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The study of organizational culture has been, over the last 10 years or so, both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the cultural approach has done much to challenge the hegemony of positivism and to suggest new and more fruitful ways of understanding organizational life. On the other hand, however, the term culture has become almost meaningless; not only is it beset by multiple and competing definitions, but it is also subject to critique by both traditional and more radical theorists and researchers. Researchers operating largely from within the positivist tradition argue that the notion of "organizational culture" is far too vague, fuzzy, and empirically untestable to yield significant insights into organizational behavior. In contrast, more radical scholars suggest that, although at one time the cultural approach was a heuristically powerful perspective, it has long since succumbed to the "terrorism" of a managerial logic that dictates some kind of correlation between theory/research and organizational effectiveness. This rather tenuous position is perhaps best summed up by the claim of Smircich and Calas (1987: 229) that organizational culture research is "dominant but dead."
It is in this rather messy context that Joanne Martin's book is situated. She has taken on the unenviable task of trying to bring some cogency and coherence to a field of study that lacks both. Broadly speaking, Martin's goals are two-fold. First, she attempts to articulate an analytic framework that provides a way of successfully "reading" the literature on organizational culture. Second, through the use of a case study approach, she employs this framework to demonstrate how different theoretical perspectives construct widely divergent analyses of organizational culture.
Martin's analysis is based on the development of three perspectives on organizational culture: the integration perspective, the differentiation perspective, and the fragmentation perspective. The integration perspective is the most widely employed in organizational culture research, and according to this view, organizations are characterized by "consensus, consistency, and clarity" (p. 45). In short, it is a monolithic view of organizational life in which culture is conceived as harmonious and homogeneous. Researchers who use this perspective tend to search for organizationwide consensus and, in consequence, overlook sites of conflict. The differentiation perspective,...