Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives

Joanne Martin

Dec 1992 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Despite the surge of interest over the last decade in cultural phenomena in organizations, researchers of widely differing disciplinary backgrounds, epistemologies, methodological preferences, and political ideologies continue to disagree about fundamental issues--with good reason. Consolidating a diverse array of theoretical and empirical studies into an analytical framework that clarifies and challenges the assumptions that have guided organizational culture research, this pathbreaking book delineates three competing perspectives and offers a way out of the conceptual chaos caused by conflicts among these viewpoints. This analysis acknowledges incommensurabilities without creating pressures toward assimilation, while offering insights unavailable to any single perspective. Exploring tcpks to major intellectual developments (postmodernism, feminist theory, environmental dependence) within and outside of organizational theory, Cultures in Organizations brings a critical, interdisciplinary perspective to the field. This theoretical approach has an extensive empirical base, drawing on studies of a wide variety of organizations, including a large multi-national electronics corporation, the Peace Corps, universities, small non-profit organizations, and several large and small private-sector companies. By alternating between theoretical abstractions and studies of particular organizations, Joanne Martin delineates and bridges divergent approaches to the study of cultures in organizations, offering a breadth and an openness to multiple viewpoints not available elsewhere.

About the author

Joanne Martin is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business and also, by courtesy, in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Author or co-author of four books and numerous articles, she has served as Chair of the Organization and Management Theory Division and as a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management, and is a fellow both of the American Psychological Society and of the American Psychological Association.