Corporate Identity

Corporate Identity research at VU

The interest in corporate identity at our faculty materialised during a lunch

lecture held on February 3, 2005.

Peter Peverelli presented the model he is currently developing, which is to

be presented in monograph on Chinese Corporate Identity published by

Routledge.

Peverelli’s main criticisms on the bulk of current models:

- They are static; they focus on what the (intended) identity is, rather

than how it is constructed;

- They are unidirectional; they fail to address the fact that how a company

wants others to see it is partly related to how those others see the company;

- they are singular; they presuppose that an enterprise has one single identity

and fail to take into account how the identity of a compay varies for different ‘others.’

The most essential of his new proposal are:

- Corporate identity is part of the consequences of organising. A model

of corporate identity should therefore be an organic part of a general

theory of organising;

- Corporate identity is part of how a company makes sense of its relation

to social-cognitive structures and how other social-cognitive structures

make sense of that company;

- As social-cognitive structures themselves, companies are constructed by

their member actors. Organising of individual actors in various inclusions

will affect the construction of corporate identity.

Some of criticism of the meeting’s discussant, Paul Jansen, were:

- Peverelli’s definition is unclear, therefore a counter proposal:

- Situation-relative self-interpretation of organization -> many identities in

many situations

- Inspired by developmental psychology”: Identity formation = creative construction by integrating different self-images, identity = sameness.

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