Alessandra Zamparini - 17:00-18.30
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Start date: 3 October 2012
End date: 4 October 2012
How and why cluster firms combine regional and individual identities in their communication.
The case of Franciacorta wineries.
The interdependence between collective supra-organizational identities and corporate identities is increasingly gaining attention both in organization studies (Navis and Glynn 2010) and corporate communication research (Lammers, 2011; van Halderen et al. 2011). A great interest is on how firms reach optimal distinctiveness, maintaining and communicating an identity which is similar enough to referent collective identities to get legitimacy, but different enough to emerge from the group (Deephouse 1999). So far empirical contributions addressed this issue mainly at the level of industries, strategic groups and market categories. To our knowledge there is a scarcity of empirical attention to these identity dynamics at the level of regional business clusters, despite the growing theoretical interest on geographic communities (Marquis et al.2011), and a longstanding debate on the relevance of socio-cultural territorial identity versus individual firm identities in regional clusters studies (Lazerson and Lorenzoni 1999). The purpose of this paper is to explore how regional cluster firms integrate collective and individual identity claims into their external communications, and what influences different patterns among cluster firms.
The paper adopts a single case design with embedded units (Yin, 2003), being the regional cluster the case, and its individual firms the embedded units of analysis. The Franciacorta wine cluster (Italy) is an extreme revelatory case in the wine industry: in 50 years a collective identity was established with a highly institutionalized collective identity story, starting from a territory lacking a winemaking tradition. At the same time some firms with highly recognized individual corporate identities operate in the cluster. The methods comprise a quantitative analysis of firms' web contents (84 available websites), qualitative interviews, observations and document analysis for a theoretical sample of 13 selected firms.
Data emphasize three types of collective/individual identity combinations into external communications. The "enthusiastic" type is a group story, where collective symbols, values and stories are strictly intertwined with the firm's individual elements, and collective identity is used to highlight differences from other collective identities. The "spanning" type is a distinctive individual identity story, highlighting differences within the cluster, but visibly expressing the minimum sufficient elements to be recognized as legitimate cluster members both inside and outside the cluster. The "branded" type is a combination of individual symbols and collective values in an identity story where conformity to the collective identity legitimates in the cluster and outside, while differentiation happens mainly at the symbolic level. The influencing role of social (historical role, status, strategic involvement into the cluster and friendship ties) and of socio-psychological variables (identification, construed external image and perception of collective communications) is presented and discussed.
This paper contributes to the recent stream of research that moves closer organizational identity studies and new institutionalism. It shows that the distinction between symbolic/visual and narrative identity claims is relevant to get a deeper understanding on how firms try to reach optimal distinctiveness. Three different ways in which institutional bricolage (Glynn 2008) is performed by different firms in a regional cluster context are proposed and related to social and socio-psychological variables. Furthermore our results expand the debate on the strategic role of cluster identities in regional studies, adopting a communication perspective and showing how collective identity is differently used as a strategic resource for communication by different cluster firms. As a practical contribution the paper shows that, at least in the agro food sector, the collective cluster identity can be a strong strategic element of corporate identity communication, not only for small traditional cluster firms, but also for leader firms.
