Weathering a Meta-Level Identity Crisis: Forging a Coherent Collective Identity for an Emerging Field
采用纵向扎根理论方法，研究新兴学术领域组织集体遭遇的身份危机，发现遗留身份和嵌套结构导致集体身份形成过程复杂且持续不稳定，最终通过形成“连贯身份”而非“共识身份”解决危机。
We employed a longitudinal, grounded-theory approach to investigate the occurrence of an identity crisis in an emerging collective of organizations attempting to form a new academic field. The findings indicate that legacy identities and the nested structure of such organizations have implications for the formation of identity at this level. Specifically, the co-evolution of organization-level and collective-level identities, and the interdependencies between the levels, rendered the collective identity formation process as multiphased, complex, contentious, and continuously precarious—ultimately leading to an identity crisis that was resolved not by arriving at a “consensual identity,” but, rather, a “coherent identity.” The findings contribute to the nascent stream of literature on collective identity beyond the organizational level by explicating identity-work processes involved in the precipitation, manifestation, and resolution of an identity crisis in an emerging field.