Corporate Identity in relation to Culture and Image in the Returns Department of IKEA Malmö

The growing focus on customer relationship forces enterprises to tailor their processes in a more customer oriented way. The concept of customer relations is a topic of marketing studies, but it has strong implications on organization studies because of its role in the formation of employee understanding. “Customer orientation” is said to be at the very heart of the IKEA way, especially in Returns Departments; however, negative customer feedbacks and inconsistent framing and expression of the concept by staff explains how there might be possible gaps even in strong corporate cultures such as IKEA’s. The existing literature has devoted little attention to the gaps in the content and processes that form employees’ social identity at work. Hence, adopting an interpretative perspective, this thesis contributes to the empirical and theoretical understanding of this aspect of framing and expression of employees’ social identity. We draw a skeleton model to obtain a comprehensive view of the interplay of organizational culture, identity and image, and to explore possible gaps in the processes through which organizational identity is constructed. In doing so, we aim at unpacking the concept of customer orientation as part of IKEA organizational culture