Organizational identity has become a popular topic in family business research. Yet, there is little research accounting for the peculiarities of family businesses. Organizational identity research is dominated by the view of Albert and Whetten (1985) and the question of what organizational identity is. Little attention has been devoted to understand how organizational identity is constructed in family businesses. We draw on case studies and use a dualities perspective. This perspective builds on three dualities which are common to family businesses, i.e. formality-informality, independence-dependence, and historical paths-new paths.