The Configuration of Organizational Images Among Firms in the Canadian Beer Brewing Industry

We integrate the literature on organizational image management and neo-institutional theory to arrive at a better understanding of how organizations routinely represent themselves positively in their external environment. Drawing on a cross-sectional exploratory study of the website communications of 36 firms in the Canadian brewing industry, we investigate how these organizations construct essential and distinctive organizational images in reference to a map of identity attributes and image categories at the organizational field level. We conclude that organizational self-categorizations explain the field-level configuration of images we discovered by establishing legitimacy claims targeted at relevant stakeholders. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.