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Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

This paper seeks to elaborate on how subject positions promoting shareholder value are infused with an outcome focus.

The study employs Foucault's perspectives on government and the interrelations between objectivity and subjectivity in the analysis of in‐depth case data gathered in one shareholder value‐oriented‐listed company and one non‐listed company.

The outside financial market discipline that objectifies shareholder value‐oriented company executives makes them subjects in their own organisation, allowing them to redirect discipline onwards and thereby objectify their subordinates. The non‐listed company executives, due to the relatively closed governance structure of their company and the lack of outside ownership, are not subject to such continuous outside discipline; they lack the same access to the means to create tangible outcomes within their organisations. The subject positions promoting shareholder value are focused on outcomes, whereas the non‐listed company subject positions are focused on processes.

The subject positions of actors within different types of non‐listed companies and listed companies without a shareholder focus form a target for future studies.

The study contributes to the literatures on manager subject position formation and shareholder value. These contributions are achieved by uncovering a novel consequence of subject position formation and by revealing a mechanism by which outcome focus is tied with shareholder value.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the negotiation of learner and worker identities in a group of high-skilled newcomers who participate in an introductory and mentoring programme.

The paper takes the interdependence of learning, work and identity and a constructivist approach to identity as a point of departure. The design is qualitative with semi-structured interviews as the main source of data.

For the learning potential in introductory programmes to be fulfilled, all parties involved must recognise a need for learning. This is especially important in organisations that are knowledge intensive and that demand highly skilled and competent workers, as negotiations of learner identity might be more demanding for this group of employees.

The current paper is situated in a specific organisational and national context, and only pays attention to some of the negotiations between expert and learner identities that are relevant if induction programmes and initiatives should be experienced as positive. Connections between identity work, learning and job performance for this group of workers should consequently be empirically investigated by a variety of methods and within several organisational and national contexts.

The paper shows that it is vital for organisers and leaders to be sensitive to the significance that the identity work has for learning, when they plan, execute and evaluate induction programmes and initiatives for high-skilled and competent workers.

The facilitation of job transitions and induction for high-skilled and experienced workers is underresearched, and the paper shows how identity and learning is closely connected for this group of employees.

Hiring management consultants as external support in organizational change is in the literature described as a socially and emotionally stressful activity for managers. Management consultants need to deal with these threatening aspects of their service. This paper aims to explore the subject positions management consultants offer managers in their self‐presentations on the World Wide Web.

The paper studies the self‐presentations on the www of four large management consultancies–Accenture, BCG, KPMG, and McKinsey & Co. Using a Foucault inspired discourse analytical framework, we analyze the subject positions offered to client‐managers in these self‐presentations and how these subject positions relate to the management regimes of bureaucracy and post‐bureaucracy.

The study identifies two different discursive practices–one normalizing practice, constructing the use of management consultants as a natural aspect of management and a second practice rationalizing the use of management consultants, providing arguments aimed at reducing the pressures on the manager. The normalizing discourse which draws on a post‐bureaucratic regime was found in Accenture and KPMG. The rationalizing discourse was found in McKinsey and BCG and draws on the bureaucratic regime.

This work highlights how consultants deal with the pressures their presence puts on managers. It illustrates how managerial truth regimes contribute to shaping the conditions for management consulting and the consultant‐client relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse scholarly subjectivity in the context of citation practices in interdisciplinary PhD research.

The paper provides an analysis of longitudinal series of qualitative interviews with PhD students who write scholarly articles as dissertation components. Conceptualizations of subjectivity within practice theories form the basis for the analysis.

Scholarly argumentation entails a rhetorical paradox of “bringing something new” to the communication while at the same time “establishing a common ground” with an audience. By enacting this paradox through citing in an emerging interdisciplinary setting, the informants negotiate subject positions in different modes of identification across the involved disciplines. In an emerging interdisciplinary field, the articulation of scholarly subjectivity is a joint open-ended achievement demanding knowledgeability in multiple disciplinary understandings and conducts. However, identifications that are expressible within the informants’ local site, i.e. interactions with supervisors, other seniors and peers, are not always expressible when negotiating subject positions with journals.

This paper contributes to research on citation practices in emerging interdisciplinary fields. By linking the enactment of citing in scholarly writing to the negotiation of subject positions, the paper provides new insights about the complexities involved in becoming a scholar.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dynamic and power-laden nature of university–society collaboration from the individual academic's point of view.

This paper applies an autoethnographic approach in following a specific collaboration process through detailed fieldnotes and continuous reflections.

This research presents university–society collaboration as an emergent, volatile and fairly unpredictable process, involving a multitude of actors on both sides. The interactions among actors shape the emerging process and power relationships. The academic's situation could be understood in terms of multiple and shifting subject positions that could be embraced, accepted, resisted or surrendered to by the academic.

These findings may help academics with own experiences of collaboration to shed light on their observations. Novice academics, interested in collaborating with society, should be aware of the possibility of tensions and exercise of power in interactions with societal actors. When setting up collaboration agreements, academic and societal actors are advised to openly discuss potential problems and how to handle those.

This unique, in-depth testimony of a single collaboration process from the individual academic's point of view uncovers previously unobserved dynamic and political attributes of the process.

To explore the discursive construction of disordered eating and athlete identity meanings within elite female athlete’s stories. Published athlete autobiographies were interrogated as cultural sites of analysis to accomplish this aim.

A critical social constructionist perspective on disordered eating is outlined along with narrative research findings on female athletes and disordered eating. A discursive psychological approach and critical discourse analysis (CDA) is then discussed to theorize and study meanings of disordered eating and athlete identities/subject positions. Next, the utility of studying two elite female athlete’s autobiographies is outlined followed by examples from a CDA of two athlete stories.

Two discourses and two identity/subject positions within each are outlined: discourse of performance and the “committed, controlled athlete” and a discourse of personal growth and the “empowered athlete in transition.” The features of each discourse and subject position are outlined and examples from each athlete’s story. The intention is to show the ways in which discursive resources construct the body, food and identities in sport and the implications.

The chapter is concluded with why studying “disordered eating and body talk” within discourses is useful to expand understanding of constraining and emancipative aspects of athlete identities, struggle and recovery.

Narratives about educational phenomena and identities that circulate in society have the power to frame and make sense of specific educational experiences as well as general educational ideas. Some of these narratives also underwrite assumptions for policymaking and thus produce meaning, structure and alignment in an otherwise uncertain and complex field of governing. Narrative control refers to the way a specific selection of narratives and narrative plots legitimise, necessitate and normalise a specific way to understand educational purposes, processes and identities. The analyses in this chapter illuminate processes of narrative control in core documents of the latest Norwegian educational reform. Through the narrative construction of a specific educational trajectory, pupil identity and categories of deviance representing positions at risk, the documents' narrative control generates a specific standard regulating what a ‘normal pupil’ is.

The purpose of this paper is to explore practitioner and academic conceptualisations about what drives individuals (who are the target of financial inclusion efforts) to adopt and use financial services. It compares this with individual’s personal subjectivities to understand how the similarities and differences might contribute to problems in financial inclusion efforts.

To uncover such conceptualisations, a Foucauldian discourse analysis of three texts is conducted.

The analysis uncovers the ways in which financial subjects are produced. Important points of discontinuity are evident between texts, pointing to potential failures within financial inclusion constructs. Distilling aspects of continuity between texts shows up three kinds of subjects produced predicated on the site of economic engagement as owners of bodies, tangible property and intangible property. These subjects are shown to all share concerns with income and expense management. The analysis shows that subject positions and strategic actions (including the use of financial service providers) are mutually reinforcing, and that therefore financial subjects will engage only to the extent that the product or service enacts their subject position. With the financial subject as the starting point, it is possible to understand the use or rejection of particular financial products and services.

Asset building is proposed as a field of activity not currently considered part of mainstream financial inclusion, questioning the terms on which individuals are to be financially “included”.

Approximately 2 billion people globally, and 66 per cent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa, are excluded from the formal financial system. While financial inclusion is considered beneficial, many projects face significant challenges. This suggests insufficient understanding of what drives individuals to adopt and use financial services. This paper makes a contribution by exploring the gap between academics, practitioners and individuals using a method that has not previously been applied in this field, and uncovering differences in understanding that have not previously been explored. The insights into financial inclusion in provided in this paper are original in the literature.

Sweden, as a country based on extremely high secular and self-expression values, serve as an example that somewhat differ from other countries internationally, when it comes to educational leadership curriculum. The chapter takes its starting point at the governmental decision for Swedish universities to gender-mainstream their organisations, something that affects the educational leadership curriculum. To be able to discuss this, I present three research studies on gendering leader identity development processes and gender equality strategies in the Swedish higher education setting. In a longitudinal study of the process of leader identity development, the main result was the emergence of a gendering process in the discourse on academic leadership. At the end of the leadership assignment period, leader identity was described in differing terms at subject positions held by women and men, respectively. In a separate study on female heads of research-heavy departments, three conflicting subject positions appeared that showed different strategies when leaders were of the female sex: (a) a gender-conscious position, (b) a gender-neutral or gender-unconscious position and (c) a position of sex discrimination experience. In a third, large national study, based on horizontal analysis of gender equality in Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs), was found that universities internally consist of different worlds when it comes to the possibility of making academic careers and in how male- and female-dominated academic disciplines explain gender inequality and strategies to handle this. Results from these studies will be discussed, in light of the striving for (gender) equal and just organisations, since gender equality is an important aspect of Swedish educational leadership curriculum.