Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Investigation Of Corporate Identification And Disidentification, Wijnand Hendrik Rijkenberg

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the taken-for-granted processes of both identification and disidentification with corporate messages. Theories of identity and identification aided as a starting place in developing a focus for this study and Bakhtin’s dialogism perspective provided a lens for understanding how people’s word choices in their interviews worked as performances of identification and disidentification in the world of the Mokum Corporation, a nationwide company operating in the financial industry. The findings from this study challenge the idea that a corporation controls employee identification. Rather, while the messages from a corporate office can influence what meanings are out for employees to …