Identity Work and Legitimacy

Abstract

We analyse the relationships between identity work and internal legitimacy. Based on an in-depth case study of prisoners in Helsinki Prison, we focus on how their identity work affirmed and contested three kinds of institutional legitimacy – pragmatic, moral and cognitive. The research contribution we make is to show that some forms of identity work are also a form of internal legitimacy work, and how this identity talk constructs organizations as more (or less) legitimate. This is important because it demonstrates that identity work is an intrinsic (though often overlooked) aspect of processes of organizing.

Keywords

identity identity work legitimacy prison prisoners

Introduction

In this paper, we analyse linkages between ‘identity work’ and ‘internal legitimacy’. People in organizations work continuously on developing plausible understandings of their selves and these identities pattern actions and outcomes (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Brown & Lewis, 2011; Clarke, Brown & Hope-Hailey, 2009; Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010; Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010; Lok, 2010). Referred to as identity work, such activities involve people manoeuvring in relation to available discourses in order to formulate, maintain, evaluate and revise self-narratives which promote liveability (Svenningson & Alvesson, 2003; Watson, 2008). The internal legitimacy of an organization is an ongoing set of individual and social processes manifested in an apparent collective acceptance by its members that their organization is, to some extent, desirable, proper or appropriate (Suchman, 1995). The key contribution we make is to show how people’s talk about their selves affirms and contests the internally ascribed legitimacy of organizations.

Substantial research has been devoted to explaining and theorizing external legitimacy, the legitimacy granted to organizations in their environments by stakeholders such as customers, suppliers and government regulators (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Far less attention has been given to internal legitimacy, which is accorded organizations by their participants, and its importance for organizational stability and effectiveness (Brown, 1994; Burawoy, 1979; Clegg, Rhodes & Kornberger, 2007). As Johnson (2004, p. 1) has observed: ‘articulating the general processes that underlie [internal] legitimacy has remained a difficult and persistent problem’. Internal legitimacy is a particular concern for prisons, where the stability, predictability and acceptability of the environment for inmates is often a fragile social accomplishment (Liebling, 2004, p. 291; Sparks, 1994; Sykes, 1958). We address this gap by outlining an understanding of internal legitimacy as a fluid discursive resource that is talked and written continuously into and out of existence though organizationally relevant identity work (Coupland & Brown, 2004).

Based on an in-depth case study of inmates in Helsinki Prison, we analyse how prisoners’ talk about their selves also functioned as internal ‘legitimacy work’, i.e. discursive activity that constructs organizations as legitimate or illegitimate. Micro-level discourse, we argue, can thus have macro-level consequences. Two broad kinds of identity work are considered, ‘legitimacy affirming’ and ‘legitimacy contesting’, which are further divided into three categories: ‘pragmatic’, ‘moral’ and ‘cognitive’. Ours is a study of people’s continuing efforts to narrate their selves within the constraints imposed by a total institution (Goffman, 1968, p. 17), i.e. an apparatus in which a large batch of people, co-located and under a single authority, are treated alike, participate in the same activities, and share experiences tightly scheduled by officials to achieve its notional aims. Prisons have long been used as a context to develop social theory (de Beaumont & de Tocqueville, 1833; Etzioni, 1964), and offer rich opportunities for research and theory building in organization studies, not least because there are important parallels between penitentiaries and other institutions such as factories, schools and hospitals (Foucault, 1977), and between some aspects of prisoners’ lives and those of increasingly surveilled workers (Burawoy, 1979; Sewell, 2005; Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992).

Identity Work and Legitimacy in Prisons

Identity work and prisoners

Our primary interest is in people’s social identities, the identities they ‘work on’ through their membership of social categories such as organizations (e.g. Coupland, 2001; Tracy, 2000; Tracy, Myers & Scott, 2006). One stream of research suggests that individuals’ social identities take the form of self-narratives (Giddens, 1991) which they author through internal soliloquies and interactions with others (Beech, 2008). These identities are constituted within discursive regimes which provide materials and opportunities for individuals reflexively to author versions of their selves (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005, p. 169). Reflexivity describes ‘that which turns back upon, or takes account of the self’ (Holland, 1999, p. 464), and signifies that people’s self-conceptions are, to an extent, the products of self-conscious activities. Identity work refers to the mutually constitutive processes by which people strive to shape relatively coherent and distinctive notions of their selves (Watson, 2008, p. 129; see also Snow & Anderson, 1987; Svenningson & Alvesson, 2003). That is, people in organizations draw on locally available discourses in their continuing experiments with ‘possible’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986), ‘potential’ (Gergen, 1972), ‘provisional’ (Ibarra, 1999) and ‘aspirational’ (Thornborrow & Brown, 2009) selves as they seek to realize whom they want, though possibly only temporarily, to become (Grey, 1994, p. 482).

Considerable labour process (Burawoy, 1979, 1985) and Foucauldian (Foucault, 1977) literatures have shown how identities are not neutral processes, but suffused with power (Ezzamel, Willmott & Worthington, 2001; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011). This is palpable in total institutions, within which individuals ‘tend to coconstruct a single dominant discourse that essentially blankets dialogue and suffocates conflict’ (Tracy, 2000, p. 120). Prisons, especially, coerce prisoners to approximate to an ideal such that their individuality is totalized and their spatial captivity overwritten by a more profound psychic captivity (Butler, 1997; Tracy, 2004a, 2004b). In short, inmates evolve as part-colonized subjects who provide accounts of their selves in vocabularies made available by disciplinary practices. Yet, even in prisons there are limits on the effectiveness of disciplinary power and the totalizing effects of technologies of the self. People are subject to, but also ‘agentially play’ (Newton, 1998, p. 430) with, the discursive resources available to them, and thus discover their selves as responsible for their own action (i.e. as moral beings) (Ibarra-Colado, 2008, p. 566). Indeed, ‘the permanent presence of external disciplinary mechanisms in organizations can be taken as evidence that individuals will never be rendered completely docile’ (Sewell, 2008, p. 388).

Our project relates to several streams of research on prisons and prisoners, especially that which focuses on how inmates seek ‘to preserve some sense of identity’ through ‘continuous cognitive engineering’ (Cohen & Taylor, 1992, pp. 34, 36). ‘Prisonization’, ‘the taking on, in greater or lesser degree, of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary’ (Clemmer, 1940, p. 270), is an omnipresent threat to prisoners’ assertions of uniqueness. Prisons deliberately humiliate and strip inmates of their identities, and they respond by organizing ‘an “underlife” outside the control of …the total institution’ in which work on treasured ‘special’ features of their selves can occur (e.g. Davies, 1989, p. 92; Cohen & Taylor, 1992; Shaw, 1930). Prisoners also adopt particular role identities, for example as ‘cooperative’, ‘withdrawn’ and ‘rebellious’, and/or as ‘merchants’ who trade in goods, ‘politicians’ who organize interests, and ‘toughs’ who exploit the weak (Matthews, 1999; Toch, 1977). These identity strategies have been theorized as a reaction against a pervasive fear among prisoners of becoming institutionalized ‘zombies’, a means of resisting the sense that they are ‘only prisoners’, and efforts to inoculate their selves from ‘contamination’ (Cohen Taylor, 1992, p. 35).

Legitimacy and prisons

Legitimacy was initially conceived by Weber ([1918] 1968) as conformity with a set of rules that actors accept either because they feel obliged to do so or because the rules are thought to constitute a desirable mode of action. Parsons (1951) subsequently suggested that legitimacy exists when there is widespread consensus on the desirability or appropriateness of values, norms, beliefs and actions, while Homans (1974) theorized that legitimized regimes establish sanctionable standards of behaviour which prescribe and proscribe what should and should not be. Within organization studies, the most frequently cited formulation of legitimacy is Suchman’s (1995, p. 574) conception of it as ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions’. Most attention has focused on external legitimacy. This research has tended to adopt ‘new institutionalist’ conceptions of legitimacy as ‘the degree of cultural support for an organization’ (Meyer & Scott, 1983, p. 201), and studied the isomorphic pressures on organizations to conform to the expectations of external stakeholders (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Sillince & Brown, 2009). Our principal interest, however, is in internal (member-ascribed) legitimacy, and in particular the identity-related discursive processes by which participants support and/or challenge the notional appropriateness of a regime.

As labour process and sociology scholars have established, the ‘manufacture’ of workers’ consent is often more effective in garnering their willing compliance than the use of coercion (e.g. Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1979). It is surprising, therefore, that this phenomenon is ‘often taken for granted’ (Johansson & Sell, 2004, p. 90), and that understanding of ‘the general processes that underlie legitimacy’ remains ‘a difficult and persistent problem’ (Johnson, Dowd & Ridgeway, 2006, p. 53), especially as internal legitimacy is always contingent and often fragile (Clegg et al., 2007; Erkama & Vaara, 2010; Gollant & Sillince, 2007; Heusinkveld & Reijers, 2009). This said, there is recognition that ‘inherently, legitimacy is a multilevel process’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 12), with both individual and collective aspects, and that for a social entity to become normatively prescriptive actors must sense that significant others – generally co-members – will accept that the structure is valid or justified (Berger, Ridgeway, Fisek & Norman, 1998; Walker & Zelditch, 1993). Importantly, even organizations which generate internal tension and dissatisfaction may be held in place by countervailing factors which render them sufficiently legitimate to be viable (Weber, [1918] 1968).

Contemporary theorizing on legitimacy tends to divide into what Suchman (1995) refers to as the ‘strategic’, which emphasizes how organizations maintain societal support (Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990), and the ‘institutional’, which deals with sector-wide and cultural pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Both traditions are characterized by three key strands of distinct but interrelated research centred on different legitimacy ‘types’ that have different behavioural underpinnings: pragmatic, moral and cognitive (Suchman, 1995). Pragmatic legitimacy is based on a self-interested calculation that an entity, such as an organization, benefits us, shares our values or is trustworthy (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Moral legitimacy incorporates a positive normative evaluation of an institution, its procedures, structures and its outputs, and is based on a prosocial logic rather than personal or sectional interest (Parsons, 1960). Cognitive legitimacy is granted to organizations which render the world comprehensible or taken-for-granted, reducing anxiety and militating against dissenting views that an existing order is in fact arbitrary and could be altered (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994). While there are many subtle nuances within these research streams linked, for example, to temporality, the degree of active/passive support, and connections between the different legitimacy types, there is overwhelming consensus that the types themselves are a useful framework for analysis.

In prisons, internal legitimacy is not an ‘abstruse concern’ but ‘is intimately and practically implicated in every aspect of penal relations’ (Sparks, 1994, p. 16). Prison managers and correctional officers cannot simply rely on the use of coercion as this may exacerbate rule-breaking. Prisons are ‘small societies’ in which order is a somewhat ‘mysterious’ continuing social and practical accomplishment dependent on bargains, privileges, sanctions and the use of discretionary power (Cressey, 1961; Lombardo, 1981; Rothman & Kimberly, 1975). The fragility of prison regimes is symptomized by the ongoing threat and fairly frequent occurrence of riots (Goldstone & Useem, 1999; Montgomery & Crews, 1998). While for a prison to function inmates must regard it as reasonably legitimate, and prisoners may ‘come to accept the validity of the regime constructed by their rulers’, their acquiescence is only ever partial and their ‘subjugation is not complete’ (Sykes, 1958, p. 48). Prison officers are engaged continuously in a struggle to maintain order, often in difficult circumstances. Not only are ‘all total institutions riddled with contradictions’ (Blau, Light & Chamlin, 1986, p. 149), but, as Sparks and Bottoms (1995, p. 60) have pointed out, in prisons everyday instances of brutality, racism, bureaucratic delay and petty miscarriage of justice are ‘delegitimising’ (Matthews, 1999). Yet, although the legitimacy of prisons is often subject to debate, how legitimation processes relate to the identity work of prisoners has been largely ignored.

Two final preliminary issues require brief attention. First, while there are evident differences between employees in work organizations and prisoners, there are also important similarities. For example, like prisoners, many workers are subject to mind-numbing routines that induce restlessness and boredom (Fisher, 1993), their identity work is often vulnerable ‘to being co-opted, packaged, invaded, exploited’, and they seek, often ingeniously, ‘to subvert or resist paramount reality’ (Cohen & Taylor, 1992, pp. 14, 16; Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1979; Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992). Second, insightful though previous research has been, neither organizational nor penological studies have tackled directly how discursive processes of identity work connect to internal legitimacy processes. Our work is, thus, exploratory in nature. Building on extant literatures, we offer an analysis of the identity work engaged in by prisoners and show how this functioned to affirm and contest internal legitimacy. We then discuss the implications of our findings while also recognizing the need for more fine-grained studies of these phenomena.

Research design

This inductive study was conducted from an interpretive perspective in an attempt to produce a rich account of the lives of those incarcerated in Helsinki Prison, Finland. Our focus on prisoners rather than the managers, guards and support staff is an important limitation, though identity issues relating to correctional workers have already received recent in-depth attention in management and communication studies (Tracy & Scott, 2006; Tracy et al., 2006). The decision to study prisoners was driven by three concerns. First, given that in many countries incarceration ‘is becoming a normal pathway for significant portions of the population’, there is a strong rationale for examining ‘the experience of imprisonment’ (Simon, 2000, p. 285). Second, because a prison is ‘a system of total power’ (Sykes, 1958, p. xvi) with de-individualizing tendencies, it may correlate with, and offer insight into, ‘the prevalent depersonalization of modern life’ (Fludernik, 1999, p. 70). Third, most scholarly attention has focused on US, ‘super max’ prisons where inmates are held in near total isolation and which ‘don’t instruct or correct. They merely contain’ (Robertson, 1997, p. 1005). There is, therefore, a case for the investigation of, for example, inmates’ experiences in Nordic penal institutions, which place a greater emphasis on prisoner rehabilitation.

Context

Referred to by inmates as ‘the Rock’ (after the infamous American penal institution, Alcatraz), Helsinki Prison was the oldest and (by popular repute) ‘toughest’ prison in Finland. It was a ‘high-security’ establishment populated by approximately 320 male inmates, who were mostly long-serving serious violence and drug offenders. Defined formally as a ‘closed prison’, it operated on the basis of seclusion, close surveillance and risk management (Garland, 2001). The prison staff consisted of four managers (a director and three deputy managers), 31 rehabilitation and activities personnel (e.g. social workers, psychologists), 27 support services workers (e.g. cooks) and 125 security officers. In line with the Finnish penal system it was operated on an official ideology of ‘humane neoclassicism’ which, in contrast to the retributive nature of, for instance, many US prison regimes, emphasized ‘both legal safeguards against coercive care and the goal of less repressive measures in general’ (Ikponwosa, 2006, p. 387). This meant that according to law a custodial sentence should not involve any punishment other than the loss of liberty, priority being given to rehabilitation, and prisoners treated justly and their human dignity respected (The Finnish Sentences Enforcement Act, 1974, p. 612). One corollary of this approach was that Finland incarcerated only 70 people per 100,000, among the lowest in Europe, and had a total daily prison population of less than 4000.

Data collection

Access to Helsinki Prison was granted by the Criminal Sanctions Agency through which the Finnish Ministry of Justice has overall charge of the penal system. All the data were collected, transcribed and translated by a native Finnish/English speaker (and co-author of this paper). Preliminary discussions with a deputy manager led us to seek recruits for the project by advertising on cell block and social facilities notice boards. The advertisement identified the research project as a sociological study of everyday life in prison, with a particular interest in inmates’ personal experiences and viewpoints. While those interviewed appeared relaxed and happy to answer our questions, some of our interviewees said that a small number of inmates suspected the primary researcher was an undercover policeman seeking to elicit incriminating statements. The point here is that our sample was one of convenience, though we have no reason to think that it was biased in any important respect. The interviews took place in a ‘staff’ building, to which each prisoner was individually escorted by a guard who then left the room. Many of the men had histories of violence and some were convicted murderers, so for safety the offices all had ‘panic buttons’. During the course of this research, however, the prisoners were calm and well behaved, and the primary researcher was very rarely perturbed.

Our data consisted of 44 audio-recorded semi-structured interviews with prisoners conducted between June 2009 and June 2010. These ‘conversations with “embedded questions”’ (Fetterman, 1989, p. 49) were of between 60 and 120 minutes, with a median duration of 90 minutes. Once an interview had been conducted a Finnish language transcript was generally produced within 48 hours, and an English language transcript was prepared immediately afterwards. The interviews were structured using open-ended ‘broad domain’ questions phrased in colloquial Finnish, such as: ‘how did you end up in here?’; ‘tell me about your average day/week’; ‘what are the best/worst things about being here?’ In response to prisoners’ accounts the researcher often followed up with invitations to elaborate further on what seemed to be interesting themes. Additionally, we collected official documentation about the penal system in Finland produced by the Criminal Sanctions Agency and undertook a broad-ranging literature review centred on the Finnish and other penal systems. Our analysis has also been informed by the primary researcher’s experience of entering Helsinki Prison and casual observations of buildings, and the living and working conditions for inmates.

Data analysis

Recognizing that language is a significant ‘medium of social control and power’ (Fairclough, 1989, p. 3) our attention focused on prisoners’ discoursal practices, how they constructed versions of their selves, and how they reproduced ‘existing social and power relations’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 77). To produce ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) we subjected our transcript material to a form of grounded theory analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in which we derived coded categories in an inductive process of interaction and integration of theory and empirical data (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). While our primary focus was on how prisoners constructed versions of their selves, we sought also to ‘identify the salient grounded categories of meaning held by participants in the setting’ (Marshall & Rossman 1995, p. 114). It was at this stage we noticed that inmates’ identity talk was also often talk about the prison’s legitimacy. Remembering Suchman’s (1995, pp. 571–2) assertion that ‘the literature on organizational legitimacy provides surprisingly fragile conceptual moorings’, we began to re-read the transcript material and independently generate analytic codes concerned with identity work and legitimacy processes. Through continued discussion between the researchers, we identified two broad types of identity work: that which affirmed the legitimacy of the prison (‘legitimating identity work’), and that which contested it (‘delegitimating identity work’).

Each of these themes was then analysed to evaluate in more detail how inmates’ talk functioned in relation to internal legitimacy. There is a considerable range of concepts, theories and typologies of legitimacy, and processes underpinning legitimacy, available to researchers (e.g. Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Working with these resources, we began to code our transcript data. At an early stage it became apparent that the most interesting and relevant data meshed with three bases for legitimacy attributions: pragmatic (based on interest), moral (derived from perceptions of rightness) and cognitive (founded on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness). This categorization of legitimacy types is not associated with any individual stream of theorizing but deeply embedded in the literatures on organizational legitimacy (e.g. Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Parsons, 1951; Selznick, 1949; Suchman, 1995; Weber, [1918] 1968). The fact that this typology is broadly accepted by scholarly communities made it fitting for our purposes as we sought to make novel connections between ‘legitimacy’ and ‘identity work’. Use of this framework also meant that coding our data was a more reliable process because the categories are tightly defined, and pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy talk was in practice generally clearly recognizable.

We then engaged in an iterative process of confronting theory with data, interpretation, coding and recoding, until our evolving framework exhausted our empirical data (see Strauss & Corbin, 1990). An overview of the final iteration of our coding paradigm is provided by Table 1. Analysing our transcripts using this framework revealed that all types of identity/legitimacy talk were well represented, with the most frequently used form being ‘affirming pragmatic legitimacy’ (39 inmates) and the least used form ‘contesting pragmatic legitimacy’ (21 inmates) (see Table 2). While very few inmates engaged in all six forms of talk, most made reference to several of them: 40 inmates made reference to at least one form of ‘affirming’ and one kind of ‘contesting’ legitimacy discourse; 4 prisoners drew only on the ‘affirming legitimacy’ discourse. Although our approach to data analysis was inductive and rigorous we recognize also that it reflected our idiosyncratic understandings regarding what constitutes interesting first order data from which to build theory. As Gelsthorpe (2007, p. 534) asserts: ‘inevitably, the researcher’s subjective experience structures the sociological narrative because it provides the medium through which the raw data are gathered’.

Table 1.

Coding For Prisoners’ Identity Work and Prison Legitimacy.

Type of identity work	Prisoners’ construction of the prison	Examples
Legitimating identity work
Affirms pragmatic legitimacy	The prison serves inmates’ perceived interests	Provides opportunities for inmates to work on preferred versions of their selves, for sociality and for enjoyment
Affirms moral legitimacy	The prison makes inmates better people consonant with the principle of humane neoclassicism	Provides sentence plans which help inmates to live drug-free, law-abiding life styles
Affirms cognitive legitimacy	The prison facilitates understanding of everyday life and of future (non-prisoner) selves	Provides helpful routines for most and a lifestyle choice for some inmates; it permits work on aspirational selves
Delegitimating identity work
Contests pragmatic legitimacy	The prison undermines inmates’ perceived interests	Subjects prisoners to various deprivations centred on e.g. family, food, studying, sports and medical care
Contests moral legitimacy	The prison fails to make inmates better people or to abide by the principle of humane neoclassicism	Sentence plans are not used constructively to help prisoners but to control them
Contests cognitive legitimacy	The prison does not make everyday life meaningful or help inmates work on aspirational selves	For some, prison routines were not helpful and prison was abhorrent; prison thwarts aspirational selves

Table 2.

Number of Inmates Engaging in the Six Kinds of Identity/Legitimacy Talk.

Identity/legitimacy talk	Affirming pragmatic legitimacy	Affirming moral legitimacy	Affirming cognitive legitimacy	Contesting pragmatic legitimacy	Contesting moral legitimacy	Contesting cognitive legitimacy
Number of inmates (N = 44)	39	30	30	21	31	27

Legitimacy and Identity Work

Here we analyse the legitimacy affirming and contesting identity work of inmates with respect to Helsinki Prison. Identity work was one of the few ‘luxury’ activities (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005, p. 188) available to convicts, and most recognized that prison was ‘…a place to do some serious reflecting’ on who they were and who they wanted to be (Nalle¹). As Rami said:

People spend a lot of time with themselves in here, a kind of a vacuum with only themselves, and so they find their priorities and aspirations, they become crystallized… This is one of those things, being imprisoned, that you’re forced to examine yourself and really find yourself.

Overall, despite many petty annoyances and some more profound grievances, the inmates constructed the organization as sufficiently legitimate to obey the rule structures and the institution was not prone to serious disorder.

Legitimating and delegitimating identity work

Affirming pragmatic legitimacy

This refers to inmates’ attribution of legitimacy to the prison based on the self-interested calculation that they gained from it directly or because it served their larger or longer-term purposes (see Table 3). Most of this identity talk reflected acquiescence to a social order that allowed them to work on preferred versions of their selves as fathers, brothers and husbands and pursue lifestyle practices such as playing the guitar (Tommy), cooking (Antti) and tending a miniature garden (Sergei). Many inmates valued the opportunities that the prison offered them for sociality and enjoyment and to work on their physical selves through weight-training, running and martial arts. A smaller number appreciated the work assignments they were given and assistance in self-developmental activities centred on, for example, the arts and education. While almost all the inmates maintained that ‘I would rather be free’ (Ilkka) than incarcerated, some talked enthusiastically about the positive aspects of their prison lives. A few even maintained that prison was a good place, that was appropriate for them, and that the time they spent there was in some respects the best of their lives:

I needed to get myself in prison. I even told them [the police] about things I did that they didn’t know about, just to get a proper sentence and have the time to get my head back into shape. Prison is a better place than out there, always; you can gather your strength in here. (Sergei)

Table 3.

Pragmatic Legitimacy.

Affirming pragmatic legitimacy	Contesting pragmatic legitimacy
‘They’re all right, it’s good those family meetings… Cameras watch you from every direction. But my kids, they can run around, I can play with them on the floor, it’s normal.’ (Mikael)	‘I have an eight-year-old boy and I’ve seen him three times during my sentence. Last time I saw him, he was five and I haven’t seen him since or been in any contact. They should do a better job in ensuring that our family relations don’t go bad.’ (Saku)
‘I draw, read about art and generally try to familiarize myself with the topic. I also do carpentry and wood sculpting and I draw plans for new works.’ (Saku)	‘It’s about really knowing that you’re in here, that your life is going to waste. That there’s nothing sensible to do, that you can’t accomplish anything… you kind of live this meaningless existence in here, it’s wasted time.’ (Toni)
‘Even though I’m in prison right now, this has been the best time of my life, being sober. This is the longest period I have been sober. I’ve done drugs and booze since I was a kid and so this has been a “getting to know myself” kind of period for me.’ (Rauno)	‘A youngster of 18–20 years comes in here to do a life sentence and when he gets out at 30–35, he’s still that 18-year-old kid mentally. There’s no mental development in here.’ (Ville)
‘You get to see how your health is improving. And you get to train every day, you train in the afternoon and then you feel good for the rest of the day.’ (Marko)	‘We have to train in secret and we also have to make all our training equipment ourselves, so we have to limit our training, we can’t do all the exercises we would do as civilians… coz our equipment is limited and it would cause all sorts of injuries.’ (Jesse)
‘And the healthcare is ok.’ (Ilkka)	‘My hands are a mess. Another additional punishment you get in here is a really poor healthcare system.’ (Erik)

In these ways, prisoners’ constructed versions of their selves in an institutional context which they regarded as serving their interests, i.e. as pragmatically legitimate. It was not unusual for prisoners to acknowledge that the prison was an environment in which they could reflect on themselves, who they were, and what they wanted to become, generally with what they regarded as positive results: ‘I’ve done so much work mentally that I’m pretty much at peace with myself’ (Olli). Even those men who claimed that time spent in prison was ‘a waste of my youth’ also often maintained that the organization had ‘been useful too, I think – how else would I have had the opportunity to think about things so much, about my life’ (Harri). For example, Jarmo had taken the opportunity to learn stonemasonry in order to work on his preferred conception of self as neither a drug dealer nor a prisoner: ‘I don’t see myself as a prisoner, no, and I don’t like being called a “dealer” either; been trying to get rid of that one… well, I guess I am a stonemason now [laughter]’. Inmates constituted the prison as a benign organization with which they were in many ways satisfied because it allowed them to be whom they wanted, whether it was a parent, sportsman, artist, student or a productive worker, and to ‘lose’ stigmatized and unvalued aspects of the self, such as drunkard, gang member or drug dealer. Legitimacy was thus accorded to the prison as a result of a perceived exchange, with support given in return for access to a lifestyle and opportunities that inmates desired.

Contesting pragmatic legitimacy

Inmates commented on deprivations to which they were subject and how these thwarted their best interests. This identity talk constructed them as particular kinds of people – as weak, helpless, dependent subjects who suffered unfairly in a highly coercive and impersonal regime. The material and social deprivations to which they said they were subjected constituted attacks on their sense of self, revealing to their selves assorted personal inadequacies (Sykes, 1958, pp. 68–9). Such talk also contested the pragmatic legitimacy of the prison, as it questioned whether the institution offered sufficient advantages to them (a fair exchange) to merit their consent. Identity work that contested the legitimacy of the prison centred most frequently on the limited opportunities that it offered inmates to engage in constructive activity with the result that ‘killing time’ was problematic and their lives were ‘really tedious’ (Victor). Implied contest of the reciprocal exchange relationship on which pragmatic legitimacy is based was also evident in prisoners’ observations on the restricted opportunities for self-development. Much of this talk expressed prisoners’ discontent with the prison on pragmatic grounds in general terms without actively criticizing specific aspects of its structures, procedures or policies. As Ville noted, ‘This is a place of mental stagnation.’

Identity work that construed prisoners as puny, powerless and reliant but which more actively critiqued the pragmatic legitimacy of the prison, i.e. contested directly the notional exchange relationship on which such legitimacy is based, was also evident. That ‘the average inmate finds himself in a harshly Spartan environment which he defines as painfully depriving’ (Sykes, 1958, p. 68) has been much discussed (Cohen & Taylor, 1992). In Helsinki Prison, the majority of inmates’ complaints focused on the food and medical care, petty rules, a perceived lack of support for education and sports activities, and, they maintained, ‘It’s getting worse all the time; they’re taking more and more away from us’ (Johan). Perhaps most interesting from our perspective was inmates’ talk about how the institution thwarted their efforts to work on preferred versions of their selves as husbands, partners, fathers and brothers. This too has been noted by prior researchers, who have commented that prisoners are deprived of certain kinds of identities ‘as providers, nurturers, or influential family members’ (Toch, 1977, p. 56). As Erik said, ‘This is so frustrating and unfair you know…. These people do their best to see that your affairs go to hell, that your family gets broken up, and that you remain a criminal.’ The effect of Helsinki Prison to deny inmates this whole category of familial social identities led to inmates’ discoursal contest of its pragmatic legitimacy.

Affirming moral legitimacy

Moral legitimacy is credited to an organization and its activities on the basis of a positive normative evaluation (see Table 4). Most strikingly, prisoners accepted the moral legitimacy of the prison in their talk about how it sought to make them ‘better’ people. As Niko said, ‘If going to prison is good for some people, I’m one of them.’ The principal mechanism by which this was accomplished, they said, was their ‘sentence plan’. Sentence plans were written for all prisoners on the basis of a two-hour interview in another prison (Riihimäki), and updated with comments by local prison officials who evaluated inmates on their progress. They were individualized, formal, documented agreements which set out activities (e.g. good behaviour, educational classes), goals (e.g. to maintain family ties, to maintain a drug-free lifestyle) and possible rewards (e.g. holidays, being moved to an open prison, family visits). Most prisoners said that they were satisfied with their ‘sentence plan’ in principle, and understood them to be instruments by which they could work constructively on their selves.

Table 4.

Moral Legitimacy.

Affirming moral legitimacy	Contesting moral legitimacy
‘Let’s say that I have learned to think about things in a different manner…now that I’ve been sober and had time to think about things, I feel like I’ve got my values straight again, values that were lost to me for a long time. That’s how I feel about all this.’ (Niko)	‘It’s [sentence plan] a useless bother. They write up all sorts of things you should achieve… For most of us it just doesn’t lead to anything.’ (Victor)
‘Prison is losing its reputation as a penitentiary and is seen more and more as a rehabilitative institution, and I think this is the right direction.’ (Julle)	‘The idea is that prisoners should be deprived only of their freedom. That’s what our punishment is supposed to be. But in Finnish prisons, they practically restrict every aspect of your life.’ (Saku)
‘Right now I have papers going for open prison and I’m trying to work towards all them goals to set in my sentence plan. It says in there that I can apply for open prison during the latter part of my sentence. Our officers and other staff have seen how I have improved and how I am really ready for change.’ (Toni)	‘The sentence plan should be bound by law but these guys, they don’t abide by it, they don’t give a fuck.’ (Erik)
‘We have regular urine tests, that’s part of the deal… but it’s a good system, it is a rehab block after all.’ (Antti)	‘This placement department is a stupid idea… it’s an exclusionary body… meaning that they don’t fulfil their intended role of helping prisoners readjust into society… they don’t do anything to prevent us from coming back to prison.’ (Johan)
‘I got a history of drug abuse and violence and now I’m sober… I’ve been on anger-management courses; I’ve learned to control myself a bit… I got some new ways of thinking too.’ (Harri)	‘To be totally honest, I think it’s a human tragedy that you’re locked up in a small box for ten years and when you get out you’re in such a shape that nobody will want to have their kid sitting next to you in the bus.’ (Jaska)

For example, Johan stated that ‘I have a good sentence plan’, accepting implicitly both the appropriateness of the disciplinary process and the specific set of institutionally prescribed directives regarding what kind of person he should work to become. Family men frequently worked diligently on their sentence plans in order, they said, to secure valued goals such as family camps and short vacations. Those inmates with histories of substance abuse were often appreciative of the prison’s rehabilitation programmes which could lead not just to, for example, sobering up, but to re-evaluation of the self. Inmates acknowledged the rightness of formal prison procedures to impose on the identity work of inmates: ‘The idea is great, that they make a plan for the prisoner, what he could do, and then write that down for the prisoner to follow’ (Jaakko). Some of the men even discussed reflexively how they had come to terms with this system of institutional and self-auditing:

I’m quite pleased with it [sentence plan]…. First I thought to myself that ‘I ain’t going to no rehab block’, but then I started seeing things differently… At the end of the day, it’s pretty much up to you how it works out. (Risto)

In working on their selves in ways specified by the prison, monitoring their performance against agreed targets, and accepting the surveillance of correctional officers, the inmates laboured on identities not entirely of their own choosing. Their acceptance of sentence plans was concomitantly an acceptance of the moral legitimacy of the prison and of its right to engineer their lives.

Contesting moral legitimacy

Prisoners sometimes said that the institution was not genuinely concerned with making them ‘better’ people and that it was not operated consonant with the Finnish prison system’s espoused philosophy of humane neoclassicism. This identity talk contested the institution’s moral legitimacy as it questioned fundamentally the predicates on which it was notionally founded. Considerable dissatisfaction centred on the operation of the sentence plan system which officially served both to promote prisoners’ ‘adjustment to society’ and to render prisoner management ‘predictable, well-planned and efficient’ (Mohell & Pajuoja, 2006, pp. 66–7). The men, though, said that the developmental role of sentence plans was frequently compromised. The overwhelming sentiment they expressed was that the sentence plans functioned to exert control over them, and to render them docile. For inmates, the sentence plans symptomized that ‘you don’t have any control over your own being’ (Mikael), that in prison officials and their apparatus ‘take away your ability to decide about your own life’ (Jari), and that ‘you’re powerless against them [prison officers]’ (Jesse).

Occasionally, prisoners talk about their selves and their predicaments extended beyond pointing out ‘unethical’ practices, and actively targeted aspects of the prison system itself. For example, inmates impugned the actions of the placement department at Riihimäki, thus questioning the prison system’s ability to act on ‘collectively valued purposes in a proper and adequate manner’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 581). They also pointed to what they considered to be apparent contradictions between the prison system’s notional philosophy of rehabilitation and their personal experiences of retribution while incarcerated. A few prisoners even queried the efficacy of a penal system that relied on custodial sentences which made, or could make them, unfit to re-enter society. The prisoners in these ways constructed themselves as subject to unfair and inappropriate treatment, and sometimes as victims of a failed or failing system. Of course, these claims were self-serving, fusing the good of prisoners with that of society as a whole, but this is not unusual for those evaluating moral legitimacy (Suchman, 1995). This form of identity work reflected a negative normative evaluation of the prison, suggesting that individual guards often acted unethically, that procedures were operated hypocritically, and even that the Finnish penal system lacked legitimacy.

Affirming cognitive legitimacy

Cognitive legitimacy is granted by participants to organizations to the extent that they help make their worlds and their lives comprehensible. The inmates talked about how the prison allowed them to make predictable and meaningful sense of themselves, acknowledging its legitimacy in two ways (see Table 5). First, inmates described the prison as providing routines that patterned their daily lives, helping them to cope with their status as prisoners:

It’s all about routines… and if they somehow deviate, it instantly feels strange and new. But in a way, it’s [routine behaviour] how you keep going in here. (Marko)

Table 5.

Cognitive Legitimacy.

Affirming cognitive legitimacy	Contesting cognitive legitimacy
‘You just kind of know when the day begins and when it ends, you have a set rhythm and you don’t think about anything since everything is thought for you. You don’t need to use your own brain when the guards are opening doors for you.’ (Jukka)	‘It would be nice if you could use your head more. Every day is just the same, and weekends, they’re even more simplistic than weekdays.’ (Mike)
‘It’s like, it feels kind of easy, that everything is ready-made for you, that they’ve thought everything through, even bringing your meals to you and stuff like that.’ (Harri)	‘It’s the same shit on different days. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Doing the same routine every day is not good coz when you need to change it, you’re not able to, you don’t have the means or know-how.’ (Pepe)
‘It’s good that there’s a lot to do and there ain’t many breaks in between. When you get your routines sorted out and you get used to it all, the days go by easier… they have structure.’ (Risto)	‘The boredom hits you when there’s nothing to do during evenings and nights … Every day is the same. There’s nothing to keep your mind stimulated in here.’ (Rauli)
‘This [prison] doesn’t really differ much from summer camp… Of course, there are certain rules and restrictions, but this isn’t much different from campus-living.’ (Johan)	‘I see it as mindless tormenting. It’s not based on logical thinking at all… it’s like some form of idiotism… that first they say one thing and then they say something wholly different… They don’t use their power in a constructive way, they use it as a means to subdue people.’ (Jari)
‘My future goal is to start my own car painting business. It’s important for me to maintain this vision and direction.’ (Marko)	‘I’ve tried to get into law school twice…this year I couldn’t do it because the welfare people wouldn’t pay for my exam books.’ (Jaakko)

Indeed, for some inmates, mostly repeat offenders and ‘career criminals’, highly structured prison environments offered a welcome, consistent, knowable lifestyle which helped them to make sense of their selves as valued institutional citizens:

It’s [prison] a lifestyle. It’s kind of normal for me. I feel alive when I’m in here… Here I feel like I’m somebody. I’m taken care of in here. I have a family in here. (Sergei)

That is, prison not only rendered inmates’ lives manageable for them but was embraced as a welcome locale for identity work which then also minimized the possibility of serious dissent. Second, inmates said that the prison afforded them an opportunity to work on future-projected versions of their selves. They said that it enabled them to prepare for re-entry into society, and described the institution variously as an opportunity for ‘healing’ (Julle) and ‘resting’ (Sergei) but typically for ‘preparing’ (Hannu) and ‘developing’ (Saku). Most were clear that they were engaged in ‘projects of the self’, in preparation for the time that they would be released:

My goal is to develop myself so that I can manage in the future and make a living for my family and myself and even perhaps make a contribution towards the greater good. (Saku)

Inmates’ talk about their aspirations for the future (Thornborrow & Brown, 2009, p. 356), and of their ‘ideal selves’ (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 954) served an important identity-defining function, allowing inmates to ‘be men once more again providing they do not look too closely at one another’s credentials’ (Liebow, 1967, p. 213). In talking about their selves as projects that they worked on and their ambitions to be conventional members of society – electricians (Jari), painters (Marko), bar owners (Jukka), etc. – they understood the prison not merely as a place in which to survive but to enact preferred versions of their identities. Such talk also functioned to acknowledge the legitimacy of the prison as an institution in which they could pursue their goals (even those perhaps appropriately categorized as ‘future-oriented fabrications’ (Snow & Anderson, 1987, p. 1360).

Contesting cognitive legitimacy

The prisoners’ identity talk also contested the cognitive legitimacy of the institution through their questioning and rejection of it as a means of making sense of their current existence and future selves. Contestation of the prison’s legitimacy occurred through inmates objections to the mundane predictability of prison routines, to the fact that ‘every day is the same’ (Rauli). Rather than lending a reassuring sensemaking structure to their everyday lives, these individuals commented on ‘how such an unwavering institutional rhythm could get you into a really foul mood’ (Jussi), as ‘it’s not based on any logical thinking at all’ (Jari), just ‘forced on us’ (Tommy). Additionally, inmates described the behaviour of officials and systems as ‘mindless tormenting’ (Jari) and ‘blackmailing’ (Henri) and said that they were regarded ‘like some animal’ (Erik). They said that they were appalled by the quixotic ways they were treated even when they played by the prison system’s own rules. They grumbled about ‘all this arbitrariness’ (Mikael), ‘empty promises’ (Victor) and ‘utter illogicality’ (Jarmo) which meant that ‘you can’t win’ (Johan). Further, while for some inmates prison was a ‘lifestyle choice’, for others it was abhorrent:

I’m not made for this kind of place… This is a really hard place for me mentally… I’m not the kind of personality that can survive in this kind of place, I can’t adjust to prison life. (Martin)

Inmates also complained that the prison administration was either unresponsive or worked actively to frustrate them in pursuit of valued identity goals. As Mikael said, ‘the administration here doesn’t like it when you guys have certain aspirations and objectives’. In particular, inmates complained that the prison authority was unwilling to help out in their efforts to educate themselves. Such talk emphasized the difficulties that they had reading (positive) meaning into their prison selves and the institution as a place of correction: ‘You get this crushing feeling of inadequacy, that you’re a really insignificant and useless human being’ (Jari). As Fludernik (1999, p. 61) observes, ‘modern disciplinary tactics replace vengeance by the institutionalization of depersonalizing indifference’. Such prisoner comments not only contested the legitimacy of the prison but also implied an uncomfortable recognition of their inferior status as carriers of stigmatized identities, within both their immediate and unresponsive incarcerating environment, and broader Finnish society.

Discussion

In this section, we have two broad aims. First, we further analyse inmates’ identity work, and how it affirmed and contested pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy, and consider the implications of our study for understanding internal legitimacy processes. Second, we discuss our study’s limitations and sketch some possibilities for further research on internal legitimacy, identity work and prisons. We then draw some brief conclusions.

Identity work and legitimacy processes

Like employees in work settings, prisoners drew on organizational discourses to author their selves. Aspects of prisoners’ talk – notably that centred on sentence plans – served to construct them as managed and self-managing subjects through ongoing processes of normalization (enforced through sentence plans), measurement (against sentence plan targets), comparison (e.g. with other, notionally well-behaved prisoners), correction (through continuous evaluation of behaviour), technologies of the self (e.g. monitoring one’s own performance against agreed targets) and avowal (e.g. expressions of support for the sentence plan objectives). Discourse in these ways produced prisoners’ identities, supplying and enforcing regulatory principles which invaded and totalized individuals, rendering them coherent but docile. Prisoners, though, were not without agency, and, especially in their talk about preferred forms of identity work, and aspirations for the future, inmates constituted their selves, ‘shifting the parameters that defined who they were’ (Thornborrow & Brown, 2009, p. 370).

Our findings are strongly suggestive of the importance of identity work to prisoners, and of their efforts to build self-esteem through the construction of valued, if (arguably) sometimes fantasized, identities (Brown & Starkey, 2000, p. 107; Gabriel, 1995, p. 479). Prisoners, like mental health patients (Goffman, 1968), the homeless (Snow & Anderson, 1987), blue-collar workers (Burawoy, 1979) and those performing ‘dirty work’ (Tracy & Scott, 2006), labour on the creation and maintenance of preferred versions of their selves because for them, and others at the margins or bottom of status orders, such activity is ‘especially critical for survival’ and ‘to retain a sense of self and thus their humanity’ (Snow & Anderson, 1987, p. 1365). Just as for inmates ‘there was the continual problem…of resisting the sense that they were only prisoners’ (Cohen & Taylor, 1992, p. 41), many categories of workers, including correctional officers, struggle to maintain a sense of self-worth (Tracy, 2000, 2004a). Further, identity work is also activity with implications for the discursive construction of organizations and their legitimacy.

Through their identity work, prisoners affirmed and contested the prison’s legitimacy. In talking about the prison as an organization that afforded them opportunities to work on preferred versions of their selves, for sociality and for enjoyment, the inmates’ affirmation of its legitimacy was based primarily on rational calculations of self-interest (pragmatic legitimacy). Talk about how Helsinki Prison operated in line with the Finnish penal system’s espoused philosophy of humane neoclassicism, and helping prisoners to become better people, constructed it as morally legitimate. Prisoners’ recognition of the value of prison routines for everyday sensemaking and the scope that the institution gave them to make sense of their projected future selves ascribed to it cognitive legitimacy. Perhaps in part because of such legitimating talk, Helsinki Prison was, and had long been, remarkably stable, and unaffected by serious disorder. Inmates’ affirmation of the legitimacy of the prison had concomitant implications for their construction of their selves, i.e. as more-or-less rule-abiding, non-disruptive and self-oriented. This is a phenomenon that has been commented upon in other forms of organization, and which Burawoy (1985) refers to as strategizing one’s own subordination.

Prisoners’ acceptance, however, was not total or unquestioning. In inmates’ talk about the prison as subjecting them to multiple deprivations, prisoners’ contestation of its legitimacy was founded on an understanding that it did not serve their interests (lacked pragmatic legitimacy). Their talk regarding how sentence plans were used to control them, how prison officials reneged on their obligations, and the inefficacy of the Finnish prison regime constructed the institution as lacking moral legitimacy. Prisoners’ denial of the meaningfulness of everyday routines, their descriptions of the arbitrary decisions, and their talk about how the prison undermined their work on longer-term future (aspirational) selves, constituted the institution as cognitively illegitimate. While this identity talk suggested that the ongoing legitimacy of the prison could not be taken for granted, it nevertheless had few implications for its everyday functioning. Prisoners were generally mostly accepting and obedient. Their contestation of the legitimacy of the prison had, though, consequences for their construals of their selves, i.e. as long-suffering and unfairly treated anonymous players in the ongoing institutional drama of everyday prison existence. This has its complement in work organizations whose employees have often been found to express dissatisfaction with their jobs and cynicism toward their managers, and yet remain largely docile (Fleming & Spicer, 2003; Humphreys & Brown, 2002a; Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992).

The conception of internal legitimacy that emerges from our research is that it is constructed and reconstructed on a continuing basis by participants through discourse as they fashion versions of their organizational selves. That is, in construing their identities, organizational men and women are also engaged in ‘legitimacy work’. Individuals do not simply accept or reject the legitimacy of their organizations but construe it in multiple and often contradictory ways through their narrativizations of self. It is from these very many micro, collectively informed identity-based individual claims, judgements and evaluations that legitimacy as an ongoing discursive accomplishment is enacted. Through this talk inmates both constructed and recognized a status quo of taken-for-granted practices that visibly governed their and others’ behaviour, lending the prison the appearance of general validity (Zelditch & Walker, 1984). This generated understandings that supported widespread compliance which, backed by the threat of sanctions, led to continued acceptance of established procedures and practices. These processes, fundamental to social organization, while seemingly inevitable and omnipotent, were in fact works in progress, always in danger of ‘being seen [by inmates] as contingent and vulnerable’ (Johnson et al., 2006, p. 73).

Research implications and limitations

Our analysis has important implications for research on internal legitimacy processes. It suggests, that in order to understand the dynamics of legitimacy, attention needs to be devoted to forms of talk in which the legitimacy of organizations is constructed. In this respect, it seems likely that discourse centred on institutions’ histories, and cultures, key events and strategies, and significant individuals and their actions may be important. Such research would be a valuable complement to other studies that have examined how legitimacy concerns centre on talk about, for example, environmental debates (Coupland & Brown, 2004), founding events (Golant & Sillince, 2007), design knowledge development (Heusinkveld & Reijers, 2009), organizations’ identities (Clegg et al., 2007), care of the elderly (Brown, Ainsworth & Grant, 2012) and organizational restructurings (Erkama & Vaara, 2010). As the costs associated with legitimacy deficits can be substantial (Scott, 2001; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), so studies which analyse language and legitimacy may have practical benefits. Researchers interested in the sudden death of organizations, very low levels of member commitment and loyalty, and the causes of prison riots, may find that they can in part be explained by the lack of opportunities participants have to engage in legitimacy-affirming identity work.

This research also has at least two sets of significant implications for research on identity. First, most researchers have either treated identity work as a series of loosely specified processes without making any further distinctions or identified highly specific tactics with limited generalizability. Like Snow and Anderson’s (1987) generic patterns of ‘identity talk’, our analysis points the way for other typological schemes to analyse the identity work of more conventional organizational participants in other contexts and for other purposes. Second, while there has been some preliminary research on identity work and, for instance, identification (Humphreys & Brown, 2002b) and institutional change (Lok, 2010), our research indicates that identity work is likely to be an important aspect of other organizational processes and outcomes. Further studies might, for instance, focus on relationships between people’s constructions of self and processes of organizationally based operating routines, performance appraisals, client work, board meetings, strategizing, and so forth.

Like much exploratory research this study has raised more questions than it has answered. We have focused on prisoners, but those for whom prisons are work organizations – managers, guards and support staff – also engage in identity work which relates to legitimacy. Of these, perhaps the most interesting are correctional officers, who engage regularly in ‘dirty work’, are prone to work stress (Tracy, 2004b) and struggle to combat self-understandings that they have tainted or stigmatized identities (Tracy, 2004a; Tracy & Scott, 2006). Unable to draw on supportive discourses, such as those centred on occupational prestige or masculine heterosexuality, how do correctional staff construe the legitimacy of their work organization in their identity talk? Further, our findings doubtless incorporate unique features of our Finnish case. By comparison with Finland, US prisons, for example, tend to emphasize containment rather than rehabilitation, are often underfunded and overcrowded, and increasingly operated by for-profit companies or according to ‘business’ principles (Riveland, 1999). What kinds of discourses for identity work are available to prisoners and prison staff in these circumstances, and, for inmates in particular, what scope is there for legitimacy-affirming self-construal?

We have analysed internal legitimacy issues, but this is just one aspect of the legitimacy nexus centred on penitentiaries that often exist in hostile, politically charged environments. Closed, high-security, ‘supermax’ prisons in particular have attracted criticism ‘that they constitute cruel and unusual punishment, are inhumane, and violate minimum standards of decency’ (Riveland, 1999, p. 191). How do these externally located discourses connect with internally based delegitimating identity work and with what effects? Moreover, ours is a study of a regime that prisoners seemed to regard, fundamentally, as legitimate, but what identity work takes place among inmates leading up to prison riots? How do prisoners appropriate particular discourses in their identity work to undermine prison legitimacy, and how does talk which contests the legitimacy of prisons lead to riotous action (Goldstone and Useem, 1999, p. 1014)? A limitation of our study is that it has focused on just three broad kinds of identity/legitimacy work and other research might use more refined or perhaps different categories for analysis. Also, in our study we have paid little attention to the fact that even in a single prison there may be important differences in inmate experiences as a result of architecture, living arrangements, length of sentence, prescribed activities, etc., and that people may respond idiosyncratically to what is ostensibly the ‘same’ setting. More individualized research programmes are required which may uncover other distinctions in the types of identity work and their connections with internal legitimacy.

Finally, it may be objected that we have focused on a single (and in the context of management studies arguably ‘extreme’) set of people with a particular relationship (enforced captivity) to their organization. Yet the unusual context enabled our identification of links between identity work and internal legitimacy because these concerns are so salient in a penal institution. Further, there are important parallels between prisons and prisoners and employees in conventional work organizations that make our findings broadly relevant. Just as prisoners had continuously to consider ‘how to accommodate to prison life… in order to preserve some sense of identity’ (Cohen & Taylor, 1992, p. 34), so too do workers in business organizations who are subject to tailored programmes of culture change, training and performance management (Ezzamel et al., 2001; Thomas & Davies, 2005). Our findings regarding prisoners resonate too with research on employees whose consent to ‘game rules’ is fabricated through processes of collusion in which workers accommodate the meaninglessness of their work lives with its ‘impairment, tedium and weariness’ (Burawoy, 1979, p. 78). Moreover, in conventional work organizations as in prisons, while a ‘legitimation crisis’ may arise if people become uncertain regarding the outcomes of consent to ‘making out’, most of the time workers, like prisoners, are complicit in ‘voluntary servitude’, and define their selves using institutionally prescribed discourses (Burawoy, 1979, p. 89; Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992).

Conclusions

Total institutions such as prisons are well suited to studies of identity as they target selves and subject them to processes of change. Our research suggests that even in a total institution, in which people are confined in limited spaces and subjected to stultifying routines in isolated locations in fortress architecture, they nevertheless have considerable latitude to exploit opportunities for identity work. While there may be a ‘glacial cruelty intrinsic to the system’s fundamental purpose of ultimate depersonalization’, this does not necessarily imply that full institutionalization and regimentation are actually realized: subjects’ ‘experiential self-identity structures the carceral space’ (Fludernik, 1999, pp. 47, 54). The same is true in conventional work organizations, perhaps most obviously in call centres, but also more generally in bureaucratic institutions which target individuals in order to make them notionally more ‘appropriate’ to context (Willmott, 1993). Just as disciplinary measures make prisoners aware of the ineluctability of their condition, so analogous processes operate on employees, imprinting on them an awareness of the (seeming) inescapability of their lot. Organizations, then, are vectors and instruments of power that exist within relations of power which saturate and thus form them. Work organizations and employees, like prisons and prisoners, are not independent, but invested in each other and co-created and contested on a quotidian basis by active and often aspiring inmates and employees.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance and insightful comments provided by Alison Hirst, Michael Humphreys, John Sillince, Andre Spicer, Graham Sewell and the anonymous reviewers. The authors would also like to thank the Finnish Criminal Sanctions Agency and staff of Helsinki Prison for their co-operation. Finally, the authors would like to express their gratitude to the inmates of Helsinki Prison for sharing their daily lives with us.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Andrew D. Brown is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Bath. He has previously held faculty positions at the universities of Manchester, Nottingham, Cambridge and Warwick. His primary research interests centre on issues of identity, narrative and sensemaking, and his work has been published in journals including Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies and Human Relations. He currently serves on the editorial boards of such journals as Group and Organization Management, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Organization and Organization Studies.

Sammy Toyoki is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Aalto School of Economics. He obtained his PhD in Consumer Research at the University of Warwick and his principal research interests focus on identity, practice and temporality in organization and consumer culture.

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