Social organization identity: the benefits of ambiguity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate, how Stella’s Circle, in St. John’s, Canada, a large, long-lived, social organization providing diverse services, created an enduring crisis-free identity. Design/methodology/approach Data from 13 semi-structured interviews and document review was used to examine the organization’s relationships with its many stakeholders. Findings Serendipitously, nuanced communication with elements of both ambiguity and clarity, enabled the organization to establish an enduring, crisis-free identity. To achieve this successful balance, the organization used powerful, yet ambiguous, words and labels coupled with customized narratives to manage stakeholder identity perceptions. Practical implications Understanding the nuances of this organization’s communication can assist other social organizations create and manage a crisis free identity. Originality/value Besides being the first-time, the tension between identity ambiguity and clarity has been scrutinized in this context. This work argues that social constructivist identity theory can be, beneficially, cross-pollinated with the concept of strategic ambiguity from communication theory to develop a fuller understanding of successful social organization identity management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".