The concept
Some economists view an organization, specifically the firm, as a nexus of contracts among individuals (e.g. Jensen and Meckling, 1976). This usefully draws attention to the economic interests of organizational members, and to the fact that these interests may conflict both among themselves and with those of the employer. Nevertheless, it is an inadequate perspective because it adopts an atomistic view of organizations, ignoring how they are socially constituted. Organizations are in fact complex systems of inter-group relations and networks. Some groups are employed within the organizational core; others contribute to value chains through outsourcing, sub-contracting, and various forms of partnership within a wider organizational network. The behavior and performance of these groups is not just defined in economic terms, but is also subject to logics of action that arise from what groups stand for in the eyes of the people who belong to them.
A sense of belonging to a group is reinforced when it possesses characteristics which are compatible with a person’s own individual identity (Strauss, 1959). Indeed, such characteristics may contribute to the forming of that identity. They simultaneously make for uniformity within that group and for distinctiveness from other groups. Groups differ from one another in terms of values, experiences, and behaviors. The dynamics of social relations and the subtleties embedded in inter-personal interactions can encourage and reinforce the sense of belonging to a group.
Individual identity is related to the way that people conceive of themselves. Psychologists generally associate identity with those stable and enduring cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics that are part of a person’s biography and career (Weigert et al., 1986; Dubar, 1992). Identity is primarily informational and selective in the sense that it takes from the environment those sources of information considered useful or functional to the individual’s self-concept (Tajfel, 1982; Turner et al., 1987). This self-concept is sustained importantly by what people value as their capabilities, including the competencies and knowledge they possess.
Various types of sources can inform the self: the activities individuals develop, the roles they perform in different contexts, and the groups they interact with. In order to inform their identity, people draw meaning from sources to which they attach an emotional and particular value—‘the significant others’, whether they be a person, a group, or an espoused value system (Foote, 1951). The notion of social identity builds upon this foundation by postulating that, while identity is an essentially subjective phenomenon, it normally has highly significant social referents. In other words, an individual’s definition of the self is based (at least in part) on the group or other social categories to which he or she perceives they belong (Tajfel, 1982). Social identity is mostly relational and environmental in the sense that self-perception changes through the interaction of individuals with other people and with their environments. Goffman’s (1959) concept of the ‘performed self’ suggests that an individual’s identity can change in the course of social interaction. People interpret and enact their social identities in response to the situations in which they find themselves (Weick, 2001).
Students of organization have become increasingly aware of the relevance of identity for the expectations and behavior of organizational members (Hatch and Schultz, 2004). According to Ravasi and Schultz (2006: 435), ‘identities reside in shared interpretive schemes that [organizational] members collectively construct in order to provide meaning to their experience.’ Albert, Ashforth, and Dutton (2000: 13) comment that ‘identity and identification . . . are root constructs in organizational phenomena and have been a subtext of many organizational behaviors.’ The significance of social identity for organizational behavior in general, and for the process of organizational learning in particular, lies in the way that identification with a particular social group can be a referent for people to surface certain cognitive assumptions about themselves in relation to others. These assumptions, and the sense that people make of situations, influence the extent to which they are prepared to relate positively with those others including sharing their tacit or specialized knowledge. Social identity thus impinges on the ‘semantic learning’ that Corley and Gioia (2003) discuss in the previous edition of this Handbook. The enactment of social identity, and the potential barriers to collective learning that this introduces, is likely to take place primarily under certain conditions, especially those that are interpreted as posing a threat to the people concerned and/or when dependence on their membership group is perceived to be high (Weick, 1988; Salk and Shenkar, 2001). Moreover, as Corley and Gioia (2003) argue, the identity people attach to an organization can be quite fluid and subject to change as they reinterpret what it means to be ‘us’ as an organization.
The main challenge to organizational managements stems from the likelihood that individuals may be more inclined to identify with particular groups than with the organization itself (Martin, 1992). Identities can develop around a functional role, professional membership, gender, nationality, or a particular hierarchical status in an organization (Weigert et al., 1986; Ashforth and Mael, 1989). Occupational and national identities are of particular significance. Professionals, technical people, and other specialists may identify more with their occupational peer group or external reference groups than with their employing organizations. Functional specialists who work across the interface between the organization and the environment like sales personnel or purchasing officers tend to identify strongly with clients and partners (Alvesson, 2000). Similarly, it is quite possible that the members of ethnic or national groups working within a multinational corporation (MNC) or an international strategic alliance (ISA) will identify more closely with their fellow nationals, even those outside the organization, than with groups of different origin (Royce, 1982). Since people can belong to more than one group, it is possible for them to have multiple social identities, just as the pluralistic nature of organizations means that they will contain multiple social identities (Pratt and Foreman, 2000).
Occupationally-based identity
It is widely agreed that the strongest occupationally-based identity is to be found among members of the recognized professions. Many professionals work in units where they regulate or partially regulate their own work and careers—in private practice, professional firms, or public service organizations. This applies to most doctors, lawyers, and scientists, as well as to some accountants and engineers. However, many engineers and scientists are also employed within managerially-led organizations such as business firms, where they play a vital role in one of the most important fields of learning, namely product and process innovation. Other less professionally-recognized functional specialists such as HRM, IT, and marketing personnel are often heavily involved in organizational learning and change projects within firms.
Alvesson notes (2000: 1109) that people who see themselves primarily as professionals, albeit broadly defined, are likely to have weaker ties to an employing company and may as a result be more disloyal to that employer. Evidence suggests, however, that this does not necessarily mean that there will be a conflict between occupational and organizational commitments. Professionals who remain with non-professional organizations appear willing to accommodate their value orientations and professional self-perception to managerial expectations (Child, 1982). A significant factor here is whether non-professional organizations can satisfy the aspirations that professionals have for career advancement (Wallace, 1995).
Nationality-based identity
Nationality and ethnicity are two other bases for social identity that play an important role in contemporary organizations. Considerable attention has been paid to the cultural features that map onto different nationalities and their implications for behavior within organizations (Hofstede, 1991; Trompenaars, 1993). Nationality and ethnic group membership are strong life-long social points of reference for personal identity, and it is this identity that motivates adherence to the cultural values and behaviors associated with them (Weigert et al., 1986; Bloom, 1990; Sarup, 1996). As organizations increase their global reach, either through organic expansion or through mergers, acquisitions, and alliances, so their need to find a basis for people of different cultures to work together increases correspondingly. Given the intensity of global competition and the rapid rate of environmental change, much of this cross-cultural work will be directed towards the goals of innovation and learning.
A particular aspect of globalization concerns the international transfer of knowledge. When MNCs acquire local companies, they usually intend to transfer knowledge in the form of standard practices which are embedded in their domestic cultural contexts or that have been successful elsewhere. These practices extend beyond purely technical matters to involve particular ways of relating to people, authority, space, and time. These are sensitive issues because they impinge upon factors associated with social identity in the local context. What multinational managers understand as ‘best practice’ may be viewed by local staff as inappropriate or even illegitimate in their social and political context (Markóczy and Child, 1995). Differences associated with national cultures have been found to hinder knowledge transfer both between and within organizations (Lyles and Salk, 1996; Hong, Snell, and Easterby-Smith, 2006). Hence, the argument that a transfer of practices across national cultural boundaries requires their adaptation to local norms, or ‘recontextualization’ (Brannen et al., 1997). For this reason, corporate practices in areas like product promotion and personnel selection are not necessarily adopted by subsidiaries without modification. When imported practices are sensitive to local cultural norms, it may be necessary to de-construct and re-construct those practices in order to prevent social identity conflict.
Organizational identity
When corporate strategies affront meaningful values for identity, or go against already embedded values, role performance is subject to a struggle between a subjective and an objective identity (Berger et al., 1973). People can show how they reject these changes by cognitively distancing themselves and withdrawing commitment from these roles or from the organization (Burke, 1980; Weigert et al., 1986; Snow and Anderson, 1987). The multiple attachments that people have to roles, institutions, and situations inside and outside the place of work may vary in intensity and in the degree to which they overlap. This allows space for accommodation of identity; by negotiating their involvement, people may be committed to their work and/or to colleagues in different groups, without necessarily being committed to the organization.
Faced with a plurality of group identities, managements endeavor to develop organizational identities that offer a basis for enhancing identification with, and loyalty to, the organization and accord with their definition of its goals (Alvesson, 2000). A classic definition of organizational identity is what is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization’s character (Albert and Whetten, 1985). This definition, however, presents two problems in relation to the analysis of organizational learning. First, the assumption that organizational identity is enduring is inconsistent with the need for contemporary organizations to adapt to rapid and substantial external changes, some of which may require a fundamental redefinition of their strategic missions. In the extreme case, when adaptation is accomplished through merger and acquisition, an organization’s previous identity may be destroyed. Adaptation places a premium on the capacity of organizations to learn, including learning to develop a new or modified organizational identity. Second, and most germane to the theme of this chapter, there is the danger that a unitary conception of organizational identity overlooks the other social memberships that provide identities for people within an organization and the implications these alternative identities have for the process of learning.
Corporate cultures are designed to enhance organizational identity, and identification with it, by creating a notion of a common enterprise, a sense of belonging, and a shared understanding (Brown, 1995). Most knowledge creation and organizational learning requires the members of different groups to collaborate and also to commit to the organizational goals that inform the investment in learning. The task of those who manage organizational learning is therefore to reconcile group social identities with a wider organizational identity. This can pose a significant challenge. The relations between groups in organizations often involve competition for power, status, and reward (Hogg and Abrams, 1988). Moreover, the collective identity and sense of common interest among group members are not necessarily aligned to a given employer or network partner. As we have noted, professional and national groups may identify more strongly with their peers outside the organization in which they are employed or to which they are contracted. Organizations can therefore become domains of contest between group identities and the meanings attached to them (Pratt and Foreman, 2000; Brown and Humphreys, 2006). Insofar as group identities are associated with perceived interests, they are far from neutral within the ambit of organizational politics (Rodrigues and Child, 2008). In turn, this can present a formidable challenge to securing the openness of communication and trust between different organizational groups that most commentators would see as essential conditions for effective organizational learning.