The dynamics of corporate brand charisma: Routinization and activation at Carlsberg IT

In response to Marshall Meyer (1990), who questioned Max Weber’s relevance to contemporary organization studies, Lounsbury and Carberry (2005) countered that, although Weberian scholarship in organization studies has dwindled, Weber’s theories continue to offer fertile ground to organizational researchers. To illustrate their point, Lounsbury and Carberry used Weber’s work to explain globalization, postindustrialism, and varieties of capitalism in the information age. We think that corporate branding is another contemporary phenomenon amenable to Weberian analysis and devote this article to exploring what Weber’s theory of the routinization of charisma might reveal about corporate branding. Interest in corporate branding migrated into organization studies from marketing, mainly in relation to research on organizational identity. In the realm of management practice, Olins (1989), Kapferer (1992), Ind (2001, 2003), Hatch and Schultz (2001) and Balmer and Greyser (2003) were among those who made connections between organizational identity and corporate brand management. Somewhat later, in the academic literature, Hatch and Schultz (2008) proposed organizational identity theory as a foundation for understanding how corporate branding works, while Kärreman and Rylander (2008) and Tarnovskaya (2011) presented Scandinavian Journal of Management (2013) 29, 147—162