Abstract
This study aims to develop a contextualized perspective for understanding the variation in the persistence of founders’ ideological imprints across different periods. We argue for the time-varying influence of political circumstances on ideological imprinting to grasp the consequences of multiple different imprints. Employing a multiple-case study research design that relies heavily on archival data, we explored the political contextual sources of variation in political cartoons of Turkish humor magazines from 1972 to 2015. Our findings show that the variation in the persistence of ideological imprints is related to political changes that result in (in)congruence between the founder’s political ideology and the ideology of the governing party, the type of political ideology that the founder represents, and change within the party ideology over time. By revealing how political contexts surrounding imprints lead to persistence, we contribute to imprinting theory and the organizational implications of political ideologies in non-Western contexts.
Introduction
Studies have shown that organizations founded in similar external conditions display similar characteristics and sustain these characteristics beyond their founding stage (Johnson, 2007; Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013). Founders are portrayed as a potential source of imprinting, notably during formative periods. They act as conduits by which the particular circumstances of time and place are conveyed to their organizations. Studies have further revealed that founders’ identities (Fauchart & Gruber, 2011), their initial mode of venture ideation (Hsu & Lim, 2014), and business novelty and thinking patterns (Snihur & Zott, 2019) can leave lasting imprints on their organizations’ outcomes despite significant environmental changes.
However, very few studies have offered insight into the imprinting effects of individual founders’ political ideologies (Marquis & Qiao, 2018; Wang et al., 2019) or more explicitly into the intervening conditions that can explain the variation in the persistence of founders’ ideological imprints over different periods. Political ideology, defined as the “interrelated set of attitudes and values about the proper goals of society and how they should be achieved” (Tedin, 1987, p. 65), has developed as an increasingly important topic within organization studies. Accordingly, studies have demonstrated that ideological imprints, which underline the political ideology formed through past events, influence the actions of organizations from firm-level internationalization strategies (Marquis & Qiao, 2018) to the likelihood of local firms securing political appointments (Wang et al., 2019). However, the nascent literature on ideological imprints fails to unpack the deeply contextualized conditions under which organizations are imprinted and more specifically the political contingencies surrounding ideological imprints.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine how political contextual circumstances generate variation in the persistence of ideological imprints. We theorize about the persistence of ideological imprints by examining key political contextual conditions leading to differences in the imprinting process, such as how the imprints left by founders embedded in different political ideologies and in different political eras have varied in relative salience. By showing this, we contribute to an understanding of why some imprints persist while others fade away.
Our study allows us to make theoretical contributions to the understanding of the variation in persistence of ideological imprints. First, we reveal how changes in the macro-political context influence the pervasiveness of imprints. Second, we show that the persistence of imprints tends to depend on the type of political ideology. Finally, we demonstrate that there are temporal variations in the relative salience of imprints, even within the same political epoch.
We examine these imprinting processes through ideological discourse analysis of political cartoons published in Turkish humor magazines from 1972 to 2015. As different media outlets reflect distinct political orientations in their news reporting, political cartoons also echo the ideological values of their producers and form a visual discourse in transmitting political meanings. In so doing, we not only extend our theoretical understanding of imprinting, but also respond to those who have called for more research from underrepresented populations and contexts.
Theoretical Framework
Persistence of Imprints and Political Contextual Conditions
The main premise of the imprinting thesis rests on the notion that contextual conditions during an organization’s founding leave lasting marks that impact subsequent organizational behavior (Johnson, 2007). As organizations founded at one time typically reflect a different social structure from those formed at another time (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 154), previous research has established that organizations are imprinted with the economic, technological, political, and institutional elements of their founding environment (Marquis, 2003).
The definition of imprinting encompasses the existence of temporally limited sensitive periods characterized by high susceptibility to environmental influences (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013, p. 199). Although most studies have taken founding as the key sensitive period for organizations in the maintenance and reproduction of imprints (Carroll & Hannan, 2004; Marquis et al., 2013), later sensitive periods such as new market entries, the process of becoming a public company, merging with another firm, periods of crisis, and shifts in senior executive positions are also times when imprinting can occur (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013, p. 223). The imprinting literature, while highlighting the links between resource and macro-economic environments (Marquis & Huang, 2010; Tilcsik, 2014), has offered limited insight on the impact of political environments on firms’ economic performances (Inoue, 2019).
As not all imprinting processes have the same influence, specific political circumstances under which ideological imprinting unfolds will likely impact the relative pervasiveness of imprints. Oertel et al.’s (2016) study on varying survival chances of firms founded in the former socialist part of Germany after reunification is illustrative in this regard. They concluded that organizations that experienced higher degrees of dissimilarity between the founding institutional environment and conditions after institutional change were more likely to radically alter their structures in order to improve their long-term survival prospects. Furthermore, in a study examining the influence of communist ideology on a firm’s political orientation in China, Wang et al. (2019) showed that the persistence of the imprint is shaped by an individual’s prior exposure to events consistent with the focal imprint and the features of the contemporary working environment. By examining the issue on local and regional social and economic environment scales, Wang et al. (2019) revealed that regions with stronger communist imprints consistent with the imprinted ideology reinforced the imprint effect.
As these studies focused on the varying consistencies between imprinted ideology and the broader contexts, they have given very limited attention to explaining the conditions that may result in in(congruence) between a founder’s imprinted ideology and the ideology of the governing party and hence how these might lead to changes in the relative pervasiveness of the ideological imprints. Hence, they fail to provide an explanation of how macro-level political environmental changes may alter the process of imprinting. In this regard, elections and associated political changes are potentially pivotal moments that may highlight a critical transition from one governmental ideology to another. Scholars have recently begun to delve into the implications of election cycles (Inoue, 2019; Julio & Yook, 2012) and organizational implications of national political conventions. Elections are shown to influence organizational outcomes particularly for politically embedded organizations connected to the state and its actors (Inoue, 2019, p. 26). Unpacking the susceptibility of different organizations to external influences during periods of political change may enable a more profound understanding of the relative salience of different imprints.
Founder’s Political Ideology as a Source of Imprinting
Prior research on imprinting has shown the significance of founders in selecting historically specific elements that endure for long periods of time (Baron et al., 1999; Johnson, 2007). Similarly, both Marquis and Qiao (2018) and Wang et al. (2019) revealed that founders who were politically indoctrinated in different historical periods were imprinted with different ideological beliefs, thereby underlining the political ideology of the individual as an individual source of imprinting. Political ideology at the individual level represents deeply held values, beliefs, and preferences about the ideal goals for society that individuals pursue through the course of their lives (Jost, 2006). Political ideology in organizations is mainly salient in terms of how values that differentiate conservatives and liberals impact organizational decisions about resource allocation, corporate strategy, and financial investment. Studies have shown that liberals prefer outcomes that distribute resources more evenly, with greater likelihood of liberal CEOs in comparison to conservative CEOs giving the same capital allocation across units within their firms (Gupta et al., 2018) or ensuring pay equity within top management teams (Chin & Semadeni, 2017). Furthermore, Christensen et al. (2015) showed that managers’ political orientations explained firm-level tax avoidance strategies. Due to risk aversion, conservative CEOs were found to be less likely to engage in corporate tax avoidance than liberal CEOs. For corporate strategy decisions, political ideology is influential in terms of impacting the extent of leaders’ concern for those to whom the organization is responsible. Furthermore, research has revealed that liberals adopt broader views of the stakeholder community in which the organization is embedded. For instance, liberal CEOs in the United States are more likely than conservative CEOs to implement CSR initiatives; similarly, those companies with higher numbers of liberals on average are more likely to adopt and promote CSR policies (Chin et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2019). Studies have also found that managers’ liberalism reduced gender differences among subordinates in terms of hiring, work team selection, pay, and promotions (Briscoe & Joshi, 2017; Carnahan & Greenwood, 2018; Chin & Semadeni, 2017). However, these studies fail to consider the macro-political environmental dynamics that may influence the ideologically driven strategic decisions of founders at the organizational level.
Political ideologies have been mainly conceptualized across the liberalism–conservatism axis (also referred to as the left–right axis), which is argued to be the most parsimonious way of classifying political attitudes of how individuals view ideal goals for society and ways to achieve them (Jost, 2006, p. 654). This conceptualization has been mainly employed in studies in the United States and European countries. Given that ideology is multifaceted and context-specific (Marquis & Qiao, 2018, p. 30), we need to understand how other ideologies and more specifically ideologies in the contexts of developing democracies influence organizational behavior and strategy. A characterization of political ideologies along with a liberalism–conservatism axis masks significant nuances in the origins of political ideologies and fails to account for the complexities in individuals’ ideological views (Feldman & Huddy, 2014). Recent studies have also confirmed that a single economic dimension of interventionism and egalitarianism failed to fully depict the left–right divide in the European context (Otjes, 2018). Rather than a monolithic portrayal of a left–right divide in Europe, overlapping ideological cleavages among issues such as the expansion of higher education, mass migration, ethnic diversity, identity politics, aging of societies, and the geographical segregation of populations between globalized major cities and declining hinterlands have emerged as important in building a holistic understanding of political ideology and its influence (Çarkoğlu, 2007; Ford & Jennings, 2020).
Moreover, while assuming that ideological imprinting has a uniform and stable effect, prior research has failed to consider the variation in the persistence of imprints over time (Wang et al., 2019). Indeed, political ideologies are subject to change in their policies and strategies over time (Bashirov & Lancaster, 2018). This change usually emanates from external factors such as “social, economic and political changes and events that take place outside the observed party” (Harmel & Janda, 1994, p. 267). The inclusion–moderation hypothesis, or the idea that increased political inclusion is a mechanism that produces moderation, contends that during periods of political liberalization or state repression, radical political parties encounter a trade-off between radicalism and inclusion, which urges them to moderate if they are to be included in the legal political system (Schwedler, 2011). Such moderation can be tactical where radical parties make a decision on whether to accept electoral democracy as a means to achieve ideological goals and renounce their original stance without compromising their core ideology (Karakaya & Yildirim, 2013). On the contrary, radicalization entails the (re)adoption of anti-system, non-democratic, and/or violent tactics where it involves a shift away from pluralistic views and goals and embraces a rigid ideology that is intolerant of alternative perspectives (Bashirov & Lancaster, 2018, p. 1212).
In unpacking the political contextual circumstances surrounding variation in persistence of ideological imprints, we argue for the importance of three intervening conditions: (a) the degree of compatibility between the founder’s and the governing party’s ideology, (b) the type of political ideology that the founder represents, and (c) the basis of party change over time. In the following section, the multifaceted nature of political ideologies is demonstrated with regard to the empirical context of this study.
Empirical Context: The Turkish Political Landscape (1971–2015)
It has been argued that the traditional left–right conceptualization used to describe party systems in the Western context has very limited explanatory power in other settings (Ayata & Ayata, 2007; Öniş, 2009). We therefore need a more diverse array of empirical settings to develop the scope and robustness of our explanatory theories, something to which we seek to contribute with our case set in Turkey. Instead of a single conventional continuum along a left–right ideological divide, a multidimensional framework provides a better explanation of ideologies in the Turkish context (Çarkoğlu, 2007; Hale, 2002). This framework captures several ideological cleavages along left–right, Islamism-secularism, and Turkish nationalism-Kurdish identity axes leads to four distinct ideological groups represented by different political parties: extreme-left, center-left, center-right, and extreme-right.
The center-left ideology primarily rests on the official state ideology of secularist nationalism that curtailed public expressions of religious and non-Turkish ethnic identities. It espoused the transformation of a backward and archaic traditional society into a scientific, secular, and developed modern state (Ayata & Ayata, 2007). The party system of the 1970s saw the Republican People’s Party (RPP) and the Justice Party (JP) as the two major parties, representing the center-left and center-right. These two parties alternated in power by forming coalition governments with minor extreme-right-wing parties, such as the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (NAP) and pro-Islamist National Salvation Party (NSP). The former embraced a combined ideology of ultra-nationalist anti-communism and militant agitation, whereas the latter relied on religious mobilization, mainly emphasizing a Muslim identity in electoral politics and criticizing the Republican modernization project.
The major distinguishing characteristic of party politics during the 1970s was the growing left–right ideological polarization, which escalated political violence, terrorism, and an accompanying economic crisis. This was ended by a military intervention in 1980 (Hale, 2002). The party system that was set by the 1983 elections following three years of military rule involved the newly formed center-rightist Motherland Party (MP), which went on to dominate politics by forming single-party governments until 1991. While the center-right remained loyal to the secular republic, it also promoted a more inclusive understanding of secularism that was tolerant of public expressions of Islam. It was pro-market and aimed to reduce the role of the state in the economy and to enhance export-led growth.
As political ideology is deeply contextualized, left-wing ideology of the post-1980 period is mainly characterized by cynicism, described as merciless scorn without taking the sensitivities of the situation into account or even for its own sake (Bora, 2006). Defined as a structural problem of the left-wing ideology in Turkey (Bora, 2006), such cynicism mainly rests on powerlessness in the face of reality or, more accurately, of the power that gives rise to that reality. Cynical left-wing ideology treats opposition to the policies of the government with demeaning scorn from an overwhelming sense of incapacity against power. Cynical leftists refrain from taking any political action, rather opting to understand the situation and take an opposing stance through harsh social criticism. As left-wing ideology fails to realize its ideological mission, it is argued that it substitutes the feeling of despair with a pessimistic and more often decadence-inclined cynicism (Bora, 2005). Fleming (2005) refers to the metaphor of psychological distancing in explaining cynicism, such that the individual constructs his/her ideal out of his/her ability to distance him/herself from the organization. Distancing enables individuals to distance their internal experiences of self from the established order and involves a kind of tactical detachment, aloofness, and normative isolation. Bora (2006) argues that left-wing political ideology devotes itself to cynicism when it is incapable of doing something, loses its constructive/founding ideological premises, and gets stuck in an “anti-” perspective. The defeat period for leftists, which started with the neoliberalism following the post-Soviet order and the Özal period after the 1980 coup, reduced both the language and action of leftists to the level of cynicism (İnsel, 2010).
The 1990s, in contrast to one party enjoying large parliamentary majorities, saw no single party securing the majority of the seats. As a consequence, political power was exercised through coalition or minority governments. The end of the Cold War and the dominance of neoliberalism precipitated the erosion of support for the center-right such that ideological differences paved the way to ethnic and religious identity politics in Turkey, leading to growing electoral support for Kurdish nationalist and pro-Islamist parties during the mid-1990s (Özbudun, 2000, p. 78).
As the political center withered, two extreme-right parties, the pro-Islamist Welfare Party (WP) and the ultra-nationalist NAP, vied for prominence (Çarkoğlu, 2007). The WP resorted to Islamic nationalism by utilizing strong collectivist and communitarian elements, whereas the NAP was nationalist, racist, xenophobic, and strongly statist (Arıkan, 2002). The NAP heavily used anti-Kurdish rhetoric and policies to develop its electoral base. On the other hand, the pro-Islamist parties leveraged heavy criticism of secularism, accusing secularists of limiting the rights of individuals in a country with a predominantly Muslim population to practice religion freely. From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the WP was relatively more radicalized, envisioning a state-led transformation of the socioeconomic system based on Islamic moral principles and reviving an authentic Islamic claim to be central to Turkey’s identity (Somer, 2014). The party also aimed to put an end to Turkey’s pursuit of EU membership and pro-West foreign policy.
The success of the pro-Islamist WP in the 1995 elections, winning 21.4%of the votes, allowed it to form a coalition government with the center-right True Path Party (TPP). However, the WP’s growing electoral strength also generated a strong backlash from the country’s secularist political forces. Following a crisis-ridden year during 1996–1997, the WP–TPP coalition was ousted from power amidst increasing pressures from the secularist forces, which were largely mobilized by the armed forces against the government. The subsequent coalition government formed in 1999 by the center-leftist Democratic Left Party (DLP) with the ultra-nationalist NAP came to an end with the 2002 elections.
By the end of the 1990s, anti-Western, anti-capitalist rhetoric had disappeared from the election manifestos of pro-Islamist parties while the newly formed Justice and Development Party (JDP) of Erdoğan redefined the role of the state as enabling the market to function effectively. The 2002 elections saw the JDP win 34.2% of the electoral vote and form a single-party government. The tactical moderation of the JDP to gain relative acceptance by the center depended on avoiding religious discourse, adopting liberal democracy, embracing Turkey’s Western alliances, pursuing EU membership, and promoting economic globalism (Somer, 2014). The victory of the party continued with both the 2007 and 2011 elections and the party became more religiously conservative from 2011 onwards. The pro-liberal democratic zeal of the party increasingly paved the way towards nationalist and social-conservative rhetoric and practice. Table 1 illustrates the electoral politics, accompanied by Table 2, which shows the ideological underpinnings of the political parties in Turkey between 1971 and 2015. Table 3 gives a timeline of important events in Turkey relevant to this study.
Electoral Politics in Turkey.
Notes. Center-left parties: Republican People’s Party (RPP), Democratic Left Party (DLP), Social Democratic Populist Party (SDPP).
Center-right parties: Justice Party (JP), Motherland Party (MP), True Path Party (TPP).
Extreme-right parties: National Salvation Party (NSP), Nationalist Action Party (NAP), Welfare Party (WP), Justice and Development Party (JDP).
Major Political Parties in Turkey.
Source. Reproduced from Akan (2015, pp. 143–149).
Timeline of Important Events for This Study in Turkey (1970–2015).
Magazines and the Use of Humor in Turkey (1971–2015)
In Turkey, it is argued that the role of humor magazines is to make the forms of domination apparent so that the dominant classes can be talked about in the public sphere in a cynical manner (Cantek, 1997). The sarcastic attitude towards the ruling elite and articulation of oppositional discourse through cartoons has become a strategy for demonstrating disdain for ruling parties in societies such as Turkey where political opposition has failed to arise (Hoşafçı, 2006). All of the content produced symbolizes sudden, minor intellectual guerrilla attacks against the governing power. Humor magazines hence expose images, narratives, and tactics that are used to reflect the political order (Cantek, 1997). They have also been seen as a powerful tool to fight against repressive regimes and challenge the dominant political discourse under authoritarian rulers (Eğilmezler-Boylan, 2015). Therefore, humor can be seen “as a safe release of aggressiveness against political order, as a vehicle for expressing popular disdain or for questioning the legitimacy of the political system” (Görkem, 2015, p. 591). The appeal of the magazines as sources of opposition, rebellion, and freedom of expression even during times of ideological constraints was further reflected in the highest sales figures of the Gırgır and Leman magazines during the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.
Historically, humor magazines first became apparent with the center-left Gırgır in 1972. Gırgır reached a circulation of 500,000 during the 1980s, making it the best-selling humor magazine of its time (Gönenç & Cantek, 2013). Others were subsequently launched and either positioned as competitors or created by cartoonists who left Gırgır. For example, in the 1970s, Çarşaf (1975–1992) was created as a competitor of Gırgır, while the short-lived Marxist-socialist Mikrop magazine (1978) was launched by cartoonists who left Gırgır. Similarly, the 1980s witnessed several cartoonists leaving Gırgır to publish the relatively marginal and radical Limon magazine (1986–1991) that became Leman in 1991. Limon followed a path of radical and desperate criticism of all political parties (Cantek, 2002). Another separation from Gırgır came in 1989, when Hıbır (1989–1995) was formed as an alternative with a center-left ideology and became popular among the emerging urban middle-class youth. The popularity of Hıbır was also reflected in its circulation figures of 350,000–400,000, which were close to those of Gırgır. The humor magazine market of the 1990s was dominated by Limon’s successor, Leman (1991–), being the most popular one with respect to its highest circulation in the 1990s and the longest-running humor magazine in Turkish history, as well as Hıbır’s successor, H.B.R. Maymun (1995–1998), and Pişmiş Kelle (1990–2001) (Cantek, 2002). Pişmiş Kelle was launched by the founder of Mikrop and adopted the Marxist, socialist, and anti-fascist ideology of its predecessor. Separations from existing humor magazines also continued into the 2000s, with a group of cartoonists who left Leman launching Lombak in 2001 and another group founding Penguen in 2002.
In comparison to the 1970s, when class conflict was the defining element of internal politics, the economic and social developments of the 1980s, emphasizing consumerism, not only made class issues more trivial but also had a significant impact on humor. The ideologically driven left–right distinction lost its impact in the 1980s. Neo-liberal policies and an accompanying export-promotion model led to an intensified emphasis on capital and privatization. The expansion of capitalism created a new class of youth distanced from politics. Socially, the eradication of the sense of “us” and its replacement with “me” led to the dissolution of the old neighborhood culture that Gırgır portrayed in its cartoons.
In this vein, Şimşek (2014) argued that the new ruling class that emerged in the neoliberal period ended the era characterized by the “poor little man who mocked himself” sense of humor. Instead, the new middle class formed a language that ridiculed subclasses. The new mass culture and changes in media ownership also triggered a new style of humor, where former communitarian values such as solidarity were slowly replaced by a new urban culture from the 1980s onwards (Eğilmezler-Boylan, 2015). The individualistic and cynical characteristics of the new era, largely represented in Leman, became the ultimate reflection of the “me” identity of the era. The fading away of class issues and prominence of ethnicity concerns came along with the weakening of the social welfare state in the 1980s as people began to identify themselves as part of diverse ethnic and religious groups.
In the aftermath of the military coup d’état of 1980, some topics such as the behavior of the military regime and the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey were treated as taboo subjects by humor magazines (Eğilmezler-Boylan, 2015). Humorists combatted the pressure they were under by creating their own secret language that only they and their readers could understand (interview with a caricaturist from Gırgır). With the elections in 1983 and following the formation of center-right single-party governments, waves of neoliberalism and liberalization were also reflected in humor. For example, Prime Minister Özal would hang Gırgır caricatures on his wall and show them to International Monetary Fund representatives during loan meetings. All the same, in comparison to no court cases filed against cartoonists in the second half of the 1970s, several cartoonists from Leman were imprisoned during the 1990s (Vreskala, 2018) and sporadic cases continued into the 2000s. The 1990s witnessed a change in the socio-cultural context, with the new-right movement becoming firmly established. The birth of new media under the auspices of new-rightist editors paved the way for Leman to radically position itself as defending human rights that were completely discarded and perceived as an outdated concept even by social democrats (Arık, 1998, pp. 110–111). While standing against this change, the magazine led the anti-media movement and created humor content that would otherwise be non-existent in mainstream media outlets. With the increasing authoritarianism of the late 2000s, humor magazines remained relatively aloof to political pressure in comparison to other types of media and showed the most resistance towards ideological constraints (Aytekin, 2014).
Methodology
We adopted a multiple-case study design in order to identify the conditions driving the persistence of founders’ ideological imprints in their political cartoon production (Chreim et al., 2019; Cloutier & Ravasi, 2019). Political cartoons as a part of visual media build political values and subject positions by culminating in a construal of self and other and emphasizing certain ideological underpinnings (Kardaş, 2012, p. 205). Cartoons are considered as a form of visual communicative discourse transmitting political meanings and serving as a filtering system that contributes to the framing of social reality (Greenberg, 2002). Relatedly, studies have shown that the political ideologies of cartoonists are manifested in their cartoons (Mourenza, 2016); they directly or indirectly express their political ideologies through exploitation of available semiotic elements, pursuing political implications (Medhurst & DeSousa, 1981). This multiple-case study encompasses four humor magazines in Turkey, Gırgır, Leman, Ustura, and Cafcaf, representing different political ideologies and spanning different time periods. The uncovering of similarities and differences across cases allowed us to highlight dynamics that would be more difficult to observe with single-case studies.
We initially sought to identify the political ideologies of the founders and the imprints of different political ideologies. Political science research has long held that “party identification represents the most stable and influential political predisposition in the belief system of ordinary citizens” (Goren et al., 2009, p. 805). The political ideologies of the founders have been revealed through interviews with them and by secondary archival materials such as autobiographies, editorial texts, correspondence on social media, and other interviews given to media outlets. The author conducted face-to-face interviews with the founders, which lasted between 45 and 70 minutes. In order to pinpoint their ideological leanings, questions such as “How do you identify yourself in political/ideological terms?,” “By whom are you ideologically influenced/inspired?,” “Do you associate your ideology with a specific political party?,” “What were the main events that brought you closer to this ideological leaning?,” and “Do you see any change in your political ideology from where you started and where you are now?” were directed to the founders. Both the interviews and secondary materials were thematically analyzed to uncover the dominant ideas that shaped their political ideologies (Maclean et al., 2014).
To capture the imprints of political ideologies, we relied on election manifestos of political parties and employed an inductive analytic approach to guide our coding process. We identified main themes with regard to the role of the state and religion, socioeconomic development strategies, foreign policy, state-business relations, and labor issues. As themes emerged, we cycled back to the cover pages of the humor magazines to check whether the political cartoonists reflected these patterns.
As “the acquisition, expression, enactment and reproduction” of ideology happens through discursive structures and meanings, depending on the context (Dijk, 2006, p. 124), we examined the cover pages of humor magazines through ideological discourse analysis. One of the ways in which ideology in discourse is organized and expressed is through “positive self-representation (boasting) and negative other representation (derogation)” (Dijk, 2006, p. 126). It has been argued that political ideologies generate ideological polarization between in-groups and out-groups, while they tend to express their own good aspects in comparison to bad features of their rivals. This polarization hence impacts all levels of discourse from visual structures and lexicon to the underlying semantic levels of meaning (Dijk, 2013). Both at the micro level of lexicalization and sentence meaning as well as the macro level of topics and overall meaning, discourse semantics may be affected by underlying ideologies (Dijk, 2016, p. 28).
Three stages guided our data analyses. First, we established the content in the political cartoons of different time periods with a close reading of the political contextual landscape of the era. By doing so, we identified recurring topics, events, and actors in the visuals and paid attention to any temporal variation. Second, we carried out a more in-depth ideological discourse analysis of the political cartoons. In accordance with Dijk’s ideological square typology (2006), cartoons were coded with regard to “positive representations of us,” “negative representations of us,” “negative representations of them,” and “positive representations of them.” In order to see how founders emphasized their and others’ characteristics, which underlines how members of the in-group emphasize their own actions and those of out-group members, we also coded for actor descriptions (i.e., the way that political actors are described in either negative or positive terms) and overarching topic(s) in the political cartoons (i.e., selection of positive/negative topics about us/them). In total, 1573 cartoons from four magazines were coded (see Table 4).
Distribution of Cartoons along Ideological Square Typology.
In the final stage, we explored in more detail the ways in which the discourses of political ideologies were drawn on by political cartoonists. In order to enable comparisons, we examined the extent of compatibility between the discursive elements of different political ideologies revealed from the election manifestos and ideological elements in political cartoons in terms of their meaning over time. In the following section, each of the case studies is analyzed in detail with particular focus on ideological discursive elements. Tables 5–8 show how we moved from empirical themes to conceptual categories and aggregate dimensions in our analytical process.
Data Structure (Gırgır Magazine).
Data Structure (Leman Magazine).
Data Structure (Ustura Magazine).
Data Structure (Cafcaf Magazine).
Case Studies
Gırgır magazine (1972–1989)
Gırgır was founded by the center-leftist political cartoonist Oğuz Aral in 1972. This followed the military coup of 1971 and Gırgır quickly became the most circulated magazine of its time with its middle-of-the-road policy and apolitical cartoons that were mostly sexual in nature (Tunç, 2001, p. 246). Its satire evolved to become moderately political in the 1980s with the political landscape of the period underpinning center-right governments. The founder’s negative representation of the other and positive representation of the magazine’s own ideology displayed temporal variation between the 1970s and 1980s. To start with the former, by adopting the slogan of “Gırgır does not deal with politics but politicians,” cartoons embodied derogatory personal representations of right-wing politicians by ridiculing their individual personal traits and appearances. This was mainly achieved by the feminization of political actors, caricaturized presentations of their naked bodies, and unrealistic depictions (May 11, 1975, Issue 144, Figure 1a). During the 1970s, negative actor descriptions were visualized by incorporating elements outside the political landscape. For instance, political actors were portrayed in apolitical routine social life settings such as in male-female relationships, sports, and entertainment. In the 1980s, such representations shifted with negative representations of right-wing leaders featuring them in isolation and directly targeting their wrongdoings. During the single center-right-wing government of the 1980s, the negative representation of political actors was relatively stronger with respect to their governmental policies and personalities as these figures were heavily portrayed as individuals guided by their apparent self-interest, lawlessness, and willingness to accept bribes (August 13, 1989, Issue 884, Figure 1b).
The magazine’s representation of political affairs in the aftermath of the 1980 coup took brutal aim at the protagonists of the coup, contributing to the political positioning of the magazine as the voice of the opposition. In contrast to the 1970s, the center-leftist ideological imprint of the founder became much more apparent following the 1983 elections won by the center-rightist MP (July 11, 1987, Issue 788, Figure 1c). The magazine positioned itself as statist by resisting the negative consequences of the capitalist system and neoliberal economic programs with its apparent political attitude as the defender of the secular, contemporary nation founded by Atatürk in 1923. Relatedly, the expansion of religious education and the threat of Islamization, in opposition to the state ideology, were targeted for criticism in cartoons that reflected a secular, pro-modernization stance (Cantek, 2008).
The founder’s positive representation of a center-left ideology was also susceptible to both temporal variation and party change. The positive representation was relatively covert in the 1970s with its weak support of the RPP, which eventually drifted towards a negative representation of the center-left from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s. The center-left ideology saw the West as a source of modernization but also considered it a source of imperialist conspiracy that threatened Turkey’s sovereignty. This was reflected in cartoons that blamed the government for being a representative of imperialist powers. In economic policy, center-leftists advocated extensive state regulation of the economy, adapting a highly critical attitude towards privatization and neoliberal reform programs. This was very much reflected in the cartoons of the period, criticizing corporate holding structures, aligned state-capital interests, and deterioration of workers’ rights.
In the 1980s, the lack of opposition from center-leftist political parties also contributed to the magazine’s drift towards a negative representation of its own ideology. The political landscape of the late 1980s was reduced to a contest over leadership and intra-party struggles within the center-left (Ayata & Ayata, 2007). Cartoons of the period accused center-leftist parties of not being an effective opposition and portrayed quarrels between the leaders of different center-leftist parties. Parties and their leaders were mainly criticized for their inability to oppose the governing power and their failure in fulfilling the missions of a “real” social democrat party. Furthermore, the RPP had also gone through its own transformation. Election manifestos of the 1970s prioritized a developmental economic model in which labor rights were emphasized, unequal income distribution and discrepancies across regions problematized, and the creation of a fairer social justice and universal social security system prioritized. In the 1980s, the party shifted to emphasizing more general liberal policy tools, transparency, and accountability. Therefore, cartoons raising issues of poor living conditions, poverty, failure to access basic goods, and upsurges in commodity prices of the 1970s were replaced by coverage of alleged mafia-government relations, corruption, and bribery in the post-1980 period. In conclusion, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by variations in the persistence of the founder’s center-leftist ideological imprints. The moderate criticism of “other” ideologies during the center-left and coalition governments of the 1970s, which hid the complex nature of arrangements between political actors and social reality, was altered into intense criticism during the single-party government of center-right ideology in the 1980s. Moderate positive representation of the center-leftist ideology of the 1970s was to a great extent eliminated and transformed into opposition in the 1980s. Gırgır as the most popular magazine of its time with the highest circulation figures was taken over by another business group in 1989 and, following that, the founder left the magazine together with its cartoonists and founded a new one.
Leman magazine (1991–2011)
The Leman magazine was founded in 1991 by two previous Gırgır cartoonists, representing a left-wing ideology colored by cynicism (Bora, 2010; Cantek, 1997; Hoşafçı, 2006; Şimşek, 2014). By heavily resorting to slang in its content, Leman gave the image of not falling into the dominant ideology, not showing concern or any interest in authority, but rather explicitly saying who was engaged in political wrong-doing. At the same time, Leman’s position was more of a tamed critique without any opposition to the capitalist system. The magazine’s position was manifested through anti-imperialist, anti-statist, anti-racist, and anti-media discursive elements in cartoons. The magazine claimed to reflect the distorted cultural and social relations prevalent in Turkish society and positioned itself as engaging in radical opposition to the government and supporting controversial issues of the time, such as Kurdish nationalism.
Leman’s cynical leftist ideology was mainly fed by opposing the dominant political discourse, nourished by revealing content that was unexpressed in the public sphere and covered up by the dominant ideology. The main factor in the popularization of the magazine was that it adopted a stance of attacking all kinds of views and actions that advocated the dominant ideology. The advocacy of “spelling out its opposition” against the ruling classes also led it to become the best-selling magazine. Although these attacks opened a hole in the hegemonic discourse through their sharp criticism, they failed to offer an alternative opposition policy for liberating and transforming society (Bora, 2010). This failure is argued to be associated with the cynical attitude of left-wing ideology that manifested in the combination of two expressions, “whatever we say, nothing will change” and “we do what no one else can do, we do not hesitate to speak our mind,” which heavily dominated the magazine’s discourse. Reflecting a safe and tolerated cynical stance, Leman produced content within the institutionalized scope of critical humor.
The persistence of cynical leftist ideological imprints held firm irrespective of political changes between 1991 and 2011, resulting in a consistent negative representation of the other (center-right, extreme-right ideologies). Turkey was governed by unstable coalitions between 1991 and 2002, which were mostly led by center-right and extreme-right parties. The only radical change was between 1999 and 2002, when the center-left DLP formed a coalition with the ultra-nationalist NAP and center-right MP. The intense criticism also continued during this period with criticism of the coalition partners, and from 2002 to 2011, during the single government of the JDP.
In contrast to the center-left Gırgır’s negative representation of other ideologies mainly through caricaturized actor descriptions, the founders of Leman produced cartoons based on coherent ideological themes, which remained stable over the magazine’s lifespan. The founders reflected anti-imperialism in their cartoons on foreign policy by accusing Turkish politicians of obeying U.S. orders and increasing the Americanization of Turkish society. The portrayal in 1999 of U.S. President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and the depiction of Turkish society revering them as gods (November 20, 1999, Issue 419, Figure 2a), showed commonalities with another cartoon in 2002 (October 17, 2002, Issue 571) that heavily criticized the Iraq policy of President Bush while using English phrases such as “Go Home Yankee!”
Cartoons that negatively represented the ultra-nationalist other reflected an anti-racist discursive element. In the Turkish political landscape, racism is often attributed to the NAP with respect to its nationalist, anti-democratic, and xenophobic ideological underpinnings (Arıkan, 2002). Throughout the magazine’s lifespan, but particularly rising in frequency after the 1999 elections with the NAP becoming a coalition partner, cartoons manifested opposition of NAP supporters by portraying rising attacks on leftists. Cartoons from the different political periods of 1994 (December 24, 1994, Issue 163), 1996 (December 15, 1996, Issue 266, Figure 2b), and 1999 (May 8, 1999, Issue 391) show the magazine’s perception of the NAP as fascist and racist. More specifically, cartoons portrayed political violence at universities by NAP followers against left-wing university students and readers of Leman magazine. Finally, anti-media discourse as the main ideological aspect of the magazine was prevalent irrespective of the governing party. The anti-media discourse implied that the media was corrupt and urged cartoonists to criticize it (October 21, 2000, Issue 2000/43, Figure 2c). In this regard, the magazine positioned itself as free and independent of big media groups and engaged in a battle against the mainstream media, depicted as representing the dominant ideology of the state.
With respect to the negative representation of the center-left ideology, the founders depicted these parties with feelings of disdain, anger, and disbelief and did not hesitate to equate social democrats with right-wing parties in their cartoons. In contrast to the center-left Gırgır, Leman’s stance towards center-left parties was more discriminatory and provocative, with its criticism directed at the incompetence of the leaders of the center-left rather than the underlying ideology. Irrespective of the political party in power, the magazine reflected a cynical leftist stance through heavy and overt criticism of the center-left political actors, as in this example: “The right always determines the agenda. Social democrats are in despair” (June 14, 1993, Issue 83). Similarly, the three leaders of different center-left parties at the time were criticized as “those that abandoned the left in Turkey, who carried radical and center-right votes to 80%, and left-wing votes to marginal figures” (March 4, 1994, Issue 125).
Ustura magazine (1994–1997)
Ustura was founded in 1994 by a pro-Islamist cartoonist who had previously worked for the center-left Gırgır. The founder described the magazine as one “that does not humiliate through humor, curse spiritual values or exploit sexuality” (September 7, 1994, p. 2). Although Ustura only survived from 1994 to 1997, the political landscape went through significant shifts in that time period, starting with a coalition government of the center-right TPP and center-left RPP, followed by victory for the pro-Islamist WP in the 1995 elections and subsequent government formation between the WP and TPP. The period ended with the post-modern coup of 1997 and the outlawing of the WP for its Islamic ideology.
The negative representation of other ideologies displayed variation before and after the 1995 elections. Up until the mid-1996 coalition between the WP and TPP, the founder’s harsh negative representations of other political actors heavily incorporated discursive elements from an extreme-left-wing ideology. It mainly revolved around anti-government, anti-capitalist, and anti-media discourses without attempting to instantiate positive representations of a pro-Islamist ideology. The anti-government discourse included criticisms of the governing party and its coalition partners. Anti-capitalism was reified through criticisms of the privatization of state-owned economic enterprises, the “capitalist class,” and the down-playing of the social state (October 28, 1994, Issue 7, Figure 3a). An anti-media stance was prevalently interlinked with criticisms of politicians and the state apparatus. The view of the mainstream media as corrupt was portrayed with “dirt” and “litter bin” metaphors, whereby the media was viewed as contaminated (September 16, 1994, Issue 1). As the founder intended to extend his magazine’s reach beyond an Islamist audience, he developed a moderate tone in line with the secularist mainstream ideology of the period. This moderate representation of Islamist ideology was attained by simultaneously integrating elements from both left-wing and religious discourses. For instance, state repression of religious freedoms was drawn together with the right to strike for civil servants (July 30, 1995, Issue 46). Following the 1995 elections, the founder started to manifest positive representations of his ideology in close alignment with the WP’s political identity. In contrast to the previous period, the founder resorted to a high prevalence of pro-government cartoons along with the party’s discourse. Cartoons reflecting the WP’s discourse in the mid-1990s also presented an anti-Western, anti-European approach and a promise of a state based on nationalism and Islam (Dağı, 1998, p. 131). The WP was against Turkey’s membership of the EU, viewing it as a “Christian Unity against Muslims” (Cizre, 2008). Similarly, the European Customs Union was portrayed as a “Butchers Union” with an ironic visual of a cow dancing and celebrating its membership (December 16, 1995, Issue 66, Figure 3b). As part of its anti-Western stance, the goal of the party was to forge a closer union among Muslim countries. In this regard, emphasis was given to strengthening relations with the Middle East, African states, and Bosnia. Accordingly, the magazine devoted attention to wars in these countries, viewing them as human rights violations, and adopting a strong opposition to Israel (March 27, 1996, Issue 85).
The negative representation of the other became more explicit and discursively radicalized after the external shock of the 1997 post-modern coup and the subsequent resignation of the WP government. The main objective of the military was to undermine the power of the Imam-Hatip religious schools, which had been designed to educate Islamic preachers but had increasingly become a power base for defenders of Islam and political parties based on its ideas (Güven, 2005). In the aftermath of the coup, cartoons showed support for religious Imam-Hatip schools and criticized the ban of these schools by the secularist military leadership (November 8, 1997, Issue 165, Figure 3c). To conclude, the pro-Islamist ideological imprints of the founder were shown to be moderate and vague from its founding to the 1995 elections due to the political context of the period and the mainstream secularist ideology of the state. This period was characterized more by resorting to discursive elements of extreme-left-wing ideology with carefully disguised religious elements. However, from the electoral victory of a pro-Islamist party in 1995 until the closure of the magazine, the congruence between the founder’s ideology and the governing party led to a dramatic revival of pro-Islamist ideological imprint manifestations by providing support to the pro-Islamist party and crafting humor around the party’s narratives. Unlike Leman, since their pro-Islamist critical humor was not institutionalized, they needed to adapt their ideological imprints. The magazine, being one of the first and relatively longer attempts of Islamist humor, was closed following the 1997 post-modern coup due to economic difficulties.
Cafcaf magazine (2007–2015)
Cafcaf was founded by a pro-Islamist Turkish language teacher in 2007 who had served as the editor of several Islamist journals during the 1990s. Challenging the established secular hegemony in the cartoon field, the magazine mainly portrayed the social and political problems of conservatives during JDP rule while aiming to reach an Islamic audience. Cafcaf was distinctive in the sense that although it coincided with the single-party government of the JDP, the manifestation of the founder’s ideological imprints changed over time. Before 2011, the magazine was oriented towards crafting content reflective of Islamic values and criticism of secular institutions, such as the army and the judiciary. From 2011 onwards, this was replaced by efforts to legitimize the government and its policies while criticizing those who opposed the government. In contrast to the extreme-left ideological imprints of Leman’s founder that were coherently evident throughout the lifetime of the magazine, Cafcaf’s founder reflected stronger pro-Islamist imprints as the governing party maintained its hegemony and gained authoritarian momentum in the post-2011 period.
The political dynamics in the founding period of Cafcaf were precipitated by the 1997 political crisis when the military intervened in politics to counter the appeal of Islam. The aftermath of the crisis witnessed Islamic groups reassessing their ideological rhetoric and taking a “low-profile, non-confrontational and moderate stance” (Özgür, 2012). The initial period from 2007 to 2011 was marked by a moderate level of negative representation of center-left parties and very limited positive espousing of a pro-Islamist ideology. Cartoons expressed opposition to state repression and portrayed their in-group with a “victim” metaphor. Topics included past events such as the banning of headscarves, as the government had banned women who wore headscarves from working in the public sector with a regulation following the 1982 Constitution, as well as the military’s intervention in politics, judicial decisions, religious Imam-Hatip schools, and negative references to the RPP (October 2009, Issue 28). The RPP was usually ridiculed for its inability to solve the headscarf issue of conservatives in Turkey (September 2010, Issue 42, Figure 4a). Another striking feature of this period was the founder’s policy of giving pedagogical lessons on social and religious values, such as teaching religious terms and rituals, criticizing low levels of literacy, and opposing the content of television broadcasts (April 2010, Issue 34, Figure 4b).
The post-2011 period was indicative of party change from a self-proclaimed conservative democracy to an authoritarian turn in a more Islamist direction (Tansel, 2018). The JDP not only lost its reformist zeal but also sought to undo some important democratic gains along with de-moderation of its religious discourse (Başkan, 2015, p. 43). The humor content of the magazine based on rights and freedoms dramatically drifted towards embeddedness in JDP policies from 2011 onwards. As the party converged towards authoritarianism, the magazine’s content moved away from its moderate claims and began to be a defender of the JDP’s leader and policies. The growing democratic backslides and authoritarian turn of the government were realized through two external shocks in the post-2011 period. First, the Gezi protests emerged in 2013 as a movement from below, reacting to the rising authoritarianism of the JDP government. It started out as a small-scale environmental protest to prevent the demolition of a city park and evolved into a massive civil revolt (Öniş, 2015). Associated cartoons portrayed an attitude in support of the JDP’s stance of framing Gezi youth as “them” and using Erdoğan’s denounced narrative of “çapulcu”—marauders, low-life, riffraff, or bums—to characterize the protesters. In a conversation between a university student and his uncle, the uncle makes fun of him with these words: “What happened to you? Weren’t you making a revolution in October? If you can’t beat them, join them! Don’t resist too much, çapulcu!” (October 2013, Issue 57).
The second turning point in the shift in orientation of the magazine was a corruption scandal involving four former ministers, their sons, President Erdoğan’s family, and certain bureaucrats, which became public on December 17 and 25, 2013. These allegations were labeled as a plot against the government orchestrated by members of the Gülen community within the judiciary and the police force. Serious charges of corruption suggested that Turkey’s new elites were increasingly benefiting from asymmetric access to state resources, which seemed to confer tremendous advantages on individuals and groups within the bureaucracy connected to the higher ranks of the party apparatus. Following this, the cartoons criticized the Gülen community and its leader while positively representing the President (September 2014, Issue 62, Figure 4c). In conclusion, the pro-Islamist ideological imprints of the founder under a pro-Islamist government may still be subject to variation. In this case, the 2011 elections and the party’s authoritarian turn served as an impetus for the founder to become more embedded in the ruling party’s narratives and attempts to legitimate government policies. Cafcaf, being the subsequent pro-Islamist humor magazine following Ustura of the 1990s, closed due to low circulation numbers and the founding team continued the tradition with another magazine.
Discussion
Our primary interest in this study has been to identify contextual contingencies that result in the varying relative persistence and decay of ideological imprints across different eras. Our study makes three theoretical contributions. First, we show how changes in the macro-political context impact the relative pervasiveness and subsequent resilience of imprints. Mechanisms leading to imprint decay have mainly remained at organizational and individual levels. For instance, at the organizational level, they include distant organizational search (Kriauciunas & Kale, 2006) and incongruence between the initial and current organizational environments hindering individuals’ imprinted skills (Tilcsik, 2014). At the institutional level, Liedong and Frynas (2018) have shown that the institutional voids characteristic of emerging countries may culminate in poor firm performance and imprint decay. At a broader level, how firms manage their political environment has critical implications for organizational success. As firms do not operate in a vacuum and the political environment exerts significant influence on corporate behavior (Oliver & Holzinger, 2008), our focus on how the political context influences ideological imprints reveals important insights into how certain imprints are more resilient while others fade away in light of government changes. Political changes characterized by regular elections are highly significant elements of the political landscape in many countries. It has been shown that elections influence organizational outcomes in settings marked with politically embedded organizations linked to state actors (Inoue, 2019), and it is indeed important for managers to deal with the political environment to enhance their firms’ market performance. Moreover, studies have concluded that decoupling market and political environments may be problematic in some contexts in which they are closely interrelated (Guo et al., 2017; Oliver & Holzinger, 2008). Our study extends this work by demonstrating how political changes resulting from elections impacted the persistence of a founder’s ideological imprints in such a way that the imprints were more pronounced when there was incongruence between the founder’s and the governing power’s ideologies. By showing this, we have extended understanding of how the fit between the imprint and other organizational features such as top management role structures and dominant logics contributes to imprint decay (Burton & Beckman, 2007).
Second, we demonstrate how variations in the ideologies of founders lead to variations in imprinting effects. In contrast to the argument that institutional environments that are consistent with the imprinted ideology tend to lead to greater persistence of the imprint effect (e.g., Wang et al., 2019), we reveal that irrespective of the congruence between imprinted values and the environment, the persistence of the ideological imprints tends to be high for certain types of political ideologies (in our case, left-wing cynicism). We theorize that the deeply contextualized nature of political ideology informs organizational behavior in different ways, and that, in particular, a more moderate founder’s/firm’s ideologies are more susceptible to changes in the political environment. Our findings showed that institutionalized critical humor of the left as opposed to extreme-right serves the persistence of ideological imprints as a cynical stance. This led us to shed more light on context sensitivity by demonstrating how both temporal and geographical settings can engender a profound influence on the socio-political embeddedness of organizations as a result of the historically contingent processes from which they have emerged (Suddaby et al., 2014).
While revealing the misfit between imprinted features and the institutional requirements of the organization’s environment, studies have highlighted variations in failure rates depending on to what extent organizations may change their imprint and adapt to new circumstances (Marquis & Huang, 2010) and experience different levels of perceived adaptation pressure (Oertel et al., 2016). Our study extends this stream of literature by showing how the type of the founder’s imprinted political ideology impacts organizational outcomes. Contrary to the literature that underlines the varying effects of imprinting before and after radical change (Oertel et al., 2016), the imprinting effect of the founder’s left-wing ideology is found to be high in a period in which center-rightist and/or pro-Islamist ideology is in power. Even if the leftist ideological imprint does not match the governing power, stemming from contextualized nature of the cynical left-wing ideology, the persistence of the ideological imprint was more persistent. By contrast, the center-left and extreme-right imprints fluctuated with political changes. As individuals are polarized into and strongly identify with ideological cynicism, they are less cognitively flexible than moderates (Greenberg & Jonas, 2003), and this cynicism influences the persistence of their ideological imprints.
While studies suggest that imprinting might be most intense during an organization’s founding (Baron et al., 1999), our study demonstrates that there are temporal variations in the relative salience of imprints, even within the same political era. Our findings also shed light on the important but neglected question of whether imprinting conditions vary across a single political epoch. In explaining change in extreme parties that swing along the ideological continuum over time, we theorized the inclusion-moderation argument, which rests on the idea that competitive electoral processes may repress radical ideas, hence transforming extremist parties into more moderate ones. In order to be included in electoral systems, parties move from the end of their ideological spectra to positions that are more acceptable to broader constituencies (Schwedler, 2011).
We extend the growing literature on the role of political ideologies in shaping non-political organizational outcomes (Briscoe et al., 2014; Gupta & Briscoe, 2019; Gupta & Wowak, 2017) by demonstrating how political environments can affect the persistence and decay of ideological imprints. Although scholars have acknowledged that contextual constraints can hinder CEOs’ infusion of their ideologies into firm strategies (Chin et al., 2013; Christensen et al., 2015; Gupta et al., 2019), we lack an understanding of this issue at a macro level. Briscoe and Joshi (2017) provided evidence for the impact of a supervisor’s ideology being influenced by the degree of alignment with the immediate workplace context. Gupta and Briscoe (2019) have shown that ideological effects are stronger when organizational ideology contradicts the ideology of the external environment in which the organization is embedded, such as its community or industry. We advance these findings by showing how the macro-level political ideological context of the organization influences the relative salience of the political ideology of the founder to shape organizational outcomes. Ideologies in an organization’s societal context may influence the pervasiveness of an individual’s ideology such that when managers formulate their organizational responses, their ideology will be more or less salient depending on its congruence with the macro-level political ideology. Our study responds to the call for research on developing and testing contextual conditions that make individuals’ political views salient to organizations. We contribute to the literature by considering when and for whom political ideology tends to be activated—or dormant—to understand when it is more likely to impact organizational decisions (Swigart et al., 2020).
By referring to the contextual determinants of political ideology in organizations (Swigart et al., 2020), our work reveals the role that politically charged events, such as elections, play in making political ideology more salient within organizations and highlights the dynamic relationship between political ideology and organizational outcomes over time. Importantly, therefore, we draw attention to the interaction of a founder’s political ideology with the societal political environment. Although political ideology is assumed to be stable over time (Hibbing et al., 2014), our work demonstrates that political ideology must be assessed in more dynamic ways. This is in line with Swigart et al.’s (2020) contention that political ideology may change as the members of a team change over time and organizational political ideology may vary as a result of mergers, acquisitions, or headquarter relocations. Together with these externally driven contextual determinants, we show that the impact of the organization’s political ideology may also change as a result of change in the ruling political party.
In response to calls for exploring political ideology in other national contexts operating under different political and governance regimes (Gupta & Briscoe, 2019), our study extends the literature on organizational political ideology, which has been dominated by studies examining ideology along a liberalism-conservatism axis. However, recent studies have suggested that such a simplified categorization could overlook underlying aspects of ideological heterogeneity (Jost, 2006). We confirm this by revealing how varying impacts of different types of founders’ ideologies guided by cleavages along pro-Islamism, and secularism influenced the persistence of ideological imprints over time. We also show that founders’ cynicism brought about the stability of the imprints across the organization’s lifespan, while the relative coherence of other ideological imprints (i.e., center-leftist, pro-Islamist) were subject to political changes.
Finally, our study speaks to the less developed stream of organizational political ideology research. This work has generally ignored changes within political parties, so our research extends the understanding in two ways: First, it shifts attention to a more nuanced appreciation of change in party ideology over time as a result of local political dominance, and second, it reveals a more contextualized view of intra-party change affecting whether or to what degree the founder’s political ideology will persist over time. It thereby contributes to theorizing how founders’ imprints can change in salience during the same epoch resulting from transition in a ruling party’s agenda.
Conclusion
This study was motivated by the need to better understand the mechanisms influencing ideological imprinting persistence over time. It revealed that political changes in the macro-environment impact the foregrounding and fading away of founders’ ideological imprints. More specifically, ideological imprints are to a great extent affected by governmental changes through elections. By taking the context into consideration, we further challenge the single-faceted notion of liberalism-conservatism that widely characterizes the Western world. It has been shown that left–right voting alignments are determined not only by socioeconomic orientations but also by non-economic values (Freire, 2015). As a dimension of identification, the left–right continuum is an encompassing device that can anchor multiple political values in the majority of European countries (Freire, 2015), excluding Central and East European countries with a post-communist background (Otjes, 2018). We also contest the monolithic understanding of left-wing ideology by showing how persistence of imprints can yield variation across the spectra of political ideologies in non-Western contexts. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that even for the same ideology and political era, manifestations of ideological imprints differ stemming from intra-party change.
This study furthers the nascent research on political ideology by proposing a dynamic political perspective on firm-level outcomes by looking at humor magazines. In so doing, we have sought to develop the incomplete view of how firm behavior is impacted by political dynamics during political cycles (Inoue, 2019). While our work is revelatory, it is focused on achieving a deep understanding of the dynamics at play in a given context (Eisenhardt, 1989) and is therefore particularly suited to examining phenomena that have received limited scholarly attention, such as, in our case, the influence of political context on ideological imprinting. However, there is evidence that changes in the political environment and election cycles can influence corporate investment (Julio & Yook, 2012) and firm-level performance for state-owned enterprises (Inoue, 2019). Our qualitative analysis of extreme cases enabled theoretical insights by making processes and dynamics more observable than they might otherwise be under less extreme circumstances (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 537). Thus, we feel that our findings may well be applicable to other settings, but in line with good qualitative practice, we leave such an association to others to make such a transference. We do hope, however, that our work will be used as a springboard for others interested in this aspect of imprinting theory.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Prof. John M. Amis; whose invaluable feedback and suggestions greatly improved this article in its various forms during my postdoctoral study at the University of Edinburgh Business School. I sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers, Royston Greenwood, Giuseppe Delmestri, Nelson Philips, Şükrü Özen, İlay Öztürk, and Özgü Karakulak for providing helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to recognize the feedback from the participants of the 6th Austrian Early Scholars Workshop in Management and the University of Bakircay for their continued support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
