Who are we now? Organizational scandal and identity work in the world of finance

This dissertation investigates internal processes of organizational scandal from an identity perspective. The aim is to examine in what way the threat from scandal affects the identity processes of organizational members, asking: How does organizational scandal affect organizational members’ identity processes?
This is investigated through an organizational ethnography taking place in Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank. Danske Bank was involved in what is assumed to be the world’s largest case of money laundering. The findings of the study advance the current understanding of identity work during threat, arguing how organizational members will endure—and prefer—more pain and tension from identity threat than anticipated in existing literature. The organizational members construct organizational identities alongside discursive constructions of threat in contradictory ways, which perpetuates tension for them—but allows them to work on multiple preferred organizational identities.