Constructing the Ideal Worker Identity: the Rhetorical Construction of Discursive Resources Inundercover Boss

Scholars theorize that organizations influence individuals' work identity management, yet scholars have studied individuals' efforts more than organizations' identity regulation processes. Recent attention to popular culture's role in organizing invites study of how organization-focused reality programming regulates work identity discourses. Thus, this project asks how organizations rhetorically construct norms that can regulate identities in Undercover Boss. The show offers tension-filled hero narratives that (re)construct and regulate an ideal worker discourse in organizationally beneficial ways. The findings demonstrate how reality programming functions as organizational rhetoric that interacts at both macro-level and micro-levels to discursively manage workplace identities.