Things Fall Apart : Dynamics of British party identities under the decline of class politics

In times of institutional decline, organizations seek to reposition and differentiate their identities. This presents a challenge as such repositioning and differentiation requires systematic, i.e., substantial and sustained, investments on new identity elements under conditions of significant uncertainty brought about by the decline of an institution. The present study investigates how British political parties handled their identity repositioning and differentiation in the face of the decline of an institution of social class politics over the period from 1970 to 2015. Starting from the premise that institutional decline that unfolds over an extended period presents substantively different uncertainties to organizations, our findings show that (a) organizations work with systematic efforts to reposition their identity only in the latter stage of institutional decline, and (b), such organizational efforts, however, are unlikely to yield distinct identities in the absence of an institution to help coordinate organizational actions at the collective level. We draw implications for theories of identity change, institutional theory, and organizational competition.