Organizational Identity

Conceptual Overview

The term identity, while it has long attracted the attention of theorists across the social sciences, has, from the mid-1980s, found itself increasingly attractive to scholars of organization and management. The idea that notions of identity can bridge traditionally distinct levels of analysis—individual, group, organizational, and societal—and foster constructive conversations between disciplines as distinct as psychology, sociology, and anthropology has propelled it to prominence. It has also been argued that, in a complementary way, the management of multiple identities has become a key practical issue for managers.

Most accounts of the origins of contemporary views on OI begin with Stuart Albert and David Whetten's seminal article “Organizational Identity,” published in 1985. In this work, Albert and Whetten argued that an adequate statement of an organization's identity expressed a series of claims regarding what was central, distinctive, and temporally continuous about it. Building on this foundation, a range of theorists have developed what have been referred to as functionalist, interpretive, psychodynamic, and postmodern versions of the OI concept. In broad terms, functionalist accounts tend to suggest that the identities of organizations are constituted by objective, often tangible features, such as corporate logos, brand management programs, and strategic reports. Interpretive notions of OI emphasize that the identities of organizations consist of their members' understandings of who they are collectively and what their organization stands for. Psychodynamic accounts of OI theorize organizations' identities as the outcomes of collective psychic processes such as denial, rationalization, idealization, symbolization, and fantasy, which maintain and enhance collective self-esteem. Postmodern versions of OI tend to suggest that organizations do not have identities per se, that identities are instead linguistic constructs, and as such are multiple, contested, and in a constant state of flux.

A number of different frameworks are available for making sense of the large and differentiated literature on OI. Albert has argued that the term OI might be construed as a construct, a question, or a metaphor, and each of these options has been pursued by scholars. Whetten has distinguished two broad conceptions of OI. First, there are scholars interested in identity in organizations, who suggest that OI is a collection of [Page 1078]shared beliefs held by participants about their organization. Second, there are theorists of the identities of organizations, who depict organizations as social actors, much as if the collectivity were a single individual, and represent OI as a set of categorical identity claims made by founders and subsequent leaders. Some of these conceptions of OI—as construct, question, metaphor, shared attribute, and set of categorical claims—may be complementary. For example, it is possible to define OI as the answer, in the form of a set of shared, organizationally relevant beliefs, to the question, who are we collectively? The upshot of this complexity is a vibrant if far from straightforward set of debates regarding the nature of OI that mirrors the arguments concerning the nature of OC in the 1980s and 1990s.

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