Questioning Organizational Identity During Radical Technological Change

Radical technological changes often threaten firms’ organizational identity and necessitate them to reinvent themselves, if they can. To contribute to research on firm responses to radical technological change, we adopt a multifaceted view of organizational identity and emphasize that who or what a firm is, is as important as what a firm does and why. We explore this identity-strategy nexus using a qualitative, multi-case study of Dutch music companies responding to the emergence of digitalization. Our analysis identifies three response mechanisms, which provide an alternative explanation for the heterogeneity in firm responses to the same radical technological change.