ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical reading of ‘organizational culture’. Surely a management education fit for the second decade of the twenty-first century should have something to say about race, gender, and identity. Indeed, would not a ‘liberal’ education ‘call out’ sexism, racism, and homophobia and in so doing offer strategies, both individual and organizational, designed to address these concerns? Joanne Martin et al. observe that most organizational cultures make a claim to uniqueness. Yet unlike the culture models, the work of Martin and her colleagues reveals aspects of organization that have, in effect, been written out of the analysis of ‘organizational culture’. Indeed, the fragmentation perspective on culture invites us to consider counter-cultural formations that have grown up to dispute the competence and/or the legitimacy of the managerial elite. In common with the typology proffered by Terrence Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, Charles Handy’s account of cultural types is, at one level, plausible.
