Abstract
Today we are as a society much likely to think that government should and can solve issues of poverty, environmental degradation, and moral in- justice. Social enterprises as organizations seek to achieve social missions through business ventures make a difference in what can be done. Yet, as a typical type of hybrid-identity organization, social enterprises face the ten- sions, competing demands, and ethical dilemmas arising from the divergent identities. On the other hand, extant literature provides strong evidence of the central role that identification plays in organizational action. While prior research has focused on how hybrid identities manifest and can be managed at the organizational level, the process through which identification emerges in hybrid-identity organizations remains poorly understood. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to expand insight into identification by building theory about how social enterprises foster identification under their hybrid identities. The results of this study suggest that to foster identification, social enterprises need to manage their hybrid organizational identities and embed the new common identity into member’s daily work through attraction, selection and socialization processes. This research further establishes a process model of identification based on hybrid identities to elaborate all the findings.