Why would an academic project incentivized towards scientific publications be repurposed to become a medical platform for responsible innovation? Patient Innovation, a nonprofit medical platform that focuses on the sharing and dissemination of innovations to find solutions for rare and chronic diseases, was initially set up as an academic research project. However, team members reframed their core purpose from conducting research on user innovation to providing global access to these innovations and creating societal impact. Using a framing lens to understand organizational repurposing, we illuminate how serendipitous inspiration, moral emotions and the power of socially conscious users and catalysts drove this emergent reframing of core purpose and develop a model of organizational repurposing. We show how a frame drift towards a change in purpose occurs spontaneously in interactions, as actors frame and reframe situations and feel inspired and morally motivated to transcend their immediate self-interests and serve collective goals.

Technologies are known to alter social structures in the workplace, reconfigure roles and relationships, and disrupt status hierarchies. However, less attention has been given to how an emerging technology disrupts the meaning and moral values that tether people to their work and render it meaningful. To understand how workers respond to such an emerging technology, we undertook an inductive, qualitative study of military personnel working in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drone operations, for the U.S. Air Force. We draw on multiple data sources, including personal diaries kept by personnel involved in drone operations. We identified three characteristics of drone technology: remote-split operations, remote piloting of unmanned vehicles, and interaction through iconic representations. Our analysis suggests that drone technology has revolutionized warfare by (1) creating distanciated intimacy, (2) dissolving traditional spatio-temporal boundaries between work and personal life, and (3) redefining the legal and moral parameters of work. Drone program workers identified with these changes to their working environment in contradictory ways, which evoked emotional ambivalence about right and wrong. However, their organization gave them little help in alleviating their conflicting feelings. We illuminate how workers cope with such ambivalence when a technology transforms the meaning and morality of their work. We extend theory by showing that workers’ responses to a changed working environment as a result of a remote technology are not just based on how the technology changes workers’ tasks, roles, and status but also on how it affects their moral values.

In this article, we explore how organizational actors cope with a perceived misalignment between their organization’s identity and strategy. Based on an inductive, interpretive case study at a public broadcasting organization, we identify three cognitive tactics through which organizational members cope with an identity–strategy misalignment: contextualization, abstraction, and fatalism. Furthermore, we show that the enactment of these cognitive coping tactics coincides with specific strategy-related tasks that prioritize different aspects of an organization’s identity and, therefore, invokes different conceptions of the identity–strategy misalignment. Based on these findings, we develop a framework that conceptualizes how organizational members cope with an identity–strategy misalignment. We end the article by discussing the implications of our study for further research on the linkages between organizational identity and strategy.

In this article, we investigate the strategy–identity nexus by illustrating the interaction between organizational identity, anti-identity, and strategy. While extant research illustrates the potentially constraining role of organizational identity on change trajectories, less is known about the role of organizational anti-identity. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a leading German distributor’s 32-year history, we highlight the importance of organizational anti-identity for both continuous and discontinuous change initiatives, and illustrate how organizational members can overcome identity ambiguity by referring to “who we are not as an organization” rather than to “who we are as an organization.” We further show how managers who draw on identity reservoirs may have greater leeway when exploiting anti-identity, and how ambiguity and resistance may be overcome by referring to “who we are not” as an organization. Our findings broaden our understanding of the role of anti-identity for strategy selection and contribute to the burgeoning literature on the strategy–identity nexus.

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