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LIT-1135: Organizational Identity, Image, and Adaptive Instability

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1389) in full, from Imperial College London's Spiral repository, which deposits the published version; worth reading as the argument that organizational identity has continuity rather than endurance: its labels persist while their meanings shift, driven by members' comparison of who they think they are with how they think outsiders see them, and that this instability helps organizations adapt. Read it knowing that it is conceptual, illustrated only by chosen successes of deliberate change (Shell, IBM, Oticon, British Airways) with no data, that "adaptive" is not measured, and that it poses, without answering, when a changed identity is still the same one.
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Tagssocial-science, individuation
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1389 — Gioia, Schultz and Corley — Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability

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Gioia, D. A., Schultz, M. & Corley, K. G. (2000). Academy of Management Review 25(1):63–81.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1389).

Why this is here

A6 of the exchange of 2026-10-16, for the reputation case (CASE-103): identity and image feeding back on each other, and a challenge to any criterion of persistence that requires identity content to stay fixed.

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