Jeudi 21 mars 2024 de 14h à 16h, en salle de réunion de l'IAE de Poitiers, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir Corentin Curchod, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management & Organisation at University of Edinburgh Business School. L'intervention se déroulera en français.

Professional Identity and Role Change in Times of Adversity: Pharmacists’ quest of their self during the covid-19 pandemic

Corentin Curchod, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management & Organisation at University of Edinburgh Business School.

The literature on role identity and identity work has explained how professionals experience identity tensions when their occupational role changes, and how they engage in identity work to re-establish a sense of coherence. Role change proves especially challenging for professionals, as their roles tend to be more rigidly scripted and more intertwined with their self than for non-professionals. Professionals are nevertheless likely to experience role change, in particular when they are mobilized to respond to crises. Existing literature has mainly focused on incremental role change that takes place during work transition, which is of limited help in explaining identity work in situations of turmoil. The objective of this paper is to investigate how professionals maintain a coherent sense of who they are in situations of sudden change in their role expectations. We address this issue by using interview data gathered from pharmacists in France before and during the covid-19 pandemic. We found that their professional identity encompassed a hierarchy of role identities, and that the pandemic, by assigning pharmacists the role of being the main points of contact with the population regarding healthcare, led to identity tensions and a rapid recalibration between their different roles. Our findings contribute to theorize the process of role identity restructuration during crises – a process we call ‘snap identity work’ – as a condition for maintaining purposeful action. They also shed new light on the dynamics between sensemaking and identity, and between power, status and identity.

Note : intervention en français