Organizational Culture and Identity Strategies in International Management: an interdisciplinary review

The notion of organizational culture has raised a considerable interest during the past two decades in the field of International Management for being a factor playing an important role in the various organizational processes leading ultimately to performance. However organizational culture is generally presented as a set of values and ideas that would be homogeneously shared by the entire organization, a monolithic vision generally rejected by most social scientists and psychologists. This paper examines how different disciplines have conceptualized organizational culture and identity, progressively revealing its complex and multidimensional nature. We argue that there is a considerable discrepancy between the claimed organizational culture expressed and promoted by the top management as an indirect control mechanism and the sub-cultures and identities coexisting in a firm. Using the example of research on identity and culture in Mergers and Acquisitions, we show that the shift from the traditional “monolithic culture” analysis to the more complex “multiple culture” perspective requires major change in the approach of human interaction in International Business and Management.