How organizations cope with multiple and sometimes conflicting institutional demands is an increasingly familiar yet little understood question. This paper examines how four French business schools ...responded to demands that they internationalize their management education whilst retaining their traditional identities. We trace the role played by field-level actors in pushing and articulating competing logics and the importance of institutional and organizational identity in how organizations respond. By highlighting the role of identity aspirations we show that what matters is not how an organization sees itself—i.e., what it is—but how it wants to see itself—i.e., what it wishes to become. Finally, we unpack and explain why status differences across organizations affect the nature of the opportunities that are perceived and the scale and format of the responses that are implemented.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider advances in corporate identity scholarship on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the first special edition of corporate identity to appear in ...the
European Journal of Marketing
in 1997.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper takes the form of a literature review.
Findings
The notion of, what can be termed, “identity‐based views of the corporation” is introduced. Each of the ten identity based perspectives that inform the above are underpinned by a critically important question which is believed to be of considerable saliency to marketing scholars and policy advisors alike. As a precursor to an exposition of these ten perspectives, the paper discusses five principal schools of thought relating to identity and identification ((the
quindrivium
) which can be characterised as: corporate identity (the identity of the organisation); communicated corporate identification (identification from the organisation); stakeholder corporate identification (an individual, or stakeholder group's, identification with the organisation); stakeholder cultural identification (an individual, or stakeholder group's, identification to a corporate culture); and envisioned identities and identifications (this is a broad category and relates to how an organisation, or group, envisions how another corporation or group characterises their identity or mode of identification.))
Practical implications
Each of the ten identity‐based views of the corporation outlined here is underpinned by a question of critical importance which aims to be of assistance to senior executives in comprehending and managing identity‐related concerns of the corporation.
Originality/value
The introduction of notions relating to identity based views of the corporation/corporation brands represents, perhaps, a natural
denouement
for the “schools of thought” approach which has long‐characterised the British School of scholarship
vis‐
à
‐vis
corporate identity scholarship since the early 1990s.
Exit is a critical part of the entrepreneurial process. At the same time, research indicates that founders are likely to form strong identity connections to the organizations they start. In turn, ...when founders exit their organizations, the process of psychological disengagement might destabilize their identities. Yet, limited research addresses how founders experience exit or how they manage their identities during this process. Through a qualitative, inductive study of founders of technology-based companies, I developed a theoretical model of founder psychological disengagement that delineates how founder work orientations relate to the disengagement paths that founders follow when leaving one organization and starting another. In elaborating on theory of psychological disengagement, this study has implications for understanding the psychology of founders, how founders exit and begin again, and psychological disengagement more broadly.
Given the ever-changing nature of contemporary workplaces, members often renegotiate how they view the identity of their organization. One way they do so is by expanding or contracting their ...conception of organizational identity. In studying these processes, we develop the construct of "identity elasticity"—the tensions that simultaneously stretch, while holding together, social constructions of identity. To explicate the parameters of elasticity, we problematize previous conceptions of the three foundations of organizational identity—centrality, endurance, and distinctiveness—and document the dialectic tensions experienced in their social constructions. We show how identity is experienced not only through a listing of attributes but also by negotiating a set of processual tensions. In so doing, we also bring together two competing views on organizational identity—process and characteristic. We show how experiencing and navigating the tensions of elasticity is a type of organizational identity work (process) that changes organizational members' constructions of identity (characteristic). We develop our findings as a result of a 10-year-long multiple-method study of an organization undergoing significant growing pains in its identity—the Episcopal Church. Further, we position elasticity as a crucial construct with implications for how organizational identity is viewed.
Purpose
This paper aims to operationalise and juxtapose variables related to identity, strategy and communications, and then examine the impact of such integration on organisational stakeholders’ ...trust, loyalty and commitment by using commitment/trust theory.
Design/methodology/approach
This research design utilises explanatory research at the preliminary stage, as informed by the literature and conceptual framework. The subsequent model was examined via a positivist survey carried out among stakeholders in high-end retail stores in London. Structural equation modelling (SEM) via AMOS was conducted to gain insight into the various relevant influences and relationships.
Findings
The results indicate that identity and strategy are key drivers of integrated corporate communication, and they serve to build stakeholder trust, loyalty and commitment.
Originality/value
The paper shows that while practitioners have indicated that integrated marketing communication is important for organisations, there are a few other areas of concern with regard to consequences related to trust, loyalty and commitment, especially in a retail context. This paper empirically examined relationships between these constructs by validating a conceptual model by using SEM.
Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on an analysis of ...309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost 50 years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm's ongoing rhetorical history—here, the bulletins' repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm's past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)—sustains its identity. Thus, knowing "who we are" might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget "who we were not."
Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a ...new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart, in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots. Leveraging such a characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We also evaluate the effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three state-of-the-art detection showing the superiority of our solution. Finally, among the peculiarities of our approach is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of lightweight account characteristics.
Articulates the main trends in the literature on corporate identity; defines corporate identity; explains the rationale for corporate identity management and describes the main methods used to reveal ...the desired and the actual corporate identity. Particular reference will be made to two recently developed models used to reveal an organization's identity: Balmer's Affinity Audit (BAA) and The Rotterdam Organizational Identification Test (ROIT). Concludes that while empirical research on the area will increasingly be multidisciplinary marketing will, nonetheless, play a pivotal role in an understanding of corporate identity.
In his 2018 letter to the chief executive officers (CEOs) of some of the nation’s largest publically traded organizations, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (a global investment management ...corporation), said “Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential”.1 Simon Sinek refers to an organization’s purpose as their WHY.2 In essence, it’s a company’s fundamental reason for being3—how the people inside it are making a difference4and how their work is meaningful.5
Through a qualitative study of BP executives during and after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and spill, I examine whether and how the relationship between an organization and its members ...can be repaired once damaged. I found that the incident destabilized executives' organizational identification, leading them to doubt the alignment between their own identity and BP's, and generated feelings of ambivalence toward the organization and their role in it. This marked the onset of a process through which members reassessed their identification, leading them either to reidentify and repair their relationship with BP or to deidentify and sever that relationship. Executives resolved their ambivalence and strongly reidentified only when they had organizationally sanctioned opportunities, through working on BPs' response to the incident, to enact the identity attributes of technical excellence and environmental consciousness that were threatened by the Gulf events, suggesting that full relationship repair requires active co-creation by the member and the organization. Absent co-created repair, social information that supported or undermined executives' identification with BP was key to resolving ambivalence and destabilized identification. Building on these findings, I develop a model of repairing damaged relationships after a transgression, with the concepts of destabilized identification and co-created repair, and the mechanism of ambivalence resolution at its center.
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