Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 17, 2006

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting

Julie Bayle-Cordier
Pages 58-63

Acquiring Responsible Organizations
A Resource Based View and Organizational Identity Perspective

This paper develops the argument that the acquisition of responsible organizations can be a source of competitive advantage for acquiring firms. We argue that corporate responsibility identity is a tacit and strategic resource because it is valuable, rare, non-imitable and non-substitutable. We postulate that organizational identity is a useful framework to better understand corporate responsibility identity. Finally, we argue that to capitalize on the acquisition of responsible organizations, acquiring firms must engage in critical self-reflexivity and be willing to modify their organizational identity.