ABSTRACT
This text intends to study the identity of enterprises from an organizing perspective. In this chapter, I intend to show how a more useful definition of corporate identity can be reached by trying to craft such a definition as an organic part of a comprehensive model of human organizing processes. This model is based on social integration theory as formulated in Peverelli (2000) and regards an enterprise as a social-cognitive structure, produced and continuously reproduced in ongoing social interaction. It has a social element, the actors connected to the enterprise, and a cognitive element, the ideas, perceptions, causal models, ways of doing things, etc., shared by those actors in relation to the enterprise. This coarse formulation will probably be more confusing than clarifying, but I will introduce the model in more detail further in this chapter. The gist in this paragraph is to clarify that I regard an enterprise as a product, a construct, of social interaction. The enterprise is a story, told and continuously retold by the actors involved. These actors include people working for the enterprise, but also comprise other actors, usually referred to as stakeholders in mainstream management literature. The analysis of such stories will therefore be an important methodology employed in this study.
