“Tearing the Fabric” or “Weaving the Tapestry”? A Discursive Resources Approach to Identity-Implicating Organizational Events

Organizational Identity and Profound Organizational Events

Traditionally, organizational identity has been conceptualized as the central, enduring, and distinctive components of an organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985), wherein members collectively agree upon “who we are as an organization” (Petriglieri & Devine, 2016). In this vein, social identity theorists posit that when an organizational identity and/or image is positive, organizational members are more apt to strongly identify with the organization (Dutton et al., 1994); that is, the organization becomes and serves as a source of identity for the individual in a way that is self-defining (Pratt, 2000). In turn, when an organization is confronted with an event that reflects negatively on it, or challenges conceptualizations of who/what the organization is in ways that could be viewed as a “threat” to an organization’s identity, past work suggests that members tend to “take actions to repair the stigmatized organizational identity to affirm a positive collective identity with which they can identify” (Frandsen, 2012, p. 232; cf. Elsbach & Kramer, 1996).

With this in mind, it is understandable why scholars studying “profound” organizational events and shocks (i.e., “those that have the potential to alter the collective understanding of ‘who we are as an organization’”; Whetten, 2006, p. 221) have traditionally considered the collective organizational responses to these events rather than the processes through which individual members construct and make sense of these events (Petriglieri & Devine, 2016). That is, when members’ constructions of their organization’s identity are shared or significantly overlapping, then members’ “identity claims are likely to be represented as categorical imperatives—what the organization must do to avoid acting out of character” (Whetten, 2006, p. 221) or other coherent responses to such an event. Consequently, identity scholars studying externally-induced organizational crises and environmental changes (e.g., Corley & Gioia, 2000; Elsbach & Kramer, 1996; Ravasi & Schultz, 2006) as well as internal events such as planned changes (e.g., Clark et al., 2010; Jacobs et al., 2008) have tended to examine collective-level responses to these identity-implicating events.

Not only might organizational events or shocks disrupt members’ collective identity perceptions (Helms Mills et al., 2010), leading them to question their assumptions and beliefs about their organization’s identity, but they may also trigger a transformation of the organization’s identity as well (Clark et al., 2010; Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Indeed, research finds that an organization’s identity is often updated in response to current and recent events affecting the organization (Brown & Humphreys, 2003). In this way, organizational identity can both inform and be informed by organizational events, members’ collective interpretations of those events, and collective responses to them.

While past research tended to emphasize the collective identity perceptions held by an organization’s membership in regard to organizational events and identity (thus suggesting a homogeneity in perceptions held across individual members), more recent scholarship has recognized that not all members of an organization will construct an organizational event in the same way because they often do not construct their organization’s identity in the same way (Petriglieri & Devine, 2016). Indeed, scholars in both communication and management disciplines often conceptualize identities—at both the individual and organizational levels—as diverse, fragmented, and emergent (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Gioia et al., 2000; Kuhn, 2006; Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003; Tracy & Scott, 2006; Tracy & Trethewey, 2005). Thus, rather than being stable and agreed-upon, members’ descriptions of their organization’s identity may vary significantly (Glynn, 2000; Hsu & Elsbach, 2013).

Within this stream of research, a growing body of work has taken a discursive turn, viewing organizational identities as “extremely fluid discursive constructions constantly being made and re-made” (Brown & Humphreys, 2006, p. 233; see also Kuhn, 2006; Musson & Duberley, 2007). In this way, organizational identity is constituted in an emergent process, rather than being a stable set of characteristics, and is co-constructed by organizational members through discursive and interactive social practices (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). Yet, there is no inevitable compulsion for members to achieve consensus regarding their organization’s identity. Rather, individuals may passively respond to or actively negotiate these discourses (Frandsen, 2012), potentially resulting in competing discourses and thus contradictory versions of what legitimately constitutes organizational identity (Brown, 2006; Jack & Lorbiecki, 2007). Following Kuhn (2006), but applying his definition of identity to the organizational level, we suggest that organizational “identity is the conception of the [organization] reflexively and discursively understood” in interaction with others (p. 1340).

Viewing organizational identity from such a discursive and emergent lens is particularly important for studying organizational members’ discursive processes underlying, and constructions of, organizational events. In other words, when an organization’s members discursively construct organizational identities differently, theory suggests the result will be disparate event constructions, as well (Petriglieri & Devine, 2016). Brown and Humphreys (2003) provide initial empirical evidence of this point. Taking a narrative perspective of identity construction, they demonstrated that organizational members provided significantly distinct narratives in relation to organizational identity changes resulting from a corporate merger. However, despite this initial work, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how individual members of an organization construct the same event differently (Petriglieri & Devine, 2016) and consequently the “contradictions and ambiguities in organizational identity constructions” that may arise in relation to a single organizational event (Tienari & Vaara, 2016, p. 469). Thus, the discursive approach described below can help to unpack the discursive practices underlying this iterative event/identity construction.

Organizational Identity Work

While research on individual-level identity work has gained momentum in recent years, scholarship on identity work, applied at the organizational level of analysis, has not kept pace. Indeed, it was more than 10 years after Alvesson and Willmott (2002, p. 626) defined individual identity work as the “range of activities individuals engage in for forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening, or revising their self-meanings” that Kreiner et al. (2015, p. 985) introduced their definition of organizational identity work as “the cognitive, discursive, and behavioral processes in which individuals engage to create, present, sustain, share, and/or adapt organizational identity.”

At the individual level of analysis, and informing our work, narrative identity theories have suggested that individuals craft (and re-craft) stories about themselves as a way of making sense of new experiences and events that affect who they are and how they define themselves (Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010; Linde, 2001). An important component of this identity work is to maintain or achieve coherence such that individuals see themselves as remaining the same over time (Caza et al., 2018). In contrast to these individual-level identity work processes, our findings reveal that organizational members may have less need to maintain coherence among organizational identities and instead construct incoherence as a response to organizational events that are asserted to have unfavorable identity consequences. However, those who construct an organizational event as having favorable outcomes to organizational identity would be more likely to construct identity coherence.

A Discursive Resource Approach to Organizational Identity Work in Response to an Identity-Implicating Event

In this work, we pay particular attention to the discursive process of identity work, or the ways in which individual organizational members discursively constitute organizational identities in situ as a response to an identity-implicating event. Given the plurality of individual responses that a profound organizational event might evoke, we examine the discursive resources members draw upon in constructing their organizations’ identities (cf. Larson & Pearson, 2012; Meisenbach & Feldner, 2019; Wieland, 2010). Discursive resources are defined as the “concepts, expressions, or other linguistic devices that, when deployed in talk, present explanations for past and/or future activity that guide interactants’ interpretation of experience while molding individual and collective action” (Kuhn, 2006, p. 1341). These resources may be drawn upon by members to construct or deconstruct varying versions of organizational identity(ies) and may be drawn from sources that are internal or external to the organization (Tienari & Vaara, 2016).

Examining discursive resources provides the opportunity to examine the intersection of micro- and macro-discourses (Wieland, 2010) as members draw upon more habitual or established discourses that may be derived from organizational practices, symbols, or texts (Meisenbach & Feldner, 2019) and/or from the “wider historical, socio-cultural, and societal context” (Tienari & Vaara, 2016, p. 462; cf. Brown & Humphreys, 2003). Discursive resources that are utilized in situ by members in their everyday talk represent a linguistic, strategic choice that carries certain cultural or value-laden assumptions (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). In our case, we build on past work (e.g., Kuhn & Nelson, 2002; Larson & Pepper, 2003) to show how organizational members discursively constitute varying versions of organizational identity vis-à-vis a profound, identity-implicating organizational event.

In our analysis, we emphasize unique aspects of how identity is discursively produced or reproduced while taking into account the dynamic interplay of macro- and micro-discourses, as well as situated social practices in the ongoing constitution of organizational identities (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Bouchikhi et al., 1998; Cerulo, 1997). We also extend theorization of organizational identity work by intentionally taking into account how organizational events play a significant discursive role in that identity work as they are variously categorized and imbued with meaning. Specifically, we demonstrate how invoking different discursive resources influences how organizational identity is constructed in positive or negative terms. Identity may be variously constructed in terms of past, present, or future attributes (i.e., constructing temporal (in)coherence), or in terms of its ascription to different organizational subgroups or other entities (i.e., constructing collective (in)coherence). In all, this work takes a more nuanced approach to unpacking members’ discursive construction processes underlying their interpretation and framing of organizational events vis-à-vis identity. We thus arrive at a more holistic understanding of how and why members construct events as having varying implications for organizational identity reinforcement or change.

Organizational Context

The focus of our study was The Episcopal Church (TEC), an international organization of nearly two million members (at the time of our data collection) headquartered in the United States. TEC is globally affiliated with the larger Anglican Communion (comprised at the time of our study of over 80 million members and headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury [UK]). We specifically focused on a watershed event in TEC’s history: the election of the Church’s first openly gay bishop in 2003. Immediately following this event, members made their responses known in both Church and external media sources, revealing the emerging divisiveness of the issue. As the introductory quotes reveal, while some members painted the event with largely positive brush strokes, others primarily framed the event as destructive to the identity of the Church. In light of the contentiousness of member discourses, this case provides an extreme example from which to unpack members’ disparate organizational event and identity constructions and the discursive processes underlying these constructions.

We collected data over a ten-year period (2003–2013) to capture the evolutionary nature of unfolding events and discursive processes constituting identities. Our data consisted of in-depth interviews with Church leadership and members as well as naturally occurring texts (e.g., official Church statements, media reports, etc.) that members drew on in their discursive “work” to constitute and legitimate varying versions of identity.

Sample and Data

We conducted 72 in-depth interviews with an array of Church leaders, both clergy and lay leaders, who voiced their positions on the matter at hand. The discourse sample of interview conversations was drawn such that multiple voices were heard from a diverse spectrum of viewpoints, including liberal-leaning discourses (overwhelmingly in support of Bishop Robinson’s ordination), conservative-leaning discourses (overwhelmingly opposed to his ordination), and moderate discourses (mixed or conciliatory toward multiple views of the ordination).

We also collected textual data, or “naturally occurring materials” (Phillips & Jorgensen, 2002, p. 120) that yielded evidence of discursive resources available for organizational members. These data included newspaper articles, media interviews with Church officials, and official Church statements and reports (e.g., from General Conventions and leadership meetings). We carefully read and collected these texts (from 2003–2011) and catalogued them as document files on an ongoing basis. The resulting database contained over 2000 files sorted into a detailed folder system that facilitated retrieval. Collecting such a broad range of materials enabled us to look across many texts for shared terminology or habitual forms of argument as evidence of commonly invoked discursive resources (Kuhn, 2006; Kuhn et al., 2008).

Procedures

The 72 interviews were in-depth, semi-structured, and averaged 1 hour in length. Questions were open-ended and pertained to both the event in question as well as the identity of the Church such that members were able to speak openly about these dynamics. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

A discursive approach to organizational identity (and events) focuses on the role that language, or discourse, plays in individuals’ constructions of identity (and events) (Kuhn & Nelson, 2002; Scott et al., 1998) in terms of what the discourse is doing to accomplish certain versions of identity and event meanings/implications, not treating discourse as though it is representing identities and events (Fairhust & Putnam, 2014). Interview data can capture an organizational member’s discursive work to constitute an event account and/or identity construction at a particular point in time (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). When taking a discursive resource approach, the analyst focuses on ways informants frame and assign meaning to particular activities, events, phenomena, or identities and the broader discourses on which these frames draw (Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). Analysts examine the ideas, words, and symbols that provide explanations and guide interpretation of experiences (Kuhn, 2006) as individuals selectively and strategically draw on these resources in their everyday discourse to reinforce or transform their accounts and accomplish specific discursive tasks. These tasks constitute and/or legitimize certain versions of the social world (including organizational events and identities), sometimes supporting and, at times, challenging the legitimacy of other versions (Phillips & Jorgensen, 2002). Our analysis of interviews consequently involved identifying and comparing/contrasting the discursive resources members of TEC evoked, noting how their use shaped organizational identity and event construction.

We conducted a multistep discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on the discursive resources TEC members invoked in their interviews. Following a discursive resources analytic procedure similar to that described by Kuhn (2006), the first step of our analysis involved selecting key texts for in-depth analysis. We strategically chose passages that were particularly rich in regard to organizational members’ discursive constructions of organizational identity or the event under study. For this study, we analyzed 106 major passages (totaling 144 single-spaced pages) of discursive interactions between one of the authors and the study participants. After locating these passages, the second step of our analysis involved re-reading our study participants’ responses to identify commonly-used expressions, tropes, or metaphors that were used in constructing the identity(ies) of The Episcopal Church. These labels became discursive resources that members used in constructing their versions of organizational identity. Through our analysis, three primary labels emerged into which the segments could be coded: 1) “Bridge Church,” 2) “A Church Divided,” and 3) “Inclusive”/“Welcoming” Church. From this step of our analyses, we found that these labels were employed to construct distinct versions of organizational identities deployed for further discursive purposes—e.g., to legitimize that particular version of identity or to frame the meaning(s) of the precipitating event (the ordination of an openly gay bishop). Hence, the labels served as discursive resources upon which constructions of identity were built. The third analytic step included unpacking the ways in which informants constructed their organization’s identities in terms that worked toward their coherence or incoherence (e.g., as convergent and consistent, or divergent and inconsistent, with the trajectory of historic identities). These formulations both affected and were affected by constructions of the meaning and predicted consequences of a watershed event facing their organization, as the event was asserted to be aligned or misaligned with different versions of the organization’s identities. In our fourth step, we paid particular attention to the linkage between members’ use of various framings/discursive resources with their identity/event constructions to develop an understanding of the discursive processes through which members variously construct the implications of organizational events. Hence, whereas step three focused on identifying discrete discursive resources, step four focused on their interrelationships. The fifth and final step included unpacking the implications—for the individual, the organization, and/or society – stemming from members’ event constructions. The first four steps in our analysis follow a similar process to that described by Kuhn (2006). We went one step further, however, by focusing on the implications of members’ event constructions to which members’ accounts allude.

The Episcopal Church as a “Bridge” Church

Based on our interview and archival data, we found that TEC had been described for decades as a “bridge Church,” that is, a bridge between Catholicism and Protestantism. Many of our informants invoked this label as a discursive resource when implicitly expressing their disfavor with the consecration of Bishop Robinson. In this way, study participants used the bridge Church label as a means of creating a juxtaposition—what we refer to as collective incoherence—between what the Episcopal Church as an agentic entity claims as its identity versus informants’ versions of the Church’s defining features. In other words, using the organizational identity work tactic of crafting collective incoherence—or demonstrating a conflict between multiple concurrent identities stemming from distinct or competing organizational membership factions—enabled some organizational members to create distance between themselves and TEC. Specifically, one participant claimed:

Well, I mean, it purports to be a bridge Church between the best of Protestantism and the best of Roman Catholicism—that it’s a thinking person’s Church that allows a person to major on the majors and not major on the minors. And to find a balanced form of community that has both spiritual depth and intellectual integrity in the modern world. That’s the ostensible presentation. The reality is that it is a deeply upper middle class, deeply white, deeply Western, deeply increasingly secularized denomination that is elitist in its outlook and out of touch with not only its own grass roots but with much of the rest of the world. And the Episcopal Church is very, very much self-consciously, you know, focused on itself and its own sense of importance. And this is in a period of decline. (M-N-1) ¹

This discourse seeks to accomplish a contrast between the categories of “purported” identity (e.g., a “bridge Church,” a “thinking person’s Church”) and “real” identity (e.g., deeply upper middle class, out of touch with itself and the world, self-important, and in decline). Thus, an identity gap is discursively created as an incoherence between the stated identity of TEC (purported or ideal) versus what is constituted as the current reality (actual). The organizational member paints TEC’s “real” identity in largely negative terms while crafting the purported identity in a wholly positive light. The implication of this discursively-constituted collective incoherence is not only that the purported identity is not currently being realized, but that the “real” identity is, in fact, inferior and perhaps difficult to identify with. Identification implications were expressed by another informant who claimed: “I continue to be committed to the vocation of the Episcopal Church as I understand its ‘ought’ rather than its ‘is.’”

Other informants invoking the “bridge Church” label as a discursive resource did so in a way that suggested that this identity no longer holds true or has shifted over time. This represents what we call temporal incoherence, defined as a constructed gap or misalignment between past and present and/or present and future organizational identities. In other words, “bridge Church” represents a former identity that has “collapsed” and been replaced by a new identity that is less clear and/or still evolving.

As the following informant suggests, temporal incoherence:

Came out of proposing TEC’s identity as a bridge Church, within the panoply of Protestantism and Catholicism in the United States. Um, it also, during that period, thought of itself as a kind of unofficial establishment. That is to say, it built a national cathedral. It took great pride in the fact that the leadership—the political and economic leadership of this country—were Episcopalian. And that gave it a kind of crypto-establishment aura. And that, what shall I say, identity collapsed at a certain point. And I think, out of that, the Episcopal Church tried to put itself forward as a kind of enlightened form of Christianity with roots in a kind of rich history and liturgical tradition, but nonetheless open to the latest developments in learning and culture. And I think that this particular identity is still playing itself out. So, you see that in a lot of things as an attempt to distinguish ourselves from more conservative, or quote-unquote “closed communities.” (M-N-7)

In this passage we see an older, and partially collapsed, identity of TEC, a “bridge Church” between Protestantism and Catholicism, as well as a Church of the political and economic elite in the United States. At the same time, TEC is asserted to be shifting from a traditional and/or “establishment” Church to one that is more open and progressive. This juxtaposition between past and present identity exemplifies temporal incoherence.

Both study participants above referenced the Episcopal Church as if it were a distinct and agentic entity, separate from its membership, that attempts to craft its own identity (e.g., “it purports to be a bridge Church,” “proposing its identity as a bridge Church,” “the Episcopal Church tried to put itself forward as”). Using this framing, as opposed to more inclusive language (such as “our Church,” “us,” or “we”) serves to distance the organizational member from the organization and its identity. We suggest this further indicates a tactic for collective incoherence in that it positions an identity version put forth by one faction of the Church—in this case, the traditional or leader-centric, official version of identity—as distinct from and potentially opposing the version constituted by another group—in this case, the organizational membership more broadly, or what informants called the “people in the pew.”

Thus, organizational members engaged in both direct and more subtle identity work tactics to craft collective and/or temporal incoherence to frame their preferred version of the meaning and implications (identity-related and otherwise) of the event. In the quote above, the organizational member is discursively framing the act of consecrating a gay bishop to be “an attempt to distinguish ourselves from more conservative, or quote-unquote ‘closed communities.’” Consequently, this event is construed as being aligned with an evolving identity to which the Church is alleged to be transitioning. Simultaneously, the event is seen as misaligned with a past/purported identity of the Church given that the new/evolving identity of TEC was constituted in this particular discourse as distinct from and inferior to the past/purported identity.

In sum, rather than discursively constructing the current or “real” identity of TEC in isolation, these organizational members contrasted historic or purported identity attributes as a means of constructing current organizational identity incoherence. This creation of collective and/or temporal incoherence enabled some members to frame the event as being aligned with one version of the organization’s identity while at the same time being misaligned with another version. Thus, organizational members may rely on one or both of these discursive identity work tactics when confronted with an organizational event they construct as being incongruent or problematic (even threatening) to a particular organizational identity, but which is not seen as a universal threat to the entire membership or all aspects of organizational identity.

The Episcopal Church as a Church “Divided”

Organizational members who expressed their opposition to the consecration of Bishop Robinson, and/or constructed this event as misaligned with an organizational identity, drew on texts that characterized the Episcopal Church as a “Church divided.” This phrase became a discursive resource derived from mass-media accounts such as contemporary news releases of events in TEC since 2003 and interviews with key TEC and Anglican leaders. For example, a study participant who drew on the “divided Church” discursive resource explained how he read the phrase in a Time magazine article detailing the events of the 2003 General Convention:

The week after General Convention, if you opened up Time Magazine , and there was a full-page of, actually two pages, picture of the House of Bishops, gallery people sitting around the House of Bishops—and the big … headline was “A Church Divided.” Um, that’s regardless of our traditions of worship or liturgy or inclusions or political correctness. All of that is secondary now to the perceived reality, which is that now we are a Church divided. (M-N-3)

Drawing on the “Church divided” discursive resource, this organizational member constructs both temporal and collective incoherence. Regarding the former, there is the suggestion that the “perceived reality” (the member’s term) of being a divided Church supersedes the organization’s other and/or previous identity constructions for which the Church is traditionally known (e.g., “traditions of worship or liturgy or inclusions”). Regarding the latter, the characterization of a divided Church implicates that there are at least two factions or groups divided in how they would prioritize identity versions of the organization, thereby creating collective incoherence.

Unlike organizational members drawing on the “bridge Church” label as a discursive resource (positioning TEC’s formal identity as such in contradistinction to the composition of its broader membership), those invoking the “Church divided” metaphor tended to constitute TEC as being composed of two competing membership factions each attempting to prevail over the other in their preferred version of TEC identity. Indeed, while this identity characterization may have been relatively new and discursively deployed in response to the identity-implicating event in the Episcopal Church, this framing also revealed ongoing identity incompatibilities and discursive collisions between these factions. Organizational members constituted the event not only as the spark that created membership division, but also as one that had its roots in past divisions (e.g., previous conflicts in TEC regarding the ordination of women and revisions to its Book of Common Prayer) and was now reinforced by another period of historic change. In this way, organizational members called attention to the ongoing incoherence between the various factions within TEC, and consequently differing discursive versions of TEC identity.

In constructing these identities as incompatible, one participant memorably observed:

I think they’re incompatible, yes …. I think we embarrass each other. We’re like a couple that live together, you know, and they were married and they live together, but every time they see each other, they throw up. And it’s not that we’re unkind to each other; we just haven’t got anything much in common. (M-N-9)

When the identities of an organization are constituted in discourse as incoherent, some organizational members argued that conflicting identities may continue to coexist and evolve separately, but constructing a cohesive path forward will be difficult. Others invoking the “Church divided” metaphor were more negative in their assessments and constructions, suggesting that the multiple identities of TEC were in the process of colliding, with “collision” connoting a more dynamic and confrontational consequence than mere incompatibility. Such an identity collision is articulated in the following quote:

I think there are, there’s always been the strain between those who believe the gospel means “We need to be out in the world working with the poor, the voiceless, the powerless”—you know, doing those really radical things like feeding the poor, the hungry, clothe the naked and stuff like that—and those who believe that the Church is the safe place they go to worship with people just like them .... And when that vision of the Church is disturbed, it’s very bothersome to people. So, I think probably there have always been multiple visions of the Church and probably there have been minor collisions of those visions always. I think this latest collision of the Church, the various views of the Church, has been exacerbated by a very small group of people who really, really, really want to turn the clock back. (F-Y-2)

Within this quote, we see a dichotomy of two identities being produced: 1) a Church that addresses “radical” social needs by working with the “powerless” vs. 2) a “safe” haven to worship only with similar others. The purpose of reducing complexity to a dichotomy seems to be strategic in order to imply that the “latest collision”—i.e., the ordination of a gay bishop— somehow exemplifies, and also is rooted in, that dichotomy. Through crafting collective incoherence, the study participant is suggesting that the event in question is aligned with a faction of the organization’s membership (and their identity) while being misaligned with another faction (and their identity).

Organizational members who drew on the “Church divided” discursive resource discussed the implication of the event for the organization at large. In the following quote, the study participant constructs the incoherence between multiple identities (and their membership factions) as unsustainable, with both discursive and material “impacts” of further division and organizational decline: “Nobody wakes up on Sunday morning and says to themselves, ‘Hey Honey, let’s see if we can go to a divided church.’… So, the impact of having this being our main issue is going to be further shrinkage and further division” (M-N-3).

Thus, unlike the “bridge Church” discursive resource, those invoking the “Church divided” resource were more explicit in their disapproval of the event and their concern for significant organizational consequences beyond merely personal implications. In other words, the membership division that was reinforced by this event constituted an organizational identity threat. For some members, the event influenced their public (rather than personal) distancing from the opposing faction as evidenced in the following passage:

Well, from the moment, from literally the moment of those votes a year ago last month, we were in a crisis mode, in a battle for our life, because we received immediately phone calls demanding the names of parishioners literally be taken out of our directory. Ah, money stopped instantly. There was just a huge revulsion about the whole process. And so we indicated very clearly to our diocesan officers that—well to the diocese … we tried not to make a personal issue out of it. We tried to stay above the individuals and personals, but we did take out an ad in the public, a large public announcement in the [names of newspapers], indicating our parish specifically distanced itself from those actions of General Convention, repudiated them, and stood with historic Anglicanism. (M-N-5)

In sum, those drawing on the “Church divided” discursive resource invoked an “us” versus “them” discourse—i.e., crafting collective incoherence—wherein disagreeing membership factions were discursively framed as being at odds; multiple identities were perceived as incompatible, and the organizational event was constructed in such a way as to reinforce and/or magnify these incompatibilities and present an organizational threat. Consequently, some members decided to publicly distance themselves from the competing faction or organization at large as a means of responding to this threat.

The Episcopal Church as a “Welcoming” Church

Not all organizational members were opposed to the consecration of Bishop Robinson, nor did they frame the event as a threat or as a misalignment with all or part of the organization and its identity(ies). Rather, some members framed the event as a logical progression or enactment of what the organization was becoming and aligned themselves with an organizational identity narrative that placed TEC on a positive trajectory temporally. For these members, the idea of TEC as “welcoming” to all, regardless of one’s personal characteristics or background, was readily drawn on as a resource. The following quote explicates the welcoming/inclusive nature of the Church, which often served as a basis for members’ identification:

And this is kind of a crazy place; we have, yeah, a lot of African students and we had a lot of gay people and this that and the other—street people coming in, and then, all kinds of folks. And he said, “I really want my family to be here because, you know, this is the kind of a world I want my family to treasure.” (M-Y-10)

This idea of TEC as “welcoming” was also evidenced in TEC’s discursive symbols and texts. Indeed, the phrase “The Episcopal Church welcomes you” (F-Y-1) was often invoked by members.

Organizational members drawing on this discursive resource highlighted the significance and ambiguity of the “Episcopal Church Welcomes You” slogan which was affixed to thousands of official Episcopal Church signs (approximately 7700 of them) as well as TEC’s webpage and other Church-produced texts. It was thus a readily accessible discursive resource for members to draw on as further evidenced in the same participant’s quote:

So they commissioned the national Church to develop a sign, … sort of a logo that could be hung in, you know, neighborhoods around and cities around the country that would help direct people to find the Episcopal Church and that sign said, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.” …Well, ((chuckling)) we had never said that before. ((laughing)) We had said, anybody who needs to be an Episcopalian already is one ((chuckling)) .… So, I think that we’ve begun to live into our own vision. And we’re now living into the reality of that vision. (F-Y-1).

Both discursive and non-discursive (material) elements of the sign work together to become a discursive resource that employs both the sign’s symbolism and discursive slogan to contribute toward constituting a change in the identity of TEC. More specifically, the participant’s discourse reflects TEC’s pre-sign and post-sign identity positions as she states, “We had said, anybody who needs to be an Episcopalian already is one.” The very existence of the sign, however, nudges a shift toward the “welcoming” identity for TEC. Thus, while this organizational member crafted temporal incoherence such that a change in the identity of TEC is evident, she is crafting this incoherence in a positive light, with the suggestion that this new identity represents a welcomed shift.

Two additional features of this passage above are worth noting. First, the participant invokes the pronoun “we” several times, suggesting that the organization is made up of a relatively cohesive membership (or, at the very least, not rival factions) that is collectively changing and adopting this new “welcoming” identity—i.e., crafting collective coherence. Positive implications of this discursive resource stand in sharp contrast to the collective incoherence noted in the previous two cases of drawing on discursive resources. Second, the phrase “we’re now living into the reality of that vision” suggests that the event of Bishop Robinson’s consecration is constituted as part of that reality and therefore aligned with the “welcoming Church” identity. If not a full-blown organizational identity opportunity, the event embodies, in the person of Bishop Robinson, a natural progression of what the organization is ostensibly becoming.

The participant went on to discuss the roots of this identity shift, suggesting that the identity of inclusivity or being welcoming may have also been born out of language changes within revised versions of the Book of Common Prayer used by the Episcopal Church.

If you want to know what’s brought us to this point in time, it’s the 1979 Prayer Book. And the 1928 Prayer Book Society was absolutely right when they said, “You know, if you institute these changes, everything in the Church will change.” They were absolutely right. And now I understand why they hated the ((chuckling)) 1979 prayer book .... And the, even the sort of nod to italicizing the pronouns, um, sent a very strong and clear message of inclusion, turning the priest, you know, from facing the wall to facing the people ... and bringing people and welcoming everyone into body of Christ, changed us. (F-Y-1)

It is implied that the described identity-related changes (i.e., welcoming everyone) are beneficial, and that this particular discursive resource has the effect of altering TEC’s identity and further discourses completely, i.e., “everything in the Church will change.”

For those organizational members drawing on the discursive resource of “The Episcopal Church welcomes you” or of TEC as being inclusive, there is the implication that multiple membership factions and identities may indeed coexist. In turn, this coexistence represents collective coherence. In other words, the perceived inclusive nature of the Church is accepting of a multiplicity of identities.

This collective identity coherence is further revealed in the following quotes (from the same two participants above):

And all of those identities are both compatible as well as conflicting at times. They have places sort of on their outer borders, where they complement, overlap, and conflict. And that’s the juice, that’s the pulse, the energy, the excitement for me, of being an Episcopalian. It’s in that “stuff.” (F-Y-1)

Evidenced at the end of the previous quote, as well as within the following quote, is the notion that the identity of TEC, and consequently the Church at large, is in a state of becoming.

I think we’ve reached the crossroads, and the crossroads is “OK, does the Episcopal Church welcome you?” And what does that welcome entail? ... What does that mean? What is “welcomes you?” Is it just hello, how are you, good day? Have a nice day? Or is it “welcomes you into the full body of Christ?” “Welcomes you into the leadership of the body of Christ.” “Welcomes you into the councils of the Church.” What is “welcome” and who is “you?” (F-Y-1)

From this quote, we see that what is meant by “welcome”—including who is welcomed and what that welcoming entails—is left as a series of open-ended questions, not fixed categorizations. Thus, drawing on the discursive resource of “welcoming” also opens a discursive space for varied identity versions of the Episcopal Church, with the consecration of a gay bishop foreshadowing one of these versions as an event that is aligned with a new identity of a “welcoming Church.” Those members who were supportive of this organizational event also highlighted its far-reaching societal implications:

(TEC) values a role in society of asking the hard questions, of challenging society to be more inclusive, to grow, to stretch, to be something of an example in society. Other people are attracted to the Church because it challenges society’s preconceptions about what’s right and wrong. You know, it challenges the powers of principalities; it’s on the cutting edge of social change. (M-Y-14)

Thus, rather than constructing personal or organizational (identity) threats and consequently personally or publicly distancing oneself (or one’s group) from the organization, TEC may be discursively constructed by some members as leading ongoing and positive change, not just for their collective membership but for society at large. As the passages in this section reflect, organizational members may be more likely to construct these positive organizational identity implications from an event when they craft collective identity coherence and positive temporal incoherence, which in turn results in an alignment between the event and a cohesive and/or new organizational identity.