Questioning Organizational Identity During Radical Technological Change.

Exogenous radical technological changes often threaten firms' organizational identity. Many organizations, be it incumbent or new entrant, need to reinvent themselves in light of such technological changes, if they can. To contribute to research on organizational identity and firm responses to radical technological change, we adopt a multifaceted view of organizational identity and emphasize that who or what a firm is, is as important as what a firm does and why. Based on a qualitative, multi-case study on the responses of Dutch music companies to the emergence of digitalization, we explore how this identity-strategy nexus plays our during radical technological change. Based on our analysis, we identify three identity-strategy response mechanisms. In identity affirmation, firms prioritize their identity and incorporate radical technologies to fit their organizational identity. In identity hedging and identity accommodation firms prioritize strategy and suspend organizational identity in favour of strategic change, which over time reconfigures organizational identity. This provides an alternative explanation for the heterogeneity in firm responses to the same radical technological change. The differences across these three response mechanisms yield important insights for the growing study of the intersection of radical technological change and the OI literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]