majken schultz

In recent years, companies have increasingly seen the benefits of creating a corporate brand. Rather than spend marketing dollars on branding individual products, giants like Disney and Microsoft promote a single umbrella image that casts one glow over all their products. A company must align three interdependent elements--call them strategic stars--to create a strong corporate brand: vision, culture, and image. Aligning the stars takes concentrated managerial skill and will, the authors say, because each element is driven by a different constituency: management, employees, or stakeholders. To effectively build a corporate brand, executives must identify where their strategic stars fall out of line. The authors offer a series of diagnostic questions designed to reveal misalignments in corporate vision, culture, and image. The first set of questions looks for gaps between vision and culture; for example, when management establishes a vision that is too ambitious for the organization ...

Although many organizational researchers make reference to Mead’s theory of social identity, none have explored how Mead’s ideas about the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ might be extended to identity processes at the organizational level of analysis. In this article we define organizational analogs for Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘me’ and explain how these two phases of organizational identity are related. In doing so, we bring together existing theory concerning the links between organizational identities and images, with new theory concerning how reflection embeds identity in organizational culture and how identity expresses cultural understandings through symbols. We offer a model of organizational identity dynamics built on four processes linking organizational identity to culture and image. Whereas the processes linking identity and image (mirroring and impressing) have been described in the literature before, the contribution of this article lies in articulation of the processes...

This paper describes corporate branding as an organisational tool whose successful application depends on attending to the strategic, organisational and communicational context in which it is used. A model to help managers analyse context in terms of the alignment between strategic vision, organisational culture and corporate image is presented. The model is based on a gap analysis, which enables managers to assess the coherence of their corporate brand. Use of the model is illustrated by examining the stages of development that British Airways passed through in the creation of its corporate brand. The paper concludes that corporate brand management is a dynamic process that involves keeping up with continuous adjustments of vision, culture and image. The model suggests an approach to corporate branding that is organisationally integrated and cross‐functional, hence the thesis that it is important to bring the (whole) corporation into corporate branding.

We see several fruitful ways in which the relationships between institutions and organizational culture can be further developed. They emerge from our empirical observations in areas where the world is indeed changing and from the theoretical assumption that organizations and institutions are intertwined and interdependent. The first observation is that multiplicity in meanings systems is found at the organizational and institutional level. We see competing institutional logics reflected at the cultural level in terms of subcultures, so clearly there are competing meaning systems and practices that are mirrored at field level and organizational level. We can study how these different competing logics coexist as well as trace their origin. In examining how they coexist, the work on subcultures and the different relationships between them (e.g., Martin, 2002) can be used to further develop the relationships between competing institutional logics. But more importantly, if the different kinds of tensions, conflicts, or peaceful coexistence are located at both the institutional and organizational levels of analysis, we open up a set of issues regarding if and how organizations adapt to competing institutional logics and/or how organizational distinctiveness may serve as the origin for new competing logics. There is also the notion of hybrid identities, as suggested by Albert and Whetten (1985), offering the possibility of playing with the idea of hybrid cultures integrating competing institutional logics—such as business and philanthropy, global and local. An interesting question comes from the observation that many of the most significant subcultures emerge from different occupational and professional cultures (e.g., doctors vs. administrators, human resources vs. marketing). These logics are specific to fields, defined as a community of organizations, but refer to institutions that are even more general, as suggested by Friedland and Alford (1991). It is important to acknowledge which sources of internal conflicts and tensions emerge from differences in meaning systems from outside the organization. How do we distinguish between institutional logics that are embedded within a specific field, such as health care and education, and logics that are more general, implicated in a wide range of organizations? Therefore, dealing with the multiplicity in meaning systems at the organizational and institutional level involves examining how institutional logics and organizational cultures interact. And, in particular, it requires analysis of how conflicting and competing logics, at the organizational level, intersect with subcultures and how far they are implicated in each other. The second area relates to the need for a process perspective, which focuses on how the relationships between culture and institutions develop over time. This enables a more sophisticated understanding of how organizational culture, for periods of time, may be able to challenge or transform dominant institutional logics, just as it allows for a better understanding of how institutions take hold in individual organizations. For example, how do challenger cultures develop and shift to institutionalized cultures and challenger institutions to dominant logics and how are these processes interrelated? Work on the emergence of institutional logics and the transformation of organizational cultures needs to be examined in conjunction. A process perspective raises the notion of how we study culture as a source of distinctiveness. Culture is clearly not the only source of distinction, but culture may have a special role as the local meaning systems that express local distinctiveness in relation to the broader institutionalized environment and translate institutional requirements to the local context. Also, the fact that some institutions are more temporary than we expect (compare “proto-institutions”; Lawrence, Winn, & Jennings, 2001) may pose new challenges in our studies. It may be the case that institutional logics “discarded” at the field level may survive in cultural pockets at the organizational level. The third area for examining the institution or organizational culture relationship concerns the challenges from globalization and how globalization influences the role of institutions across national cultures. We witness how more and more companies are seeking to create global organizational cultures, sharing values and practices as a way to create organizational cohesiveness across national boundaries and create credibility and recognition among their stakeholders. This has been a prominent theme in studying organizational culture, whereas 419800 JMIXXX10.1177/1056492611419800Schu ltz and HiningsJournal of Management Inquiry

ABSTRACT Seen through European lenses, American academia is struggling with a disconnection between scientific rigor and pragmatic relevance that has taken hold during the last decades within management and organization studies. The implications are serious: a potential loss of relevance to business and society; a domination of stand-alone-constructs that neglect their intellectual heritage; a limited dissemination of research findings to a relatively small audience; and the institutionalization of intellectual homogeneity within a self-supporting academic community. I explore some of the reasons behind this development and argue that change can only emerge from within academia itself. My hope is that current developments within leading journals and academic institutions might lead to a different future where new voices and a more global outlook will encourage a redoing of American pragmatism at its best.