On Becoming Who We Are: How a Social Venture Layers Its Identity in an Emerging Field

Organizational identity shapes how ventures define who they are and become; however, we know little about how identity evolves in social ventures over time. This gap is important because social ventures continually negotiate social purpose and financial sustainability while responding to shifting stakeholder and institutional expectations. Based on an 8-year inductive study of an impact investing venture, we examine how venture identity and an emerging field co-evolve. Our findings identify four phases of identity evolution: experimentation, institutionalization, maturation, and scaling. Rather than replacing earlier identity claims, the venture cumulatively layered new meanings onto them, preserving, reinterpreting, and extending prior commitments while maintaining coherence across changing contexts. As the venture articulated and refined its identity, it also shaped shared understandings of impact investing, allowing venture identity and field formation to develop together. We contribute to organizational identity research by theorizing identity evolution as a recursive process of adaptation, persistence, and cumulative layering.