Peter Foreman - room A34 - 12:30-14:00

Creating Shared Identities in Collective Entrepreneurship: The Process of Identity Construction in Emergent Organizational Collectivities

Abstract: The notion of "collective entrepreneurship" has grown as a counterweight to traditional ideas of solo individuals as progenitors of a new venture creation. Most recently, Ruef (2010) draws on the concept of social identities to explain how individuals might identify and collaborate with others, taking collective action to achieve entrepreneurial goals. But what happens when the "group" of entrepreneurs consists of organizations, and the objective is creating a shared identity that generates entrepreneurial rents arising from collective activity? What will be the basis of the collective's sense of self and how will these decisions be made? And how do individual organizational members balance the tension between the shared identity of the collective and their own distinctive identity? These issues will be examined within the context of several burgeoning wine regions and the efforts of individual wineries to establish a defined collective identity as a wine trail.

Bio: Peter Foreman received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he had previously earned an M.B.A. His Ph.D. concentration was in Organizational Theory with minors in Strategic Management and Research Methods. Foreman's research program focuses on issues of organizational identity and reputation, managerial cognition, top management teams, and the strategic management of identity, image, and reputation. His work has appeared in several refereed journals, including Academy of Management Review and Organization Science, and he has presented his research at dozens of conferences and seminars throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Most recently, he has coauthored a chapter on the relationships between identity, image, reputation, and legitimacy in the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation, and a chapter on hybrid identities in family businesses in the Sage Handbook of Family Business.