Talking about us: the discursive construction of organizational identity in a sport team

The aim of the present contribution was to investigate how communication could be informative of the person/organization relationship. Indeed through linguistic markers and rhetorical strategies, communication could reveal how individuals cognitively organize their representations of the organization they live in, how they make sense of their membership and participation and how they convey these feelings through discourse. To this purpose, the chapter has drawn from a very composite theoretical framework connecting psychology of communication, more specifically focusing on the contribution of the psycholinguistic approach, to organizational research. Participants to the study were 8 players of a volleyball team engaged in the Italian A2 league. Narrative individual in-depth interviews were collected and the discursive data were analysed by adopting diatextual analysis, that is a peculiar address within discourse analysis specifically interested in catching the nexus between interlocutors, texts and contexts of talk.