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They Put Themselves Out There: A Longitudinal Study of Organizational Expressiveness

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Abstract

This longitudinal study analyzes organizational expressiveness over a 35-year period. On the basis of 1307 official self-narratives retrieved from employment advertisements published in a major Norwegian newspaper between 1980 and 2015, the study tracks the expression of organizational identity labels over time. It seeks to determine how organizational expressiveness evolves and changes in symbolic meaning, including which overarching identity—the utilitarian or the normative identity—becomes more prevalent over time. Specifically, expressed labels change (1) in terms of their prevalence, suggesting that some labels display increasing long-term trends, whereas others display declining trends, and (2) in terms of their composition and meaning, suggesting that organizations gradually rely on an increasing portfolio of labels to express who they are and what they represent. Over time, these changes weaken the expression of a utilitarian identity, whereas the normative identity is strengthened.

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Notes

  1. Brickson (2005) relies on a third category: a relational identity orientation, which emerges from the normative (collectivistic) identity. In this research, this category is integrated into the normative identity type.

  2. The large reduction in the total number of advertisements, as well as the reduction in advertisements posted by private sector organizations, should be seen in connection with the growth of online and mobile IT technologies after the year 2000. As a result of this development, a number of alternative opportunities for posting employment advertisements in competition with traditional newspapers are available. With a population that has become increasingly larger users of online and mobile IT technology, hiring organizations must post their employment advertisements where they believe they can reach the most relevant target groups, which, today, probably means spreading them to more outlets than before.

  3. For example, the number of codes was 30 in 1970 and only 1 in 1965 and 1960.

  4. To determine whether a tendency is increasing or declining, a scatterplot trend line was calculated for each label.

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Acknowledgements

Preliminary versions of this research were presented at the 19th International Corporate Identity Group Symposium, Essex, UK, 13–14 June 2016 and at the NEON conference at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, 23–24 November 2016. I thank the participants for helpful comments. Special thanks to Shawn M. Pope. Therese Nguyen and Rakel Filtvedt provided invaluable data collection assistance.

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  1. School of Business and Economics, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Christian Magnus Falsens vei 18, 1430, Ås, Norway

    Arild Wæraas

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Wæraas, A. They Put Themselves Out There: A Longitudinal Study of Organizational Expressiveness. Corp Reputation Rev 23, 267–279 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41299-019-00085-x

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