Why your performance reviews, personality tests, and generational training modules are running on a grammatical bug philosophy diagnosed a century ago, and why L&D keeps missing it.
Your piece hit something I've been noticing from the other direction. You describe the damage of labels being placed on people — but I've also seen cases where labels are actively sought. Sometimes people reach for a diagnostic label or an identity category not because it describes their experience accurately, but because it becomes a tool: something to demand accommodation with, or to signal difference. And when that happens, the people who genuinely live with the condition get quietly crowded out. Their suffering becomes harder to voice, not easier, because the label has been repurposed by others.
It's a strange double bind. First the label freezes you. Then someone else picks up the same label as a weapon or an accessory, and now you can't even say "this is real for me" without being confused with the performance.
I also noticed something about the direction labels travel. The negative ones seem to stick almost instantly — one mistake and the label lands. The positive ones take much longer to arrive, if they arrive at all. I'm not sure whether that's a property of how organisations work or something deeper about how attention operates, but the asymmetry feels real.
What stayed with me most was a small everyday version of what you're describing. A restaurant gets praised on television. You go. The food doesn't quite match. But because the label "acclaimed" is already attached, you hesitate to trust your own tongue. Maybe you even talk yourself out of your own reaction. The label didn't just describe the restaurant — it quietly overwrote your judgment before you had a chance to form one.
That might be the part of your argument that has the widest reach. The "is of identity" doesn't only freeze the person being labelled. It can freeze the people around them too — replacing their own observation with whatever the label already decided.
I love this kind of discussion, so thank you for reading closely enough to press on it, Arimitsu.
You're pointing at territory I've spent real time in. Back in 2018, I did a close read of Nick Beech's 2008 Organization paper on dialogic identity work, where he builds on Alvesson and Willmott to frame identity regulation and identity work as mutually constitutive processes, the discursive practices that define people, and the active construction-of-self that happens inside those practices, feeding each other. What you're describing, labels actively sought as tools, the crowding-out of people who live with the condition, the restaurant example where the label arrives before observation does, maps cleanly onto that literature. Beech, Goffman on announcement-and-enactment, Creed and Scully on performance-based identity, the whole thread.
That's what makes me want to stay close to the frame of this particular essay, rather than widen into it.
Monday was scoped to one narrow thing: a sentence-level grammatical bug in how teams talk about people, and the hundred-year gap between philosophical diagnosis and installable team-level fix. Not identity formation. Not the sociology of categorization. The copula move and the repair. The reason for the tight scope is that MRCI's whole value proposition is that it does something Alvesson, Beech, Edmondson, and the identity-work literature don't: hand a team a sentence they can say to repair. When I widen the aperture to identity formation, I lose the thing that makes the framework different from the traditions it's downstream of.
A diagnostic test I'd offer for your restaurant example: that scene isn't really about the "is" of identity. A guidebook saying "acclaimed" does the same pre-emptive work whether or not the grammar uses "is." That's closer to anchoring and authority-cue effects (Tversky and Kahneman on anchoring, Cialdini on authority). Labels actively sought as tools are dialogic identity work. Both interesting fields. Neither is the field that Monday was mapping.
That said, you've brought to light an essay I probably do need to write or co-write with you if you are interested. The third-party pre-emption piece (label arrives before observation does) is genuinely its own thing, and it's load-bearing for what AI-generated labels are doing at scale right now. You've also reminded me to go back to Beech. Seven years is long enough.
Thanks, Arimitsu. This is the kind of exchange that makes publishing worth it.
Thank you, Jerry. It's genuinely encouraging to hear these observations connect to that literature. I'm far from an expert in this territory, but if the opportunity comes up, I'd welcome it.
Your piece hit something I've been noticing from the other direction. You describe the damage of labels being placed on people — but I've also seen cases where labels are actively sought. Sometimes people reach for a diagnostic label or an identity category not because it describes their experience accurately, but because it becomes a tool: something to demand accommodation with, or to signal difference. And when that happens, the people who genuinely live with the condition get quietly crowded out. Their suffering becomes harder to voice, not easier, because the label has been repurposed by others.
It's a strange double bind. First the label freezes you. Then someone else picks up the same label as a weapon or an accessory, and now you can't even say "this is real for me" without being confused with the performance.
I also noticed something about the direction labels travel. The negative ones seem to stick almost instantly — one mistake and the label lands. The positive ones take much longer to arrive, if they arrive at all. I'm not sure whether that's a property of how organisations work or something deeper about how attention operates, but the asymmetry feels real.
What stayed with me most was a small everyday version of what you're describing. A restaurant gets praised on television. You go. The food doesn't quite match. But because the label "acclaimed" is already attached, you hesitate to trust your own tongue. Maybe you even talk yourself out of your own reaction. The label didn't just describe the restaurant — it quietly overwrote your judgment before you had a chance to form one.
That might be the part of your argument that has the widest reach. The "is of identity" doesn't only freeze the person being labelled. It can freeze the people around them too — replacing their own observation with whatever the label already decided.
I love this kind of discussion, so thank you for reading closely enough to press on it, Arimitsu.
You're pointing at territory I've spent real time in. Back in 2018, I did a close read of Nick Beech's 2008 Organization paper on dialogic identity work, where he builds on Alvesson and Willmott to frame identity regulation and identity work as mutually constitutive processes, the discursive practices that define people, and the active construction-of-self that happens inside those practices, feeding each other. What you're describing, labels actively sought as tools, the crowding-out of people who live with the condition, the restaurant example where the label arrives before observation does, maps cleanly onto that literature. Beech, Goffman on announcement-and-enactment, Creed and Scully on performance-based identity, the whole thread.
That's what makes me want to stay close to the frame of this particular essay, rather than widen into it.
Monday was scoped to one narrow thing: a sentence-level grammatical bug in how teams talk about people, and the hundred-year gap between philosophical diagnosis and installable team-level fix. Not identity formation. Not the sociology of categorization. The copula move and the repair. The reason for the tight scope is that MRCI's whole value proposition is that it does something Alvesson, Beech, Edmondson, and the identity-work literature don't: hand a team a sentence they can say to repair. When I widen the aperture to identity formation, I lose the thing that makes the framework different from the traditions it's downstream of.
A diagnostic test I'd offer for your restaurant example: that scene isn't really about the "is" of identity. A guidebook saying "acclaimed" does the same pre-emptive work whether or not the grammar uses "is." That's closer to anchoring and authority-cue effects (Tversky and Kahneman on anchoring, Cialdini on authority). Labels actively sought as tools are dialogic identity work. Both interesting fields. Neither is the field that Monday was mapping.
That said, you've brought to light an essay I probably do need to write or co-write with you if you are interested. The third-party pre-emption piece (label arrives before observation does) is genuinely its own thing, and it's load-bearing for what AI-generated labels are doing at scale right now. You've also reminded me to go back to Beech. Seven years is long enough.
Thanks, Arimitsu. This is the kind of exchange that makes publishing worth it.
Jerry
Thank you, Jerry. It's genuinely encouraging to hear these observations connect to that literature. I'm far from an expert in this territory, but if the opportunity comes up, I'd welcome it.