ry skills and competencies, the individual may move from learning to be a part of the group to teaching others how to become a part of the group.
Thus, as O'Brien and Kollock (2001) have indicated, regardless of the setting in which an individual may work and the identity that he or she acquires through work, it is important to recognize that all settings requires the adoption of a relevant identity. The conditions of work and the attitudes which reflect perceptions of the value and meaning of the work are what most directly shapes an idealized identity. However, the degree to which an individual personally adopts or adapts this identity naturally varies, often quite significantly. This general background establishes some of the theoretical issues considered during the cross setting comparison presented below.
Goffman (2001) theorized that individuals in ordinary work situations present themselves and their activities to others within the context of a dramaturgical idiom. The work environment, like that of the social encounter, is interpreted by Goffman (2001) as something of a stage against which the identity of characters or individuals can be played out. This particular paradigm suggests that what individuals in their work settings present is in apart an assumed set of characteristics, traits, or values which are possibly exaggerated while the person is intimately involved in the normative work situation.
A somewhat different paradigm of how identity is constructed was advanced by Albert Bandura (2003) who focused on social learning theory and asserted that cognitive processes play a prominent role in the acquisition and retention of behavior as well as its expression. Bandura's (2003) theory infers that individuals learn their behaviors through interaction with their environment, corrective feedback, and positive as well as negative reinforcement. In other words, individuals who become immersed in a particular ...