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The purpose of this paper is to conceptually develop and empirically test a model according to which a crisis leads to a greater reputational damage when it is highly relevant to the firm’s organizational identity or highly relevant to stakeholders’ identity.

A total of 299 participants based in the USA were recruited online using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. The study uses a 2 (relevance of crisis to organizational identity: low vs high) × 2 (relevance of crisis to stakeholders’ identity: low vs high) between-subjects experimental design.

The results confirm the hypotheses that an organizational crisis leads to greater reputational damage when it is highly relevant to the firm’s organizational identity or when it is highly relevant to stakeholders’ identity. No significant interaction between the two variables was found.

Future research could focus on further elaborating on how the two identity-related variables tested in this paper interact with other variables that have already been studied for moderating the effects of crises on reputation damage.

The paper reaffirms the deep interconnection between identity, stakeholders and reputation. Concretely, the results of the study suggest an informative way of mapping the degree to which risks or issues could potentially damage organizational reputation.

The paper contributes to the literature by providing a more situational understanding of how the same exact crisis can damage the reputation of organizations differently. By doing so, the paper opens several new avenues for future research.

This paper aims to examine the main and the interaction effect of follower’s professional identity and leader’s use of charismatic leadership tactics (CLTs) on follower performance and work engagement during a crisis.

The authors performed a 2 × 2 between subjects experiment in which both professional identity and CLTs were manipulated for a group of 320 participants.

Professional identity has a main positive effect on followers’ performance and work engagement and works as a neutralizer (counter-effect) moderator in the relationship between CLTs and work engagement during a crisis.

Participants in the experiments were final-year engineering students and the authors manipulated only two dimensions of crisis, i.e. time urgency and high priority.

Organizations can strive to select for and develop professional identity amongst their members to survive crisis like situations rather than rely only on charismatic leaders.

This is the first study to incorporate crisis for examining a neutralizer for CLTs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for predicting the role and effects of perceived organizational identity (POI) on organizational members' perceptions and behaviors during crisis and change situations, and the scope of the resulting POI changes that may occur.

The paper brings together research on crisis, change, threat/opportunity, and POI, along with case study data to create a threat/opportunity framework for making these predictions.

Based on whether threat or opportunity is perceived during crisis and change situations, different aspects of individuals' POIs will become salient. In threat situations, individuals will focus on perceptions of “who we are.” In opportunity situations, individuals will also focus on “who we could be.” The focus of attention and the threat/opportunity context will influence organizational identification, learning, and openness to change; and whether incremental or transformational POI change occurs. The perception of “who we could be” will motivate more change than the ideal organizational identity or the image of “who we want to be” that is typically studied in the literature. The scope of POI change is also dependent on perceptions of identity cost and the identity gap.

Future research can test the hypotheses suggested here in various crisis and change contexts. Also, differentiating between threat and opportunity contexts is important for understanding the role of POI, and the extent to which POI changes can occur in crisis and change situations. Studies of resistance to POI change could consider whether individuals perceived the identity cost and the identity gap as being too low. More research on POI in opportunity contexts could expand understanding of the POI image of “who we could be” in motivating POI change. Finally, further integration of the literature on crisis and change can benefit both fields.

Practitioners can predict which aspects of POI will become salient in threat and opportunity conditions, and manage their different effects. For individuals to learn and change their POIs during crisis and change situations, managers need to diminish heightened perceptions of threat and shift the focus of attention to “who we could be.” Top managers' claims of “who we could be” need to be perceived by organizational members as being desirable and attainable in order to be motivating. Finally, to create transformational POI change, executives need to highlight the identity cost of not changing, and the size of the identity gap.

The threat/opportunity framework enables new predictions of the role and effects of POI in crisis and change situations. The paper highlights the POI image of “who we could be,” defines incremental and transformational POI change, redefines the identity gap concept, and introduces the notion of identity cost to provide a framework for predicting the scope of POI change that has received limited research attention. Finally, the paper contributes to research on POI in opportunity‐oriented conditions, and integrates research on crisis and change.

Drawing on Weick’s sensemaking perspective, this study aims to describe how Czech social entrepreneurs shape the shared meaning of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and what approaches to the crisis the sensemaking process leads to.

This study is based on the principles of grounded theory. Through in-depth interviews with 25 social entrepreneurs, it captures the entrepreneurs’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of their understanding of social enterprise identity. Interviews with experts in the field of social entrepreneurship were also conducted to help achieve a deeper analysis of the entrepreneurial cases.

Results of research show that despite the obstacles, most social entrepreneurs arrive at a positive redescription of the crisis. Enterprises not affected by the pandemic adopt a conventional approach. The most vulnerable enterprises are paralyzed and wait with uncertainty for future developments in their enterprise’s situation.

As knowledge of vulnerabilities is a key prerequisite for crisis prevention, this research can serve as a useful material for business incubators and other institutions that provide mentoring and expertise to start-up social entrepreneurs including focus on crisis management implementation.

This study complements the theory of crisis sensemaking with the level of social entrepreneurship, which is characterized by a dichotomy of social and business goals that results in a specific shared meaning of identity which is tied to perceptions of vulnerabilities. This study describes the influence of perceived identity on coping with a crisis.

Migration has a strong political significance and a crucial constitutive role for identity. The liminal status and exclusion of migrants delimits the inside/outside of political communities and allows for the constitution and coherence of identity. Migration is also a challenge: while it is often presented as a managerial issue related to states’ economic and labour considerations, it essentially challenges and undermines their national and cultural self-image. Migration management also reflects the values and qualities communities identify in themselves; thus immigration policies put communities and states to the test for the way such values are upheld. This contribution explores migration’s constitutive role for European identity and the challenges it presents it with. Explaining the securitisation of migration management in Europe and its racial and dehumanising characteristics, it argues that the two-tier human rights system created in the European space affecting migrants undermines European identity value claims and threatens to undo them. It claims that the time has come to acknowledge European identity’s historical constitution in colonialism, and to envisage it as a fluid, open-ended project accommodating in earnest racial and cultural diversity, pluralism and difference.

The themes of crisis and identity have been discussed endlessly in relation to European unification since 1950, but generally not in their interrelation. After looking briefly at the literature on the notion that integration has often proceeded through crises, and on the relation between European and national and regional identities, the author examines some real or perceived crises and suggests how they may have impacted the issue of identity. These crises include that of the immediate post-war years, the slow emergence of serious reflection on the Holocaust, the imposition of communist rule across half of Europe and the Cold War, the crises of decolonisation and the persistence of European racism, European divisions in relation to crises in the Middle East, Europe’s (non-)response to environmental crisis, the crises of the 1968 years, the crises of post-communist transition and the Yugoslav wars, the Eurozone and refugee crises, the Brexit crisis and finally the current coronavirus crisis. These persistent and often recurring crises (Dauerkrisen) have confronted European political elites with what have been called crises of crisis management, and European populations with different ways of conceptualising their relation to Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the link between identity and crisis deriving by natural disasters, exploring the function of the shared identity linking individuals, groups, organizations and its external networks. The shared identity is not static. It is a dynamic self-reflexive learning process and is reciprocal. The object of the research is a medium-sized multi-utility company, which experienced the 2012 earthquakes, and how responsibly and rapidly it responded and recovered in collaboration with its stakeholders in the local territory.

Semi-structured interviews were directed to both managers and to selected representatives of the “vertical external networks” of the company (local authorities, a consumer association and a trade association). The primary data were supplemented by archived materials for data triangulation.

The research highlights the importance of identity and relationship with local stakeholders and communities when facing the earthquakes. Believing themselves to be socially responsible, ethical and capable, employees were highly motivated and collaborative. Resuming normal services was AIMAG’s priority. The behavior of AIMAG, its employees and its local stakeholders were guided by a shared community identity. After the earthquakes, this shared community identity was strengthened, thus improving the community’s resilience.

The paper highlights the role of identity in linking both inside and outside an organization, in contributing greatly to joint decision making and action, and, finally, in increasing the awareness of the company leaders and staff regarding the importance of their actions for the whole local community. This research advocates the role of identity in disaster risk reduction.

This paper aims to explore how accountants manage the processes of identity (re)construction after identity crisis, resulting from increasing pressures and regulatory requirements, considering both introspective and the extrospective issues.

The study drew on an integrated framework drawing on Luigi Pirandello’s views about identity crises and the search for individual coherence and possible representation strategies. It used an ethnographic approach based on photo-elicitation, conversations and documentary sources to explore the identity reconstruction processes of Italian Commercialisti.

Several conditions caused an identity crisis among Commercialisti, including regulatory requirements, public administration demands and increasing power of IT providers. Commercialisti reacted to these circumstances by re-constructing their image through strategies designed to impress both themselves and others.

The paper has implications for the accounting profession in general and in Italy, suggesting that further pressure may result in rapid change efforts among accountants. It provides a broader and more systematic understanding of the threats to the role of accountants and suggests how they can manage complexity to create new opportunities. It also encourages accountants to focus on alternative roles as a possible new strategy that few have tried.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the understanding of identity crisis issues and related representation strategies in the accounting profession. Unlike past contributions, it made a full assessment of both the dynamics of an identity crisis and the micro-level responses to it, in a new, non-Anglo-Saxon context.

When a crisis strikes, responders need to make sense of it to gain an understanding of its origins, nature and implications. In this way, crisis sensemaking guides the implementation of the response. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the sensemaking questions that responders need to address for achieving effective and efficient crisis management.

Data are drawn from six exercises, in which teams of professionals from different crisis organizations were confronted with two terrorist attacks. Just like in real incidents, these professionals convened in tactical response teams and formulated their response collectively.

The exercises demonstrate that crisis responders do not just have to make sense of the crisis, but also of their own roles and actions. They raise and address three sensemaking questions: What is happening in this crisis? (i.e. situational sensemaking), Who am I in this crisis? (i.e. identity-oriented sensemaking) and How does it matter what I do? (i.e. action-oriented sensemaking).

Crisis preparation tends to focus on plans and systems that accelerate or improve the construction of a situational understanding, while this study suggests the need of more preparatory attention for crisis responders’ roles and actions.

The research extends crisis sensemaking literature beyond the restricted focus on the incident itself by showing that responders are also trying to grasp their own role and how their actions matter when they are engaged in crisis response.

The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.