organizational culture as fragmented

In Chapter 4, the authors of the text discuss Martin's three perspectives on organizational culture: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. Although Martin's work is a bit dated (1992), her work is cited widely and provides useful insight into this perspective on organizational culture. The most important contribution from Martin's work is the identification of the fragmentation approach.

An integration approach to culture stresses harmony and similarities; the differentiation approach focuses on separation and conflict; and the fragmentation approach turns our attention to multiplicity and flux. Thus, from a fragmentation perspective, there is no one interpretation of meaning and meanings change from moment to moment. The world does not have the order and predictability found in the other two perspectives. The fragmentation approach to organizational culture is clearly rooted in postmodernism.

Martin defines culture from a fragmentation perspective as, "a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely connected by their changing positions on a variety of issues. Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their individual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issues are activated at a given moment" (p. 153). Martin uses the jungle metaphor to stress the unknown and unknowable nature of culture from the fragmentation perspective.

In applying the fragmentation approach to organizational culture, co-cultures (Martin uses the term subcultures, but co-cultures is a more accurate term) are no longer clearly defined. Organization members move in and out of co-cultures, so insiders and outsiders are less differentiated and boundaries are porous and mutable. Ambiguity is central to organizational life and must be an integral aspect of any study of organizational culture.

Recognizing the centrality of ambiguity in organizations moves organizational scholars away from oppositional or dichotomous thinking and toward more complex views of organizational culture. So the fragmentation perspective explores multiple meanings of what is present as well as what is absent. For example, in analyzing stories, researchers from the fragmentation perspective seek multiple story interpretations and also consider what stories are not told or which organization members are not part of the story. The fragmentation perspective recognizes ambiguities in symbols, ideology, and action. These ambiguities and multiple interpretations do not necessarily come together as a coherent whole. Organizational cultures are characterized by inconsistency, paradox, and contradiction.

~ Professor Cyborg