Strategic identities amid institutional complexity: A multi-level analysis of values and temporality in organizational contexts

This thesis examines how organizations (both new ventures and established companies) navigate institutional complexity during sustainability transitions through the strategic management of their identity. Here, the transformation of core modes of production and consumption to enable systems’ indefinite continuation exposes complex, dynamic, and multi-dimensional processes. Within these, values – a core component of identity – reflect which principles actors consider fundamental, guiding process decision-making. Complexity emerges from values’ multi-faceted and interconnected nature, as well as dynamic relationship with diverse and potentially conflicting temporal structures within, between, and external to organizations. I thus ask: how do value and temporal complexity impact the ways in which organizations enact sustainability transitions using their identity? Through three studies, I advance our understanding of the mechanisms and processes that enable organizations’ successful navigation of these related challenges. I contribute to existing literature by first, explaining how venture founders ensure values alignment in founding teams through a longitudinal, community-based process of scrutiny across three layers of public and private social arenas. I next theorize how ventures pursuing long-horizon innovations for societal good engage in social proofing processes to overcome investors’ misaligned expectations. Finally, I demonstrate how organizations can transform yet maintain coherent identities when facing competing field-level demands whose relative salience is altered by compounding exogenous shocks. Collectively, these studies extend our understanding of how organizations strategically navigate value and temporal challenges amid institutional complexity. Chapter 2 explores how increasing funding of climate technologies during sustainability transitions encourages entrepreneurs with different values to enter the market, complicating team founding processes. Chapter 3 argues that temporal complexity related to moonshot ventures’ long-horizon innovations are incompatible with the short-term focus of dominant lean-startup methodologies, exposing a need for proofing processes to overcome this misalignment and sustain resource flows. Chapter 4 examines how incumbent organizations approach necessary organizational identity management during sustainability transitions, particularly as they navigate complexities arising from repeated exogenous shocks.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• De Fauconberg, Ariel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Grimes, Matthew

• Institutional complexity
• Sustainability transitions
• Temporality
• Values authentication
• Identity management
• Entrepreneurship

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/1804a168-fda7-4ce5-a405-0ef72add3bfe/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120182

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/387375