Reputation and identity conflict in management consulting
通过对一家大型咨询公司的案例研究，本文探讨了当组织身份与外部利益相关者的感知严重不符时，组织如何通过转向其他身份形式来缓冲身份变化，并分析了咨询公司等专业服务企业中声誉与身份的独特互动机制。
Based on a case study of a large consulting firm, this article makes two contributions to the literature on reputation and identity by examining how an organization responds when its identity is substantially misaligned with the experience and perceptions of external stakeholders that form the basis of reputational judgments. First, rather than triggering some form of identity adaptation, it outlines how other forms of identity can come into play to remediate this gap, buffering the organization’s identity from change. This shift to other individual identities is facilitated by a low organizational identity context even when the identity of the firm is coherent and strong. The second contribution concerns the conceptualization of consulting and other professional service firms. We explain how reputation and identity interact in the context of the distinctive organizational features of these firms. Notably, their loosely coupled structure and the central importance of expert knowledge claims enable individual consultants both to reinforce and supplement corporate reputation via individual identity work.