This article investigates the introduction of AI in a patent law firm. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 42 patent attorneys and specialist professional staff in the firm, we examine how patent attorneys perceived AI and responded through identity work. While extant literature suggests that professionals' appropriate technologies in ways that an old identity (who they were) is revised through identity work (who they could be), with technology as a core identity marker, our findings present an alternative picture. We identified three interrelated identity dimensions (individual, organization, and profession) that shaped how patent attorneys responded during the implementation of a new AI tool by: contesting the changing perceptions of autonomy, compromising in the effort to integrate AI with existing processes and practices, and connecting with clients in novel ways as they reshaped established ways of thinking and working. Our analysis highlights how the specific characteristics of AI (automation and/or augmentation) generated a fragmented professional identity instead of evolving into a revised, collective identity. This article contributes to the literature on IS and identity by highlighting the complex and fragmented nature of identity change in the face of AI implementation. The study is unique, as it captures the transitional moment when a groundbreaking technology is first implemented in a professional service firm.

Abstract Increased use of multidisciplinary teams to carry out tasks that were previously seen as the domain of one profession has brought the manner in which professions collaborate to the fore of management interests. Drawing on 49 in‐depth interviews with senior architects in four multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs), this article contributes to better understandings of identity threats in interprofessional collaborations. My findings bring to the fore two threats to architects' identity relating to fragmentation of work and competing professional values. I show how architects manage these threats through the simultaneous use of two responses: highlighting identity distinctions and modifying identity and practices . However, despite these strategies to defend against identity threats, respondents presented themselves as under‐recognized and often under‐compensated. These findings suggest that the strength of professional identity may not merely mediate threats to professionals' identity but also be constraining by locking professionals in a kind of futile resistance and disrupting identity transformation. Further, responses to professional identity threats may result in a persistent identity struggle that renders professionals vulnerable to deep insecurities regarding their worth in interprofessional collaborations. The article contributes to recent debates on the unintended consequences of interprofessional collaborations thus highlighting the challenges of finding better ways to work together.

Abstract In this article, we take inspiration from the evolution of the material use of glass to explore how the metaphorical use of glass could be developed to understand the emerging struggles of women in architecture. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews of architects employed in professional service firms, we suggest that the multi‐faceted nature of glass helped us to identify and understand the complex experiences of inequality for women in architecture. In so doing, we make three contributions to scholarship on gender, work, and organizations. First, we demonstrate how glass barriers were truly material in their consequences for senior women, as they prevented their rise or initiated their decline. A focus on glass barriers, however, did not fully account for the experiences of younger women in these firms. Surprisingly, and in stark contrast to the “boys club world” that left many senior women in architecture with a fractured sense of self as they struggled to construct self‐affirming identities as both women and architects, we found that the exclusive use of new technologies enabled younger women architects to melt some aspects of the traditional identity and turn them into new forms. Our conceptualization of “technologies of glass” draws attention to the social, cultural, and technological resources that younger women deploy to construct a strong professional identity in the changing world of architecture. We argue that glass can be understood not just as a constraint but as a multifaceted material with limitless possibilities for design. Thus, by highlighting the material‐symbolic entanglements of the use of glass, we strengthen and refresh the metaphor of glass, to better understand the fluidity of contemporary challenges facing professional women at work.

In the context of management and organisational literature, boredom has largely been seen in individual, psychological and negative terms, both for those experiencing it and for organisational outcomes. Through selective references to a wider sociological, historical and philosophical set of perspectives, we make a case here for refiguring boredom at work as a more relational and political notion. Rather than being seen as negative or trivial, we suggest that it is central to the concerns of organisation studies (and more widely) as a ambivalent everyday condition and experience. In particular, boredom is intimately linked to the project and promises of modernity and its associated effects on time, from factory industrialisation to contemporary work platforms. Both in terms of philosophical argument and applied fields such as art, literature, architecture and design, we suggest that boredom is both emancipatory/productive and alienating. Such an understanding establishes opportunities for research which would be central to the experience of contemporary paid employment and wider experience.

Abstract Implementing design thinking for innovation (DTI) is seen as a way to balance exploration and exploitation, and thus attain an ambidextrous innovation portfolio. Yet, transitioning to ambidexterity is challenging, and is often met with inertia. So how can managers implement DTI as a path toward ambidextrous innovation? In this article, based on an in‐depth longitudinal case study of a leading Australian property development firm and drawing on rich primary and secondary data collected over four years, we examine how middle managers leveraged DTI to respond to inertia generatively, and how this process helped shift the cognitive frame of the organization toward ambidexterity. In our case, the middle manager implemented three DTI practices—(1) creative problem‐solving, (2) sprint execution, and (3) creative confidence— to transition the organization's cognitive frame from an explorative to exploitative, to ultimately an ambidextrous innovation frame. Our argument is that these DTI practices trigger three generative mechanisms—frame flexibility, co‐optation, and collective sensemaking—to support this transition. Drawing on these insights, we develop a process framework of how different DT practices and related generative mechanisms can be deployed flexibly to adapt to the interim (explorative and exploitative) innovation objectives over time. We argue that freezing the innovation frame in each phase can trigger a generative response to inertia, which enables the organization to transition more radically to an ambidextrous innovation portfolio. We thus contribute to the limited design thinking research on the role of cognition in DTI implementation, and more generally to innovation management and ambidexterity research on how leveraging DTI to achieve an ambidextrous innovation portfolio is an emergent and adaptive process.

In this article, we explore how time and temporality shape the identities of early career researchers as they learn to become academics. We engage in a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on how our shared identities as middle-class women and our divergences in age, ethnicity, familial status and sexuality shaped our embodied experiences of becoming academics. Drawing on the concept of queer time, we reconceptualise the becoming of newcomers as they learn (or do not learn) to belong to academia. We illustrate how queer time interrupts normative ideas of newcomer learning as progress, development and reproduction. We suggest that learning may alternatively be understood as ‘moments of friction’ and ‘moments of opportunity’ in which newcomers to the academy feel out of step, out of place and out of time. We conceptualise these moments as simultaneously painful yet productive of possibilities for learning to become an academic, differently.

Abstract This article examines how professionals employed in professional organizations make sense of the disruption of their work. Based on a qualitative study of an Australian intellectual property (IP) law firm, we shed light on the ways in which the discursive practices of professionals may undermine change in professional organizations. We identify three defensive strategies of IP professionals (denial, regression, and projection) resulting from the inability to resolve conflicts between market-based pressures and their entrenched understandings of professional work. In doing so, we show how professionals can become ‘stuck’ in defensive responses that may further marginalize the role of professional organizations in society. These findings call into question overly deterministic, radical accounts of organizational change that do not take into account the contextual embeddedness of professional organizations.

<p>This chapter explores the identity implications for people who inhabit the liquid world of organizations. It draws upon Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity and suggests that traditional conceptions may constrain new ways of thinking about identity and identity tensions in increasingly liquidly modern organizational contexts. The authors focus on literature that discusses identity tensions in the workplace and the responses of individuals as they seek to negotiate and/or manage these tensions. In so doing, the authors draw attention to how the nature of liquid modernity challenges existing conceptions of identity work and raise issues and questions for further research.</p>

Large-scale construction projects increasingly have powerful and knowledgeable clients as project owners with whom professionals, such as architects, must interact. In such contexts, clients may have a significant impact on the constitution of a coherent and stable professional identity. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 architects across four large multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs) located in Sydney, Australia, supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article explores how architects constitute their identity in interactions with clients. The findings led us to conceptualise professional–client interactions in terms of two overarching discursive strategies deployed by architects in attempts to manage clients that are powerful and knowledgeable: best for client and best for project. We illustrate the anxieties that architects experience and suggest that attempts to secure professional identity may result in (re)producing an enduring sense of anxiety with unintended consequences for project outcomes and organisational performance.

For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, although extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work. Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies ( idealizing, reframing and distancing) that are bound up in junior architects’ emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects’ efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities.

In this article, we explore what happens in professional formation when the locus of its meaning, as it has been formed, is increasingly contradicted by professional practice. Specifically, we explore the problematic nature of architects’ professional identity that is constituted in terms of the primacy of design aesthetics, in contexts where practice denies this identification. We highlight the tensions between identity and practices and suggest that while architects’ traditional self-identification enables perpetuation of the profession’s identity, it challenges the profession’s standing in its relations with other professions and occupations. We refer to this as a paradox of identity. Although much has been written about the profound changes occurring in professional practices and professional jurisdictions, scant attention has been given to the ways in which professionals shape their identities in the context of changing practices. We conducted a year-long ethnography of contemporary architects engaged in large and complex projects in order to examine both the architects’ and the profession’s identity. Our contributions are threefold. First, we conceptualize misalignments between professional identity and professional practice as identity paradox that has consequences for identity work among professionals. Second, we highlight how professional identity construction is organized around competing and paradoxical identification. Third, the article contributes to sociological studies of architecture by generating insights about the identity work of architects engaged in large multi-organizational projects.