Being all that you can be

Do organizations influence the race and gender identities of their employees? Data collected in four organizations suggest they do. The initial focus of this research was the effect of organizational policies and practices, but early data collection signaled the importance of interactions with others. As a result, interactions involving identity are the unit of analysis in this research. I identified three different kinds of interactions: spotlighting interactions which highlight an aspect of an individual's identity, testing interactions which confirm or deny an identity projected by the individual, and shaping expression interactions which influence how an individual enacts an identity.