“Who are we Online?” Approaches to Organizational Identity in Social Media Contexts

Abstract

In the last year the conversation about organizing and organizations in digital contexts has seen theoretically valuable additions. This paper presents a contribution to this dialogue, looking at the strict separation between a functionalist, social constructionist, and postmodern perspective on organizational identity in the social media context. Through semi-structured interviews with social media marketing professionals who engage daily in the representation of their organizations online, and the concept of identity work as an interpretive lens, this article shows how the very discourse of organizational identity has changed as a result of the persistent, public, editable, and immediate context of social media platforms. The somewhat rigid theoretical approaches to organizational identity might be conflated in practice.