This chapter is about identity construction and display in the workplace. It is concerned directly with a few of the many ways work selves and work lives are animated and made meaningful and what this might mean to managers in organizations where strong, valued, collective work identities are at play. I take as axiomatic that work is a natural locale for the study of identity since we spend so much of our adult life at it. But the significance of work is by no means only quantitative. As Hughes (1951) noted long ago, our work is as good a clue as any as to our sense of self, our course of being, our way of life. “What do you do for a living?” is an all too familiar probe to which we must have a ready answer or risk censor.

There are a number of ways work can bestow meaning on the self. Some are set by historical and institutional processes that are rather distant and removed from specific individuals going about their trade. Others emerge from the kinds of things people do in the ordinary context of going about their work. The former draws on a relatively stable, categorical ordering of occupational status and provides something of a shell or vessel within which people labor (Hauser and Warren, 1997). Such processes govern the prestige of a given occupation in a socially recognized universe of occupations (e.g., work rather than play, leisure, contemplation, or self-development).