Identity Alignment in the Inter-organisational Relationship: The Case of Open Access

Abstract

Organisations routinely participate in inter-organisational relationships such as mergers & acquisitions, conglomerates, networks, business alliances, and industry associations. However, our understanding of how these relationships affect organisational identities remains limited. To address this issue, we study how members construe their organisational identities and those of other key organisations they have relationships with, and how this construal influences the implementation of innovative practices. We examine how members of an academic university press in the UK made sense of both their own organisational identities and those of their parent university, sister organisations and competitors; and how this affected the implementation of the Open Access publishing model. We offer a relational view of organisational identity and develop a process model of organisational identity alignment in inter-organisational relationships.