Connecting People and place in N.L.: Co-constructing Identity in a Tourism Social Enterprise

Friday, Nov. 24, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.

BN-4031

Join the Faculty of Business Administration for a special presentation with Dr. John Schouten, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in social enterprise, and Dr. Beth DuFault, adjunct professor, Department of Sociology, in celebration of Research Week 2023.

Social enterprises transmit pro-social values to their staff, volunteers, stakeholders and communities. Certain social enterprises can also improve aspects of their beneficiaries’ identity and self-worth. However, knowledge about identity-construction dynamics among social enterprises, their founders and other stakeholders, and the communities and cultures in which they are situated is undertheorized and fragmented across fields. This is due, in part, to the lack of a theory to explain identity construction across micro-individual, meso-organizational, and macro-cultural levels. We advance a novel, multi-level theoretical framework for understanding identity construction based on assemblage theory. We then use the framework to interpret data from our multi-year ethnographic study of a social enterprise in Petty Harbour, N.L.

The findings support the usefulness of the identity-as-assemblage construct for understanding complex identity dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. Our study reveals that the tourism social enterprise actively curates and mobilizes identity resources from local culture and heritage for use by various stakeholders in their personal and collective identity projects. It suggests that the impacts (1) are greater for people with transitional or problematic identities and that (2) they can result in generativity whereby staff and volunteers “pay it forward” with the effect of scaling the social impact of the enterprise.

They also open the door to provocative research questions, including the role of narrative transmission in the flow of identity resources and a potential identity-mirroring role for social enterprise in shaping or reinforcing elements of collective place identity.

To register for this presentation, please email mgulliver@mun.ca by Nov. 21.

Presented by Faculty of Business Administration

Event Listing 2023-11-24 11:00:00 2023-11-24 13:00:00 America/St_Johns Connecting People and place in N.L.: Co-constructing Identity in a Tourism Social Enterprise Join the Faculty of Business Administration for a special presentation with Dr. John Schouten, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in social enterprise, and Dr. Beth DuFault, adjunct professor, Department of Sociology, in celebration of Research Week 2023. Social enterprises transmit pro-social values to their staff, volunteers, stakeholders and communities. Certain social enterprises can also improve aspects of their beneficiaries’ identity and self-worth. However, knowledge about identity-construction dynamics among social enterprises, their founders and other stakeholders, and the communities and cultures in which they are situated is undertheorized and fragmented across fields. This is due, in part, to the lack of a theory to explain identity construction across micro-individual, meso-organizational, and macro-cultural levels. We advance a novel, multi-level theoretical framework for understanding identity construction based on assemblage theory. We then use the framework to interpret data from our multi-year ethnographic study of a social enterprise in Petty Harbour, N.L. The findings support the usefulness of the identity-as-assemblage construct for understanding complex identity dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. Our study reveals that the tourism social enterprise actively curates and mobilizes identity resources from local culture and heritage for use by various stakeholders in their personal and collective identity projects. It suggests that the impacts (1) are greater for people with transitional or problematic identities and that (2) they can result in generativity whereby staff and volunteers “pay it forward” with the effect of scaling the social impact of the enterprise. They also open the door to provocative research questions, including the role of narrative transmission in the flow of identity resources and a potential identity-mirroring role for social enterprise in shaping or reinforcing elements of collective place identity. To register for this presentation, please email mgulliver@mun.ca by Nov. 21. BN-4031 Faculty of Business Administration