Abstract
In this article, I theorize how communication creates participants’ organizational identification with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and their co-construction of organizational identities. Findings from my 3-year organizational ethnography of an NPO serving transgender people, the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRC), showcase how Directors, staff, and “guests” (those being served by the NPO) co-constructed a “family” organizational identity and their subsequent organizational identification through communication. My analysis reveals how TGRC’s shared cultural values, physical space, language, and artifacts both supported and shaped their family organizational identity. Ethnographic findings illustrate how TGRC participants constructed family through cultural elements including TGRC as a home space while simultaneously going beyond an organizational container to embrace discourses and texts to construct their identity. I end with calls for future research on organizational culture, identity, and identification co-construction to include the people organizations serve and for more ethnographic and arts-based research to enrich such pursuits.
Keywords
This article theorizes how communication creates participants’ organizational identification with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and co-construction of organizational identities. Findings from my 3-year organizational ethnography of an NPO serving transgender people, the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRC), showcase how TGRC Directors, staff, and “guests” (those being served by the NPO) co-constructed a “family” organizational identity and their subsequent organizational identification through communication.
In joining this special issue on organizational culture, identification, and identity, I explore how “family” became a central organizational identity in relationship to shared cultural values of “support” and “love” and space and artifacts of “home” from my larger theoretical project on NPO organizational identities. In other words, I seek to connect often disparate areas of organizational culture and identity research (Alvesson, 2011). I situate the research as cultural through my methodological commitment to long-term ethnography that surfaced “cultural elements,” including rituals, language, values, and artifacts, that symbolize organizational culture (Eisenberg, Trethewey, LeGreco, & Goodall, 2017, p. 126).
Specifically, I illustrate how organizational identity in NPOs can be co-constructed via communication with managers, staff, and, importantly, with those served by the NPO, which, in turn, connects to individuals’ organizational identification with the NPO. I respond to calls for organizational identification research to understand volunteer and stakeholder identification with NPOs (Payne, Mize Smith, Everson, & Newman; 2019; Steimel, 2013). Additionally, I extend this literature further by calling for more research on how guests (those served by an NPO) are affected by organizational identification. I contest current bifurcations of “members” (those “internal” to the organization) and “stakeholders” or “community members” (those “external” to the organization).
My argument proceeds in four parts. First, I review literature on organizational identity, identification, and culture. Second, I describe my ethnographic methods before introducing my analysis of “TGRC as family.” Third, I detail rich findings of how family was co-constructed via communication of shared values, artifacts, and staff and guests’ organizational identification. I also present key tensions to sustaining “family” as an organizational identity. Finally, I offer conclusions and areas for future direction.
Organizing Theories of Identity, Identification, and Culture
This article joins in conversation with past scholarship on organizational identity, identification, and culture. It examines key dilemmas of linking organizational identity and organizational culture and addresses how organizational identification connects. First, let me briefly define each construct as I use them herein. I define organizational identity as organizational members’ self-referential communication about who they believe they are as an organization, and the communicative practices through which they construct, sustain, and transform those beliefs. Organizational identification examines how individuals draw meaning about who they are from organizations and how individuals may make decisions that benefit organizations because of their identification. Organizational culture is best defined by Keyton (2014) as a “multilevel system of artifacts, values, and assumptions” where “some organizational members or groups of them must share interpretations of the cultural elements found in organizational life; yet it is highly unlikely that all organizational members share all or even most interpretations” (p. 550). Shared interpretations, then, do not equal consensus.
Dilemmas Between Organizational Culture and Organizational Identity
The relationship of organizational identity to organizational culture is complex and contested. In the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity, Davide Ravasi (2018) carefully traces linkages among organizational identity, culture, and image, and I will not duplicate his precise labor here. Instead, I tease out two key dilemmas I surfaced in reading Ravasi’s review: (a) the internal/external dilemma and (b) the influence dilemma.
First, for what I call the internal/external dilemma, Ravasi (2018) notes the common theorization of organizational identity as “(internal) members’ perceptions” whereas image or reputation is “(external) stakeholders’ perceptions” (p. 65) about who an organization is. Similarly, Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) widely cited article calls for organizational identity theorists to account for the effects of both organizational culture as the context of internal definitions of organizational identity, and organizational images as the site of external definitions of organizational identity, but most especially to describe the processes by which these two sets of definitions influence one another. (p. 991)
For Hatch and Schultz (2002), then, culture shapes internal organizational identity, whereas image shapes external organizational identity, and research on organizational identity should address their interconnections, which can be assessed using their four-part process model.
Like Hatch and Schultz (2002), I use a social constructionist approach to theorizing organizational identity and seek to understand culture in relationship to identity. Social constructionists view organizational “identity as emerging from the shared interpretive schemes that [organizational] members collectively construct” (Gioia, Patvardhan, Hamilton, & Corley, 2013, p. 141). However, as an organizational communication scholar, I disagree with the premise that organizational identity can be clearly demarcated as either internal or external that is normative in current theory (Hatch & Schultz, 2002; Ravasi, 2018). Organizational boundaries are not so neat and tight that we can easily trace clear distinctions of how communication influences outsiders/image and insiders/identity.
In part, this internal/external dilemma is shaped by how one theorizes organizations as either bounded from society, communities, and other organizations or not. Cheney, Christensen, and Dailey (2014) reveal how both scholars and practitioners’ binding of organizations influences our theorizations. They describe a common bifurcation with either (a) organizations as containers or (b) organizing emerging via communication. Organizations are commonly viewed as containers where communication occurs within them. Here, organizations “produce communication not as their general way of being or existence but as something distinct and separate from other organizing practices” (Cheney et al., 2014, p. 701). Internal communication is often administrative to achieve managerial goals, and external communications are used for public relations to influence and strategically connect to outsiders/stakeholders. Here, the distinction between identity and image makes sense: There is an us (internal), and there is a them (external).
In contrast, Cheney et al. (2014) present a second approach critiquing organizations as fixed sites. They cite organizational communication scholarship inspired by Karl Weick’s view on “the power of talk to enact and thus constitute organizational reality, albeit often within the established boundaries of authority and decision making for an organization” (p. 701). I have argued elsewhere that in focusing on the second approach where we go beyond a container, we can “capture process over product, as it also eradicates some of the limitations of the transmission framing” of communication (Deetz & Eger, 2014, p. 30). In other words, here communication is a complex process where we co-create organizations rather than top-down business orientations where communication is administrative and linear. How we theorize organization, therefore, shapes how we understand organizational identity.
Yet Cheney et al. (2014) reveal that scholarship in the second approach often “continues to assume that organizing and identification occurs in organizations” (p. 701). They thus call for more scholarship to go beyond the walls of one organization to understand identity formation “across and within sites” (p. 701). Additionally, to push us past the internal/external dilemma, they contest the “binary—either you are a member or not” (p. 704), including a consideration of contingent, temporary, and virtual workers. I extend their discussion of membership to question why most scholarship does not consider those served by NPOs as impacting organizational identities. In other words, considering those served by organizations purposefully muddies internal/external or member/nonmember boundaries.
A second dilemma from Ravasi’s (2018) chapter is what I term the influence dilemma. Here, authors contest the interrelationship and potential similarities of organizational identity and culture. What’s the central, influencing construct: identity or culture? Ravasi notes two potential perspectives. One perspective from early scholarship pointed to how “cultural values . . . shape how members think about ‘who we are as an organization’” (Ravasi, 2018, p. 69). Here, culture can sometimes be a “referent for identity” (p. 69; see also Ravasi & Schultz, 2006) where members “look at established cultural practices and artifacts as a source of stability, to provide an answer” to questions about organizational identity (Ravasi, 2018, p. 69). In contrast, a second perspective showcases how organizational identity changes can, in turn, shape the culture (see Fiol, 1991; Rindova, Dalpiaz, & Ravasi, 2011).
Ravasi instead argues for both/and. His review of past research (particularly Hatch and Schultz’s [2002] work) reveals that, “On the one hand, idiosyncratic patterns of thought and behavior that characterize an organization’s culture may help members make sense of” organizational identity (Ravasi, 2018, p. 71), just as organizational identity and “categorical claims in organizational self-referential discourse may encourage members to change deeply ingrained (cultural) patterns of thought and action” (p. 72). We can best understand them as intertwined.
Ravasi ends with a powerful contribution to the influence dilemma that invites scholars to consider what he calls a “deeper layer” for both culture and identity of “core values.” “These core values. . .define what the organization ‘is’ and ‘stands for,’ and how it differs from other comparable organizations, and they are highly resistant to change” (Ravasi, 2018, p. 73). In other words, what culture researchers call “shared values” may be directly akin to what organizational identity scholars call “central, enduring, and distinctive” (CED) criteria.
And a final wrench in the influence dilemma that we must consider: Is organizational identity merely a regurgitation of past organizational culture research? Are they different at all? Ravasi (2018) explains, “This confusion is understandable, because organizational culture . . . is an important referent for the self-referential claims and understandings that constitute what we commonly refer to as ‘organizational identity’” (p. 67). Mats Alvesson has popularized this critique over the past decade, demonstrating a robust skepticism about if organizational identity offers anything unique or better than past constructs, especially organizational culture.
For example, Alvesson, Ashcraft, and Thomas (2008) claim that “the rise of identity scholarship may be more a case of old wine in new bottles” (p. 7). Specifically, the authors suggest that identity “can be (and perhaps has been) applied to almost any phenomenon, much as the [prior] organizational culture craze co-opted and replaced similar yet worn out constructs” (p. 7). Elsewhere, Alvesson (2011) continues this critique, specifying that identity (and also discourse) scholarship may be simply a redux of 1980s/1990s organizational culture scholarship and analyzes their distinctions and overlaps. He questions if identity and discourse are simply newer, more marketable terms for scholars to claim novelty without actually delivering on those claims.
Most recently in the same handbook as Ravasi, Alvesson and Robertson (2018) provide a rich critique of organizational identity scholarship overall, including a section on “Organizational Culture Dressed Up As OI” (p. 169). They note how much research on organizational identity appears to either have “a case of conceptual amnesia” or plays “an academic language game and a re-labeling of OC as OI” (p. 170). This argument is reminiscent of questions we often ask as researchers to our own organizational participants: Where is the institutional memory? Alvesson (2011) specifically argues how identity researchers seem to “come very close to themes well covered in organizational culture without referring to the wealth of work within the latter umbrella” (p. 21). He shows how rarely the two constructs are cited together since identity became the terminology in vogue and how identity made organizational culture “seem superfluous” (p. 22). Rather than consider identity scholarship as a form of organizational culture studies—even though much organizational identity scholarship emphasizes “shared meanings and understandings of organizational reality” (p. 12)—Alvesson explains that many scholars almost entirely avoid conceptualizing identity and culture together.
Alvesson and Robertson (2018) more recently add to this critique by showing how those that do contend with culture choose a “rather impoverished view of culture” popularized by Albert and Whetten (1985) and later Whetten (2006) where culture becomes a “thing-like variable” to studying organizational identity (Alvesson & Robertson, 2018, p. 171). They also point to how the few studies that include culture treat it as deriving from the identity (where identity is the influencer on culture). In this way, Alvesson and colleagues’ labor reminds us that we cannot simply do away with the influence dilemma by using identity as a direct synonym to culture. The same can be said of how organizational identity and identification become conflated, to which I now turn.
Connecting Organizational Identification and Organizational Identity
Since the 1980s, organizational communication scholars have examined the importance of theorizing organizational identification building from foundational works by George Cheney and Phil Tompkins (see Cheney, 1983a, 1983b; Cheney & Tompkins, 1987; Tompkins & Cheney, 1985). Their theories specifically extend identification research by political scientist Herbert A. Simon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke. Tompkins and Cheney (1985) use Simon’s work to show how employees’ identifications have consequences for organizations, as employees will enact their decision making based on how they are “biased toward alternatives tied to [their] targets of identification” (p. 192). Similarly, Cheney (1983a) followed Burke’s recognition of organizations as “vital in that they grant us personal meaning” through our “cooperative association with social units” (p. 347). Cheney (1983b) also argues that one way we communicate identification is through labels or names, such as naming organizations where we work as part of our identities.
Scholars continue to extend Tompkins and Cheney’s organizational identification theorization via concertive control (i.e., Barker, 1993; Larson & Tompkins, 2005) and as a communication process (i.e., Myers, Davis, Schreuder, & Seibold, 2016) with the potential for multiple organizational identifications (i.e., Larson & Pepper, 2011). They examine contexts including change and crisis (Ploeger & Bisel, 2013), anticipatory socialization (Gibson & Papa, 2000), technology (Sias & Duncan, 2018), and groups (Snyder & Cistulli, 2018). Throughout this literature, researchers conceptualize how individuals understand themselves through organizations and how this shapes cultures, structures, and power.
Others discuss the possibilities of theorizing both organizational identity and identification in communication research. Cheney et al. (2014), for example, call for research to “emphasize the necessary interplay between operationalizations of individual identifications with organizations, organizational formulations of identity, and the larger social landscape for identity formulation in the contemporary world” (p. 696). In organization studies, Gioia et al. (2013) advance theories of organizational identity as both self-referential and self-reflective as a reflexive consideration of the existential question “who-am-I-as-an-individual?’/’who-are-we-as-an-organization?” Identity, at all levels, taps into the apparently fundamental need for all social actors to see themselves as having a sense of “self,” to articulate core values, and to act according to deeply rooted assumptions about “who we are and can be as individuals, organizations, societies” etc. (p. 127)
Both self-referential and self-reflexive communication are important areas for communication scholars to attend to in studies of organizational identity and organizational identification.
However, connecting identity and identification can risk conflating them. Gioia et al. (2013) caution about scaling identity from the individual to organizational level. Critics of social construction research point to scaling as a limitation where organizations are anthropomorphized as too meaning-centered, too much like individuals, and too “difficult to measure” (p. 170; see also Whetten, 2006). Tracking individuals and organizational levels, then, becomes difficult work.
My article connects participants’ identification with organizational identity. However, I do so cautiously, as Alvesson and Robertson (2018) reveal that their interrelationship is “rarely considered debatable” (p. 163). They call for research to addresses “uncertainty, ambivalence, or incoherence” (p. 165) of these relationships. My inclusion of organizational culture, identity, and identification therefore attempts meaningful interconnections among the constructs in my fieldwork while refuting any cause-and-effect relationships or clear “influencers,” as these constructs are interwoven in participants’ organizational communication. For example, organizational identification shapes and is also shaped by organizational culture (see Gibson & Papa, 2000; Schrodt, 2009). Thus, my research questions are as follows:
Methods
This research derives from my 3-year ethnography of TGRC. TGRC is a transgender-led, grassroots NPO in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States, that serves transgender and gender nonconforming people across the state through support, outreach, education, and direct services. They uniquely address systemic discrimination transgender people face not only for their gender identities but also other identities including race, age, disability, citizenship, sexuality, and more. TGRC specifically serves large populations of transgender women of color (particularly indigenous trans women) as well as transgender people experiencing addiction, engaging in survival sex work, and experiencing chronic homelessness. Two, White, housed transgender men who created the organization, Directors Brooks and Henry, lead TGRC, and at the time of my research, there were no paid full-time staff. Instead, TGRC relied on legions of volunteers and interns to run their drop-in center open 6 days a week offering food, shelter, bathrooms, readings, and computers and conversation with others living life outside of the gender binary.
During my ethnography, I volunteered weekly to build rapport as a White, cisgender woman (someone who identifies with my sex assigned at birth) doing research in solidarity with transgender people. I used my communication expertise to teach business communication skills such as resumes, cover letters, interviews, and more as the Work Outreach Coordinator. My volunteer position addressed systemic unemployment, as many participants were unemployed or underemployed due to transphobia despite their continuous job search labor (see Eger, 2018).
I conducted extensive data collection in my ethnography using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, document and artifact analysis, and an arts-based method. My 415 hours of participant observation helped me understand TGRC participants’ co-creation of organizational culture both at TGRC in their drop-in center off Route 66 in Albuquerque and in the community with TGRC. This disrupts organizational ethnography of the “container,” as TGRC existed far beyond its four walls. I later used semi-structured interviews to understand participants’ experiences and perspectives on TGRC’s organizational identities, totaling in 64 hours of interviews (n = 36). I also utilized document and artifact analysis to examine how “communication activity is often encoded in documents” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 299) and the role that physical artifacts played in creating TGRC’s culture. Lastly, I designed a new arts-based method called a “creative focus group” where participants created collages or drawings about who TGRC is as an organization and how they identify with TGRC, and we discussed their art in focus groups. Five focus groups resulted in 9 hours and 20 minutes of conversation (112 minute average).
I then analyzed fieldnotes, transcripts, documents, artifacts, and art through coding and memo writing in Dedoose, a qualitative data analysis software. I did not code with a priori codes but instead relied on my extensive inductive coding to build to key themes. Herein, I focus on how participants co-constructed TGRC as a “family” through communication.
TGRC as a Family
As a transgender NPO serving people experiencing incredible marginalization, TGRC provided support to “guests” (their shared language for the people that they served) as a central mission. In coding, I noticed how “family,” “support,” “love,” and “home” reappeared as in vivo codes. “TGRC as family” became what Albert and Whetten (1985) theorize as the “criteria” for organizational identity: central, continuity over time (or now called enduring), and distinctive as the CED criteria. I observed how family became an organizational identity through shared cultural values of “love and support” and artifacts of “home” with which participants identified.
Research has previously examined the ways in which organizational members claim connection as a family, whether as an organizational identity, identification, metaphor, and/or value. Typically, it depicts “organizations as families” as connoting a distinctive cluster of themes including: shelter, safety, nurturing, familiarity, exclusivity, privacy, intimacy, cohesiveness, and mutual obligation. Additionally, family suggests a hierarchical, disciplinary social structure in which “parents” wield superior knowledge and legitimate authority over dependent “children” (Taylor, 1997). Some research specifically examines family-owned organizations where literal family members link familial and organizational identities (Whetten, Foreman, & Dyer, 2014; Zellweger, Eddleston, & Kellermanns, 2010).
Smith and Eisenberg (1987) specifically researched family metaphorically in their investigation of Disneyland’s contradictions as “the happiest place on earth” with simultaneous labor strikes. They analyzed employees and managers’ contrasting usage of the metaphors of family or drama. Employees identified with the history of Disneyland as family-centered and critiqued the new culture as no longer fitting the deceased Walt Disney’s vision. Managers contrasted Disneyland as an organization for performance and entertainment as business.
Other studies of family and organizations have more sharply critiqued how hailing employees as “family” may facilitate control. Pribble (1990), for example, studied how a medical technology company, BE, harnessed new employees’ organizational identification through orientation-related communication. Here, managers described how supplies like pacemakers acted as life-saving technologies that could, in the future, save employees or customers’ family members, thereby connecting values of family, health, and work by “describing how work at BE is important because of its impact on families” (p. 259). Kirby (2006) also theorized the organizational appropriation of family roles as controlling workers’ lives (see also Deetz, 1992). She argued that depicting employees as “helping” the organization as “family” serves to benefit “competitive advantage and cost savings rather than altruism” (p. 477).
While prior research on family and organizational communication offer important exemplars, we need research on NPOs specifically engaging emotional support in their mission, as is the case of TGRC, and how such cultures value family and attachment, which are co-created with people the organization serves. Here, I will show how organizational communication created TGRC as family and address key tensions they faced.
Participants’ Identification With TGRC as a Family Home
My ethnographic research repeatedly illustrated that participants identified with TGRC’s family organizational identity. I will examine guests and staff’s communication about TGRC as a home, first in terms of physical space like artifacts creating “home” and second as a symbolic place for sharing emotional “support” and “love” via cultural values of attachment.
Guests’ Identification With TGRC as a Family Home
Viewing the drop-in center as a home was perhaps most meaningful for guests who identified as homeless. For example, in a creative focus group with predominantly indigenous trans women, Alyce created a collage featuring the importance of TGRC as home (see Figure 1). Alyce identified as a Diné, homeless, trans woman with disabilities in her early 30s who engaged in survival sex work and experienced drug addiction. She described TGRC’s drop-in as a place for “Time Off” (words she cut out of a magazine) and “Home” (which she handwrote). She chose, “Time Off” is because on my off days, I’ll come here, and I’ll hang out with the girls . . . I could talk about everything that’s bothering me. And people understand it in here more than out there. . . . When you try to talk to people out there (points outside), they won’t give a fuck. But here, it’s like, they care. And we all care about each other when we come together.
Alyce’s Collage.
For Alyce, TGRC became a place for “time off” from sex work and street survival, and it also became a place for creating a caring home with other guests. In a later interview, she said, “It’s like one big giant family here. We all put up with each other, and no one’s going to do that except family.”
Housed guests who used TGRC’s other services also valued artifacts and beliefs communicating home, like those utilizing support groups or community education. In a creative focus group with Rainbow Friends Support Group guests—which included those who identified as transgender, gender nonconforming, and even cisgender family, friends, or parents—a participant named Zbigniew who never visited TGRC during drop-in hours also focused on TGRC as “home.” Zbigniew had a young history with TGRC, having only participated in Rainbow Friends and Non-Binary support groups for over 1 month. Zbigniew identified as “a genderfluid, White, pansexual, broke ass bitch” in their mid-20s.
In narrating their collage (see Figure 2), Zbigniew viewed TGRC as a “foundation of good things,” including a place to come together at “home.” They described the colorful pinwheels pasted in the bottom left of Figure 2 to show the vibrancy and variety of perspectives that you get if you go to TGRC in like any of the group meetings. And the way it brings people together. . . . But, you know, the one thing that describes it most is this [points to top right]: HOME! It’s home.
Section of Zbigniew’s collage.
For both Zbigniew and Alyce, TGRC became a physical home in part due to the emotional support and the other people and artifacts that could be found when visiting “home.”
Guests’ organizational identification with TGRC as home also encouraged them to take an active role in providing emotional support for one another and thereby co-constructing and sustaining TGRC’s family organizational identity. This points to an understudied aspect of organizational identity: how those served by an organization also provide discourse that shapes and buttresses its preferred identities. Guests valuing TGRC as home and creating support for and with one another provided a unique “nonprofit legitimacy” (Gill & Wells, 2014), or how the NPO follows through with its identity claims of “who we are” as an organization. Guests, thus, communicated further legitimacy for staff and Directors’ family organizational identity through their own organizational identification (see Cheney et al., 2014).
In fact, guests co-constructing TGRC as home created repeated challenges for many homeless (often daily) drop-in guests leaving the physical center, as it was like being asked to leave their home. I observed the incredible communication difficulties associated with having guests leave the drop-in center at 6 p.m., including waking intoxicated or high guests, gathering guests and their belongings, exchanging prolonged hugs and farewells, guests pleading to stay longer, and making time for their final visits to the bathroom (as many would not be able to access a free, safe bathroom until 1 p.m. the following day).
Some guests responded to these daily exits from TGRC by beginning to play and/or sing a cappella a popular 1990s song called “Closing Time” by Semisonic. The song focuses on a bar closing at the end of the night, and its lyrics include the refrain, “Closing time: Time for you to go out go out into the world. Closing time: Turn the lights up over every boy and every girl. . . . You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” Guests commonly sung the final line upon leaving, which became especially poignant for homeless trans guests who did not have a home to return to and had no shelter until the center reopened. The song became a place where guests could voice resistance to being asked to leave home. Some guests also made snide comments to staff attempting to close the building like, “Must be nice to go home.”
The challenge of the daily closing of the center as a “home” space became apparent in my creative focus groups where homeless indigenous trans women explained the pain of leaving each day:
And then it always sucks, especially when we have to leave, because, you know—
[nods in agreement] We all have to go our separate ways.
Yeah, and then it gets lonely after that.
[nods and looks deeply into Shade’s eyes] Back to surviving.
Back to sucking dick.
Making money for a living.
[Other girls nod and look down].
To leave TGRC for many, then, was to go back to survival sex work and to return to TGRC was to escape loneliness, find emotional support, and shelter. Overall, for many guests, TGRC was a physical home and a place to be with other “family members.”
Staff’s Identification With TGRC as a Family Home
In addition to guests’ communication, staff also identified with TGRC as a family home. For example, a former TGRC social work intern, Monica (who identified as lesbian, Latina, cisgender, and in her 20s) told me that she described working at TGRC as “a family type of thing . . . It is more family oriented, more really welcoming, that’s what I see this place as.” Another staff member, Bailey (a mixed race, housed, Asian trans man in his 20s, with some college education) shared how he specifically decided to become a staff member after his positive experiences attending the Transmasculine Support Group. His first impressions of TGRC were that, “It was really like laidback and personal. Like it was just comfortable; it wasn’t like bureaucratic. . . . Just kinda like a family . . . the way people talked, the layout of the sessions and space.” Bailey credited the space, artifacts, and communication for creating a “laidback” organization like family.
Although many staff members identified with the artifacts creating home, others questioned if the family identity had truly endured when the organization grew and moved locations two times during my 3-year study. Specifically, staff and guests characterized TGRC’s third Jackson location as “moving away” from a home space and directly shifting the support values and family identity. Staff member Nancy was a White, college-educated, housed trans woman in her 50s who experienced poverty and unemployment who described the new Jackson location as “sterile” and “clinical.” She longed for the staff and Directors, “to be more engaging, more like family community versus clinical community. Cuz that’s what it feels like right now, it’s like a clinical community versus a family community.”
Thus, some staff and guests questioned if the new physical organizational space undermined TGRC’s traditional identity as a family and home, which they believed existed at the second location (which had been an actual New Mexican casita). Because the casita required little modification except removing some interior doors, participants viewed it as best symbolizing a space and showing artifacts of a home. Participants lamented how the Jackson location’s formal space changed how they cultivated informal emotional support, as there was not a clear “living room” for communication as before. Nancy told me how multiple guests expressed that they missed the “home of TGRC.” Guests similarly reported missing the casita’s built-in kitchen, shower, and laundry facilities, even though they recognized TGRC left the casita because the landlord refused to fix those very amentities. Like Nancy, other staff questioned how the Jackson location could replace the casita as home. Monica explained that, I would have preferred like a homey feel, so [the Jackson office location] just felt more like, less family oriented, and a little more like, “Oh, here is the center, what do you need?” Come and go kind of thing. Not that the staff or anybody made it feel that way; it was just the location itself.
Monica and Nancy thus demonstrated how the physical space shifted the culture and its “homey feel.”
Importantly, many staff and guests alike also reported a new appreciation of the Jackson location later in my research. The Directors were able to take over the full lease of the Jackson building (instead of half of it before), which allowed them to transform the location to include a new living room with donated artifacts from the community like new couches, a wall of books, art, and a dining table. Staff celebrated how the new additions to the Jackson location helped better showcase the family identity again, especially because this space was reserved only for trans-identified guests. Monica said, “Guests look a lot more relaxed and like a family again.”
Staff also complimented the new community-created artifacts in a staff meeting. Bailey, Hunter (a White trans man in his 30s), and Marie (a White cisgender woman in her late 30s) gushed over the new “trans-only” living room area:
I love the natural light and warmth.
I love this room in general now. The books, the pictures!
It’s really a home. We talk about it being a home, and now I love it.
Staff used self-reflexive communication (see Gioia et al., 2013) about the family organizational identity (e.g., “We talk about it being a home”) to showcase how space affirmed that identity.
In summary, communicating TGRC as a family organizational identity linked to both cultivating shared values and the community transformation of the space and artifacts to co-create home.
“Chosen” Family Organizational Identity as Valuing Attachment
A second theme of TGRC’s family identity was how the organization became a “chosen family” through participants’ communication. Importantly, a “chosen family” is a common discourse in many LGBTQIAP+ communities where people are often rejected and ostracized by their biological families. Thus, the possibility of creating a chosen family enables bonding and identification with new groups and organizations. Oswald (2002) describes the strategy of repairing stigma and abandonment by intentionally “choosing kin” (see also Weston’s [1997] ethnography on families of choice). In using “chosen family” discourse, TGRC drew upon shared experiences of ostracization to cultivate their own family organizational identity.
Participants used familial language in naming their roles. They named guests and staff as sisters, brothers, and family; the Directors as dads, daddies, and papas; and the center itself as family and home. Shared familial language showed up in written greeting cards addressed to “Dad” as artifacts that the Directors hung on a giant bulletin board outside of their office. Guests reported valuing being siblings to one another. Kylo Ren (a homeless, Navajo trans woman in her 20s) described valuing her role with other “family members” who visited. She explained, “There’s other sisters there, which is nice because we can all get along. I like that, and we all laugh . . . because that’s what the center is for . . . We are all sisters” (Italics added). Becoming sisters enabled participants to participate fully in co-constructing the family and identify with TGRC. Other participants commonly used family language, including Board of Directors members, support group guests, and community members describing TGRC as family and their role as siblings in local Trans 101 presentations, events, marches, and vigils.
Another example of valuing chosen family came from Theresa who was a Black, trans woman in her early 40s who identified as homeless, worked in sex work, and experienced addiction. She said, [Here] we’re all family. We are all sisters and brothers in God’s eyes, I mean, not from the same mother or father, but, in his eyes, we are all family. And then when we are transgender, we really family because we’re one of a kind, we’re unique. We’re different. I mean, we’re us, and can’t nobody else change that.
Theresa believed all people were one family under God as a Christian, but she also specifically believed that she and other guests were “really” family because of their gender identities. Theresa also described her identification with TGRC’s organizational identity as a family because their co-constructed culture encouraged guests to be who they were, which contrasted with her birth family that did not allow her to express her feminine identity at home. She said, With Transgender Resource, they have helped me identify me as a person, and I know I’m not alone. . . . And because my [birth] family members, they don’t approve. Like I had to dress different when I went back home. I couldn’t be myself, I was depressed, I was unhappy, and when I came back [to TGRC], I was back at me. I was me, and they helped me realize that I am me.
Theresa’s framing of realizing through her involvement at TGRC “that I am me” showcased how she came to know herself through its outreach.
Because TGRC influenced Theresa’s ongoing identity construction as “me,” she continued to return to TGRC because of the family identity. In our final interview, she said, “[Other guests are] my family and staff, they’re family. They’re loving and caring. . . . And they provide, they help.” Theresa also marked TGRC’s family organizational identity as distinctive compared with other organizations. She explained, It stands out because they really show you that they care. I mean, a lot of organizations will say this or say that but the Transgender Resource, it stands out because they show it. They just don’t talk about it. They really be about it, and they do care.
For TGRC to “really be about” caring and family showed how guests viewed their family organizational identity as embodied, enacted, and authentic. To “really be about” family as an organizational identity also influenced guests like Theresa’s continuous organizational identification, especially as they co-created TGRC as home with values of loving and caring.
Hailing chosen family discourse and centering love in values also tied to the Directors’ initial communication strategies when creating TGRC as an NPO. Because guests, staff, and the Directors described the centrality of the family identity, I asked Henry and Brooks about how, when, and why it became important for the organization. Henry described the family identity as something he and Director Brooks could offer without any funding when TGRC first opened: That’s all we had in the beginning to offer. We didn’t have anything . . . all we could do was hug people and love them and listen to them in large part . . . I believed that was enough and that no matter what else we added, that would always be the bottom [line] of what people need. You can get all fancy . . . [but] if you take those fancy things away, listening, loving, and caring will work. It does work. It’s enough to keep some people alive.
Here, Henry described the incredible life-saving importance of love to create a chosen family, especially in the TGRC early days where care and love values were often all they could offer without any sustained funding. For him, the family identity was a foundation from which any future outreach services could be provided. Director Brooks also described how from the beginning of the organization’s history, he and Henry would leave TGRC during “closing time” by saying: “We love you guys. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Communicating love as a shared value and that home would be there tomorrow became a principle form of communicating support that guests soon embraced from the Directors and one another.
Additionally, the Directors credited Gabor Maté’s (2010) In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts as a foundational external text that developed their work on building attachments and emotional support. Maté’s book details his two decades as a medical doctor in Vancouver, Canada, working with drug users and understanding their addictions involving neurological pathways that become familiarized, hardened, and repetitive for people experiencing addiction. He centers the importance of compassion and attachment to repair past traumatic histories that can then help recovery. Henry explained to me that reading Maté was life-altering to me to think about attachment in that way. That’s when I really started to think about it in an overt way, in an explicit way in what we were doing, was what does it look like to build attachment and to repair those neuropathways [he shows the brain churning by twirling his finger around] that are broken when attachments are broken.
For Henry, Maté’s writing on addiction directly connected to how he hoped to help build familial attachment through communicating emotional support of guests and staff, especially those experiencing addiction. Brooks also encouraged new staff members to read Maté to understand TGRC’s values of love and attachment. Through cultivating these values, TGRC as family persisted as an organizational identity that guests and staff identified with strongly and helped to support. I now turn to tensions around the family identity.
Tensions Sustaining the TGRC Family Identity
In this final section, I explore three tensions to TGRC’s efforts to sustain their family organizational identity: (a) staff turnover, depicted as family member loss; (b) guest resistance to staff treatment of them as “children,” versus staff perceiving the family as lenient; and (c) the Directors and staff’s communication about “disowning” a guest.
Staff Turnover and Absence as Family Member Loss
First, guests repeatedly reported that staff turnover challenged their identification with the family because it created “loss.” The high turnover among TGRC’s volunteer and intern staff undermined their attachment values. As Navajo partners Robert and Kylo Ren explained,
The staff are really wonderful. . . . We get to meet [and know] them very well. And then they leave. Then other staff comes again, and we start to get to know them again. Then, they leave again. Like that . . . Like you [pointing at me]. You are going to leave us after these years. It’s gonna be difficult [starts to cry].
You are leaving us too. It hurts. Because we get attached to them [starts to cry]. . . . It is hard because we don’t meet a lot of people. And then the staff just leave.
Here they depicted their loneliness as homeless people who are often estranged from meaningful human interaction and stigmatized and how my own planned organizational exit as a volunteer would undermine the shared attachment values. Relationships built with staff became a meaningful form of attachment for guests as TGRC hoped, but they simultaneously mourned when a member of the family left because of their strong identification with the family that they are a part of. Kylo Ren and Robert thus requested that TGRC create paid permanent staff positions to stop this cycle, and that if staff were leaving the organization, guests should be told in advance to prepare. In this way, guests identified with the chosen family identity TGRC cultivated, but this caused unanticipated pain when attachments were broken.
TGRC staff departures were common during my observations, as most worked for a period between 6 months and 1 year. While some interns chose to remain on staff for additional semesters, keeping staff “within the family” became largely impossible without future NPO funding. In fact, Henry, Brooks, and I were the only consistent staff throughout my 3-year ethnography. Guest Alyce described the loss of staff as losing her family: I’ve seen so many volunteers come and go. I get attached to all of them. Since the time from the oldest center to this center . . . they’re so much family to me because they cared a lot [she begins crying]. . . . They get to see us, see what we went through. . . . They just don’t see us as a drunk, a prostitute, or a drug user. They see me without that. . . . They see how we hurt or how our [birth] families push us away when we need them. (Italics added)
TGRC was family because staff saw her beyond stigmatized identities and as a whole person.
The Directors recognized how NPO volunteer turnover constrained guests’ attachment. However, without a paid staffing budget, Director Henry believed that as long as he and Brooks acted as consistent family members, guests could remain identified with TGRC. He rationalized, If staff show real caring and real love and real concern for our family here, people do come and go even in the family. . . . That’s all part of learning about attachment . . . that the attachment is bigger than the location. And there is also the consistent continual presence of me and Brooks . . . I’ve had times that I’m here more and times that I’m here less, but . . . I’m always going to come back here. (Italics added)
Here, Henry advocated for a particular version of the family: Those who love you remain your family despite their location or even their departure. It also showcases how TGRC as family exceeds any physical organizational container. However, given the acute rejection many guests experienced from their biological families and their identification with TGRC as chosen family (see Oswald, 2002; Weston, 1997), relying upon Henry and Brooks as consistent patriarchs may not have been enough to mend loss from staff’s permanent departures.
Additionally, some guests questioned if the Directors could sustain the family, especially as they became increasingly overextended in their exhaustive NPO labor. Aron, for example, was a Diné, housed, and college-educated trans woman in her 30s. She bemoaned, I rarely ever see Brooks or Henry . . . I think as the organization is growing . . . they’ve become a lot less available. They become an illusion sometimes because you just see them and then the next thing they’re gone . . . It makes me feel like they don’t care [her voice cracks, she begins to cry]. (Italics added)
For Aron and others, the Directors’ declining availability for providing daily emotional support became painful. Rationally understanding the Director’s busyness did not assuage Aron’s pain in experiencing the Directors as illusions. Managing staff turnover and the Directors’ strained availability thus became a constraint on TGRC as a family and guests’ identification.
Guests Resisting Being “Children” Versus Staff Leniency
A second family identity tension was a contrast between some guests experiencing being placed into “child” roles, while some staff believed the family identity actually created excessive organizational leniency, especially in conflict communication. First, some drop-in guests criticized the communication from staff members—particularly newer, less trained staff—as patronizing. Many guests, for example, disliked new rules requiring them to lock up their belongings upon entering the center and perceived staff as “watching” them.
Aron understood TGRC—somewhat paradoxically—as being both free of judgment and infantilizing. She first described TGRC as a “home” for “a lot of transgender women who live on the streets, or who are homeless or not even homeless at all, that come to the center to really be who they are, and not have to be judged.” However, Aron also believed that new staff patronized guests, which she addressed informally in a creative focus group, Staff treat the girls as children . . . because the way they talk to them. . . . How they speak to them is really, like, childlike, like taking care of the kids . . . [Those] who have been on the street for so long, and that they are adults now. They don’t know how to be a kid. (Italics added)
In response to Aron’s comment, Alyce chimed in, “I get annoyed when people do that to me. Like, why do you treat me like that?” Other indigenous trans women nodded in unison as Aron and Alyce raised this critique. Here, despite their identification with TGRC’s emotional support, they reported an unfortunate potential side effect of a family organizational identity: the patronizing experience of surveillance and discipline (see Taylor, 1997). For Aron, positioning guests as children contradicted their lived, intersectional experiences of street survival that made them into adults.
Notably, past research on organizational communication and family from Smith and Eisenberg (1987) found that Disneyland employees also lamented being treated “like kids,” but simultaneously longed for “the paternalistic care of earlier years” in the organization (p. 376). TGRC guests similarly appreciated viewing the Directors as “Dads,” putting themselves into a potential child role. In this way, using organizational identity as family with related “roles” can construct organizational members in ways they do not appreciate or intend.
Additionally, some guests questioned if TGRC’s “family” really helped empower them, or just provided a space for them to gather without caregiving. Bridget, for example, was an older, White, homeless trans guest. She dismissed the expanded living room "home" artifacts other participants lauded, saying, You look around the room, and you see who is sitting there watching that TV in the new living room? They are the same people that were there 2 years ago. Still with nothing, still struggling, and still not helped by the center.
For Bridget, TGRC provided only a space and artifacts of home without empowering guests to become more independent. Aron also critiqued the center for treating guests as children, citing how they were “being separated” by staff for disagreements and encouraged to just “watch TV.” She instead called for TGRC to give guests “tools, in case they want to stop with all the bullshit of addiction and what not in their lives.” Employing another metaphor, she recommended, “constantly. . . feeding them with something every time they come here would be a great way to empower them . . . Feed, feed, feed them.” For Aron, to “feed” guests was also to include more trans women of color as paid staff members to create positive role models for guests. TGRC could thus, in this view, go beyond literally feeding guests experiencing hunger to figuratively feeding their development through education and training. Director Brooks shared these hopes, and he sometimes deactivated the living room TV and instead encouraged guests to engage in art, training sessions, and community. He also sought paid staffing for “programmatic stuff, more activities, more involvement . . . that might impact their lives in a way that we’re not currently.”
In contrast to guests’ critiques, some staff considered communication as too lenient. While above Bailey described valuing TGRC as laidback family, he also lamented how laidback communication did not assuage guest conflicts. He valued how “we give people a lotta chances,” but he also believed that “part of being a good parent, you’ve gotta do some things that they may not agree with, but you’re wanting to see them grow.” In his view, sustaining a family organizational identity required potential parental enforcement of consequences to ensure growth.
Another staff member named Adam (a White, cisgender gay male volunteer) also critiqued organizational leniency, and he was an outlier because he did not identify with staff or guests’ co-construction of TGRC as family. He criticized TGRC for “babying” daily drop-in users, and compared them negatively with what he termed “intermediate users”: those who occasionally used TGRC for specific and immediate help (i.e., surgery information, name changes, or job resources). In a staff meeting, Adam said that intermediate users fit TGRC’s identity better because, Those are the people that are going to be the most rewarding to help and do the most with our help. They are coming with a specific idea and need. . . . That is what the center is here for. It is the Transgender Resource Center. The daily drop-in has become, excuse me, but more like babysitting.
For Adam, caretaking guests undermined TGRC’s mission as a clearinghouse for transgender resources.
After a prolonged silence in the meeting, other staff members responded to Adam’s comment by defending the legitimacy and effectiveness of TGRC’s family identity:
The people who are accessing everyday have nowhere else to go. They go everyday because TGRC is their only place.
Many guests haven’t had homes to clean or carpets to vacuum. . . . A guest said something yesterday to me, “I hate when we fight because you girls are all we have.” Is it super frustrating to break up fights everyday, or catch people drinking in the bathroom or pick up needles like we did today? Yes. But then I remember, these resources are all people have . . . TGRC means and is everything for many of them . . .
We are not babysitting, but we are trying to make a family for people who have never had it. . . . We focus here on a radical acceptance of people. . . . No matter what you do, we are going to LOVE YOU. (Italics added)
Henry, Bailey, and Liz all detailed elements of TGRC’s family identity to try to persuade Adam to join in their identification. They communicated common ground with Adam around their shared frustrations and attempted a discursive reframing of Adam’s “babysitting.” The staff were unsuccessful in fully persuading Adam. However, other staff also critiqued the leniency Adam surfaced, especially in a sustained case of family conflict that I now examine.
Confronting the Potential of Disowning a Guest
The most enduring family identity challenge in my research involved an escalating conflict with a guest, Rowan. Rowan was a feminine-identified person who used “he/him/his” pronouns, who also identified as a person of color, homeless, and who experienced drug addiction. Rowan often supported other guests by listening about their transitioning and homelessness, cleaned the casita, and sorted donations for his own street outreach for homeless people. As Rowan’s addictions worsened, staff identified his “escalating” behaviors, including shouting, pushing, and throwing objects. After a 6-week ban from TGRC, Rowan was allowed to return with the warning that a future incident would result in a longer ban. When I saw Rowan after this incident, he was cleaning TGRC’s kitchen as “our home” and told me, “We need to help clean and give to the center that gives to us.” Rowan attempted to cultivate TGRC as home, even in the throes of addiction. A new incident unfortunately occurred soon after when Rowan was asked to exit TGRC for the day after disruptive communication with another guest, and he responded by attempting to physically assault a staff member and punching one of the Directors.
Some staff members expressed safety concerns after this incident and reported feeling vulnerable and disrespected. They believed this incident indicated that the Directors prioritized TGRC’s Guiding Principles
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of welcoming back guests over staff safety. Staff questioned the status of their own inclusion and roles within the TGRC family. Bailey considered leaving TGRC because the Directors say, “Oh we love you to the staff,” but when staff tried to tell them Rowan was escalating, they ignored us, and we feel like they would rather [have] staff move on to new roles [than commit to] kicking someone out. And that shows who matters.
In this view, the Directors support of Rowan strained staff’s organizational identification.
In response to these concerns, the Directors convened a rare required meeting where staff entered calling for Rowan to be permanently banned from TGRC. Nancy, for example, felt devalued: “How it came across to me is that I would have to leave before Rowan did.” Lisa, who was a White, trans woman staff member in her 20s, agreed. She described how other “clients” responded to Rowan by leaving TGRC. Lisa believed that Rowan violated TGRC’s responsibility to provide “home,” because guests also no longer felt safe when he arrived. She recounted working at the front desk on a bustling day when all the available lockers had been filled with guests’ belongings. Rowan’s arrival created an “effect that Rowan came in and clients leave: The lockers emptied.”
After listening to staff’s critiques, the Directors communicated their regret that the staff did not feel heard, valued, or listened to in prior conversations. They also described their own extensive backstage managerial communication about how to respond. Brooks explained, In the 3 years plus that we have been open as a physical center, Henry and I have never had to ban someone ever. Nor have we ever had an altercation like what happened with Rowan in our building ever. Ever!
They recognized the conflicts as departing from prior experiences, straining their NPO Guiding Principles, and violating expectations.
Henry and Brooks then introduced a plan for Rowan’s future role at TGRC to not return to TGRC until he had a note from a medical provider proving that he had been sober for 2 months. Henry explained, “That is the way of keeping our door open for Rowan and not locking, dead-bolting, and bricking the door frame on somebody who does need some place to go.” Henry then gave a passionate speech where he dismissed the language of “clients” that many staff members (particularly social work interns) used to describe the people TGRC served: I am very reluctant to banning Rowan like every other fucking service agency in this town. . . . Of course, it is not okay what happened. . . . But also, I get nervous when we call our folks, “clients, clients, clients.” Who is the client? I’m a client. You are a client. We are the clients! We are the clients. We are trans . . . [Instead] the way I do think of it is as a family. And in family, I’m not saying there are no security issues. . . . But you don’t just ban somebody because they are the difficult person in the family. . . . I have to figure this out so it is not just saying, “Fuck you! You are a piece of trash. You can’t ever belong here. You can never find your way back into the family.”
Henry’s impromptu speech of “We are the clients!” remains one of the most profound observations from my research with TGRC. He not only critiqued the “client” medicalizing language used by staff but also positioned them as recipients of TGRC’s services—implicitly challenging them to inhabit their objectification of guest identities. He also depicted his preference to give Rowan a future path as a symbol of how TGRC differed from other local NPOs and recentered TGRC’s family identity as distinctive. His communication was persuasive: After Henry’s speech, the staff entirely shifted from wanting to ban Rowan to thanking the Directors for creating possibility for his future reentry. The family identity endured because Rowan was not disowned. Staff continued to identify with TGRC, following research from Myers et al. (2016) and Ploeger and Bisel (2013) about how members’ organizational identification may persist during crises.
The Rowan incidents built to what Albert and Whetten (1985) referred to as a “prototypical sequence” of questioning through communication misunderstandings and conflict that required future decision-making about their organizational identities (p. 264). This reveals that while co-construction of organizational identities is always ongoing, organizational members may experience critical moments (see Alvesson et al., 2008) as poignant junctures to reframe organizational identity together. In fact, staff’s starkly shifting beliefs about Rowan’s future role at TGRC from the beginning of the staff meeting to the end occurred through what Gioia et al. (2013) describe as self-referential and self-reflexive communication about organizational identity. In this view, Henry used reflexive communication to position both TGRC’s guests and staff as “clients” to negate power differences. This invocation of family was tactical in preventing TGRC staff from objectifying clients as stigmatized Others, instead requiring them to choose whether they would also view themselves in those terms. Notably, after this speech, staff’s future shared language largely shifted from “clients” to “guests.” However, few questioned what role “guests” might play within a home.
As the staff meeting closed, Brooks confessed to staff that he was “sort of flabbergasted because I was not hearing you,” and reiterated the importance of “family members” hearing one another. He called for improved organizational communication, framing it as family communication. Director Henry also urged staff “to all recommit to the effort to communicate. It’s a family. Families are fucked up. We get mad in families. We get frustrated in families. We get hurt, we get disappointed. And then we deal with it” (Italics added). Staff thanked the Directors for hearing and valuing them, and they closed the meeting telling one another they loved each other. Henry cheered, “FAM-ILY!” to end the meeting. Despite the potential for staff to disidentify with TGRC, they collectively continued to co-construct family identity during conflict as distinct from other NPOs. Thus, amid tensions, TGRC as family continues to endure.
Future Implications
This article examined how Directors, staff, and guests of TGRC co-constructed an organizational identity of family through cultural elements including artifacts, values, and language. It explored how participants identified with TGRC because of their co-creation of TGRC as home and their use of chosen family and attachment values and discourses. My ethnographic findings reveal implications for future research on organizational culture, identity, identification, and their relationships.
First, I showcase how organizational identity is co-constructed and sustained by those served in NPOs. While the Directors strategically communicated family as an organizational identity, guests and staff also created and changed what family meant due to their roles and their identification. The role “guests” play pushes against theories of identity as purely internal for members or external for stakeholders. Future research should go beyond the internal/external dilemma to more robustly understand organizations as communicative where identity is not clearly bounded in a member/nonmember binary. NPOs are ripe organizations for such inquiry, as boundaries with communities are especially complex. NPOs and for-profit business practitioners should also examine who they count as members and how they communicate beyond the outsider/image and insider/identity dichotomy.
To do so, we need to look to how discourses and texts influence organizational identity and identification outside of the organization as a “container.” Cheney and Ashcraft (2007) similarly theorized how local organizational understandings of professionalism drew upon larger discourses. My research specifically revealed how “chosen family” discourses in LGBTQIAP+ communities became a shared value in their NPO culture, which linked to their organizational identity. Similarly, the Maté (2010) text that the Directors read and disseminated became a tether for valuing attachment and cultivating guests’ organizational identification to co-constructing meaningful familial support. In contrast, Semisonic’s “Closing Time” song became a shared text for guests’ resistance and critique of TGRC’s daily closing of their home. My findings therefore reveal we need more research that goes beyond the internal/external dilemma to include discourses and texts impacting organizational identity and identification beyond a bounded organizational site.
Second, my article joins organizational identity, culture, and identification constructs in conversation together to show how they can coalesce for NPO organizing. The influence dilemma I identified above in past organizational identity literature fixates on what is the central concept—identity versus culture—if culture is included at all. Instead, we need not be fixated on chicken/egg theorizing. And we cannot simply ignore their overlaps as much research does to sidestep culture entirely that Alvesson and Robertson (2018) address. This article alternatively showcases how we can better understand their interconnections.
Rather than predicting a clear origin point and influencer (e.g., culture came first), we should be invested in the organic, ambiguous, and contested nature of organizational identity and its relationships to organizational culture and identification. For example, cultural artifacts and physical space helped create “home” for my participants, and when the organizational space shifted away from a casita, the family identity and guests and staff’s identification were compromised. This mirrors Pepper’s (2008) research on material space creating tensions in organizational communication. For TGRC, guests and donors’ co-creation of new artifacts for the Jackson building co-constructed a renewed experience of home and family in a sterile space. We therefore need further inquiry into how space and artifacts shape organizational identity and identification.
In a contrasting example, staff’s critiques of how the Directors handled familial tensions in the Rowan conflict led to their co-construction of what family would mean in the future and pushed staff to reconsider shared language of “clients” versus “guests.” This self-referential, self-reflexive communication shifted shared language and reinvoked the family organizational identity. My research reveals, then, that participants are constantly making, breaking, and rebuilding identities in relationship to organizational culture. I echo Ravasi’s (2018) call to position culture and identity as a dual process, and I similarly call for further examination of how deeper cultural values and enduring identity criteria correlate in communication. We specifically need further research on family as an organizational identity, especially in NPOs naming emotional support in their missions. Since past research reveals family as a control tool (Kirby, 2006; Pribble, 1990), we must understand consequences of “family” in theory and practice.
Third and finally, we need more ethnographic research to examine culture, identity, and identification. As Alvesson and Robertson (2018) contend, ethnography enables richer theorization of organizational identity and culture together. They explain that the “study of OI manifestations in terms of key cultural aspects—taken-for-granted assumptions, myths, shared (or contested) meanings, key symbols, etc.—through ethnographic work would be a demanding but potentially also a very productive way of taking OI ideas seriously” (p. 175). They also specifically call for ethnographic work that accounts for both culture and organizational identity from “multiple and complex data sources—visual, discursive, and textual—gathered across an organization” (p. 173). My research uniquely presented an ethnography examining cultural elements from all the data sources they describe, including 3 years of fieldwork and creative methods. However, we need further research engaging ethnography and arts-based methods in addition to robust current inquiry via interviews and surveys. Future researchers could also trace the culture, identity, and image relationship further by conducting long-term ethnography during major organizational change, new leadership, or new branding.
Because organizations shape our lives and our own identities in increasingly complex ways, we will continue to require future research considering how communication co-constructs organizational cultures and identities. From grassroots NPOs to international conglomerates, complicating our theorizations and praxis of identity as scholars and practitioners is paramount. We would be remiss to continue doing so without the voices and participation of those that we seek to serve.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks TGRC’s Directors for inviting her to research and volunteer in solidarity for intersectional transgender organizing for 3 years. She specifically thanks each TGRC participant who shared their lives, narratives, and art with her. This research is dedicated to you and the vibrant futures you are co-constructing together. The author thanks Dr. Bryan C. Taylor for his mentorship and helpful conversations about family and organizations. The author expresses deep gratitude to Jorge Lizarzaburu, Diane and Ray Riley, and Clara and Luna for their constant support of this research. Thanks also to the International Journal of Business Communication editors, the special issue editor, and anonymous journal reviewers for their support of this article. A prior draft was awarded one of the top papers in the Organizational Communication Division at the Western States Communication Association conference for Denver 2020.
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 the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by The Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
