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Part of
Identity Struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 69] 2017
► pp. 57–78

Chapter 4
Juggling “I”s and “we”s with “he”s and “she”s

Negotiating novice professional identities in stories of teamwork told in New Zealand job interviews

Teamwork is perennially among graduate employers’ most wished-for competencies, and how candidates respond to teamwork questions can be pivotal to success or failure. This chapter addresses novice interviewees’ struggles to construct professional competence in line with the normative expectations of the competency framework. Drawing on a corpus of 30 graduate interviews collected in New Zealand, the analysis highlights the discursive struggle to balance individual and team identities in orienting to achievements and difficulties, explored in terms of Bamberg’s (2011) three identity dilemmas: sameness/difference, agency/control, and constancy/change. It reveals how identities are talked into being in the tension between the “we” and the “I”, in attributing blame and in acknowledging a learning outcome, which are crucial to constructing an employable identity.

Keywords: teamwork stories, identity dilemmas, professional identities, graduate employers, competency framework
Article outline
  • Identity struggles in job interviews
  • Competency-based interviews
  • The graduate recruitment context
  • Theoretical background
  • Data and methodology
  • Analysis
  • Identity Dilemma 1
  • Identity Dilemma 2
  • Identity Dilemma 3
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Transcription conventions
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.04rei
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Greenbank, Emily
2024. Employable identities. Narrative Inquiry 34:1 ► pp. 106 ff. DOI logo
Greenbank, Emily & Meredith Marra
2020. Addressing societal discourses: negotiating an employable identity as a former refugee. Language and Intercultural Communication 20:2 ► pp. 110 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Discursive Navigation of Employable Identities in the Narratives of Former Refugees [Studies in Narrative, 27], DOI logo

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