Institutionally Bounded Identities: Digital Engineers and Dgital Creatives in Mobile Games

Abstract

Through a comparative multiple case study of 55 firms in the mobile games industry in Japan and the United States of America, we examine how new firms in new industries in different national institutional contexts develop their organizational identity. Our analysis suggests that national institutions act as an important filter through which new firms develop their organizational identity by sifting the influence of founders’ characteristics and motivations, on the one hand, and the industry technology and knowledge base, on the other. We show that these influences result in two distinctive types of organizational identity— “digital engineers” and “digital creatives”—that are closely associated with the different national institutional environments. The organizational identity of digital engineers emphasizes quality, consistency, and speed, whereas that of digital creatives emphasizes novelty, experimentation, and data analytics. New firms in new industries adopt strategic decisions that reflect and reinforce these identities, especially organizational actions regarding firm boundaries, human resources practices, and corporate development. We propose an emergent framework to explore how institutionally bounded organizational identities develop in a new digital industry.