Constructing identity by deconstructing differences: Building partnerships across cultural and hierarchical divides

Organizational studies of collective identity tend to describe how identities are discursively enacted through claims of a group's uniqueness and the articulation of distinctions between a putative ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ethnographic case study presented in this paper describes organizational actors’ collective identity talk which follows a fundamentally dissimilar pattern. Staff members of an international non-governmental organization (NGO) – a...