The Role of Visuals in Managing Identity Challenges: An Analysis of Family Firms’ Corporate Monographies

Organizational identity is at the core of management research, playing a crucial role in striking a balance between tensions within firms. Scholars have explored organizational identity and its dynamics mostly relying on verbal text; however, organizations often express their identity through visuals, such as pictures, portraits, web pages, and artefacts. In this article, we examine corporate biographies, including both verbal and visual texts, of Italian family firms who faced identity-threatening events, that is events leading to the reformulation of their organizational identity. In this context, our visual analysis aims to uncover the potential of visuals as a manifestation of organizational identity and investigate their role in organizational identity’s reformulation. We offer theoretical contributions to identity theory and family firm literature, methodological contributions on the use of visuals in management research, and empirical contributions to practitioners dealing with organizational identity threats.