•Gaps remain in understanding what and how to communicate regarding sustainability over the web.•We illustrate a powerful yet simple way for companies to assess and improve their sustainability based ...corporate identity.•The methodology is based in automated content analysis across a sample of ten companies in the Ibero-american region.•A dictionary comprising 354 key words and a total of 933 variants has been developed across the three TBL dimensions.•The methodology is interesting for practitioners in both the business and investment sectors.
In recent years, communicating about sustainability based corporate identity – i.e., the values and ethos of an organization that reflect the sustainable foundations around which the corporate brand is built – has become a central element for building a positive organizational reputation. In the business sector, the triple bottom line (TBL) approach, or a balanced conception of sustainability around environmental, social, and economic performance, has been increasingly adopted over recent decades. This paper adopts a multiple case study approach to develop and illustrate a methodology for analysing sustainability based identity as communicated through corporate websites. A critical and comparative assessment was performed on the information conveyed by a sample of ten Ibero-American companies belonging to different countries and sectors, resulting in a number of specific improvement recommendations. As part of the methodology, a dictionary comprising 354 keywords and a total of 933 variants was built corresponding to the three TBL dimensions, which was then used to perform automated content analysis across the corporate websites in the sample. Overall, this study illustrates a powerful but simple way for companies to assess and improve their communicated sustainability based corporate identity.
This study explores how organizations experience and respond to identity challenges that arise due to conflicting interpretations of their past. Drawing on a case study of a fintech venture, we offer ...a process model that illuminates the unfolding of "temporal identity complexity," a sensemaking process that involves different members developing conflicting understandings of how the past undermines the organizational identity. Our model also reveals how leaders can restore members' beliefs in the organizational identity through "temporal synergizing," a sensegiving process that recombines conflicting interpretations of the past to support desired identity claims in the present and future. In contrast with prior research that has emphasized the need to construe a sense of identity continuity over time, we show how organizations can instead capitalize on perceived discontinuity in their past to reaffirm their identity. We discuss this and other contributions to research on organizational identity, focusing on its threads on sensemaking and rhetorical history. This includes exploring the important role that temporality and emotions play in organizational identity reconstruction.
We offer as our main theoretical contribution a conceptual framework for how the past is evoked in present identity reconstruction and the ways in which the past influences the articulation of claims ...for future identity. We introduce the notion of textual, material, and oral memory forms as the means by which organizational actors evoke the past. The conceptual framework is applied in a study of two occasions of identity reconstruction in the LEGO Group, which revealed differences in ways that the past was evoked and influenced claims for future identity. Our study suggests that (1) a longer time perspective in the use of memory enabled a longer time perspective in formulating claims for future identity, (2) a broader scope of articulated identity claims for the future was related to the combination of a broader range of memory forms, and (3) the depth of claims for future identity was related to the way in which memory forms were combined. At a more general level, our paper illustrates how viewing identity construction from the perspective of an ongoing present adds a new dimension to understanding the temporal dynamics of organizational identity.
This study extends the conceptualization of corporate identity (CI), and develops a valid and reliable scale for the concept via multistage research design. After detailed literature review, key ...elements of CI in practice are clarified using 20 semi-structured interviews with senior managers in leading UK companies, followed by an online survey among senior managers in the UK food and beverage sector. Five dimensions of CI are identified following two-step structural equation modelling: consistent image, top management behavioral leadership, employee identification, mission and values dissemination, and founder transformational leadership. The scale is examined for nomological validity with an outcome variable, namely corporate social responsibility. The contribution is novel, as for the first time CI is empirically validated as a second-order hierarchical construct. The resultant scale guides practitioners to specify priorities when developing CI, acts as a tool to assess the effectiveness of activities over time, and enables corrective action where needed.
Neural recordings, returns from radars and sonars, images in astronomy and single-molecule microscopy can be modeled as a linear superposition of a small number of scaled and delayed copies of a ...band-limited or diffraction-limited point spread function, which is either determined by the nature or designed by the users; in other words, we observe the convolution between a point spread function and a sparse spike signal with unknown amplitudes and delays. While it is of great interest to accurately resolve the spike signal from as few samples as possible, however, when the point spread function is not known a priori, this problem is terribly ill-posed. This paper proposes a convex optimization framework to simultaneously estimate the point spread function as well as the spike signal, by mildly constraining the point spread function to lie in a known low-dimensional subspace. By applying the lifting trick, we obtain an underdetermined linear system of an ensemble of signals with joint spectral sparsity, to which atomic norm minimization is applied. Under mild randomness assumptions of the low-dimensional subspace as well as a separation condition of the spike signal, we prove the proposed algorithm, dubbed as AtomicLift, is guaranteed to recover the spike signal up to a scaling factor as soon as the number of samples is large enough. The extension of AtomicLift to handle noisy measurements is also discussed. Numerical examples are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Considers the significance of corporate identity, internal corporate brand/identity images, and corporate brand identification for corporate brand orientation. Three propositions based on the above ...are formulated. By highlighting the importance of these concepts, scholars are more fully able to comprehend the importance and connectedness between the concepts. The same is true for senior managers who have responsibility for managing and nurturing meaningful corporate brand orientated organizations. They also need to be cognizant of these dimensions and regularly appraise them.
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.
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