Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Organizational authenticity, or the consistency between an organization’s internal values and espoused commitment, is a rising topic in management studies. However, in the daily operations of an organization, there are many factors, including both pressures and temptations, that can erode organizational authenticity and induce mission drift. Therefore, understanding how organizations maintain authenticity becomes an acute scholarly topic, especially considering that there are increasing foundings of high-purpose organizations that aspire to put financial pursuit secondary but constantly find themselves struggling to sustain survival. Through a qualitative study of U.S. art house movie theaters whose higher purpose is to enrich people’s cultural lives by offering socially engaging and intellectually stimulating movies as opposed to commercial films for pure entertainment purposes, I uncover the practices that successful art houses adopt to stay true to this commitment. My preliminary findings reveal that successful authenticity work is more generative than restrictive, which means that maintaining authenticity is more than conforming to the minimal requirement of belonging to a self-imposed niche market. Instead, art houses transcend their identity as a film-showing space by developing a series of special film-related events that inspire discussions of real community lives, such as inequality and education, and thus become a community institution. Besides, authenticity work is more adaptive than conservative. Successful art houses view streaming media as an opportunity rather than a threat. They believe art houses could be even more advantageous because they can offer unique experiences that neither streaming media nor commercial theaters could not provide.