Constructing New Identities in Established Organization Fields

Abstract

In the production of consumer goods and services, firms are born and die by the thousands every year, and nobody finds it alarming. In contrast, universities seem to last forever, and until recently very few new ones were born. We are speaking here about European universities, most of which date back to the seventeenth century, with many older ones founded in the thirteenth century. Recently, however, new universities opened, mainly as a result of the EC's regional development policies. This article tells a story of two young universities: one in southern Italy and the other in northern Germany. Both were created in response to the needs of what were considered underdeveloped regions. The South Italian University, hereinafter called SIU, survived and became a state university. The North German University, NGU, did not survive, and what remained of it was incorporated into a neighboring state university. We would like to stress at the outset that our story represents a limited perspective - that of emerging organizations attempting to construct an identity within a well-established field. It could be complemented and/or contradicted by versions focusing on other aspects, but we feel that this perspective offers a useful lesson to future organizers who will try to establish a new university in a European country. We show the difficulties they will encounter and some possible strategies of coping with them. Our analysis is structured around three main concepts: (1) organization field, originating in the new institutional theory (DiMaggio, 1983; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), (2) action nets (Czarniawska, 1997), and (3) organizational identity (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994).