Sara's Questions - 10/7

Martin (1992) present three perspectives for viewing organizational culture: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. I really enjoyed the tongue and cheek hypothetical debate between the three perspectives that she presented (pp. 8-10). Integration comes from a shared standpoint of "culture as the social glue that binds organizational members together" (p. 8). Culture is defined in terms of 3 C's: clarity, consistency, and consensus. Team Differentiation seeks to unmask power dynamics in order to support the voices of subcultures, and move beyond an "official" view of culture. Fragmentation challenged both camps on the assumption that culture is absent from ambiguity. "Doesn't the emphasis on culture as clarity leave out most of contemporary life?" (p. 9). The arguments presented by these three perspectives in conversation with one another sound and feel very much like a conversation between Deetz's (2001) discourses and Putnam's (1983) perspectives as well as chapters by Miller, Cheney, and Mumby (2000). With these ideas in mind I pose the following questions:

1.) Which perspective of organizational culture resonates most with you?
2.) How does this relate to your worldview/scholarly identity?

Furthermore, I found it interesting that Martin published this work on organizational culture two years after Joan Acker (1990) published "Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations" in Gender & Society. Acker's work is one of the most cited articles in the field of gender and organizational research. Acker makes the claim that organizations are not gender neutral, but are masculine by design. "Assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations" (p. 139). So my questions are:
1.) How do Martin's three perspectives attempt to account for the lack of gender neutrality in organizations?
2.) How should Acker's standpoint guide the contributions made by researchers who study organizational culture?