"The Show Must Go on: The Role of Organizational Values in Art House Movie Theaters’ Identity-Challenging Transformation During COVID-19"

The literature has established that organizational change is challenging when it is deemed as contradictory to “who we are as an organization.” However, organizations may have no choice but to change drastically when a sudden shift in environmental conditions thrusts organizations into a life-or-death situation. The important question is how organizations maintain a sense of self when they are forced to become “who we are not” in a crisis. In this qualitative study of American art house movie theaters, based on data collected both before the outbreak of COVID-19 and in real time as the pandemic unfolded, I uncover the importance of organizational values in crisis-induced identity-challenging changes. I find that organizations can successfully navigate such changes through “identity compartmentalization,” which refers to organizations separating identity into technology components and value components, and “value infusion,” which refers to organizations using values to give new meanings to a technology that was previously considered as antithetical to organizational identity. In doing so, organizations consider their changes as revising the technology part of their identity but staying true to the more important, value-based part of identity. This study contributes to research on organizational values, organizational identity, and technology adoption in extreme situations. I believe business history researchers will be interested in this project because, beyond the generalizable theoretical contributions I try to make, my real-time interviews with art house managers are themselves valuable historical documentation of the behaviors of the often overlooked small organizations’ responses to a societal crisis.