January 2002
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Within organisation theory we researchers have been and still are interested in finding answers to why some organisations succeed and others fail, why some companies are competitive on the market while others are not. The classical approach tried, through its institutional ideas and theories, to provide answers to these questions, but in the 1980s, researchers became increasingly interested in finding answers in the core of organising, in the ‘inner life’ of organisations, using more subjectivist approaches of study. As a result, the study of organisational culture (see e.g. Schein 1985) as well as the related concepts like image (see e.g. Alvesson 1990 and Dutton et al. 1994) and identity (see e.g. Albert/Whetten 1985) became increasingly popular.