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Research on identity in organizations takes endurance overtime as a taken‐for‐granted expectation, but then often explores how identity changes. Conversely, research on memory in organizations takes change as a taken‐for‐granted expectation and then explores how particular memories might be maintained by purposeful action. We used both of these literatures as a basis for exploring what happened to two aspects of an organizational group's identity over the course of its first seven years. One aspect of identity centered on the group's mission and the other on the group's internal processes. Based on analysis of the processes involved in the evolution of the group's identity, we suggest several factors that foster stability in identity and several factors that foster change in identity. From the identification of these factors, and based on Lewin's Field Theory approach, we suggest a more complex depiction of what identity stability or change might mean overtime.

The purpose of this paper is to help introduce the empirical study of emotion within an institutional framework by examining shame and shaming as drivers of institutional stability and change, respectively.

The author conducted a qualitative study of 101 US print media articles generated by major US news publications and trade magazines from 1999 to 2011 in the wake of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 1999 report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.

This study resulted in two major findings. First, this research found that the institutions constituting the collective professional identity of physicians persisted via institutionalized shame inculcated in physicians during their extensive socialization into the medical profession. Potential shame over medical error served to reinforce institutionalized cultures which exacerbated medicine’s problems with error reporting. Second, this study reveals that field-level actors engage in shaming to affect institutional change. This research suggests that the IOM report was in effect a shaming effort directed at physicians and the institutions constituting their collective identity.

This study provides some verification of recent theoretical works incorporating emotion into institutional theory and also illustrates how shame can be incorporated into collective identity as an institutional imperative.

This study provides a rare empirical investigation of emotion within an institutional framework, and illuminates ways in which the emotion of shame interacts with institutional processes. This research also focusses on collective identity and institutional stability, two topics which are largely ignored by contemporary institutional researchers but are integral aspects of social life.

Five years ago a conference on Children and Marriage would probably not have included a paper on marriages without children. Having children in marriage conforms to one of society's strongest expectations; conversely not having any is portrayed as both undesirable and deviant. Society's prescriptions relating to parenthood have given rise to a number of assumptions about childless marriages. Briefly, these maintain that the causes of childlessness are almost always involuntary, that marriages without children will be less satisfactory and more prone to divorce than parental marriages, and that childlessness is generally associated negatively with various measures of mental health. It is only recently that such assumptions have been questioned, and that voluntary childlessness has become a subject of research in its own right, rather than as an aberration from the “normal” pattern of behaviour. In Britain three chief reasons for an upsurge in interest in childless by choice marriages are apparent. Firstly, there have been indications that couples are delaying childbirth in marriage and this has led to speculation that in some cases, at least, this delay would lead to higher rates of childlessness when this cohort of women had completed childbearing. Figure 1 illustrates both this trend and the fact that in the past high rates of childlessness in early marriage were associated with high rates of final childlessness. Secondly, in 1976 a pressure group was formed by some voluntarily childless individuals; its aim was to campaign for a reduction in pronatalist pressure in society. This group attracted a good deal of interest from the popular press and in the late seventies and early eighties many articles looking at various aspects of voluntary childlessness have been published. Thirdly, and most significantly, voluntary childlessness represents an alternative family form and has come into the realm of sociological studies of the family along with other lifestyles (such as one‐parent families or homosexual couples) that were once considered deviant and therefore outside the mainstream of society. It is now recognised that such living arrangements are both valid as subjects for study in their own right and in terms of the understanding they may give of more traditional arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how firms draw on historical references in corporate marketing. The paper seeks to analyze the logic behind such efforts from a corporate identity perspective and to propose potential risks and/or benefits of doing so. The paper aims to inspire the understanding of how references to history are used in marketing and the outcome of such use.

The paper mainly draws on literature relating to corporate marketing and the use of history in organizations. Combining these theories, and pointing at empirical examples, the paper clarifies why references to history can be important manifestations of corporate identity. The paper comes up with propositions concerning what consequences the reference to history in corporate marketing can have for firms' marketing strategies and business development.

The paper outlines a connection among corporate identity, organizational identity, and image through corporate communications. It suggests that among the range of corporate characteristics, historical references can be particular valuable for corporate communications thanks to the reliability age can provide (as opposed to liabilities of newness). Still, elaborations suggest that the planned use of historical references has both pros and cons in terms of business development.

Despite the notion that history, as an inevitable and distinctive firm feature, can play an important role in corporate marketing, research on the topic is quite scarce. This paper offers some remedy to this gap by elaborating on the internal and external rationales for applying historical references and how these can be explained in connections between corporate identity and history.

An underlying and fundamental aim of the new public management (NPM) reform program is to transform the organizational identity of public organizations into a business‐like identity. In this paper the construction of organizational identity as an effect of NPM initiatives is analyzed from a sensemaking perspective. The study draws on data from a two‐and‐a‐half‐year study of the introduction of NPM at the public health care authority in the region of Värmland in Sweden. It is concluded that NPM creates heterogeneous, conflicting and fluid organizational identities rather than the uniform and stable business identity it is supposed to.

To examine Hardt and Negri's discussions of immaterial labor in relation to personal identity and sociality at work in a context of the postmodernization of the global economy.

Hardt and Negri's discussions of immaterial labor are reviewed in relation to their implications for social interaction and identity at work. Heidegger's idea of “presencing” is then used to examine the dynamic emergence of identity as an effect of the “affectualization” of work.

Global trends towards an informationalized economy have profound implications for identity at work in that the dynamics of identity are foregrounded and managerial and organizational power structures that seek to define an essential worker identity are destabilized.

Suggests that research into identity at work should include a focus on the immaterial dimensions of work and should consider the implications of this for the dynamic emergence of identity and for future forms of organization and management.

Suggests that the emergence of immaterial labor might provide increasing, albeit complex and contested, opportunities for worker participation; this is on what management relies, and what at the same time has the potential of undermining the legitimacy of management.

Provides an innovative way of examining the dynamics of identity in contemporary organizations.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the robustness of the findings on educational advantage among sexual minority men.

Using nationally representative data (AddHealth) and controlling for other predictors of academic attainment, we examine the educational attainment of sexual minority males by using hierarchical regression and logistical regression for two measures of sexual identity.

We find robust differences in educational attainment across analyses and sexual orientation constructs. Our results show sexual minority identity predicts up to a year more of education for male respondents and consistently reporting male homosexuals have an even greater advantage, more than one and a half years, compared to inconsistent responders.

Our results extend previous research on educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adolescents, suggesting there are sustained differences in long-term educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adults and supporting earlier analyses of the AddHealth survey data. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining educational attainment as measured by continuous years and cut-points, using two measures of sexual orientation, providing estimates for all Wave 4 sexual minority identities (i.e., not collapsing any sexual minority category), and controlling for adolescent school geography and type. Moreover, we find early identification of sexual orientation and stability of sexual orientation may be an important source of variation in identifying LGBTQ adolescents who are at greater academic risk or who may benefit from increased social support.

The paradigmatic separation of the strategy and identity literatures constitutes an ongoing problem for the extension of either into more global contexts. The theorization proposed in this chapter presents rhetoric as the means by which the ‘strategy work’ of reimagining future options and the ‘identity work’ of reformulating the meaning of past actions may be integrated in the present moment. By locating both strategy work and identity work within the continuity of experience, we suggest that scholars will be better able to develop theoretically integrated, empirically grounded and globally relevant studies of strategy.

For a long time, researchers across the world have called for more generalizable frameworks in management research, which can be used to better understand local contexts and to extend established theories in Western countries. However, research from non-Western countries is barely visible in high-impact management journals. Although most researchers have tried to understand this lacking visibility from a more technological perspective, this study aims to analyze the extent to which group psychological processes influence the selection of international publication strategies by non-Western researchers in this study.

Hypotheses were based on social identity theory. In total, 169 management researchers from India were surveyed and their social identities and the international publication strategy were assessed.

It could be confirmed that higher identification with non-Western researchers is negatively related to the intention to publish internationally.

The findings suggest that current approaches to increasing the low visibility of non-Western research require a general revision.

This study adds a new angle to the center–periphery debate by incorporating the influence of social identities on the selection of an international publication strategy. Research socialization in the periphery seems to increase the likelihood of choosing local publication outlets rather than aiming for international publications. Therefore, it is necessary to implement strategies that aim at the psychological inclusion of peripheral researchers to increase their visibility in international journals and on international platforms.