Premium
Cultivating Foreignness: How Organizations Maintain and Leverage Minority Identities
Author(s) -
Edman Jesper
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of management studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.398
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1467-6486
pISSN - 0022-2380
DOI - 10.1111/joms.12129
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , leverage (statistics) , multinational corporation , identity (music) , extant taxon , subsidiary , organizational identity , public relations , sociology , business , political science , law , social science , physics , organizational commitment , machine learning , evolutionary biology , computer science , acoustics , biology
Scholars increasingly recognize that organizational fields contain minority identities , linked to alternative logics. Extant work has been largely silent on how such minority identities are maintained, and what their implications are for organizational agency. I contribute to filling this gap by examining how organizations cultivate minority identities, and how such identities both enable and constrain agency. Employing the foreignness of multinational enterprise subsidiaries as a particular case of minority identity, I find that managers actively cultivate minority identities by embedding into niche networks, reinforcing alternative expectations, and categorizing themselves into distinct collective identities. These elements of the minority identity enable particular forms of agency – internal experimentation and an external license to deviate – while constraining others – adaptation to the dominant logic and positioning in mature market segments. The findings extend theory by highlighting how minority identities are generated and sustained, as well as their implications for agency.