Introduction

While there is quite an extensive literature addressing the issue of individual and organizational identity construction (Alvesson 1994; Phillips and Hardy 1997; Sveningsson and Alvesson 2003; Thomas and Linstead 2002), we still know relatively little about the process of how organizational actors construct their national identities in the MNC context. The dominant view presents national identity as the collective programming of people's minds (Hofstede 1980, 1991). Lacking an agreement as to how to define “culture” (Roberts and Boyacigiller 1984), this view tends to categorize the behavioral patterns of individuals based on a limited set of continuums, e.g. collectivism–individualism, high context–low context, masculinity–femininity, etc. Such conceptualizations represent very static (Tayeb 1994), minimal (McSweeney 2002) and essentialist (Ailon-Souday and Kunda 2003; Barinaga 2007) views on national identity that try to fit it into the predetermined categorizations and fail to take into account the subjectivity and agency of organizational actors in choosing and defining “who they are” (see also chapter of Blazejewski and Becker-Ritterspach in this volume).

This chapter posits that nationalism and national identity provide an important set of discourses that are used to make sense of, to legitimize and to normalize various important issues in MNCs. The national identity construction process is far from being an objective and rational one and national identity per se cannot be viewed as static, given or taken-for-granted (Ailon-Souday and Kunda 2003; Barinaga 2007).