A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation

We extend special thanks to our informants at Alessi for their time and insights. We would like to acknowledge support for the project from ABSTRACT Our study was motivated by the growing influence in cultural sociology and organizational research of the view of culture as a " toolkit " , from which individuals draw resources flexibly to develop strategies of action that address different circumstances. To investigate if and how organizations can also use new and diverse cultural resources, we undertook a historical case study of the incorporation of new cultural resources in an organization's cultural repertoire. In-depth analysis of four rounds of incorporation of new cultural resources led to the development of a robust theoretical model that identifies cultural repertoire enrichment and organizational identity redefinition as two core mechanisms that facilitate the use of new cultural resources for the development of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility. Our model contributes to organizational research novel theoretical understanding regarding the use of cultural resources in strategy formation and change. 3 Early research in cultural sociology conceptualized culture as taken-for-granted values, norms, beliefs, and symbols acquired through socialization (Wrong 1961), which shape action in predictable, culture-reproducing directions (see Peterson 1979, p. 161). A more recent perspective conceives of culture as a flexible toolkit of cultural resources that are used by individuals to develop different strategies of action and to achieve different goals. The view of culture as a toolkit from which individuals draw cultural resources " in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems (Swidler 1986, p. 273) " has become increasingly influential in the sociology of culture (DiMaggio 1997) and has spurred a vibrant body of work. Individuals have been shown to use cultural resources flexibly in political settings to change ideas and practices (Berezin 1997), in law to produce legal sentences that challenge existing ways of thinking (Calavita 2001), in social movements to frame the direction of change and its implementation (Benford and Snow 2000; Weber et al. How individuals use cultural resources depends on their cultural repertoires (Swidler 2001). Cultural repertoires consist of those resources that individuals have selected from the broader societal cultural toolkits " of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews (Swidler 1986, p. 273) and have learned to use. From the societal cultural toolkits, individuals tend to select resources that resonate with their identity, enable them " to be a certain kind of person (Swidler 2001, p. …