Learning "who we are" by doing: Processes of co-constructing prosocial identities in community-based enterprises

Abstract

This study investigates how members in community-based enterprises (CBEs) engage in processes of co-constructing their collective prosocial identities. Based on an inductive analysis of 27 organizations that were formed explicitly as communities and sought to build alternative forms of production and consumption through innovative ways to pool and recombine resources, we found that all of the CBEs engaged in distributed experimentation that lead to epiphany sense-making. These two approaches triggered and enacted collective processes of shifts in identity or identity persistence. We advance a processual model that identifies approaches for how members of CBEs either embrace epiphanies in identity shifts or limit and react to epiphanies in identity persistence.