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The purpose of this paper is to explore and incorporate personal narratives as a new methodological tool into the qualitative research of complex organisational issues such as identity. Particularly, this study provides a fresh methodological perspective on organisational identity exploration by using personal narratives to examine multiple identities that occur in dynamic organisational contexts.

In order to examine multiple identities, personal narratives found in the 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews collected were analysed. These narratives were examined following a textual and performative analysis.

The paper furthers methodological discussions in organisations in three ways. First, it responds to the need for a methodological approach that allows multiple identity exploration in organisations while it presents personal narratives as a valuable methodological perspective within organisational research. Second, it extends the methodological use of personal narratives for the in-depth qualitative study of complex organisational issues such as identity. Finally, the study stretches the boundaries of mainstream organisational research by illustrating that personal narratives can be used as a methodological approach to explore organisational identities.

This research integrates personal narratives as a methodological tool into the qualitative research of dynamic organisational issues. Employing personal narratives has allowed the exploration of multiple identities that take place in organisations in a manner not previously achieved in organisational studies. The study, therefore, challenges previous organisational research and expands the boundaries of organisational identity studies, offering a new qualitative methodological account for identity exploration in organisations.

This study aims at a better understanding of parents’ identity work when their parenting skills are questioned, in an organizational setting. The parents in this study were assessed as at risk of unsatisfactory parental functioning because of problems related to drugs, mental health and/or psychosocial functioning, and they were observed and offered guidance at an extended health centre in Norway. The study explores how individual self-presentations are interwoven with and dependent on organizational narratives of identity.

Based on an analysis of 16 qualitative interviews, three exemplary cases are analyzed in detail. Narrative identity and professional gaze constitute the theoretical framework.

Parents and service providers negotiate which organizational narratives of identity are available, and the narratives are integrated in parents’ self-presentations in different ways. The most common strategy is to accept the organizational narratives offered, but they are also transformed and rejected. The experience of being seen by an empathic professional gaze contributes to the creation of an acceptable self-narrative.

Tending to parents’ identity needs should be an integral part of services provided. If parents are to cooperate with state services and engage in interventions, their needs for preserving an acceptable and coherent self-narrative must be considered.

This paper adds to the understanding of how identity work is a central feature of service provision. It also adds to the literature on relationships between identity narratives at different levels of society.

Virtual organizations present numerous challenges for managers, especially in regards to organizational identity formation. This paper aims to address this gap in the extant literature by exploring how organizational narratives can foster identification with the virtual organization. Moreover, information technology can further catalyze the positive effects of narratives on identity formation.

Qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 18 members of a nonprofit, virtual organization – DiverseCS – were collected. Participants were asked about their roles in the organization, challenges and collaborative efforts. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyze the data.

Efforts to instill a sense of identity and community through the adoption of information technology was met with resistance. Rather, senior leaders encouraged and institutionalized the creation of organizational narratives. Novel use of information technology – social media and hyperlinks – became a means to amplify the positive effects of narrative creation and sharing by organizational members.

This study investigates how some members of a virtual organization use information technology in novel ways to further spread organizational narratives to other organizational members and also to external collaboration partners. This research contributes to the extant literature on virtual organizational identity and also proposes a research agenda.

This study offers a critical inquiry into accountability vis-à-vis organizational identity formation. It investigates how accountability evolves in the transformation of an NGO operating in the field of migration management from an informal grassroots group into a fully-fledged organization.

The paper is the outcome of a participatory action research project on Welcome Refugees (WR), a UK-based NGO. The project involved documentary analysis, focus group and semi-structured interviews, field notes, and participant observation. The analysis draws from poststructuralist theorization to explain the interplay between organizational identity and different forms of NGO accountability over time.

The study shows how different forms of accountability became salient over time and were experienced differently by organizational members, thus leading to competing collective identity narratives. Organizational members felt accountable to beneficiaries in different ways, and this was reflected in their identification with the organization. Some advocated a rights-based approach that partially resonated with the accountability demands of external donors, while others aimed at enacting their feelings of accountability by preserving their closeness with beneficiaries and using a need-based approach. These differences led to an identity struggle that was ultimately solved through the silencing of marginalized narratives and the adoption of an adaptive regime of accountability.

The findings of the case are of practical relevance to quasi-organizations that struggle to form and maintain organizational identity in their first years of operation. Their survival depends not only on their ability to accommodate and/or resist a multiplicity of accountability demands but also on their ability to develop a shared and common understanding of identity accountability.

The paper problematizes rather than takes for granted the process through which organizations acquire a viable identity and the role of accountability within them.

Seeking an answer to the question “how does organizational identity change?” we analyze the visual identity marker of universities, namely logos, as time-related artifacts embodying visual scripts. Engaging with the Stinchcombe hypothesis, we identify five processes to the creation of visual identities of organizations: In addition to (1) imprinting (enactment of the contemporary script) and (2) imprinting-cum-inertia (persistent enactment of epochal scripts), we also identify (3) renewal (enactment of an up-to-date epochal script), (4) historization (enactment of a recovered older epochal script), and (5) multiplicity (simultaneous enactment of multiple epochal scripts). We argue that these processes work together to produce contemporary heterogeneity of visualized identity narratives of universities. We illustrate this, first, with a survey of the current-day logos of 814 university emblems in 20 countries from across the world. Second, drawing on archival and interview materials, we analyze the histories of exemplar university logos to illustrate the various time-related processes. Therefore, by interjecting history – as both time and process – into the analysis of the visualization of organizational identity, we both join with the phenomenological and semiotic analysis of visual material as well as demonstrate that history is not merely a fixed factor echoing imprinting and inertia but rather also includes several forms of engagement with temporality that are less deterministic. Overall, we argue that enactment engages with perceptions of time (imaginations of the past, present, and future) and with perceptions fixed by time (epochal imprinting and inertia) to produce heterogeneity in the visualization of organizational identity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how legacy organizational identity and death relate to each other and, thereby, contribute to closing the gap in knowledge on organizational identity constructions in times of death.

The paper opted for an exploratory study relying on primary data from in-depth narrative interviews with 20 organizational members of a bank that went bankrupt. The primary data, as well as documents like websites, newspapers, magazines, booklets, minutes, and reports, were complemented by secondary interviews with other members of the financial industry.

The paper finds that members of a dead organization construct a bankruptcy narrative that is also a legacy organizational identity narrative including a legacy organizational identity transformation and several identities that have positive and negative aspects and are conflicting but integrated into a coherent narrative. Furthermore, the paper provides empirical insights on how members of a dead organization draw upon their legacy organizational identity to justify their (lack of) past interpretations and responses to an unfolding bankruptcy. Finally, it provides empirical evidence on ways that legacy organizational identity from a dead organization play a substantial role in a living organization.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability.

The paper holds insight that can help practitioners understand members of a dying organization – including the ways they come to form and perform in a new organizational context; an understanding that is a prerequisite for helping and supporting these members in coming to perform satisfyingly in the new organization.

This paper addresses an apparent gap in the literature on identity and death; exploring identity narratives in a bankrupted bank, the paper considers constructions of legacy organizational identities in times of disruptive death.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of organizational identity through an analysis of shared identity narratives at the UK‐based specialist tour operator Laskarina Holidays.

Predicated on a view of organizations as linguistic constructs, it is argued that individual and collective identities are narrative accomplishments, and that organizations tend often to be characterised by identity multiplicity.

A case study is presented featuring three distinctive but interwoven collective identity narratives (which are labelled “utilitarian”, “normative” and “hedonic”), and these are contrasted with some “dissonant” voices. It is argued that change in organizations is, at least in part, constituted by alterations in people's understandings, encoded in narratives, and shared in conversations.

The research contribution that this paper makes is twofold. First, it makes an argument for theorizing organizational identities as narratives, constituted within discursive regimes, and continuously changing as they are created and re‐created by all participants. Second, it suggests that the narratological approach to theorizing and researching organizational identities is important because it both assists one's efforts to analyze identities as the outcomes of processes of hegemonic imposition and resistance, and allows one to read polysemy back into ethnographic research.

Situated in scholarship on narrative and antenarrative, the purpose of this paper is to develop central assumptions of an (ante)narrative approach to collective identity research and to reflexively address the methodological questions such an approach raises for producing and analysing (ante)stories. (Ante)stories include proper stories with chronology and plot as well as antestories which are fragmented and incomplete.

Based on a concrete research project exploring collective identity as narratively constructed in negotiation between organizational insiders and outsiders, emphasis is placed on elements related to the production and analysis of (ante)stories. Challenges of the applied (ante)narrative methodology are addressed focusing on three central questions: where do (ante)stories come from? Whose (ante)stories are told? And whose storied constructions of collective identity are explored?

The (ante)narrative methodology allows for a broad approach to producing and analysing (ante)stories. Consequently, it provides a rich understanding of the narrative practice of constructing collective identity. However, it also raises questions relating to the role of the researcher in the analytic process.

Implications include the necessity of developing analytic methods that take the fragmented, incoherent and dynamic nature of storytelling into account as well as reflect the researcher as a co-teller. Moreover, it is suggested that there is a need for developing a set of alternative evaluation criteria to accompany such methods.

To present and reflexively discuss (ante)narrative as a research methodology within collective identity research.

This chapter explores the development of organizational narratives of identities for embodying the qualified jobseeker with disabilities in the French job market.

While the concept of “organizational narratives of identities” has primarily been used to study the access to services to individuals with “troubled identities,” my study looks at how organizational narratives are shaped in labor market intermediation for the professional integration of workers with disabilities.

In this context, fitting the right formula story goes beyond embodying the morally “deserving” target population in order to encompasses corporate-related expectations, such as demonstrating resilience and grit, as well as disclosure-related expectations, that navigates the contradictory injunction of the French antidiscrimination system to both demonstrate a commitment to diversity and to remain indifferent to differences.

This chapter highlights the ways in which the cultural narratives surrounding disabled identities, workers’ identities, and the French cultural ideology of “indifference to differences” were translated into specific recruitment advice on the job market, as well as into organizational changes that favored the creation of a disability-friendly buffer zone in corporations: the activist disability manager. The chapter also shows how widely circulating cultural narratives shape, and are shaped by, organizational policies and procedures that can in turn shape personal experiences in the workforce.

Telling the story of the author’s attempts acquiring the Danish language over the past three and a half years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how identity work is narratively accomplished within organisational contexts. It aims at developing an in-depth understanding of the process of identity work.

The autoethnographic study illuminates narratives of subjectivity that inform notions of identity during the author’s journey of learning Danish and how this enterprise is embedded in the workplace surroundings.

The autoethnography carves out seven distinct, yet, inter-related narratives of subjectivity constituting the notion of who I am and what I should do within the process of learning Danish as a foreign language.

Instead of only describing different self-notions within identity work, the process view adopted in this research enables understanding of the various tensions, struggles and contradictions inherent in identity work. Examining the process of identity work sheds light on the multiplicity of self-notions emerging and re-emerging over time, co-existing, replacing each other, intertwining, struggling for dominance, and through this constituting the precarious and ongoing sense of identity.