Science Kids in Wonderland: Competing occupational identity narratives and Sensemaking of corporate scandals

This article explicates various ways professionals in a large, bureaucratic organization negotiate and reproduce their occupational identity through sensemaking process. Through in-depth examination of research engineers with a PhD degree working for a South Korean multinational electronics company with a performance-driven, top-down culture, we explore how their enactment of HRM practices affect their occupational identity construction and, in turn, how their sensemaking of disruptive organizational events affect and is influenced by on-going identity work. By taking a narrative approach, we identified three types of occupational identity narrative each of which reflected the distinct aspect of their on-going negotiation with the firm’s HRM practices – cynicism, marginalization, and accommodation. Subsequently, we illustrate three different ways through which corporate scandals in the company are incorporated into each of the narrative trajectories: non-event, symbolizing, and isolating. We argue that these findings provide insight into the dynamic interplay between occupational and organizational identity in the rapidly changing East-Asian context of employment relations, as well as the contested nature of collective sensemaking process.