Organizational identity construction as a control mechanism

Abstract

This study examines how identities become constructed and regulated during a strategic organizational change process. Planning and implementing a strategy is a social process, which consists of constructing, delivering, compelling, receiving, resisting and multiple contradicting meanings. The process includes multiple social factors influencing the strategy. The visions, notions, images, conceptions, assumptions and appreciation of members of an organization make the process dynamic and flexible. Thus, the strategy process is also always a matter of organizational change. By participating in the strategy process, the members produce meanings for the process and receive meanings produced somewhere else that shape their conceptions of the organization and of themselves. Another social process that takes place in organizations, and through which the meanings become negotiated, is identity formation. It is constructed in and around an organization, in its social and cultural interactions.