Identity Talks: Exploring Organizational Identity of Slow Fashion Brands

Abstract

Nowadays organizations find themselves in increasingly complex environments where it continuously becomes harder to maintain a clear organizational identity. Complexity issues arise in particular for organizations that include sustainability in their organizational identity. Few studies, especially in the cultural creative industries, have focused on exploring sustainability-focused organizational identity and its complexity. Hence, the purpose of this Master thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of organizational identity, especially in relation to sustainability. The research is hereby set in the context of the cultural creative industries (CCI). It concentrates on investigating the organizational identity of slow fashion brands, as an example of companies that integrate sustainability in their identity. The research particularly focuses on how founders of slow fashion companies perceive and navigate their organizational identity. The data pool of the qualitative research consists of information obtained from seven slow fashion companies based in the Scandinavian region. The research design is comprised of seven semi-structured interviews and two follow-up interviews. The research findings reveal that the founders of slow fashion brands perceive their organizational identity as a quite complex and multidimensional construct, where different identity components are dynamically related to each other. Based on these interactions, identity tensions can manifest and consequently need to be managed and navigated by the founders. These tensions can appear in the external as well as internal environment of the organization. The Master thesis concludes that organizational identity generally, as well as in relation to sustainability, should be approached from a holistic and universal view. In order to investigate and understand sustainability-focused organizational identity to its full extend, a combination of different research concepts as well as managerial approaches is hereby proposed.