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Part II. Enacting Identities in the Workplace and on the Streets Street-level workers care as much about who a person is as about what the person has done. Identity matters as much as acts. By identity, we mean how we come to recognize ourselves and each other through group belonging.1 All of us belong to certain groups: this is to say that we occupy subject positions. For example, street-level workers belong to various occupational groups and are recognized for their belonging to racial, class, gender, and sexual groupings. Each of these group memberships (for example, working-class, white, female, heterosexual) represents what we call a subject position. Each subject position is ‹lled with meaning, so that being hailed as a cop, a Latino, or a female often de‹nes our expectations of who we are and the expectations others have of us. Identity, then, provides a way of organizing the social world, of endowing both ourselves and others with recognizable meaning. There is a dynamism to identity because people occupy a number of subject positions that combine or intersect amid the shifting contexts of everyday life. For example, the occupational identity “rookie police of‹cer” may give way to a racial identity as a cop sheds the uniform, drives through a posh business district in an upscale new car, and is pulled over by a police of‹cer from another jurisdiction. Pulling out law enforcement identi‹cation is likely again to shift the motorist’s identity. For the of‹cer who initiated the stop, the motorist is resigni‹ed as a fellow of‹cer; for the rookie cop, his black maleness may ‹ll his sense of belonging at that moment. Street-level workers have strong occupational identities. Particularly for police of‹cers, conventional wisdom holds that the bonds of occupational identity are highly salient, creating a local culture of shared beliefs that enable cops to handle tensions in the workplace and danger on the streets. This bonding in turn produces a group loyalty 51 and a code of silence in which of‹cers are loathe to reveal the wrongdoing of fellow of‹cers.2 We ‹nd evidence of bonding among streetlevel workers that is consistent with conventional wisdom and existing literature. Street-level workers unite against management to push grievances and close ranks to protect the reputation of workers even when there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing. We take this up in chapter 5. But stories and ‹eld notes also reveal that street-level workers take on their identities differently within and across professions. Cops, teachers, and vocational rehabilitation counselors offer unique markers of their occupational identities, establishing unwritten but enforceable expectations of the “good” worker and de‹ning their jobs’ key tensions and contradictions. While these expectations and work tensions are commonly understood, they are suf‹ciently incomplete to enable workers to ‹ll in their occupational identities in particular ways. For example, some police of‹cers occupy their identities on and off duty, carrying concealed weapons and positioning themselves in restaurants with a clear view of the front door. Others submerge their occupational identities the moment they put on their street clothes and take up other subject positions, such as “students” attending university classes or “coaches” of neighborhood ball teams. Like the complex array of identities evident in contemporary public agencies, divisions are also a strong feature of the organizational environments we observed. We take up the divisive qualities of identity and identi‹cation in the workplace in chapter 6. The state-agent narrative puts workers in a bureaucratic setting where they struggle against management to retain discretionary powers and preserve their self-interests . But the stories told to us suggest that the conventional wisdom of bureaucratic division is overstated. What is more striking in the narratives is how the growing diversi‹cation of the workforce is generating identity enclaves for workers (or social and cultural space for group belonging) and rede‹ning these agencies’ internal politics.3 Like urban neighborhoods, the urban work sites we studied are occupied by streetlevel workers who draw signi‹cantly on their generational, religious, class, physical, ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender identities to form bonds and declare differences in their daily interactions with one another.4 Younger workers distance themselves from older workers who are less sensitive to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Feminists and lesbian feminists have gained dominance in one of the vocational rehabilitation work sites; as a result, the few white male workers tell stories...

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