IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhb/lufewp/2006_003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Construction of Organizational Identity. Comparative Case Studies of Consulting Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Alvesson, Mats

    (Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University)

  • Empson, Laura

    (Saïd Business School)

Abstract

Despite the great interest in organizational identity, empirical studies are relatively rare. As yet, there have been no major comparative case studies of this phenomenon. Single case studies have yielded in-depth understanding of the process of identity construction in specific organizations, but very little is known about how organizational identity is constructed more generally. This paper explores how organizational identity is constructed in four very different firms within the consulting industry. The study suggests four broad dimensions that organizational members refer to in constructing their organizational identity: knowledge work, management and membership, personal orientation, and external interface. We identify multiple themes within these broad dimensions of identity construction and highlight several broader identity-related issues, specifically: the extent to which shared ideas of a distinct organizational identity are present or absent in organizations, the relationship between organizational identity and the individual, and the balance of reality and fantasy in identity construction.

Suggested Citation

  • Alvesson, Mats & Empson, Laura, 2006. "The Construction of Organizational Identity. Comparative Case Studies of Consulting Firms," Working Paper Series 2006/3, Lund University, Institute of Economic Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:hhb:lufewp:2006_003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lri.lu.se/pdf/wp/2006-3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Organizational identity; Consulting; Professional service firms;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhb:lufewp:2006_003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Elsbeth Andersson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ielunse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.