Identity is often viewed as one of the most important concepts to help understand life in contemporary organizations among organizational scholars. For example, studies of identity among organizational members in roles such as manager, professional, consultant, and priest have provided valuable insights around managerial and professional work, motivation, change, leadership, control, and gender (Alvesson, Ashcraft, & Thomas 2008; Brown 2019). While drawing on many of these studies, this chapter offers a somewhat contrasting view. We examine if identity is as important as is often claimed, and as a consequence, when and why concerns of identity are triggered in working life, and we do so through a constructionist identity perspective. In the chapter, we argue that many people do not necessarily engage with their identities most of the time (Alvesson & Robertson 2016) and explore why they do in certain kinds of jobs and in particular situations while in others identity is neither present nor salient, at least not as a major issue. The chapter aims to cut down the identity concept in size and suggests that a more focused view on identity may help us come to better grips with what on one level is of great societal concern: identity-related struggle, tension, and confusion in people’s working lives; without adding too much to another concern: a (re)production of unwanted narcissism in our already narcissistic time of age (Foley, 2010; Lasch, 1978).

Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical and methodological approach for the analysis. The study draws on discourse analysis, understanding the category of homosexuality to be a construction built on an ‘external dimension’ (a regime of acts) and an ‘internal dimension’ (identity). Queer theory provides insights into the interplay of this act/identity distinction, which functions as an unstable dichotomy where sometimes one is favoured and sometimes the other. Within this system, the gay person is caught in a delicate situation, faced with contradictory expectations as to their ‘discretion’ and disclosure, while at the same time never in full control of what others know about their sexuality. In terms of methodological approach, the analysis is based on discourse analysis on refugee law doctrine. Unlike a classical doctrinal analysis seeking the right legal answer, this study is interested in the ways in which legal doctrine is constructed. Three case studies add an empirical element from the Common European Asylum System: sexuality-based asylum claims from Germany, France and Spain are submitted to analysis.