“We’re Dirtbags and Proud of It”: Discursively Constructing Identity as an Adventure Worker

ABSTRACT

How we talk about things familiar to us shapes who we are, and discourses influence how we present ourselves to the world. Through sensemaking, individuals draw on discourses to construct their preferred identities. As an increasing number of American workers seek nontraditional employment, it is integral to examine how individuals interpret and frame dominant and longstanding societal discourses. Adventure workers are a prime example of individuals who align with or push against normative discourses that either reflect or conflict with how they envision their identities. Through 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, we discovered tensions adventure workers experience between normative discourses and the adventure worker identity. Adventure workers communicatively reframed ideal worker norms and the real/fake-self dichotomy surrounding consistent availability, conventional measures of success, and sacrificing time and freedom to unsatisfactory work experiences. In doing so, our participants generated a new form of currency – experience – which they used to legitimize the ways they both resisted and perpetuated normative discourses. This work contributes to communication scholarship by illuminating the far-reaching influence of macro discourses in sensemaking and identity construction by extending the notion of the crystallized self and the traditional “work now, life later” ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-life balance
• adventure work
• sensemaking
• identity
• ideal worker

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Associate Professor Dr. Sarah E. Riforgiate and three anonymous reviewers for providing helpful feedback for improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kari J. Pink

Kari J. Pink (MA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) works at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee as the Advancement Communications Director. Her work-life communication research looks at how our interactions with organizations reflect who we are and influence who we become. Her research has been published in Communication Studies and the Ohio Communication Journal.

Michael C. Coker

Dr. Michael C. Coker (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, Boise State University, Idaho, USA. His research interests relate to the intersections between organizational communication and communication technology, including understudied experiences in physical and virtual spaces, intersections between work and life, and emotions as organizing features across personal and professional contexts. You can find his work published in Management Communication Quarterly, Computers in Human Behavior, and Communication Studies.

Emily A. Godager

Dr. Emily A. Godager (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is a lecturer at Marquette University, Wisconsin, USA. Her research interests relate to organizational communication, including the intersections of work and life, identity, organizational socialization, and organizational change. Her research has been published in Management Communication Quarterly and Communication Studies.