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Article: Members' responses to organizational identity threats: encountering and countering the Business Week rankings.
- Article from:
- Administrative Science Quarterly
- Article date:
- September 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This research investigates how organizational members respond to events that threaten their perceptions of their organization's identity. Using qualitative, interview, and records data, we describe how members from eight "top-20" business schools responded to the 1992 Business Week survey rankings of U.S. business schools. Our analysis suggests that the rankings posed a two-pronged threat to many members' perceptions of their schools' identities by (1) calling into question their perceptions of highly valued, core identity attributes of their schools, and (2) challenging their beliefs about their schools' standing relative to other schools. In response, members made sense ...