Relations between organizational culture, identity and image

One of the primary challenges faced by contemporary organizations stems from the breakdown of the boundary between their internal and external aspects. Previously, organizations could disconnect their internal functioning from their external relations in the environment because there were few contacts between insiders and outsiders. Top executives, marketing, purchasing, PR and strategic planning departments handled external relations while internal issues were attended to by middle and lower level managers and HRM, engineering, production and accounting departments. However, networking, business process re-engineering, flexible manufacturing, delayering, the new focus on customer service, and so on, redefine what were previously considered matters of external relations as part of the daily activities of nearly all organizational members. These changes not only imply that the categories of internal and external relations are collapsing together in organizational practice, but they also indicate a need to combine knowledge from the disciplines of marketing and organization studies. In this article we argue that, increasingly, the actions and statements of top managers simultaneously affect organizational identity and image. This is, in part, due to increasing levels of interaction between organizational members and suppliers, customers, regulators and other environmental actors, and the multiple roles of organizational members who often act both as “insiders” (i.e. as employees) and as “outsiders” (e.g. as consumers, community members and/or members of special interest groups. We will further examine the implications of the collapsing of internal-external boundaries by applying the concepts of organizational culture, identity and image as developed within both marketing and organization studies. In particular we will build our argument on the foundation of ideas developed within corporate branding, corporate image and corporate identity studies (which have emphasized the relationships of