Towards an inclusion of founders and founding processes in organizational identity research: The case of Rheinische Post

In this paper we look at the German newspaper Rheinische Post (RP) which was founded directly after WWII as a license newspaper. Based on our findings from Rheinische Post, we argue that the historical contextualization of identity procewspaperss studies needs to be enhanced. We propose going one step further including the foundation and the pre-history of organizations in studies of organizational identity. As the RP case shows, important aspects of a company’s founding identity are shaped prior to the formal foundation and sometimes going far back into the personal histories of founders may help us understand how an organization’s identity initially came about.