How social enterprises manage their organizational identification: a theoretical framework of identity management approach through attraction,selection, and socialization

Abstract

Social enterprises, as a typical type of hybrid-identity organization, face identification tensions among members, arising from the divergent identities. Prior research has focused on how hybrid identities can be managed at the organizational level. However, the process through which identification emerges in hybrid-identity social enterprises remains relatively unexplored. This study addresses these gaps and aims to contribute to identity and identification theory. This research has taken a qualitative (case study) approach, with in-depth interviews and archival data from nine social enterprises in Taiwan. Our findings reveal three different types of responses to hybrid identities of social enterprises: synthesis, integration, and deletion. It is observed that different hybrid identities management and organizational identification management practices will lead to members’ identification and dis-identification. This research proposes an attraction-selection-socialization model, suggesting that, to foster identification, social enterprises need to manage their hybrid organizational identities and embed the new common identity into members’ daily work through attraction, selection, and socialization processes.     

All for one and one for all: A mechanism through which broad‐based employee stock ownership and employee‐perceived involvement practice create a productive workforce

Drawing on social identity theory, this research frames a multimediational model that delineates how broad‐based employee stock ownership (BESO) and employee‐perceived involvement practice in tandem yield a productive workforce at the organization level. In our theoretical model, we propose that social cohesion and voluntary turnover are collective attitudinal and behavioral outcomes resulting from the shared perception of we‐ness that employees experience through both participatory practices. Our path analysis of a multisource, time‐lagged dataset from 176 large U.S. companies revealed the sequential mediating roles of social cohesion and voluntary turnover between these organizational practices and labor productivity. Our theoretical claims and empirical evidence will contribute to a systematic understanding of how and why BESO and employee involvement leverage greater organizational productivity from employees.     

People,Actors, and the Humanizing of Institutional Theory

In much contemporary institutional scholarship, the term ‘actor’ is used as a shorthand for any entity imbued with agency. Talking about actors in institutions thus serves the necessity of allocating agency before returning to the analysis of institutional structures and processes. We find this approach to actorhood limiting, conceptually and normatively. Grounded in the perspective of pragmatist phenomenology, we assert the need for distinguishing between persons and actors, and the value of integrating the person into institutional analysis. We conceive of persons as humans with a reflective capacity and sense of self, who engage with multiple institutions through the performance of institutional roles. People may acquire actorhood by temporarily aligning their self with what is expected from a particular actor-role in an institutional order. Conversely, institutions enter people’s lifeworld as they are personified in people’s social performances. We outline this perspective and examine conceptual and normative implications that arise from the integration of human experience in institutional analysis.     

Whose Right to Jerusalem?

Jerusalem is a city mired in spatial conflict. Its contested spaces represent deep conflicts among groups that vary by national identity, religion, religiosity and gender. The omnipresent nature of these conflicts provides an opportunity to look at Henri Lefebvre's concept of the right to the city (RTC). The RTC has been adopted and celebrated as a political tool for positive change, enabling communities to take control of space. Based on extensive fieldwork and in‐depth interviews, this article explores the complexity of the RTC principles and examines three urban battlefields in Jerusalem — Bar‐Ilan Street, the Kotel and the Orient House. The RTC is a powerful idea, providing the opportunity to examine people's everyday activities within the context of how space can be used to support their lives. Yet Jerusalem's myriad divisions produce claims by different groups to different parts of the city. In Jerusalem, the RTC is not a clear vision but a kaleidoscope of rights that produces a fragmented landscape within a religious and ethno‐national context governed by the nation state — Israel. The growth of cultural and ethnic diversity in urban areas may limit the possibility for a unified RTC to emerge in an urban sea of demands framed by difference. Space‐based cultural conflict exemplifies urban divisions and exacerbates claims to ‘my Jerusalem’, not ‘our Jerusalem’. Identity‐based claims to the RTC appear to work against, not for, a universalistic RTC.     

STEM selves: Women’s identity projects and their assessment of future employers in technical fields

In this paper, we take an identity project perspective on careers to explore how job seekers assess potential employers. Identity projects are individuals’ self-definitions in the light of their career development and personal aspirations and have the potential to further our understanding of careers. Drawing on focus group discussions of women seeking employment in STEM, we find four identity positioning strategies through which the women assess future employers. Our analysis illustrates the role of organizational images for shaping and realizing individuals’ identity projects. We contribute to research on identity projects by extending the concept’s focus to include job seekers as external organizational stakeholders and provide insight into their identity positioning. Furthermore, our study enhances the understanding of organizational image in the context of employee recruitment by outlining how individuals position themselves in relation to the organizational images they construct when reflecting on their identity projects and on the institutional context. Overall, we develop a more nuanced approach to understanding women’s interpretations of organizational identity claims (e.g., gender diversity claims) and thus extend current theorizing on recruiting women to STEM.     

The Continuity–Change Duality in Narrative Texts of Organizational Identity*

abstract This paper focuses on how continuity and change are managed discursively in narrative texts of organizational identity and thus helps move forward the discussion about persistence and change in organizational identity. The study reports on the content, context and authorial elements of the evolving narrative composed by a Canadian bank's senior managers. The analysis indicates that the discursive strategies employed by organizational authors to establish confluence (or simultaneous continuity and change) include the selective reporting of elements from the past, present and future, the juxtaposition of the ‘modern and attractive’ with the ‘outdated and undesirable’, the persistent use of expansive labels that allow the addition and subtraction of meanings attached to the labels, and the importation of selected themes from the wider macro‐discourses. In keeping with the view that organizations are plurivocal, evolving narratives of the organization in the business press are also presented. These narratives contribute themes that are at times concordant with senior managers’ accounts and thus confirm the value of the changes in identity elaborated by management; at other times, press accounts are discordant with senior managers’ narratives and provide alternative evaluations of the changes. The paper concludes with reflections on the indeterminacy of both organizational identity – for the texts that constitute it remain open to multiple readings and to subsequent re‐writing that continually destabilize it – and the narrative research enterprise that falls short of providing comprehensive and incontrovertible accounts of the voices that constitute organizations.     

Mediating Identity: A Study of Media Influence on Organizational Identity Construction in a Celebrity Firm

This paper reports a longitudinal field study on the effects of positive media coverage on the reconstruction of organizational identity. The study highlights how intense positive coverage – to the point of turning an organization into a ‘celebrity’– influences both the way members understand their organization (sensemaking effect) and the gratification they derive from its positive representation (self‐enhancement effect). Our findings suggest that positive media representations foster members' alignment around an emergent new understanding of what their organization is. Over time, however, celebrity may ‘captivate’ members' organizational identity beliefs and understandings, and impede further identity work as media persist in the replication of representations that differ from members' experienced reality, but are too appealing to them to be publicly contradicted.     

Activists face bureaucrats: the failure of the Israeli social workers' campaign

The Israeli social workers' campaign of 2011 enjoyed widespread support, a groundswell of rank‐and‐file participation, and democratic representation through new organisations pushing for a protracted struggle, yet the collective agreement seemingly imposed by the Histadrut fell far short of expectations. This article explains this discrepancy by asserting that the new organisations' ‘radical’ organising approach threatened the labour federation's long history of social partnership and its main strategies for retaining its hegemony. Thus incompatibility between the social partnership approach and the more radical ‘organising’ approach may explain the failure of a collective campaign and shed light on cases where the union appears to be suppressing or neutralising the aspirations of the workers it claims to represent.     

身份模糊性情景下组织如何实现双元学习?

移动互联时代,组织身份模糊性成为企业发展面临的一个新挑战.通过观察一家传统书店成长为新型文化空间的过程,探索了企业如何在身份模糊性情形下达成双元学习,从而实现持续发展.组织面临的身份模糊性主要表现为身份矛盾性和身份空泛性.通过进一步的分析,发现身份模糊性情形下实现双元学习包含两条路径:①身份矛盾性情景下需要组织进行多重...     

‘And now I’m free’: Women’s empowerment and emancipation through entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia and Sweden

Critical perspectives have called for the study of women’s entrepreneurship as a route to social change. This ‘social turn’ claims women are empowered and/or emancipated through entrepreneurship with limited problematisation of how these interchangeably used concepts operate. Using an institutional perspective in combination with a narrative approach, we investigate women entrepreneurs’ life stories on their ‘road to freedom’ where entrepreneurial activity enables them to ‘break free’ from particular gendered constraints. Through juxtaposing women’s narratives in the contexts of Saudi Arabia and Sweden, the relationship between empowerment and emancipation is disentangled and (re)conceptualised. The findings distinguish between empowerment narrated as individual practices to achieve freedom for the self within institutional structures and emancipation as narrated as a wish to challenge and change structures of power and reach collative freedom. The yearning for collective emancipation propels women’s stories of entrepreneurship by raising expectations for entrepreneurship as a vehicle for institutional change. Such stories may fascinate and inspire others to engage in entrepreneurial endeavours to become empowered, but whether they reach emancipation remains an empirical question to be answered. The performative dimension of entrepreneurial narratives is, however, their ability to turn emancipation into an (un)reachable object of desire, with a quest for even more individual empowerment and entrepreneurial activity, at the same time excluding other forms of human conduct as conducive for change.     

Gravity's pull: The identity-related motives and outcomes of hiring stars

Strategic human capital scholarship, alongside a wealth of evidence from the popular press, suggests that star employees can influence an organization's socially constructed identity. However, an overarching conceptual framework that explains these shifts has yet to emerge. In this paper, we draw upon Hatch and Schultz's (2002) theory of identity change to discuss how organizational identity-change related motives – defined as decision makers' interest in spurring changes to socially constructed, internal perceptions of their organization's central and distinctive features – act in concert with considerations of value creation and capture to influence the hiring of different identity-aspirant stars (i.e., stars that embody a desired future organizational identity). Given that stars represent catalysts for identity change that have agency and become part of the social fabric of an organization, we then explain how the mechanisms by which stars' attempts to gain or retain status – coupled with organization members' willingness to emulate their behaviors – can affect internal-oriented organizational identity change. This paper advances consideration of social-psychological factors alongside economic views of stars and offers implications for the literatures on strategic human capital and organizational identity.     

How Offshore Professionals' Job Dissatisfaction Can Promote Further Offshoring: Organizational Outcomes of Job Crafting

This paper investigates the process that leads from job dissatisfaction to new business opportunities in organizations that offshore R&D activities to emerging countries. Specifically, we investigate a major source of job dissatisfaction for offshore professionals: the misalignment between the work that they perform and their professional identity. Our findings indicate that offshore professionals react against the perception of a threat to work‐identity integrity through individual and collective job crafting. A significant outcome of job crafting is the introduction of new markets, industries, and services, which in turn may change a professional's job design. The perceptions of the compatibility of organizational identity with professional identity and with new idea recognition on the one hand, and of distant and local social support on the other, act as intervening conditions in the process. We discuss theoretical contributions to the evolution of offshoring, job crafting, and the interplay between organizational and professional identity, together with managerial implications.     

Human resource management and organizational strategies in German- and US-owned companies

The development of the international economy over the past twenty years has bred considerable diversity in the form and substance of employment relations (labour-management relations, human resource management practices) throughout the world. Cases of ‘social partnership’ are today found in the ‘free market’ United States economy; some companies operating in Germany's ‘social’ market economy are rejecting traditional forms of social partnership in the name of more unilateral strategies.

This paper examines (a) the extent to which ‘strategic diversity’ – variation in human resource strategies and policies – is possible within the heavily institutionalized, co-operative and codeterminative German economy, and (b) how managers perceive the effects of different kinds of HR approaches on organizational change and industrial adjustment. It is based on empirical evidence drawn from seven large chemicals companies operating in Germany – three of them US-owned firms and four German-owned.

The main conclusions are that considerable strategic diversity is possible within the German context, and that managers perceive distinct costs and benefits to specific aspects of the typically American ‘unilateral’ style and the more German ‘negotiated’ approach to structuring the relationship with human resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these trade-offs for the transferability of HR strategies across international borders, giving special attention to policies to avoid some of these potential costs.     

Leader prototypicality moderates the relation between access to flexible work options and employee feelings of respect and leader endorsement

Organizations are increasingly offering flexible work arrangements (FWA), which are associated with a variety of individual and organizational outcomes. Supervisors may support, discourage or prohibit employees’ access to and use of such programs. These actions and decisions can affect employees’ feelings of being respected, and their endorsement of their supervisor – that is, matters that affect employees’ motivation to work in pursuit of group and organizational goals. In the present paper, we take a fresh look at these relationships by proposing, in line with the social identity approach, that they are moderated by leader in-group prototypicality (i.e. the supervisor’s representativeness of group identity). Results from two large sample surveys a year apart at one organization show that employees with supervisors who allow more FWA feel more respected as well as express stronger endorsement of their leaders. Importantly, both of those relationships are moderated by the degree of the supervisor’s in-group prototypicality, but in opposite ways. The association of FWA allowance with respect increases slightly under conditions of higher prototypicality. However, the association of FWA allowance with endorsement of leaders increases more strongly under conditions of lower prototypicality. The discussion considers theoretical, practical and research implications of these findings.     

Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants' clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.     

The Impact of Organizational and National Cultural Differences on Social Conflict and Knowledge Transfer in International Acquisitions

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the effects of organizational and national cultural differences on international acquisitions. We argue that cultural differences prompt social identity building that leads to ‘us versus them’ thinking and thereby creates the potential for social conflict. We also maintain that the same cultural differences can contribute to learning in terms of knowledge transfer. We develop a structural equation model to test these hypothesized effects on a sample of related international acquisitions. Our analysis shows that cultural differences at the organizational level are positively associated with social conflict, but that national cultural differences can decrease social conflict. Furthermore, both organizational and national cultural differences are positively associated with knowledge transfer. This analysis shows the importance of disentangling the various effects that cultural differences have on international acquisitions. It also suggests that national cultural differences are less of a problem in international acquisitions than is usually assumed.     

The Role of Place Identity in Smart Card Adoption

Public administrations are launching smart cards for citizens’ identification and access to local public services. Despite being focused on citizens’ demands, there is a lack of acceptance of such initiatives. This study explores the key drivers of citizen adoption of smart cards and reveals that, in addition to utilitarian benefits, social processes, such as citizens’ identification with the city, affect individual adoption. The effect of place identity is moderated by citizens’ level of interdependence. The discussion highlights place branding and the support of local collectives as strategic governmental instruments for achieving a critical mass of smart card users.     

Credibility lost: attempting to reclaim an expert identity in an HR professional context

Professional insecurity is a long‐standing concern within HR, with claims to expertise seen as critical to credibility. Considering HR as an epistemic community and drawing on the identity work literature, we examine an identity threat to, and subsequent response by, a training and development (T&D) team. Based on ethnographic exposure to their practice, we explore how team members experience the threat and follow their attempts to re‐establish their position in the local epistemic community, the HR department. We examine both individual and collective identity work, considering how both the identity threat and subsequent responses are embedded within T&D and HR practice more broadly. Through this analysis, we offer academic insight on the nature of HR practice and the construction of claims to expertise.     

Sustainable Entrepreneurship and B Corps

Sustainable entrepreneurship contributes to solving social and environmental problems through the means of successful for‐profit businesses. This paper contributes to understanding how sustainable entrepreneurship is implemented by exploring an emerging new form of business, ‘B Corps’, that employs market tactics to address social and environmental issues. Through interviewing 14 B Corps, the exploratory research study found that B Corps treat profit as a means to achieve positive societal ends, they regard the B Corp model as a tool for change, the B Corp model provides a common collective identity for internal and external validation, they are focused on societal impact rather than maximizing profits and they attempt to legitimate this form of sustainable entrepreneurship by influencing the business community and government officials. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent,Earned, and Remediated Dignity

Extant research on dignity at work has revealed conditions that contribute to indignity, employees’ responses to dignity threats, and ways in which employees’ inherent dignity is undermined. But while dignity – and specifically indignity – is theorized as a phenomenon subjectively experienced and judged by individuals, little research has privileged workers’ own perspectives. In this study, working adults reveal how they personally experience and understand meanings of dignity at work. I describe three core components of workplace dignity and the communicative exchanges through which dignity desires commonly are affirmed or denied: inherent dignity as recognized by respectful interaction, earned dignity as recognized by messages of competence and contribution, and remediated dignity as recognized by social interactions and organizational practices that conceal the instrumental and unequal nature of work. Based on theoretical insights drawn from examining the relationships between these components, I argue that workplace dignity is a phenomenon theoretically distinct from human dignity.