On Celebrating the Organizational Identity Metaphor: A Rejoinder to Cornelissen
| Published date | 01 December 2002 |
| Author | Majken Schultz,Kevin G. Corley,Dennis A. Gioia |
| Date | 01 December 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00243 |
Joep Cornelissen has engaged in a rather forceful
and spirited attack on the organizational identity
metaphor, with which we three theorists/researchers
have worked extensively. Even though we are
not British, we are going to adopt a grand British
tradition and engage in an even stronger and more
spirited counter-attack on his position, which we
believe rests on some very questionable assertions
and results in some extreme and inappropriate
conclusions.
Cornelissen’s stated position essentially calls
for a moratorium on the use of organizational
identity as a metaphor in organization study, a call
we view as premature, fundamentally misguided,
and exclusionary, because it is predicated on
criteria that overlook metaphor’s most engaging
features and on criteria that apply only to the
most frequently used and hegemonic approaches
to organizational study. Although we acknowledge
his commendable attempt to offer an intellectually
provocative view that asks us to (re)consider
the appropriateness of the identity metaphor, we
deem many of the observations to be short-
sighted and paradigmatically bound in their view
of theory development, and his suggestion to
suspend the use of the metaphor to be a drastic
non-solution to a minor set of alleged problems.
Cornelissen maintains that the identity meta-
phor has somehow stymied our understanding of
organizations. Whether taken at face value or on
a deeper conceptual level, this statement is simply
not credible. Like all good metaphors, the notion
of organizational identity has made such a rapid
ascent mainly because it connects so profoundly
with so many scholars, so many practising ex-
ecutives and so many other employees as a means
of understanding organizations. Seeing organ-
izations in identity terms produces revealing
insights unavailable from other points of view
(including Cornelissen’s favoured ‘ideology’ and
‘culture’ metaphors). In this light the identity
metaphor has actually expanded our understand-
ing. Cornelissen’s unstated agenda instead appears
to be a concern that the identity metaphor seems
to have taken on a life of its own, so he is waving
red flags and red herrings at the field, in the
apparent belief that any metaphor that catches
on so quickly and so widely must in principle be
some kind of conceptual anomaly that should be
expunged.
To do so, he would subject the organizational
identity metaphor to some sort of metaphor
product life-cycle (i.e. ‘transposition, interpreta-
tion, correction, and spelling out’) and then act as
British Journal of Management, Vol. 13, 269–275 (2002)
© 2002 British Academy of Management
On Celebrating the Organizational
Identity Metaphor:
A Rejoinder to Cornelissen
Dennis A. Gioia, *Majken Schultz and †Kevin G. Corley
Pennsylvania State University, 425 Beam BAB, University Park, PA 16802, USA, *Copenhagen Business School,
Dalgas Have 15, 2000 Copenhagen F, Denmark and †Department of Business Administration, University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 408 Wohlers Hall, 1206 S. Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 619820, USA
Email: dag4@psu.edu [Gioia]; ms.ikl@cbs.dk [Schultz]; kgc2@uiuc.edu [Corley]
We disagree strongly with Cornelissen’s critique of the organizational identity metaphor
on grounds that he: seriously underplays the generative strength of metaphor in the
study of organizations; inappropriately applies the standards of assessment from one
paradigm to the approaches of another; and raises false concerns about issues of self
reference, reification and multilevel transference of concepts, among others.
07_Gioia 26/11/02 1:11 pm Page 269
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