Venturing beyond sacred grounds: managing multiple identities in religious entrepreneurship

This study examines how religious organizations (ROs) manage identity multiplicity and navigate resulting identity tensions as they engage in social service and commercial roles alongside evangelism. We study Catholic missionary organizations in Uganda to explore how multiple role expectations are articulated and managed when sacred identity claims are treated as enduring and authoritative. Building on identity elasticity theory and a social constructionist view of organizational identity, we develop an account of how ROs constitute entrepreneurial roles through sacred meanings in practice. We identify infusion-based identity elasticity as an identity work mechanism through which ROs enact multiple identity roles, while maintaining an enduring sacred core identity. We also find that ROs employ mission-centric framing, balancing, and sacralizing strategies to infuse social and business roles with religious meanings, values, and moral codes, shifting identity work from integrating identity domains to enacting sacredness in practice. The study contributes to organizational religious entrepreneurship and identity elasticity research by clarifying how ROs enact entrepreneurial activities through sacred meanings under theological and institutional constraint, and it offers insight for research on multiple organizational identities by specifying how identity multiplicity is navigated through the enactment of multiple identity roles.