Organizational and Corporate Identity on Social Media: A Literature Review

Stefano Di Lauro,Gilda Antonelli,Aizhan Tursunbayeva,Marcello Martinez

doi:10.5539/ijbm.v15n4p53

Abstract

Social media have created a multitude of ways for organizations to develop and disseminate their corporate and organizational identity. However, little is still known about how identity can be observed on social media. To address this research gap, we conducted a scoping review that collected, analyzed and synthesized the corpus of published research on organizational and corporate identity and social media. The analysis presented in this paper provides a description of the state-of-the-art on this topic that we hope can help future scholars to understand the various methodological approaches and types of data most pertinent to the exploration of organizational and corporate identity on social media, even though, overall, it reveals that there are relatively few studies with a reliable and universal method for measuring these concepts. This guarantees that future research will be necessary. Practitioners may also wish to draw on our findings to design more tailored ways of strengthening their organizational and corporate identity.

Highlights

Awareness of the prominence of organizational and corporate identity has increased noticeably in recent years due to the growth of theoretical and empirical work focusing on defining these concepts and the processes associated with them, as well as the outcomes they can lead to (Cornelissen, Haslam, & Balmer, 2007)
Interest in social media has increased in the last few years considering their high adoption rates, as well as the power they have given to organizations and individuals to interact with each other
Scholars and practitioners published numerous recommendations for effective social media communication or management strategies including how social media can be used to communicate or manage organizational or corporate identity. The former has been illustrated for example by recent generic reviews on social media metrics and analytics in marketing (e.g. Misirlis and Vlachopoulou, 2018) or generic reviews on advances in social media research (e.g. Kapoor et al, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Awareness of the prominence of organizational and corporate identity has increased noticeably in recent years due to the growth of theoretical and empirical work focusing on defining these concepts and the processes associated with them, as well as the outcomes they can lead to (Cornelissen, Haslam, & Balmer, 2007). Devereux, Melewar, & Foroudi, 2017) They have shown how diverse social media channels can impact organizations Melewar (2003) has concluded that, despite significant attention to corporate identity from both academics and practitioners, a definitive understanding of how to analyze the concept does not yet exist. To address these important gaps in the literature, we conducted a review, building on the work of Foreman and Whetten (2016), of the corpus of published research to investigate how organizational and corporate identity can be observed/measured via social media (RQ). This paper will identify, analyze and classify existing scholarly evidence on this topic and will offer a synthesis of the current state-of-the-art as a ijbm.ccsenet.org

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