Organizational Identity Struggles and Reconstruction During Organizational Change: Narratives as symbolic, emotional and practical glue

Abstract

The article offers a novel perspective on the formation of organizational identity (OI) during major organizational change. The empirical context of our studies is the establishment of a new acute care department and the reorganization of care, where nurses and managers struggle to construct and reclaim a legitimate identity within the hospital and simultaneously strive to gain a leading position among acute care departments in the country. We use Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas combined with a focus on narratives as an original and fertile perspective for studying OI. We propose that OI is inherently temporal, embodied and socially configured and cannot be separated from the institutionalized context of its setting because it is interlaced with (in this case) health professional logics. We show how OI is constructed through the strategizing moves of managers and nurses. This includes their narrative constructions of their quest for care progression and a legitimate OI that function as symbolic, emotional and practical glue.

Your home, my refuge: being a refugee in Brazil

“…As I am black, I went unnoticed, pretending to be a Brazilian". The lexical selection "pretending to be a Brazilian" denotes how Delta, as a social actor, assumed an identity, whose characteristics are socially constructed according to the expectations of the main external group, to go through a critical situation (Ernst & Jensen, 2019).…”

“…From this perspective, individuals are inserted in a system of relationships structured by standardized and articulated activities, which express social norms and rules (Tsui-Ausch, 2005). Then, a social arena is established (Ernst & Jensen, 2019), impregnated by the environment (Granovetter, 1985), removing from it and transmitting, in reciprocal interaction, norms and patterns of behavior that constitute adequate modes of action.…”

“…Nevertheless, it is not being suggested here that the elaboration of survival strategies is an exclusively rational process, conceived by an homo economicus (Husted, 2007), who, imbued with rational omniscience, is able to deal with the real world from an objective point of view and face all its complexity. This study is based on the belief that individual behavior is modeled by standards created and shared in interaction, but incorporated in the form of objective norms and rules, crystallized in society as legitimized conceptions about the most effective way in which organizations operate (Ernst & Jensen, 2019); i.e, refugees are social actors, individuals who assume an identity, and whose characteristics are socially constructed according to the expectations of external groups about who he is and the way he must face the situations.…”

Professional boundary struggles in the context of healthcare change: the relational and symbolic constitution of nursing ethos in the space of possible professionalisation

“…The study was conducted over 13 months from 2013 to 2014 in cycles of different intensities over the year, and was concerned with the implications of care reorganisation initiatives. The department is one of 21 recently established acute departments in Denmark, spearheading recent reform initiatives (see also Ernst and Jensen Schleiter, 2019).…”

Dynamics of Overt and Covert Conflict in Organizations: The Power of Organizational Identity

“…Narratives and storytelling are central to how we construct ourselves as individuals, groups, and organizations (Brown, 2006;Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012;Driver, 2009;Ernst & Schleiter, 2020;Humphreys & Brown, 2002;Linde, 2001Linde, , 2009Mallett & Wapshott, 2012), with research theorizing identities as constituted in discourse and narratives being the largest body of nonmainstream research on organizational identities (He & Brown, 2013). Advocating a narrative approach to studying collective identities, He and Brown (2013) argue that organizational identity can be defined as the totality of identity-relevant narratives that organizational members author about themselves "in their conversations, written histories, documents such as reports and web presences" (p. 10), refocusing attention to power, voice, and plurivocity.…”