Born to Write: Discovery and Construction of Self in the Identity Stories of Poets and Writers

The explorative study hereby presented is based on in-depth interviews with 16 renowned Israeli writers of prose and poetry. The aim of the study is to examine the identity-stories of these masters of the written word. By the term "identity-story", we relate to the self-reflective or "arspoetic" sides of the life stories our interviewees presented, the hows, whens and whys which had brought them to realize their identities as their cultures' authorized authors or poets. Thematic analysis of these stories, conducted in the spirit of the Schutzian Phenomenological-Interpretive approach, reveals an interesting interplay of two seemingly contradictory core meta-themes - identity-creation and identity-discovery. The present paper is focused on the identity-discovery meta-theme. Unlike the identitycreation meta-theme, which illustrates active, deliberate and conscious processes of identity construction within the social world, the identitydiscovery meta-theme is based on narratives that detect the belief in the feasibility of a transcendental revelation of a given identity, whose roots lies beyond the ties of time and place.

The Role of Circular Business Modeling in the Entrepreneurial Identity-Construction Process

The process of shaping an entrepreneurial identity is emerging as a focal point in the field of entrepreneurship. Scholarly efforts to date have turned attention to what happens during the process of identity creation, how, and why. In this article, we seek to extend the current literature by examining how entrepreneurs mold their entrepreneurial identities while enacting circular business models. Specifically, identity construction under circular business modeling is proposed as a negotiation process whereby the conflict mechanisms by which entrepreneurs construct their entrepreneurial identities are highly influenced by stakeholders’ interests. Propositions regarding the inherence of stakeholders are presented and discussed.

‘The sacred gang’. The discourse of the ‘metaphysical macho guy culture (patsanstvo)’ in Russian song lyrics

The article considers one of the methods of identity creation in a song used by lyricists in the early 21st c.: it involves a combination of profane language typical of an urban outcast (patsan, gopnik) and metaphysical, i. e. sacred, themes. Enjoying numerous representations in contemporary Russian visual arts, the discourse of the ‘metaphysical macho guy culture (patsanstvo)’ is also inseparable from the country’s literary tradition, which, however, is trying to marginalise it yet again and confine it to a song format. Analysing the poetic output of several Russian-speaking musicians (E. Limonov, P. Korolenko, Branimir, M. Elizarov, etc.), the author identifies the key features of the discourse: its faux-playfulness, emblematic quality, and adherence to low culture. The article also proposes a genre typology of the discourse in question, noting its critical, humoristic and paradoxographical varieties. In the end, the author discovers that the image of a macho guy / urban outcast (patsan) confronted with a supernatural experience is heavily influenced by the sacral archetype, which absorbs the most extreme — the lowest and the loftiest — aspects of human experience.

How Chilean Journalists Use Social Media: Digital Transformation and New Forms of Visibility and Identity Creation

Based on the content analysis of 1,400 Twitter and Instagram accounts, this study identified the social media profiles of 792 Chilean journalists from national media outlets to describe their visibility and activity levels and how they construct their identities. Our results show that although Chilean journalists have a solid digital presence, they use social media platforms differently, deploying various identity creation strategies and new journalistic roles. Our findings also address the media outlets’ influence on Chilean journalists’ profiles, level of use, and the identities emerging from their social media accounts.

The motivations and identity aspirations of university students of German: a case study in Australia

In the English-dominated field of L2 motivation, there is a need for more research on learners of languages other than English. This is particularly important in English-speaking countries, where issues involving the recruitment and retention of language students are pressing. This study discusses the main qualitative findings of a study on the motivations and identity aspirations of university students of German in Australia. The findings obtained through a questionnaire (n = 86) are complemented by in-depth interviews conducted with a small sample of respondents (n = 5). The study shows that learners of German are instrumentally, integratively and intrinsically motivated and wish to shape identities as international professionals with unique linguistic skills (Exotenmotiv, see Riemer 2006), tourists and anti-tourists, bilingual speakers in a monolingual Anglophone context and educated individuals (Bildungs-Selbst, see Busse 2015). This research furthers our knowledge on this learner population in Australia and, more broadly, on Anglophone elective language learners, as well as students of German as a foreign language in other contexts. It also contributes to our understanding of the link between motivation and processes of identity creation and development.