Abstract
This article analyzes how organizations discursively construe legitimate distinctiveness (LD) by using their own corporate stories in recombination with historical narratives about commons (i.e., cultural, social, or natural resources available in a local community). Specifically, through the study of 55 rural hotels active in Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain), we theorize about how organizations build LD through a different process than the one explained by previous studies: a process of historical bricolage. Two recursive mechanisms constitute this process—namely the appropriation and preservation of historical narratives about natural (e.g., forests, animals), social (e.g., recipes, movies), or cultural (e.g., heritage, kings) commons. This process contributes to current studies because it explains how organizations build LD through the strategic use of history, the preservation rather than the mere appropriation of collective narratives, and finally the production of stories that integrate the organizational and collective selves.
Introduction
My rural hotel is not extremely different from others, because when people come here they expect to find what is typical in the region . . . At the same time, what makes it unique is the land . . ., [which is] a place of medieval battles and conquests in Arab territories. . . . Under [the protection of] this same hotel’s walls, people survived the battle of Pavia in 1525 in Pedraza. . . . In the medieval room, there is an authentic suit of armor . . . used in that battle. [It] belonged to my ancestors . . . (Rural Hotel Owner)
This story of a rural hotel owner in Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain) highlights two essential issues: (a) the need to look like a typical Segovian rural hotel while also being uniquely attractive and, less intuitively, (b) the fact that the community itself provides the elements through which the hotel owner can claim the uniqueness of his company.
The need for organizations to be both similar to and distinct from other organizations in their industry, markets, and business groups is widely recognized in organizational studies as the need to reach legitimate distinctiveness (LD). Organizations look for LD to gain a competitive advantage (Deephouse, 1999; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001; Porac, Thomas, & Baden-Fuller, 2011), initial resources (Navis & Glynn, 2011), or the legitimization of a field (Navis & Glynn, 2010). Existing literature on LD illustrates that organizations reach LD by emphasizing their similarity to or distinctiveness from their collectives (Deephouse, 1999; Navis & Glynn, 2010; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001). In particular, studies focusing on how organizations discursively construct LD acknowledged that they act as bricoleurs (Glynn, 2008) to compose unique configurations of collective claims (Lamertz, Heugens, & Calmet, 2005) to differentiate themselves within the group.
In this article, we aim to address this process of bricolage with a specific focus on how organizations recombine historical collective narratives with their own corporate narratives to construct LD. We believe that studying this particular form of bricolage would improve our understanding of the discursive construction of LD because it has been recently acknowledged that organizations use history and their own stories as interpretative devices to build their competitive advantage (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; McGaughey, 2013; Suddaby, Foster, & Quinn-Trank, 2010). Basically, an organization defines who it is, who it was, and who it will be by constantly reenacting narratives from collective memories (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Hills, Voronov, & Hinings, 2013; Schultz & Hernes, 2013). Given the relevance of the past in the construction of organizational identity, we deem it relevant to explore how organizations combine their own corporate stories with narratives about historical collective elements such as the commons (Ostrom, 1990, 2003), which are social, cultural, or natural resources available to everyone in a local community (e.g., a region). They represent important collective historical resources because the present life experience of individuals in a community can be conceptualized by reproducing past narratives about commons (Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis, 2008; Benkler, 2006; Bollier, 2002; Burri, 2010). Hence, we believe that there is much merit in exploring how commons-based narratives intervene in organizations’ historical bricolage for LD construction through corporate stories.
With this purpose, the current manuscript presents a theory-building study to address the following research question:
We explored this question by analyzing the corporate stories of rural hotels in the local community of Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain). The theoretical model emerging from this analysis illustrates that rural hotel owners bring liveliness to past commons’ narratives through their current written (e.g., brochures, websites) and oral stories (e.g., for guests), using a process of historical bricolage that comprises two recursive mechanisms: appropriation of commons (i.e., talking about commons as a constitutive part of the hotel) and preservation of commons (i.e., talking about how the hotel helps preserve the commons). These two mechanisms are recursive because hotels use their present to preserve and reenact the past, which allows them to endlessly recreate both their own corporate story and the memory of commons. The process of historical bricolage we describe contributes to advancing knowledge on how organizations discursively construct LD by illustrating (a) the role of collective history for LD, (b) the recursive complementarity of appropriation and preservation of collective narratives, and finally (c) the narrative chain of meanings by which organizations integrate their organizational and collective selves.
The present article is structured as follows. First, we review the previous literature that defines the key concepts for our theorizing. We then present the context in which we conducted our empirical research, the methodology, and the main findings. Finally, we discuss our emerging theoretical model and contribution to LD and organizational identity studies.
Theoretical Background
In this section, we present the key concepts of our study—namely, LD, bricolage, corporate stories, history, and commons-based narratives—that, when taken together, constituted our initial conceptual framework before conducting our theory-building empirical study. This conceptual framework was valuable in helping us make sense of what we were observing throughout the study.
LD, Bricolage, and History
A number of studies have recognized the need for organizations to strike a balance between legitimacy and distinctiveness (see, for example, Rutherford & Buller, 2007; Schultz & Hinings, 2012; Whetten, 2006). The majority of studies (Lamertz et al., 2005; Navis & Glynn, 2011) have defined LD as being “parallel to the concept of optimal distinctiveness” (Navis & Glynn, 2011, p. 482). Optimal distinctiveness means that members of a group desire to maintain their sameness and distinctiveness in constant opposition to one another to gain both inclusion and individuality in a group (Brewer, 2003). Researchers have recently applied the optimal distinctiveness paradigm at the inter-organizational level, exploring how organizations in new or mature industries juxtapose claims of homogeneity and heterogeneity to claim conformity to or differentiation from other organizations in their industry (Lamertz et al., 2005; Navis & Glynn, 2011).
As Porac et al. (2011) highlighted, current research shows that organizations find LD using a two-step process: They first align their identity to the group’s features, and then, once this legitimacy cut is made, they deviate from the group and find distinctiveness. An exception to this approach is Deephouse (1999), who proposed a one-step approach, according to which organizations find LD when they position themselves a medium distance from attributes of other companies in their business group. Even in this case, Deephouse’s study highlighted the need for organizations to have access to a predefined set of attributes of the business group.
Glynn (2008) was one of the first authors to introduce bricolage as a theoretically useful concept for explaining how organizations construct LD. According to Glynn, organizations freely recombine similar collective elements of a business group, field, or industry in different unique configurations so as to make their identities distinct from each other, yet similar enough within their group of reference. McGaughey (2013) pointed out that organizations as bricoleurs might use history as a key driving factor in their bricolage. Organizations might craft historical tales that skillfully appropriate elements of their collectives with the aim of reconfiguring the group toward change. McGaughey found that the earlier history is used, the easier it is for bricoleurs to build allies and bring about a change in a group.
Although bricolage for LD has mainly been used in management studies to explain organizational agency within field dynamics, studies at the organizational level have also used bricolage to explain organizational sense making (Weick, 1993), entrepreneurship (Baker, Miner, & Eesley, 2003; Phillips & Tracey, 2007), social entrepreneurship (Di Domenico, Haugh, & Tracey, 2010), and innovation (Halme, Lindeman, & Linna, 2012). All these studies considered the act of bricolage to be an improvised process (Weick, 1993) that can provide a competitive advantage for the organization. The present identity of the bricoleur seems to be a key driving force that guides the recombination of resources at hand (Baker et al., 2003; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Duymedjian & Rüling, 2010). The concept of bricolage has strong anthropological roots and was originally defined by Lévi-Strauss (1962) in La Pensée Sauvage. Historians and anthropologists (Cheung, 2010; De Groot, 2009; Harrison, Ferris, & Wilcox, 2014; Lobur, 2008) introduced the concept of historical bricolage, which allows an actor, such as an historian, a politician, or a government, to make its present comprehensible by reorganizing old events and reading the present through this reconfigured past. Quite similarly, organizational scholars (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Beverland, 2005; Suddaby et al., 2010) illustrated how history is reconstructed by an organization with strategic purposes. However, to our knowledge, this process of historical bricolage has never been used to explain the organizational discursive construction of LD. Our aim with this article is to understand how organizations perform historical bricolage by reassembling past narratives of natural, cultural, and social commons of a local community with their unique corporate narrative to make their corporate stories and present organizational identity both legitimate and distinctive.
Corporate Stories, History, and Collective Memory
Corporate stories typically portray the organization’s unique character and describe the organization through the lens of its own distinctive identity (Hatch & Schultz, 2008; King & Whetten, 2008; Pratt & Foreman, 2000). A number of scholars (e.g., Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Beverland, 2005; Suddaby et al., 2010) have supported the idea that corporate narratives play an important role in explaining how organizations interpret the cultural heritage of their group of reference and, thus, in the development of the stories emerging about it. According to these scholars, when an organization conveys corporate stories, it rarely sets them only in the present; instead, it positions its stories as part of an ongoing historical construction of collective memories that influence how the organization defines what it is and what it is not (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Hills et al., 2013; Schultz & Hernes, 2013). Basically, organizations constantly reenact the past (i.e., include a number of collective narratives in their stories) to define who they are. It is the present identity of the organization that influences how the organization selects and makes sense of these past collective events (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Gioia, Corley, & Fabbri, 2002; Suddaby et al., 2010); in some cases, the corporate story even revisits the collective history with a mixture of real and imagined narratives (Beverland, 2005). This does not mean that organizations manipulate the past; rather, they simply appropriate history in a subjective way (Suddaby et al., 2010) and build a narrative story that is unique because it privileges some collective events of the past while omitting others.
Although previous studies have acknowledged the importance of historical collective narratives for corporate stories, the literature on organizational identity has never delved into an examination of how organizations draw on the sociohistorical heritage of a local community to build LD. A partial exception to this can be found in Voronov, De Clerq, and Hinings (2013), who showed how the history and culture of a local community might help wineries in the Ontario wine industry claim distinctiveness in the global market. However, these authors did not examine how the collective memory of a place is leveraged to face the “competitive cusp” (Porac et al., 2011, p. 647). This is surprising considering that local communities have been found to represent an important discursive resource for the identity construction of organizations (not belonging to local business groups) and individuals. According to Glynn and Halgin (2011), local communities may provide narratives that illustrate what is typical, positive, and unique in a particular place. Organizations can appropriate these narratives to build their legitimate identity narratives.
In a similar vein, Larson and Pearson (2012) studied the role of a local place’s discursive resources in the construction of occupational identities and argued that physical belongingness to a place, including things such as mountains and rivers, enables certain constructions of distinctive identities. Given that local communities and their resources might represent interesting concepts for exploring how collective memory is reenacted by organizations for the construction of their identity, we rely on the concept of commons—and commons-based narratives—to explore our research question.
Commons, Commons-Based Narratives, and Preservation of the Land
Within the management literature, the concept of commons has been studied by scholars interested in analyzing the different models that regulate how businesses and individuals use three types of community resources—namely, natural, cultural, and social resources. Since Hardin’s (1968) milestone article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which highlighted the dangers of exploiting natural commons when strategic alignment is lacking, a number of studies have proposed that either private or public hands play a crucial role in promoting shared laws, rules, and—ultimately—shared knowledge and values guiding how individuals and businesses use commons. The fundamental basis among these studies was a focus on seeking to understand how to avoid the exploitation of commons. However, a new view has emerged as a result of Ostrom’s (1990, 2003) work, which highlights how commons are unowned physical resources that do not need to be owned by someone to be purposively used in and for a community, because a collective management of resources in a community may arise organically, following a peer-to-peer logic.
Taking inspiration from Ostrom’s work, a number of studies (e.g., Abelson et al., 2008; Benkler, 2006; Burri, 2010; Zittrain, 2008) have explored how narratives about commons can be used and reproduced. Commons-based narratives are considered intangible commons reporting of physical commons, such as nature, social traditions, and cultural heritage in a community. These are not official tales about a shared use of commons in the community that guides others in the group to understand, accept, and repeat the same narratives; rather, these narratives follow the principle of commons-based peer-to-peer content creation (Benkler, 2006; Burri, 2010), which is characterized by a crowd-sourced content production of narratives that implicitly safeguards and preserves the commons and, more specifically, their use in each community. These narratives emerge as a form of individual voice, which—rather than representing an explicit definition of the community—is the result of a co-creation (Bollier, 2002) that expresses the lifeworld in a community (Habermas, 1987). In other words, how a member of a community conceptualizes his or her present experience in that community is based on past historical, natural, social, and cultural events. Therefore, a commons-based narrative is an interpretation of the individual member in the community rather than a story at the community level. For example, a scientist might narrate about the importance of his or her current medical discovery by highlighting how colleagues in the past studied a disease. The scientist might feature specific natural ingredients traditionally used to cure the disease or might emphasize the technical procedure by which a medicament has traditionally been produced, ultimately to highlight the choice of ingredients and procedure for the current discovery. Such a story builds on past narratives of natural and social commons of a scientific community; however, these facts express the present tale of the scientist and his or her discovery path rather than a story produced in agreement with the rest of the community.
Method
Given the lack of a clear theory that would enable a deductive research design through hypothesis testing, we adopted a multi-method theory-building approach (Eisenhardt, 1989). We approached rural hotels in the local community of Segovia (Castilla y León) with a clear research question and broad theoretical concepts and without research hypotheses.
Research Context
Lodging in a rural hotel in the local community of Segovia (Castilla y León) is anything but ordinary. These hotels are located far from city centers, and owners welcome visitors as if to their own home, with a personal touch typical of Segovian lands—that is, they treat guests as if they were part of the family. Guests find themselves in lands with an incredible historical heritage due to the medieval roots of the surroundings (e.g., churches, monasteries, sites of medieval battles). They are also able to enjoy a territory with amazing landscapes (e.g., natural parks, rivers, natural reserves) and old rural socioeconomic traditions (e.g., mills, shearing buildings, agriculture, and craftsmanship).
Running one of these hotels today is not easy. Rural tourism in Spain, including in the region of Segovia, emerged in the mid-1990s, when European policies culminated in a common Spanish rural policy. Thanks to government subsidies, any rural house or business could be restructured into a rural lodge. During the 1990s, rural auberges were a rarity, competition was low, and public funds were relatively easy to get. However, by the early 2000s, competition had grown as new players joined (due to a new law that subsidized the renovation of rural houses), and the Internet became a digital tourism platform that blurred the boundaries of competition among rural hotels, ordinary hotels, and other tourist resorts in the region. When the economic crisis struck Spain in 2008, rural hotels’ need to be attractive became greater than ever as demand for this type of accommodation diminished. Failing to distinguish themselves from competitors or establish legitimacy as a rural hotel led to the closure of many rural hotel businesses.
Data Collection
We collected data from five main sources. Table 1 provides an overview of the type of data, the aim of the data collection, and the use of the data in the analysis.
Data Collection and Analysis.
Note. KWIC = keyword in context; LD = legitimate distinctiveness.
In the preliminary phase of the research, we collected data to gain insights into our research context and to know more about the local Segovian collective identity and its specific features. We collected documents related to the legislation of rural hotels and the certification system by searching local and national authorities’ public archives. This approach enabled us to identify a complete list of Segovian rural hotels as well as assess whether authorities had promoted any collective identity about the local group of rural hotels. We then conducted 10 interviews with experts in tourism―mostly rural tourism―and with informants representing intermediaries that certify the quality of rural hotels. We selected interviewees using a snowball sampling procedure, starting with those named by public entities, tourist guides, and online portals. We limited the number of interviews to 10 individuals for two reasons: First, we found that the interviewees were repeating similar themes and opinions about rural hotels, both as a national industry (Spanish rural hospitality industry) and as a local group (rural hotels of Segovia in Castilla y León). Second, the rural hotel industry is rather small in Spain, limiting our options for interviewees. Only two influential guides are published for the Spanish rural hotel industry, Ruralka and Rusticae, and we were able to interview the publishers of both. Furthermore, no more than five key magazines (e.g., Turismo Rural) regularly feature articles on rural hotels, and we interviewed people working for two of them. Finally, we interviewed six tourism and hospitality experts—a considerable number for an industry as small and specialized as rural tourism in Spain. We subsequently complemented these 10 interviews with a collection of press clippings and corporate documents from the intermediaries in Spain. In total, we collected 100 documents covering news and opinions related to rural hotels over a period of 2 years.
After the preliminary phase, we collected corporate documents and materials about each rural hotel in Segovia (Castilla y León). To identify rural hotels, we relied upon the regional government’s official documents, which list the number of rural hotels renovated from private rural private houses. During our data collection, we identified 72 rural hotels listed in the Segovian local community, although this list was only our starting point. We contacted all of these hotels electronically or by phone and found that, among them, 17 had been initiated by people mainly interested in receiving subsidies from the government to renew their old family buildings; these individuals had not actually opened a business and only occasionally opened their lodges to the public. We did not consider these hotels for our analysis, as they are not consistently functioning as rural Segovian hotels. Thus, in total, we analyzed data from 55 rural hotels, which represent the real population of hotels active in the Segovian local community.
Next, we conducted 27 interviews with 25 owners (i.e., two owners were interviewed twice). As noted in previous research (Rutherford & Buller, 2007), corporate stories narrated by owners of a small business almost always include themes that owners know help to legitimize the business in the eyes of major stakeholders. We selected these owners based on two principles: (a) the similarity or non-similarity of the stories in their corporate materials (as identified by the analysis of language used in their corporate materials; see Step 2 of the analysis) and (b) the success or failure of their rural businesses. Although business performance was not our main focus, we took it into consideration because we considered success to be a proxy for identifying which hotels might have stories that helped them to be legitimized and distinctive. As the rural hotel field comprises small businesses with a relatively low degree of professionalization, it was not possible to collect comparable facts and figures about the hotels’ success (e.g., financials). We relied on self-reports to compare their financial well-being, their level of competitiveness over time, and their level of success in weathering the crisis. We triangulated hotel owners’ self-reports with ratings and reviews in either generalized online portals such as TripAdvisor or specialized portals such as Top-rural, Escapade-rural, Rustikae, and Ruralka. Three fourths of the selected rural hotels were successfully distinctive—that is, two thirds of their ratings fell in the “very good” or “excellent” categories. In addition, they were found to be legitimate as top rural auberges for the Segovian local community, as they either appeared in specialized rural portals or were categorized as country accommodations on generalist platforms.
We conducted these 27 interviews in three rounds to enhance the trustworthiness of our data analysis (Bauer & Gaskell, 2000; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994)—that is, the credibility and transparency of our analysis and the emerging theory. In the first round, we conducted 15 interviews (lasting 1.5-2 hr); in the second round, we conducted five interviews and presented our emergent model about LD to five hotel owners (two we had already interviewed in the first round and three we had not; these interviews lasted about an hour). Based on this second round of interviews, we were able to identify unclear elements in our theorizing. Finally, we conducted a third round of seven interviews (1.5-2 hr) with seven additional rural hotels to test our revised model with other rural hotels.
Data Analysis
We analyzed the data using a three-step process. First, we gained a detailed understanding of the specificities of the community of rural hotels in Segovia (Castilla y León). Second, we identified narratives about the local commons conveyed by the rural Segovian hotels. Third, to carry out the core of our analysis, we focused on the inductive investigation of all the data collected from the hotels (i.e., documents and interview transcripts) to scrutinize how commons narratives are recombined with and reproduced in hotels’ corporate narratives and how the LD of rural hotels is constructed in their corporate identity stories.
Step 1: Specificities of our empirical context
We analyzed data collected from key actors in the Spanish rural hotel industry, experts in tourism, and intermediaries (see Table 1) to (a) define what a rural hotel is and (b) create a profile of rural hotels in the Segovia local community. This step ensured that we understood whether these rural hotels were actually promoted as a local group (Segovia) or only as members of the Spanish rural hotel industry. It also helped us check whether rural hotels refer to a joint interpretation of commons or whether there are relational networks initiated by rural hotels or intermediaries at the community level. We qualitatively analyzed documents and preliminary interview transcripts in search of the previously mentioned themes. Furthermore, we quantitatively explored the 100 press clippings from intermediaries in search of news and opinions about rural Segovian hotels, selecting material based on the following syntax: “rural hotel”; “rural hotel” and “Segovia”; and “rural hotel” and “Castilla y León.”
Step 2: Identifying hotels’ stories and their common ground
Next, we analyzed the corporate material of the 55 rural hotels to learn whether they portrayed their rural business through similar stories. To avoid analyzing this corporate material with a bias (e.g., stemming from considerations that we might have heard in our preliminary interviews or read in the intermediaries’ materials), we analyzed the use of language in the corporate materials with the help of the Alceste computer-text analysis software (Reinert, 1993). This software allowed us to analyze the corporate material of the rural hotels through a keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis (for a detailed illustration of each step of Alceste’s KWIC analysis, see Illia, Sonpar, & Bauer, 2014). As in other analyses developed by management scholars, Alceste analyzes a word’s position in the text by postulating that “since the meaning of words is learned through reading and hearing them used in particular combinations, word co-occurrence is a suitable basis for representing meaning” (Ocasio & Joseph, 2005, p. 165). Compared with other computer-based analyses, Alceste offers a number of advantages. First, unlike other software that simply performs content analysis, Alceste infers meaning from words based on predefined grammatical rules (e.g., Textpack), as it does not have a predefined dictionary. It also overcomes the bias of judging the common use of language uniquely based on human coding (e.g., as in Atlas.ti or Nvivo computer-assisted qualitative data analysis). Furthermore, compared with other software that performs a KWIC analysis (e.g., centering resonance analysis [CRA]; see Corman, Kuhn, Mcphee, & Dooley, 2002), Alceste analyzes how words are used similarly in a specific part of the text by first analyzing how their use differs fundamentally from another part of the text (Illia et al., 2014). Such an analysis is not typically performed by other KWIC software. This was key in our analysis, because we had to identify whether any semantic “glue” existed between stories and, if so, what determining factor differentiated one part of the text from the other parts. We had to identify not only the common language within stories but also the glue that represented the fundamental difference between stories. Alceste was essential in helping us detect this.
Step 3: Identifying LD in hotels’ stories
Based on the preceding analysis, we were able to identify whether rural hotels deployed corporate stories with a similar language and semantics; however, we were not able to explore whether these stories also expressed distinctiveness. For the latter, we conducted a thematic analysis of both corporate and owners’ stories, a method extensively used in management and organizational identity studies (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013). As Figure 1 shows, we first reread each piece of corporate material and each interview transcript several times to identify first-order codes describing the corporate stories of the Segovian hotels, which we labeled closely to the language used in our data. We followed this process until we could not identify any additional first-order codes. Concurrently, we started identifying similarities and differences among first-order codes, enabling us to cluster them into second-order themes, categorizing different types of narratives based on commons (i.e., the natural, social, and cultural resources of the community of Segovia) or organizational characteristics (e.g., buildings, gardens, building renovations, owners’ passion, clients’ celebrity, family chef). We then assembled the emerging second-order themes into five overarching dimensions that described the processes by which the different themes were used and reproduced in the hotels’ stories. In particular, in this step we were able to identify the mechanisms by which narratives about natural, social, and cultural commons of the region interlaced with narratives about individual hotels. To label and characterize the specific mechanism of narrative construction of LD emerging from our data in this last phase of categorization, we compared our emerging findings with theories of bricolage (Baker et al., 2003; Glynn, 2008; Weick, 1993), collective narrative construction (Barry & Elmes, 1997; Boje, Luhman, & Baack, 1999; Fiol & Romanelli, 2012), crowd sourcing in the reproduction of creative commons (Abelson et al., 2008), and strategic use of history for competitive advantage (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; McGaughey, 2013; Suddaby et al., 2010). A third scholar was involved in analyzing interview transcripts to reduce potential bias. She was an outsider to this research (i.e., not an expert in its concepts and objectives), which allowed her to easily challenge our views during the analysis. Figure 1 presents our emerging data structure.
Data Structure.
In total, from our interview transcripts, we identified 259 first-order codes. Of these, 166 are appropriation hotel stories that implicitly preserve commons, and 93 are hotel stories that explicitly preserve commons. All these codes included a mix of corporate and commons-based narratives (i.e., the “rural touch”).
Findings
The Group of Segovian Rural Hotels
Although it does not represent the core of our study, the first step of our analysis was highly informative because it confirmed the characteristics of the Segovian rural hotels as a group. Our findings highlighted that rural hotels in Segovia are not strategically promoted as a local group. The regional government could play an important role in promoting a common identity for rural Segovian hotels; however, it does not. Instead, it limits its role to issuing a descriptive minimum certification to the rural hotels. As our informants explained,
[The regional government] basically indicates basic things like distance to the big cities, number of rooms, and length of open season . . . and does not provide a qualitative evaluation of rural hotels. (Expert in tourism)
In addition, the region’s tourism offices promote the region in general terms through the brand “Tierra de Sabor” (“Land of Taste”), which does not focus on rural hotels but rather on regional tourism in general. As two of our informants told us,
“Tierra del Sabor” . . . is good for other hotels and tourist operators, but right now, we, as rural hotels, do not have something that helps us communicate who we are as a group . . . (Owner) Hotels in the region, in order to attract guests, refer to the campaign launched by the tourism office, which refers more to Spanish culinary traditions than to rural ones; it relates to the whole idea of the Spanish lifestyle, such as tapas and wines, rather than to Segovian traditions. (Expert in tourism)
Ruralka and Rusticae, two quality rural tourism guides, promote only five of the 55 rural hotels in Segovia, and they do not refer to these as Segovian rural hotels but more generally as Spanish rural hotels. Furthermore, 93% of the press clippings from specialized magazines and media convey stories of rural Spanish hotels in general but do not specifically mention stories about Segovia’s rural hotels. Finally, many of the hotel owner interviewees specifically recognized that they do not have the time to promote their own rural lodge as part of a local group because they lack the time necessary to establish such a group. As one owner noted,
There is not a deliberate common identity. That would be something that might require a lot of work and we do not have time for it . . . (Owner)
Presence of Commons-Based Narratives Within Corporate Stories
Despite the fact that Segovian rural hotels are not intentionally featuring themselves as part of a local group, through our KWIC analysis of corporate materials we found that they convey corporate stories that ultimately express at least four main common narratives through a similar use of language (see Figure 2). These narratives are related to the commons of Segovia, such as nature (e.g., natural parks, the Duratón River, the Sierra Mountains), cultural heritage (e.g., churches, castles, monasteries, royal dynasties in the region), and social life (familiar and welcoming Segovian/Castilla y León atmosphere; quiet, relaxed Segovian life; culinary and economic traditions typical of rural Segovia/Castilla y León).
Commons narratives in Segovian rural hotels’ corporate stories.
The language these rural hotels use in their stories is very specific to the community of Segovia and Castilla y León (e.g., regional lords, kings, or dons of rural villages during the economic boom of the region; Segovia’s quiet family atmosphere) and does not relate to any official statement initiated at the group level in Segovia (e.g., the Spanish tapa culinary tradition; the typical Spanish welcoming atmosphere of party and leisure). Hence, these stories do not emerge through inter-organizational coordination but rather through the organizational use of regional commons.
Comparing the results of this KWIC analysis of rural hotels’ corporate materials with data from the interviews with owners, we found a surprising correspondence of stories at the corporate and owner levels. This might be due to the fact that the latter (or someone in the family or involved in the renovation of the building) wrote the corporate materials in most cases. No external agency is involved in this process. Owners stressed features related to cultural, national, and social commons of the Segovia and Castilla y León community when mentioning their establishments. For example, they discussed the relaxed, intimate, and homelike experience:
What makes it attractive is the surroundings; as I was saying before, it’s far from the city, but near enough to visit. We have a very nice garden that is amazing in the spring. . . . It is really a relaxing and quiet place, and that is something that is valued a lot. . . . Silence is a virtue that is not easy to find in our society . . ., not even in Spain . . . (Owner)
They also mentioned the hotel building and rural traditions:
The main attraction is the hotel itself, its spaces and its building. We had some restrictions in renovating it due to its UNESCO certification as a national heritage building. . . . Also, the special attention our guests receive and the fact that we take care of people with traditional food . . ., providing honest dishes and wine from Castilla y León. . . . I honestly mean that the dish is “made in Segovia” from the animal that was killed or the vegetable that was grown here. . . .] We do not import things; we use our own regional products in the house. (Owner)
Finally, they referred to cultural heritage and nature:
I describe what is here in our surroundings, the medieval ruins of Maderuelo. I also talk about the medieval fair [and] the ancient battles to conquer the region. (Owner) We are not a typical hotel. We take our guests for a walk in nature, to see animals that they and their kids may never have seen before. (Owner)
Historical Bricolage Through Appropriation and Preservation of Commons
An attentive analysis of how commons-based narratives are conveyed in both corporate materials and the owners’ narratives shows that, although the rural hotel owners share a common language, the commons narratives are interlaced with corporate narratives in a way that conveys not only similarities but also distinctions. Our data indicated that hotel owners engage in a process of historical bricolage by which they recombine narratives about the local commons with their own narratives through two main mechanisms: appropriation (i.e., talking about commons as a constitutive part of the rural hotel) and preservation (i.e., talking about how the rural hotel helps in the preservation of commons). These two mechanisms are recursive and constitute a loop in the process of historical bricolage. Corporate stories that appropriate the commons are not simply providing a present perspective about the commons, but rather are recreating the history of the commons, based on the new meaning created by blending the corporate narratives with the commons narrative. At the same time, corporate stories that preserve the commons do not simply recombine narratives about the local past; rather, they narrate tales that represent a crucial element for the revitalization of the commons in the present. Our findings, discussed next, highlight this process and also how historical bricolage is enacted to construct organizational LD (i.e., being recognized as part of the Segovian local community while maintaining distinctiveness from other Segovian rural hotels).
How appropriation happens
We found evidence showing that, when rural hotels appropriate commons narratives (dealing with social, natural, and cultural commons), they mix them with their own idiosyncratic narratives in such a way that corporate narratives become a constitutive part of the commons. Narratives about people (e.g., kings), artifacts (e.g., buildings), and animals (e.g., wolves) related to the organization give a unique concreteness to their tales drawn from commons. Table 2 illustrates the many ways in which hotels appropriate cultural commons (Narratives A and B), natural commons (Narratives C and D), and social commons (Narratives E) through their corporate stories.
Appropriation: Corporate Stories as Constitutive Part of Commons.
Regarding cultural commons, to express stories about the nearest village representing a cultural attraction, one hotel owner stated that the village had a don who was the first owner of the hotel building (Narrative A1 in Table 2). Another hotel owner qualified Segovia as a typical rural community by conveying unique stories of the hotel as a place where traders stayed during specific wool market and shearing times (Narrative B1). Finally, another hotel owner explained that the community of Segovia is a cultural heritage region; however, rather than telling stories of the region, he narrated the tales of the hotel’s establishment, starting with the royal family who owned it and the famous architects who built it (Narrative A2). In reality, although all of these stories tell about the community of Segovia—including its villages, its typical monuments, and its rural economy—they do so by conveying many concrete narratives that are distinct for each rural hotel, such as the unique narratives of the ancient owners or the building and its unique use during medieval times. One example of this type of narrative is as follows:
In the 16th century, it [the hotel] belonged to Don Diego de Corral y Valdés, son of Don Luis de Corral and Doña Juana de Valdés, founders of the “Capilla de los Corrales” of the Church of the Magdalene of Valladolid, where we can see their coat of arms. Don Luis was an honored professor at the Valladolid University, a professor of Sexto de Cánones, and spokesperson for the Royal Council and the cabinet of Emperor Carlos V. (Owner, Narrative A1 in Table 2)
A similar storyline is followed for the appropriation of natural commons. To explain that the Segovia community is a place to relax and experience nature, one hotel owner explained how he brings his clients to see a wolf that lives in the hotel’s gardens (Narrative C1), while another hotel owner capitalizes on the relaxing and charming experience of the community of Segovia by detailing the natural and monumental landscapes that clients can enjoy from the hotel’s garden and windows (Narrative D1). Such narratives describe the qualities of Segovia’s natural areas, although—surprisingly—the corporate stories only describe the hotel’s unique features rather than typical, shared collective experiences. An example of these narratives follows:
At night, when our guests are near the fireplace, we ask them, “Do you want to see a roe deer?” And we take them down into the 515 hectares around the hotel. Parents and kids see deer and maybe even wolves that live near our hotel. I tell them about the time when a wolf was living in this building. I tell them stories about how to find water . . . That is where wolves can be found. You can find water by smelling the mint and other herbs . . .; parents and kids see and learn. This is something that fascinates them. . . . We are very tied to nature. (Owner, Narrative C1 in Table 2)
Finally, owners also appropriate narratives of social commons to build their hotel stories. Many owners explained that Segovia is a community where celebrities choose to get married, film movies, or live. However, instead of telling the same narratives others might share, they tell these narratives in the context of the unique narratives of their hotels. One owner built the narrative of the room where members of the contemporary monarchy slept during a wedding (Narrative E1). Another construed the narrative of a famous contemporary filmmaker who stayed in the hotel during the shooting of a famous movie series (Narrative E3). A third explained that one of the hotel rooms is named after a movie series shot in nearby areas (Narrative E2). An example of this type of narrative follows:
Ridley Scott was here—locked up in his room for I don’t know how long—when he was shooting Kingdom of Heaven. Liam Neeson and Orlando Bloom, the guy who played the blond elf in The Lord of the Rings, also stayed here. We created the legend of Ridley Scott being locked up in room 30, working day and night without sleeping at all. . . . This is not the only movie that was shot here; our rural land with its landscapes is great for this type of movie . . . (Owner, Narrative E2 in Table 2)
How preservation happens
A number of the narratives we analyzed showed that the individual story of each hotel would be meaningless without the contribution it makes to the commons. Rural hotel owners see themselves as important guardians of local memory and identity. As Table 3 shows, rural hotels resort to narratives of building renovation, rural family values, and culture to preserve cultural commons (Narratives F and G); furthermore, they convey narratives of land products, recipes, craftsmanship, and medieval battles to preserve social commons of the community (Narratives H and I).
Preservation: Corporate Stories Preserve the Commons.
For example, regarding cultural commons, one hotel owner described the building as a historical “birth factory” where more than half the people in the village had been born. He explicitly explained how, in everything he does, he seeks to preserve the Segovian family heritage (Narrative F1). Similarly, another hotel owner recalled the family values of Segovians and the importance of preserving them through the creation of a charming and familiar atmosphere (Narrative F2). Other owners built the narrative of building renovations and clearly expressed how their work contributes to maintaining the sadly declining cultural heritage of the region, which for them is an important contribution that benefits them personally, not only the region in general (see Narratives G1 and G2). One example of this type of narrative is as follows:
This building is one that is protected as a historical place because it is a unique example of baroque art in Segovia. There is no other building like this one . . .; our chapel is unique because its altar is not oriented to the east, as in other churches. . . . Trying to preserve a building like this one is a challenge but also a duty, as it was really unfortunate that the architectural heritage of Castilla and León was deteriorating. (Owner, Narrative G1 in Table 3)
Owners of rural lodges also shared a number of narratives highlighting the preservation of social commons. For example, they illustrated how the rural hotels’ restaurants preserve the culinary tradition of the region through a grandmother’s recipe (Narrative H1) or the use of local products (Narrative H4). They also spoke of medieval battles, habits, and craftsmanship, which for them represent an important part of the conservation of their traditions and memories. They described how they dress up in medieval garb to help visitors imagine what a famous battle near the hotel was like (Narrative I1) or how they preserve the ancient art of craftsmanship by teaching it to clients (Narrative I2). In all these narratives, the owners stressed how their efforts to popularize culinary traditions, local products, and habits of the community have turned their hotels into guardians of local identity. One example of these narratives is as follows:
I believe that everything we do is a contribution to our land. For example, here we maintain the family tradition of my grandmother and mother—that is, we have morcilla (blood sausage) during only one season of the year because we make them and do not buy them from others. We make them on weekends in case some of our guests want to see how it is done. . . . Fostering the use and diffusion of local products is part of our duties . . . (Owner, Narrative H1 in Table 3)
Why appropriation creates LD
Rural hotels appropriate commons-based narratives (dealing with social, natural, and cultural commons) for strategic reasons: They want to be recognized as Segovian rural hotels and, consequently, be attractive to clients. When we asked why one owner welcomes visitors the way he does and tells them stories, he said,
Guests come here to find an authentic lifestyle typical of this region, disconnected from city stress. . . . Imagine if they came here and found a standard welcome rather than a family touch? . . . They would be disappointed. . . . Word of mouth is fast, and if people know that my hotel represents a real Segovian experience, I will have more guests. . . . These same rooms were once inhabited by representatives of noble families coming here to cure their health (at some point, after being a trading place, this building hosted a health house); why should I not tell our guests that the same health benefits can be found now? (Owner)
At the same time, we found that our respondents chose to appropriate some commons over others because they realized that they would not be able to run the business otherwise. Owners feel that they and their businesses are what they are; thus, they need to find their niche rather than copy other successful rural hotels in the region. They are conscious that they need to be different from others; otherwise, they might not be in a position to compete. As one of the owners pointed out when asked why he told only stories about nature rather than cultural heritage,
I have been in touch with animals and nature my entire life. I had different jobs in the past as a natural tourist operator; I participated in many of the nature sports that I now offer to clients. . . . I worked as an animal trainer and even lived with a wolf for many years. . . . I do not see myself running this place differently. . . . I do not have an interest in comparing my rural hotel with the Palacio del Esquileo [another rural hotel] because I would lose the confrontation. . . . My building is not as historical as that one. . . . What is special here is contact with animals, nature, which is what I am good at. . . . I can emerge and be chosen for what I, and my hotel, are good at, not for what others [are good at]. (Owner)
Why preservation creates LD
Preservation of commons through corporate stories is seen by hotel owners and managers as an effective way to nurture their source of legitimacy. Our respondents indirectly recognized that their preservation actions, in addition to benefitting their legitimacy as a real Segovian rural business, provide distinctiveness by maintaining a piece of their own organizational, personal, and family history. As one of our respondents stated when asked why it is so key to maintain the Segovian character in the building renovation (a topic she focused on throughout the interview):
The idea emerged because people coming here do not want to stay in . . . an industrial hotel. . . . When people travel they miss their own homes and like to find themselves in a welcoming atmosphere, a home that represents the typical Segovian home. . . . I always show all rooms available to help guests realize that each room is different from the others, that each one has its own character. . . . I cannot compete with other ordinary hotels with more luxury-oriented services (for example, wireless will never work as well here as in other hotels), but they cannot have these stone walls, this architectural decoration in their buildings. . . . Throughout the whole renovation . . . we made sure to keep this homelike atmosphere. . . . It was key to preserve the Segovian heritage in order to avoid being the kind of hotel in which all the bathrooms and rooms are standardized. (Owner)
Each time the owners tell their own stories, they contribute to innovating and revisiting the story about the commons, which are modernized each time a distinctive narrative emerges at the organizational level. As one of our respondents highlighted,
Guests very often ask how we prepare this typical dish. I tell them that it is my grandmother’s secret recipe, which, through the generations, became slightly modified from the typical recipe, because each daughter and son preserved it by adding a personal touch. The same is true with the building renovation we went through. I explain to them that we kept the typical features of a Segovian castle, but we included in it new elements that allow us to renovate the Segovian atmosphere—of course with all respect to the original tradition. . . . It is important for me to share this because it is key that guests understand that we have had the whole family involved in this business for generations. . . . Also, other hotels may not have architects as part of the family. (Owner)
Discussion
Our emerging theoretical model (see Figure 3) shows that organizations in our study construct LD through a different process than the one explained by previous studies—namely, a process of historical bricolage. Two recursive mechanisms constitute this process: appropriation and preservation of historical narratives about natural (e.g., forests, animals), social (e.g., recipes, movies), or cultural (e.g., heritage, kings) commons. Appropriation and preservation are recursive and are key to finding LD because the corporate stories are built on narratives that describe (a) how the heritage and history of the land are reenacted today in a subjective way by each rural hotel and (b) how such subjective revisitation contributes to maintaining the traditions of the land—specifically those related to commons. On one hand, the corporate story narrates how the hotel is a constitutive part of a historical commons (e.g., the hotel as a place to live with wild animals that traditionally live in the area). On the other hand, the corporate story explains how the hotel is contributing to preserving the commons of the community (e.g., the transmission of the rules of hunting and approaching wolves). These two mechanisms allow owners to signal in their corporate stories that they are a Segovian rural hotel (i.e., to find legitimacy), and that they are a unique one (i.e., to find distinctiveness), as they select a different combination of commons and express them through historical narratives that are subjectively told through organizational characters, tales, and episodes rather than recombining narratives that objectively refer to the collective.
A process of historical bricolage for LD narrative construction.
Theoretical Contributions
Our emerging theoretical model contributes to LD and organizational identity studies by shedding light on a historical bricolage process through which organizations narratively construct LD. This process allows us to appreciate additional facets of organizational LD construction compared with existing studies. First, organizations subjectively reinterpret and originally reproduce a collective past to find LD. Second, the organizational reinterpretation and reproduction of historical commons imply not only appropriating and reassembling but also preserving historical commons. Finally, LD construction involves a storyline that implies the integration of the organizational and collective selves.
Strategic use of historical commons for LD discursive construction
Unlike other studies taking a historical approach to bricolage that mainly examine the reproduction and transformation of collective supra-organizational identities (e.g., McGaughey, 2013), our study shows that historical bricolage has a relevant role in organizational LD construction. Our model extends knowledge on the role of history at the organizational level. In particular, the process of historical bricolage adds details to how collective histories might be relevant resources for the discursive construction of competitive advantage (Beverland, 2005; Suddaby et al., 2010) by facilitating LD construction even in those contexts where collective identities are fuzzy and not theorized by collective agents, such as trade associations (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002). Consistent with theories on collective memory and identity construction (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Schultz & Hernes, 2013), our model shows how history is not only used but also actively reinterpreted to inform the organizational present. The organization’s identity acts as a lens that guides the selection and interpretation of past collective events (Anteby & Molnar, 2012; Gioia et al., 2002; Suddaby et al., 2010), and it inspires the production of imagined narratives that are coherent and enrich the reinterpretation of the past (Beverland, 2005). Our study indeed lends support to this view; however, it also adds that the subjective reinterpretation through the appropriation of historical commons enables distinctiveness and, at the same time, enables the preservation of historical commons through corporate stories that revitalize the commons, thereby reproducing resources for legitimacy. By providing this additional insight into how the present identity of an organization intervenes in collective historical reinterpretations to construct LD, our study reflects on how historical bricolage prevents organizations from conveying distinctiveness only partially (Martin, Feldman, Hatch, & Sitkin, 1983; Pedersen & Dobbin, 2006). If the reinterpretation of history was objective, organizations would all select the same collective events and would objectivize their interpretation of history to the point that they would deploy claims that are similar to others in the same group. This phenomenon, known as the “uniqueness paradox” (Martin et al., 1983; Pedersen & Dobbin, 2006), can easily occur when organizations conform to claims, stories, or features advocated by an official agent (e.g., trade associations, intermediaries, certifiers). When membership to collectives is fuzzier, such as it happens in our case, organizations have more freedom in their subjective selection and reinterpretation of commons-based narratives. Following the terminology of Ostrom’s (1990, 2003) work, these narratives represent a renewable resource (Abelson et al., 2008; Goldman, 1998; Zittrain, 2008) for organizations and allow them to endlessly reenact the past in unique ways to find a legitimate distinctive positioning.
Preservation complements appropriation for LD construction
The majority of research has thus far recognized that a key ingredient for finding LD is the appropriation and recombination of collective elements (e.g., Lamertz et al., 2005; Navis & Glynn, 2011; Porac et al., 2011). In contrast, our theoretical model suggests that, when organizations engage in historical bricolage, they not only appropriate collective elements, but they also change them by adding heterogeneous idiosyncratic details that contribute to preserving the collective elements rather than only appropriating them. As our model illustrates, the appropriation and preservation of commons-based narratives are recursive mechanisms. The recursive complementarity of appropriation and preservation recalls what Ostrom (1990, 2003) and others (Abelson et al., 2008; Benkler, 2006; Burri, 2010; Goldman, 1998; Zittrain, 2008) described as intangible commons, such as fictional stories, music, art, and manuscripts. Given that intangible commons represent a renewable resource that is less subject to exhaustion with use, their reproduction implicitly signals that the preservation of past commons is taking place. Preservation is possible because, once appropriated, historical narratives of local places (e.g., commons-based narratives) provide a present perspective about the commons that recreates the history of the commons and features a new reality. Such corporate stories construe the present by shedding new light on the past (Suddaby et al., 2010). Rural hotels’ preserving stories do not simply link commons’ narratives about the past; rather, they narrate a subjective tale that revitalizes present commons. Hence, the organizations’ legitimization is warranted by the preservation of elements that, by nature, recall regional group features.
Narrative integration of organizational and collective selves for LD construction
Storylines resulting from appropriating and preserving narratives about historical commons differ from those typically produced by reassembling the collective with corporate identity narratives because they describe companies’ life experience in a community (Benkler, 2006; Burri, 2010). The storylines we found in our study are similar to what other scholars call story physicality (e.g., Barry & Elmes, 1997; van Riel, 2000). Stories about organizations have a “glue” that resides not in a priori persuasive attempts but rather in the true value of their narratives. A story is engaging to others when it both expresses individual experiences (Barry & Elmes, 1997; van Riel, 2000) and has physicality, either literally or figuratively (Barry & Elmes, 1997)—that is, when the story focuses on tangible individual phenomena (in our case, organizational phenomena, such as a person or a building). It is the materiality of each individual narrative that brings the collective story to life (Barry & Elmes, 1997). In these studies, physicality does not refer to discourse materiality—that is, how words are things that interrelate with other material artifacts (Clegg, Hardy, Lawrence, & Nord, 2006)—but rather how an individual corporate story is conceived as an essential, constitutive piece of a common narrative (Barry & Elmes, 1997; Boje et al., 1999).
Such physicality indicates that the output of the process of LD is not an optimal point of distinctiveness to achieve but rather an amalgamation of the various organizational selves (Ashforth & Johnson, 2001; Thoits & Virshup, 1997) into one level that is more than the sum of its parts (Pratt & Foreman, 2000). Basically, the collective level in a story may be expressed through the individual’s experience and in individual narratives (Boje et al., 1999), as the latter help give detail and vividness to the collective level by communicating individuals’ experience as part of a collective. The historical bricolage process described in our study suggests a much more integrative and constitutive bricolage process than the assembly-based one scholars have described thus far, as is represented visually in our theoretical model (see the dotted circle in the center of Figure 3). To the best of our knowledge, such a process of LD construction has not yet been discussed in the literature. Theorizing about the emergence of similarity clusters and their collective identities, Fiol and Romanelli (2012) explained something similar when they introduced the concept of story world—that is, stories that describe a collective through its participants and their own narratives. Our findings show how this story world is made of historical commons-based narratives appropriated and preserved by each organization that contributes through its own idiosyncratic stories to keep the story world alive. In this way, organizations express how their collective (supra-organizational) and organizational selves are integrated in a chain of meanings. Through historical bricolage, they construct this chain of meanings that allows them to express both membership to a supra-organizational identity and their lower-level organizational identities simultaneously—in other words, not only affiliation with a group but also the context of its activity and the role of individual actors within it.
Implications for Managerial Practice
The present study also has implications for policy and practice. Scholars have long wondered about the influence of governments, industry associations, and local institutions in building the strong identity of local businesses. Their suggestions to managers have been to invest in the promotion of local companies as a group or to facilitate collaborative networks between corporations, so that companies can build their collective identity as a group. Our study does not challenge the belief that leading identity advocates or collaborative networks can play a vital role in defining a collective explicit identity of organizations (obviously, the research here only depicts one group of organizations that operate in a relatively small community), but the way in which the companies in our study construct LD through their corporate stories suggests that, even if leading identity advocates are absent, organizations still have the opportunity to indirectly communicate their affiliation with a group through historical bricolage by appropriating and preserving the commons. From a practical point of view, our study ultimately lends support to the view that, when local businesses cannot coordinate collective actions and when institutions lack the resources to promote their local businesses, organizations can still freely emerge as a group. In the current economic crisis, this knowledge may be of vital importance for managers and practitioners.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
As with all empirical studies, our research has some limitations, which may be mitigated by future research further exploring the processes we identified.
Corroborating transferability of findings
First, as this research is based on a single qualitative case study, it requires replication to test the transferability of our findings. Although we focused on a community within a single industry, one could argue that LD emerging from corporate stories about commons might differ across industries. Thus, it would be particularly interesting to explore the issues we investigated in business communities within other industries, where historical bricolage of commons narratives might take place, such as the agriculture, food, wine, beer, textiles, information technology, and cultural industries. Regarding the specific mechanisms of appropriation and preservation, it is reasonable to argue that little is unique to the rural hotel industry, so our findings might, to some extent, be transferable to the previously mentioned industries. For example, wineries that do not have a legal appellation and lack collective identity claims might find LD by appropriating and preserving natural commons (e.g., terroir) and social commons (e.g., local wine-making techniques) through their corporate stories about family traditions. Similarly, film festivals might find LD by appropriating cultural commons (e.g., local traditions for cinema production) or social commons (e.g., places where artists live) with their own stories of celebrities and actors. Fashion companies might appropriate social commons (e.g., local design tradition) or natural commons (e.g., silkworm production) through the stories of their own designers.
Comparing ordinary hotels’ or large hotels’ narratives
Furthermore, in our study, we did not formally analyze the narratives of ordinary hotels in Segovia or compare them with the stories of rural hotels in the same region. Doing so would have allowed us to corroborate definitely whether only rural hotels or also other touristic operators leverage commons. We did not do this because we found that, according to the tourism experts in our preliminary interviews, ordinary hotels in Segovia were all positioning themselves under the regional tourism campaign “Tierra del Sabor,” which expresses Spanish cultural and social traditions, rather than Segovian commons-based ones. As a further step, it would be interesting to make a formal comparison of narratives of ordinary and rural hotels. Such an analysis would compare the process by which businesses find LD when they do and do not preserve the local commons. We indeed suspect that a chain hotel or urban hotel might not only appropriate local commons less or not at all (as our preliminary interviews highlight) but also might not engage in preserving the commons. A final limitation of our study is that the population of Segovian rural hotels only allowed us to focus on small businesses, including family businesses, in which the degree of professionalization is low. In the future, it would be interesting to study medium-sized or large companies that have a higher degree of professionalization and thus, presumably, greater strategic insights into the stories they tell.
Conclusion
The aim of this research was to explore how organizations construct LD by combining corporate and commons-based narratives. Our findings suggested that they do so by recursively appropriating and preserving commons narratives in a process of historical bricolage. By proposing such a historical-based process for LD construction, we suggest that the debate over how history intervenes in the LD process offers a promising avenue of research. We hope that our findings encourage researchers to pursue a new line of research designed specifically to examine LD not only in areas where collective historical commons are essential and where collective identities are fuzzy, such as local communities, but also in virtual communities or project-based organizational networks. We fully expect that, if such research is conducted, a growing body of literature on LD will complement and extend our findings, in addition to suggesting further questions for LD and new avenues of inquiry.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors have greatly benefited from the conversations and suggestions of a number of peers or senior scholars. First of all, they are extremely grateful to the reviewers of Journal of Management Inquiry whose suggestions and critiques were invaluable to sharpen the study. They are also extremely thankful to Kevin Corley (Arizona State University) for his incredible help and guidance while preparing this manuscript. Developing a theory-building study is anything but easy. With his help, this process became really enjoyable and extremely enriching for the authors. Comments by Diane-Laure Arjaliès (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales Paris), Frank den Hond (Vrije University), and Florian Ueberbacher (St. Gallen University) to earlier drafts were also helpful in revising this article. Finally, the last thanks goes to Mary Ann Glynn (Boston College), Rudolf Durand (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales Paris), Joep Cornelissen (Rotterdam School of Management), Jennifer Howard-Grenville (U Oregon), and the participants of the Journal of Management Studies paper development workshop at Vrije University whose comments about the authors’ initial ideas were very constructive and helpful in shaping this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research would not have been possible without the financial support provided by Ministry of Education and Research of the Junta Castilla y León (Spain).