makes it able to describe more people.
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RESEARCH DATA AVAILABILITY
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE USAGE
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This is a theoretical essay and did not generate or analyze empirical data. There are therefore no datasets associated with this article to be made available. All sources used are published works, fully identified in the references.
