This paper contributes to our understanding of organizational identity through an analysis of shared identity narratives at the UK-based specialist tour operator Laskarina Holidays. Predicated on a view of organizations as linguistic constructs, we argue that individual and collective identities are narrative accomplishments, and that organizations tend often to be characterised by identity multiplicity. The research contribution that this paper makes is threefold. First, it makes an argument for theorizing organizational identities as narratives, constituted within discursive regimes, and continuously changing as they are created and recreated by all participants. Second, it presents a case study featuring three distinctive but interwoven collective identity narratives, (which we label 'utilitarian', 'normative' and 'hedonic'), and contrasts these with some 'dissonant' voices. We argue that change in organizations is, at least in part, constituted by alterations in peoples' understandings, encoded in narratives, and shared in conversations. Finally, it suggests that our narratological approach to theorizing and researching organizational identities is important because it both assists us in our efforts to analyze identities as the outcomes of processes of hegemonic imposition and resistance, and permits us to read polysemy back into ethnographic research.
This paper provides an alternative theoretical conceptualisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to further our understanding of prosocial organisational behaviour. We argue that consumption provides a perspective that enables theorists to escape the confines of existing CSR literature. In our view the organisation is re-imagined as an arena of consumption where employees are engaged in a quest for value, constructing and confirming their identities as consumers. Using the award-winning tour operator Laskarina Holidays as an illustrative case, it is suggested that CSR can provide combinations of functional, social, emotional, epistemic and conditional value. This new perspective on CSR facilitates the coexistence of a plurality of values that are relativistically constructed and narrativised by organisational stakeholders. Our consumption paradigm provides a thought provoking means of reconciling divergent perspectives and encourages further interdisciplinary research. We argue that future research should begin, not by asking the question of why organisations assume responsibility, but by contemplating the notion of why organisations consume responsibility.
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