Queering the border: Encounter and fusion in a French-Italian organization

Nationality can be an important element in the definition of organizational identity, especially in the case of cross-cultural encounters. However, in such cases, multiple national identities matched with the same organization can generate ambiguity. Since most organization and management scholars have so far relied on a positivist approach, which equates national identity to national culture and look at it as a discrete object, we know little about how organizational members deal with multiple, ambiguous national identities. To fill this gap, in this paper we look at how the employees of a French-Italian state-owned company involved in a transnational megaproject represent their organizational binational identity. We do so by combining traditional qualitative methods with a photo elicitation technique, and relying on conceptual insights from boundary theory and queer theories. Our findings show how being a binational organization could mean different things to different people, as they rely on different framings to represent national identity; as a consequence, different ways of dealing with the identitary tensions deriving from the encounter of two national cultures emerge. Moreover, our findings reveal the potential of visual methods for the study of organizational identity and cross-cultural encounters.