The elaboration of façades of conformity using the historic case of the Pullman porters

Purpose Even though the values of George Pullman’s porters were incongruent with those embodied by their founder and organization, many porters zealously consented to performing the imposed role of dutiful servant for decades. The purpose this paper is to utilize their respective life-stories and autobiographical memories to help us better understand their compliance in sustaining a façade of conformity, while simultaneously resisting an eclipsing internalization of their work roles into their personal identities, allowing the porters to remain true to themselves. Design/methodology/approach The authors performed a form of historical retrospective case analysis of the Pullman porters as an organizational collective to elaborate a theory of how coping with values incongruence through façades of conformity may be sustainable in conjunction with the fusion of personal and counter-institutional identities to buffer deleterious employee effects. Findings A review of the extant literature suggests that maintaining such a dissonant enacted role over time can engender negative employee stress-related consequences, including increased turnover, reduced job commitment and diminished personal well-being. Yet, the Pullman porters appear to tell a different story regarding their enduring façade in the face of organizational values misfit. As recounted by the porters, their narratives of constructing difference as a productive resource to underpin their counter-institutional group identity is one of coping via the co-constitution of consent and dissent. Originality/value Research exploring the ways in which coping, consent and dissent simultaneously invoke constructions of identity and difference among groups and in juxtaposition with race-ethnicity is particularly under-explored in the extant literature. Exploring the complexities of how employees conform, comply and resist organizations with which they ethically and emotionally disidentify, from a race-ethnicity perspective that is underrepresented in the extant literature, helps extend knowledge from a new vantage point.