Philosophy of Organization and Identity

Situating Identity and Organization Historically and Culturally

If contemporary notions of individualized identity arose in the European Renaissance and became fully manifest after the European Enlightenment, then the idea of organizations having identities grew up with the institutionalization of the corporate voice from the appearance of public relations in the 1880s through the emergence of postproduct advertising in the 1920s and then with marketing just after World War II. Business, governmental agencies, and later nonprofits gradually came to concern themselves with things such as public image, reputation, and even personification. For this reason, corporate paternalism took on a strong symbolic dimension from the late 1880s through World War II, as many corporations in the United States and Western Europe portrayed themselves as caretakers of the public trust and even as “part of your family.”

The idea of organizations speaking was not new because we can hark back to the embodiment of organizations and institutions in royalty, clergy, lords, and their various representatives. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 accorded a similar status to what is now taken for granted to be a central institution of modern society, the state. Along with according the state rights and responsibilities, a line of legal reasoning from that point to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 also implicitly granted the state voice, which can then be embodied or strategically mystified for purposes of the preservation of power. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1886 that created “juristic persons” turned out to be momentous. The personhood granted to corporations at that time has been expanded to include rights of due process and rights of free speech, among others. In this way, the identity of an organization is simply assumed in formal as well as informal practices, without any searching examination of the root metaphors of person or even that of the organism.

...