ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the identity work involved in managing multimembership in, and accountability to, different communities of practice. Everyone has their own particular landscape of communities of practice within which they work, raise children, study and socialize. Reconciling the demands of multimembership can require that people modulate their identification that is, vary the strength or nature of their identification to the different communities of practice in their life. Different combinations of the three modes of identification introduced in engagement, imagination and alignment can be used to explain the nature and complexities of this modulation. The chapter explores how different modulations of identification reflect the individual's multimembership. The notion of paradigmatic trajectories in particular highlights the role of identification resting on imagining others' careers. People may reflexively find ways to maintain some form of identification that allows congruence with their multimembership.
