Pawnshop of hearts? The dynamics of identification and meaning creation in a property management organization.

Sammanfattning: Title: Pawnshop of hearts? – The dynamics of identification and meaning creation in a property management organization. Submission Date: 22nd of May 2013 Course: BUSN49- Degree Project in Managing People, Knowledge and Change (Master level) Authors: Linnea Hansson and Mathilda Welin Brook Supervisors: Jens Rennstam and Stephan Schaefer Department of Business Administration School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden Keywords: identity, organizational identity, identification, meaningfulness, work, meaning creation Thesis purpose: The purpose of our thesis is to create interesting theoretical and practical insights by exploring the dynamics of different sources of identification and meaning creation. Our aim is not to provide any generalizable “truths” of how identity and meaning creation “work” in a rational sense. We are more interested in how people relate to these concepts and how they might “work” in real life. Methodology: Our research concerns an investigative study, conducted from an interpretive qualitative perspective. Theoretical perspective: We examine and build upon existing literature on identity, identification and meaning creation and the link between the concepts in order to analyze and elaborate on our research findings. Research question: How do individuals at GoodLiving experience identification and create meaning around their work? Empirical foundation: Our research is founded upon an empirically driven case study within one of the 31 local autonomous organizations of GoodLiving, a Swedish non-professional cooperative service firm in the property management industry. Empirical material was collected through semi- structured in depth interviews. Conclusion: Employees seem to have an ambivalent relationship to the organizational identity and do not seem to establish meaningfulness through identifying with the organization as such. Meaning appears to be created by identifying with different aggregates and entities both inside and outside an organization. This leads us to speculate that meaning at work is a complex patchwork of identifications, resulting from the individuals negotiating different identities and meanings simultaneously.