In Search of Modernization: The Negotiation of Social Identity in Organizational Reform

Based on the analysis of two short documents, this article considers how social categories, such as bureaucracy, council, business, and so on, are utilized in descriptions of project work. Specifically, it examines the locally occasioned interpretative practices that enabled a single project (in a UK local authority) to be described as modernizing the way services were delivered. In part, this involved negotiating the category ‘bureaucratic’, with the author often reasoning it would be somehow misleading to use such a category to describe the project. The article focuses on the negotiation of social categories and on the work done to present aspects of the project as ‘documents’ (Garfinkel 1967) of the authority’s category membership, as ‘in keeping’ with what would be expected of such a type. Categorization, the act of tying specific events to social types or categories, is shown to be a significant resource in accounting for the character of project work. The article adds to debates on organizational identity and public-sector reform by examining members’ commonsense knowledge of various social categories and by illustrating the role of categorization in shaping how various organizational phenomena are understood.