Making Use of Organizational Identity - Authentic Organizations

Through personification, the organization can be anthropomorphized. Another term for
personification is "character mask"; creating Carrie allowed organization members to define their
organization as having a human "character", with values, emotions, morals, and so on. Rather
than basing the organization's beliefs, desires, and goals on those of the collective, these were
given to the organization itself (Gillet, 1993). Translating organizational identity directly into
human attributes reinforces the idea of ipseity, allowing the organization's "collective self" to be
represented by a character with a "real" self -- Carrie.
Using Carrie to represent the organization's identity shifted the ontological status of the
organizational identity from something people believed in to something that had an actual
existence. Talking about Carrie, depicting her, and invoking her were all ways of turning
organizational identity from something abstract to something more specific or material. Talking
about Carrie served as a way to reify collective organizational identity beliefs. Carrie not only
existed, she could be apprehended by the senses; she was tangible. Carrie was more readily
comprehensible by the mind, more substantial, and more directly evident than the identity beliefs
themselves. Carrie had been made tangible through the translation of her attributes and life story
into a range of physical artifacts, through book about her life, through the video, and through all
of the additional ways in which Carrie was expressed symbolically throughout the organization.
Some of Carrie's tangibility comes from the "objective" facts about her. The apparent
factuality of these details, the way that they are presented as unbiased, objective, material fact it's
about who Carrie is makes her tangible. Moreover, facts such as Carrie being female, American,
a wife, a mother, with a background in botany, and so on are material facts that are not
themselves mutable. They do not go away or change over time. While the interpretations of
these facts or what they are thought to imply about Carrie might change, the facts themselves
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