Territoriality and Identity in Organizations: The Case of Belo Horizonte’s Central Market

Abstract

In this paper we analyze relations between territoriality and identity in organizational context, advancing in perspective of identity about what is distinctive, enduring and core in an organization. Our research was conduced in Central Market of Belo Horizonte (Brazil), place of multiple practices – like as bohemian, buyers, goer and tourist’s ones – in which Minas Gerais’culture is presented in several nuances, an adequate research object because it permits observation of complex phenomena. Under a qualitative approach, 40 interviews were made with professionals from Central Market of Belo Horizonte to comprehend their vision about the space where they work. This material was analyzed through French discourse analysis. The coexistence of main aspects analyzed – distinctive (commerce), everlasting (church) and central (business office) – demonstrates conflicts as because there is a duplication of functions, as because in organizations there is a quotidian among different people, polarized for some groups that dominate and other who resist. These relationships equilibrate through movements of social actors in their territories around the argument of mutual survival. We have observed that shared beliefs, according Albert and Whetten (1985), also serve to explicit a kind of comprehension of space. And if this is basis idea, it is because it does not limited by purely concrete elements, once it incorporates symbolic point of view. Sharing a multiple practices space, this market has a conjunct of territories which oscillate between harmony and conflicts, once they are dynamyzed by colliding forces in defense of particular group’s interests. Territories, however, in the same way collide, accommodate each other under same ideology, of mutual survival. The territories are not categorized hierarchically, but they have different roles in socially constructed reality. Theirs spaces are not static, either interchangeable: once institutionalized, they become taken for granted appearance, immanent ones. However, what explains balance is that social actors move between territories playing multiples roles. To solve problem related to territory in what they are, what we can notice is a trial of “be part of the game”. It demonstrates that individual essentiality looks for get closer of hegemonic group, initiating an incorporation process of dominant ideology.