Scaling the Tower of Babel: Relational Differences between Identity, Image, and Culture in Organizations

Abstract

Abstract Corporate and organizational identity have attracted considerable attention from both academics and practitioners whose efforts to explain, control, and/or exploit them offer us a multiplicity of issues, concepts, and theoretical perspectives. This multiplicity is broadly based, because of the multidisciplinary appeal of the identity concept as it applies to organizations. In this chapter we examine different approaches to the study of the identity of organizations within the fields of marketing, organization studies, organizational communication, and strategy. On the one hand, the multidisciplinarity of these approaches creates considerable conceptual confusion, leading to what we describe as the Tower of Babel in identity research. On the other hand, the variety and richness that come from such diversity provide valuable input to our theorizing.