Organizing Identity

"I have to say that as usual I find very refreshing Paul du Gay's courageous and unconventional approach, a clarity of vision that I find very appealing."
- Professor Marilyn Strathern, University Of Cambridge

Like many other popular academic terms, ‘identity’ has been asked to do so much work that it has often ended up doing none at all and, as a consequence, there has been a recent turn away from identity work.

In this book, Paul du Gay moves identity theory in a new direction, offering a distinctive approach to studying how persons - human and non human - are put together or assembled: how their ‘identities’ are formed. He does through an engagement with a range of work in the social sciences, humanities and in organization studies which privileges the business of description over metaphysical speculation and epochalist assertion.

At the heart of the book is an approach to the material-cultural making up of ‘persons’ that involves a shift away from general social and cultural accounts concerning the formation of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ towards an understanding of the specific forms of personhood that individuals acquire through their immersion in and subjection to particular normative and technical regimes of conduct.

The book is written for postgraduate students and researchers interested in debates about identity, subjectivity and personhood in a range of disciplines – especially those in sociology, social anthropology, geography, and organization and management studies.