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Tomlinson, Frances (2009) The identity and power effects of social and discursive constructions of "difference" and "sameness" within contrasting organisational contexts. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
The six papers in this submission concern how actors within contrasting organisational contexts deployed ideas of sameness and difference, marked in relation to various socio-demographic categories, to construct self and other. They discuss the implications of these constructions for relationships amongst the actors involved, and for their relative advantage or disadvantage. This covering document provides the autobiographical context to the research projects on which the papers draw; summarises the aims and principal findings of each, and reveals how the analysis of constructions of sameness and difference was increasingly informed by the conceptual and methodological frameworks of identity work and critical discourse analysis. As well as highlighting the valuable empirical findings that the papers contain, the document also claims that they contribute to conceptual understandings of the interconnections amongst difference, identity, belonging and exclusion. These are discussed in relation to actors' choices to assert or downplay the 'difference' of self from other. While the assertion of a distinctive identity can reinforce a valued sense of self or enhance organisational legitimacy, differences may also be deployed to reinforce a position of inequality. Local actors' engagement with issues of sameness and difference is considered in relation to organisational and societal discourses that claim to emancipate and empower the other; this analysis throws light on our understanding of the difficulties involved in enacting the affirmative rhetoric that is found in such discourses. The document concludes by reflecting on some meth0dological and ethical issues associated with the research found in these papers and by indicating how these conceptual understandings are being developed in current research.
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