The preface to the first edition of this book is only three and a half years old, but in many ways it seems as if it was written an age ago. At an academic level, the reasons for this are quite clear. When the first proposal for this book was submitted to Sage in late 1997, an anonymous reviewer commented that ‘I am not convinced that in practice the book proposed here can actually be produced at the present time.’ After a page-and-a-half of nay-saying, s/he concluded: I remain unconvinced that it is possible at the present time to write a book which does set out in a useful way what a social identity approach to organizational psychology would look like. This would make a stimulating subject for a paper or article, but without a body of research or theorizing which did truly use a social identity approach to organizational psychology, a book on the subject seems unfeasible. Thankfully, the forward-thinking editors at Sage went ahead and commissioned the book anyway. Their judgement was vindicated, and its publication coincided with (and helped promote) a surge of interest in applying social identity and self-categorization principles to the analysis of organizational life. One indicator of this growth is the phenomenal increase in citations of the first article to formally specify links between social identity theory and organizational behaviour: Ashforth and Mael’s (1989) Academy of Management Review article. This pattern of increasing citation over time is apparent in Figure P.1 and it is notable that the article has now passed the 250-citation mark to become a recognized ‘citation classic’. Among other things, this achievement is a reflection of the fact that, in the last 3 years (during which time approximately half of the article’s total citations have occurred), 3 edited books, 2 journal special issues and at least 50 journal articles have been published that use the social identity and self-categorization tenets to tackle almost every conceivable organizational topic. To convey a flavour of its diversity, this published research has addressed topics as wide-ranging as globalization and goalsetting, service provision and strategic planning, restructuring and recruitment, burnout and bureaupathy. However one measures it, then, it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to contend today that the case for a social identity approach to organizational psychology is ‘unfeasible’. On the contrary, it has been established as a major paradigm in the field. One consequence of this is that, whereas in this book’s first edition it was accurate to observe that much of the research into organizational behaviour that had been inspired by social identity and self-categorization theories was ‘work in progress whose impact remains to be fully felt’ (p. 9), in this second edition it seems appropriate to make far less tentative claims. Indeed, the principal rationale for putting together a new edition was to update the first edition in order to take stock of the large amount of research that has been conducted in the last few years.

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