The Good, the Bad, and the Ambivalent: Managing Identification among Amway Distributors

by Michael G. Pratt

An ethnographic study of distributors for Amway, a network marketing organization, examines the practices and processes involved in managing members' organizational identification. It shows that this organization manages identification by using two types of practices: sensebreaking practices that break down meaning and sensegiving practices that provide meaning. When both sensebreaking and sensegiving practices are successful, members positively identify with the organization. When either sensebreaking or sensegiving practices fail, members deidentify, disidentify, or experience ambivalent identification with the organization. A general model of identification management is posited, and implications for both theory and practice are offered. [*]

People say that we brainwash people. That's true. We are talking about brainwashing--to help make you all more positive people!

--A speaker at a meeting of Amway distributors

Although it is common for researchers to praise organizations that promote strong attachments in their members, organizations that are too successful in this regard seem to inspire a mixture of both fascination and fear. In recent years, not-for-profit groups such as the Promise Keepers, Branch Davidians, and the Heaven's Gate cult have captured the public's attention, raising questions about the benefits and costs of groups that can evoke such strong bonds with their members. In for-profit business organizations, such as the one examined here, companies with "strong cultures" (O'Reilly, 1989) have been both praised (Deal and Kennedy, 1982) and criticized (Hochschild, 1983; Kunda, 1992) for their ability to win the minds and hearts of their employees. Despite our mixed feelings toward these organizations, practitioners and researchers cite the necessity for strong cultures and ideologies in modern business organizations (Trice and Beyer, 1993). Some writers in the popular business press, for example, believe that strong values are needed as social control mechanisms as organizations flatten hierarchies and increase spans of control (e.g., Stewart, 1996). Lipnack and Stamps (1997) have argued that strong mission statements are needed to manage work groups that are not co-located (e.g., virtual teams). Strong cultures may also bolster members' loyalty and commitment in an era in which job security no longer serves as the cornerstone of psychological contracts in the workplace (Kanter, 1989). Thus, as organizations change, there seems to be a need to inculcate individuals with organizational values so that they continue to act as organizational members. For the Amway distributors I studied, for example, there is no central business location, and work occurs outside of a traditional organizational context. Amway and similar organizations need a means of managing their workforce without the benefit of daily supervision and traditional deference cues like cubicles and uniforms.

I was initially drawn to study Amway because people seemed either to love or hate it: it seemed both wildly successful and unsuccessful in managing the minds and hearts of its dispersed workforce. [1] As the epigraph suggests, and I later discovered, Amway distributors manage their members by changing how these members think and feel about themselves in relation to their organization. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to illuminate the practices and processes that are involved in aligning individual and organizational values. To do this, I drew on a broad body of knowledge on organizational socialization, social influence/conversion, person-organization fit, and commitment. But I drew most heavily on theory in the area of organizational identification (e.g., Cheney, 1983; Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994) because this organization attempts to manage fit by managing members' self-concepts. Identification differs from similar constructs, such as commitment and person-orga nization fit, because of its emphasis on the self-concept and is thus defined here as occurring when "an individual's beliefs about his or her organization become self-referential or self-defining" (Pratt, 1998: 172). The focus of this paper, therefore, is on identification and how organizations attempt to manage the identification process. Its purpose is not to identify how factors such as personality or other individual differences affect the bond between the individual and the organization. Rather, it is on how organizations attempt, succeed, and fail to change how members view themselves in relation to the organization.

This research departs from most of the extant work on organizational identification in at least three major respects. First, most research focuses on how organizations successfully engender strong ties with members (e.g., Lofland and Stark, 1965; Kanter, 1968; Van Maanen and Schein, 1979; Cheney, 1983), but an emphasis on practices that lead to positive attachments may be misleading. In their review of identity-transforming organizations, whose goals are the conversion of members' self-concepts, Greil and Rudy (1984) suggested that attempts to transform the identity of members most often fail and that the majority of such attempts result in those members leaving the organization within four months to two years after they enter (see also Zimbardo and Andersen, 1993). Their review of identity-transforming organizations, unfortunately, does not delve into why these organizations fail in their missions. Thus, it is not clear whether the failure to manage members' identification simply involves the absence of thos e factors that cause identification or whether there are different dynamics involved. This research, therefore, examines in more detail both the successful and unsuccessful outcomes of these identification-management practices.

Second, I examine how successes and failures in different identification management practices lead to different types of identification, not just positive identification. Although other types of identification than a positive one are possible (e.g., Ashforth, 1998; Dukerich, Kramer, and Parks, 1998; Elsbach, 1999), emphasis in the literatures on commitment, socialization, and conversion of identities focus on identifying tactics that lead to positive attachments (e.g., Lofland and Stark, 1965; Van Maanen and Schein, 1979). [2] Here, however, I look at organizational conditions that lead to positive, negative, ambivalent, and broken identifications.

Third, much extant research has focused only on specific types of practices--be they influence (Cialdini, 1993; Zimbardo and Andersen, 1993), rhetorical (Cheney, 1983), commitment-inducing (Kanter, 1968), or more general socialization (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979) practices-that engender a strong bond between individuals and organization, rather than examining how these practices might work together to influence this bond. Thus, despite a considerable body of research on the organizational antecedents of fit (see Kristoff, 1996, for a review), there has been little research on the processes that underlie these tactics (Pratt, 1998). Consequently, many researchers view identification "in fairly static terms as the congruence between fixed attributes and needs of a person and those of an organization" rather than in dynamic, process-oriented terms (Ashforth, 1998: 213). This research, by contrast, goes beyond simply identifying practices that lead to identification and examines the process of how identification occurs. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to build theory by illustrating the practices and processes involved in identification management and by showing how the successes and failures of these practices are associated with a variety of identification types.

DISTRIBUTORS IN A NETWORK MARKETING ORGANIZATION

To obtain a deep understanding of the dynamics of identification, I sought information about both the context that I was studying and the perspectives of multiple constituents within this context. The context for this study comprises individuals who distribute products and services for the Amway Corporation. Amway distributors have been found to exhibit both strong positive and negative relationships with their organization (Butterfield, 1985; Biggart, 1989), and they provided an ideal extreme case from which to build theory about identification management (Eisenhardt, 1989; Pettigrew, 1990). Extreme cases facilitate theory building because the dynamics being examined tend to be more visible than they might be in other contexts.