Identity work as a strategic practice

Introduction Identity is a powerful, motivating force in organizations today. Originating as an individual-level construct in the field of psychology, identity has long been used to explain behaviour and enhance self-understanding by offering a personal frame of reference that legitimizes decision-making and enables the formation of stable relationships with others. It has also been extended to the collective and organizational levels, where it can provide an (evolving) sense of structure and continuity over time. Whether explicitly or not, questions related to identity – at all levels of analysis – frequently underlie a great deal of organizational strategizing, making identity a theoretical construct worthy of examination by strategy-as-practice scholars. Identity is derived from the Latin word ‘idem’, meaning ‘the same’ (Abend 1974). As such, it includes an implicit historical and retrospective element, in that understanding what remains the same requires looking backward in time. While at first glance this may appear to distinguish identity from strategy’s inherent future orientation, the two concepts share a number of important characteristics. Each involves a struggle to achieve some kind of balance between similarity and uniqueness, or ‘optimal distinctiveness’ (Brewer 1991; Deephouse 1999). Each contributes to a perception of coherence and stability in organizations, which is often used to frame decisions and actions. Furthermore, both identity and strategy have undergone something of a transformation of late, with strategy’s recent ‘practice turn’ (Whittington 2006) mirrored by an growing interest in ‘process’ studies in the organizational literature on identity (Schultz et al. 2012). This chapter develops the perspective of identity as a form of strategic practice. Building largely on processual studies of identity, it proposes that identity work integrating different levels of analysis and temporal orientations enables and constrains strategy work, and can itself constitute a strategic practice. The chapter is organized into four main parts. It begins by providing a (necessarily brief) overview of key studies in the vast fields of identity and identification in the organization literature, categorized by level of analysis: individual, collective and organizational. It then reviews existing work linking identity with strategy, and organizes this into three perspectives: identity as strategic resource, identity as a lens or framing device and identity as a form of work. The third section builds on process identity studies to develop the perspective of identity work as a form of strategic practice operating across temporal orientations and levels of analysis.