Resources and Organizational Identities: The Role of Rhetoric in the Creation of Competitive Advantage

The author uses resource-based view (RBV) to demonstrate how organizations use rhetoric about multiple identities to improve a firm’s competitive advantage. The author presents a model that illustrates how rhetoric can switch the audience’s attention between identities and resources to gain competitive advantage. When multiple identities exist, the organization can privilege one identity as the salient identity and suppress or disguise the other identities as nonsalient identities. These nonsalient identities then become the salient resources that support the salient identity. In addition to the model, the author develops a set of propositions linked to the rhetoric, identity, and RBV literatures.