Social Identities in an International Joint Venture: An Exploratory Case Study

International joint venture (IJV) research largely omits social and cognitive processes and, hence, overlooks their potentially important implications. This paper presents a four-year longitudinal investigation into the social identification and social enactment processes in a British-Italian, shared management joint venture. Using social identification and social enactment theories as conceptual anchors, the study reveals that national social identities were the dominant sense-making vehicle used by team members, although multiple sources of social identification were possible and present in this IJV. Contextual changes occurred that could be expected to favor organizational (IJV-based) social identities, but the dominant use of nationality-based identities did not change. Our findings suggest that social identity enactments (using particular boundaries to define primary social identities) by team members mediate the relationship of contextual variables, both environmental and structural, with group and organizational outcomes (such as role investment and job satisfaction). Our empirical results shed light on unresolved debates in the IJV literature, e.g., the implications of cultural distance and shared management for IJV performance. This study also contributes to social identity theory by highlighting promising directions for development of contextual and longitudinal dimensions in that research stream.