Third-World “Sloggers” or Elite Global Professionals? Using Organizational Toolkits to Redefine Work Identity in Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing
研究印度IT离岸外包员工如何应对西方客户不视其为专业同行的身份威胁，发现企业通过提供组织工具包（文化资源与政治资源）帮助员工主动建构积极身份，而非直接管控。
Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an organizational response, based on the critical literature on top-down identity regulation, and an individual response, based on the positive literature on bottom-up identity construction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival data from three Indian information technology (IT) offshore outsourcing firms, we examine how organizational and individual identity processes work in tandem to address this threat. We find that firms do not resolve this threat by regulating employee identity directly as they claim, but instead provide workers with an organizational toolkit—a set of organizationally available cultural resources (e.g., frames and stories) and political resources (e.g., policies and procedures) that workers use selectively and strategically to construct positive identities. By bringing a toolkit perspective to identity processes, we contribute to theory and research on cross-level identity linkages, the strategic nature of identity processes, and the local context of global identity.