Organizational Cultures of Remembrance

10.5  Coping with Identity Threats

Despite the wave of success AUDI AG’s rode on during the time of fieldwork, a critical discussion emerged among the workforce about whether or not the company was still ‘true to itself.’ This discussion, as my investigations found, was brought on by generational changes in the workforce and a number of organizational identity threats from inside and outside the company – most notably external stakeholders increasingly challenging the factuality of Audi’s central promise to deliver ‘Vorsprung durch Technik.’ Mixed with a degree of uncertainty about the future in the automobile industry, feelings of doubt regarding the organizational identity emerged among parts of the workforce. These, however, were not necessarily ...