Building Organizational Identities Through Discursive Practices

Abstract

Identity-building processes have gained increasing role in scholarly approach to organizations from the past two decades of the 20th Century. Globalization, information society developments and the dynamic of social change have brought about cultural diversity of organized action, encouraging theoretical and practical approaches to organizations as cultures. Research in organizational cultures differ in their focus and methodology, drawing insightful conclusions by comparing different nations, departmental structures or professions. We propose a comparative approach to identity building processes through the lens of these perspectives.Leaders are cornerstones of identity-building in their organizations. A discourse analysis of leaders’ formal and informal messages by looking at “presentational rhetoric” and “operational rhetoric” (Van Maanen and Schein 21) gives us a clue on the type of culture they are keen to build.