‘We’re a small team pretending to be a big one’ ; negotiating collective identities at work

Working in groups and teams is the main modus operandi of the modern workplace. Looking into the work of teams provides an insight into the ways organisations and shared systems of meaning are negotiated, reproduced and/or resisted. Membership in these formations comes with an awareness of ways of doing and ways of being. In order to claim membership, employees negotiate and align with what indexes participation to the specific formation. This process is largely, but not exclusively, linguistically done. Fitting in the team implies a process of accommodation which, however, is not equally shared between the members. The newcomer to a team is typically expected to negotiate their way in the team depending on their role and position as well as the (micro-) politics of their immediate setting. In this paper, I draw on current and recently completed work and discuss how employees do membership to a group. I take a critical stance and bring together analytical principles from interaction analysis and critical discourse studies. I present data from two settings, a new employee negotiating hegemonic ideologies and hierarchies and a team of newly established middle managers. The analysis shows that employees actively negotiate the power im/balance in enacting their professional roles and identities and do belonging and fitting in in the process. I close the paper with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the current theoretical and methodological apparatus for the study of workplace interaction and provide directions for further researc