Abstract:

This study examines how professional identity work inside organizations becomes a generative mechanism for resistance and broader social change in moments of democratic crisis. Building on scholarship that treats identity as both a site of organizational control and a resource for challenging dominant norms, we address a key gap: prior research shows that professional identities can enable activism, yet offers limited insight into how identity-based resistance is produced in the mundane, everyday flow of work and how it scales beyond the organization. We trace how this bridge between micro meaning-making and macro mobilization is enacted.

We draw on an online ethnography of a virtual protest group of academics in a leading college in central Israel that mobilized against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul beginning in January 2023. The case is theoretically revealing because participants faced strong professional scripts of neutrality and objectivity, alongside organizational practices that reframed political speech as “personal opinion” and disciplined public expression.

We develop the concept of identity stretching to explain how academics contested and reconstructed what counts as “acting as an academic” under such constraints. Identity stretching operates through four interrelated mechanisms. Epistemic subversion redefines authorized knowledge and discourse by inserting politically charged interpretation and coordination into professional channels and by circulating pedagogical scripts that legitimate politically situated learning. Embodied enactment translates resistance into material, campus-based performances (e.g., wearable slogans, marches, and spatial markings) that make stance visible within regulated spaces. Social identities mobilization weaves gendered, parental, and place-based identities into academic participation, challenging the expectation that socially marked positions remain “private.” Public repositioning extends academic identity into civic arenas by publicly leveraging titles, affiliations, and expertise through strikes, petitions, and public debate.

Our contributions are threefold. First, we show how micro-level identity enactments can become shared repertoires that sustain collective action and travel into civic and political arenas. Second, we specify a broadened repertoire of resistance resources—epistemic, embodied, relational, and public—through which identity stretching is enacted. Third, we reconceptualize organizational activism as a contested process of meaning-making and identity negotiation that can emerge in tension with legitimacy expectations, thereby illuminating how professionals mobilize identity to defend democratic institutions and reimagine the public role of knowledge work.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Identity

Keywords: Identity work;Occupational / work / professional identity;Identity regulation / control;Identity construction;Qualitative;ethnography

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Dr. Linda Jakob Sadeh