Tell me your story: The role of narratives in corporate identity construction

Narratives are of paramount importance for corporate identity construction (Linde 2001). By retelling important and meaningful narratives, employees actively produce and negotiate the company’s identity (Bhatia 2011: 31), but also recontextualize and reinterpret these narratives, and consequently, the company’s identity (Georgakopoulou 2007: 10). This paper analyses how different narratives of vicarious experience contribute to the multiple, complex and sometimes conflicting corporate identities in a European pharmaceutical company, and how they are retold by employees. Narratives of vicarious experience are “stories about other people engaged in actions that the tellers did not witness” (Norrick 2013: 385). In big companies, the majority of identity narratives are inevitably stories of vicarious experience; the collective nature of corporate identity construction makes it impossible to rely exclusively on narratives of personal experience. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic approach, including semi-structured interviewing and participant observation in the PR department, we demonstrate how the founder’s narrative on the one hand, and the so-called Bad Pharma discourse on the other are retold. While the founder’s narrative provides us with the company’s ‘ideal identity’, the Bad Pharma discourse reflects the identity as constructed by the industry’s opponents. We examine how employees deal with these conflicting narratives by analysing how they position themselves, how they establish epistemic authority, and the relation between personal and collective identities. We account for how these seemingly contradictory stories can be part of the same identity discourse, and how the notion of narrative of vicarious experience can be useful to make sense of this