CRITICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY

Critical Analysis Essay

Critical Analysis Essay

Organizational Identities as Organizational Products:

Introduction

The article says that the business people today face an increasing range of culturally diverse situations. To ensure success in business, many organizations are using cross-cultural training to improve their manager's cross-cultural effectiveness and enhance their communication skills. In a diverse workplace there are many cultures collide. Many culture norms influence a manager's behavior and subsequent reactions (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001). "Culture is behind our behavior on the job. Often without our realization, culture influences how close we stand, how loud we speak, how we deal with conflict - even how we participate in a meeting.

Article Critique

Multiple organizational identities Organizational identity, at its core, involves 'self-referential meaning . . . [it] is about an entity's attempts to define itself' (Corley et al., 2006: 87; see Albert & Whetten, 1985). These self-referential meanings, which are always 'contextualized and inherently comparative' (Corley et al., 2006: 87) may be tacit or explicit, taken for granted, or more consciously worked on (see Clarke et al., 2009; Thornborrow & Brown, 2009). Taking as a starting point Albert and Whetten's (1985) conception of organizational identity as that which is central, distinctive and enduring about it, functionalist, interpretive, psychodynamic and discursive perspectives with often conflicting ontological and epistemological premises have been developed. The field is characterized by vigorous and overlapping debates regarding whether organizational identity is best construed as a metaphor or phenomenological, as socially constructed or objectively existing 'essence', and a property of organizations as social actors (Whetten & Mackey, 2002) or a set of 'shared' understandings (Humphreys & Brown, 2002a, 2002b). One consequence of such diverse activity is confusion regarding how best to define the concept and engage in empirical research. Pratt (2003: 162) has argued that 'identity - as an explanatory concept - is often overused and under specified', while Whetten (2006: 220) has suggested that 'the concept of organizational identity is suffering an identity crisis'. From our perspective, organizations are socially and symbolically constructed using rhetoric to achieve identity transformation and management. Organizational identities are, thus, phenomenological, socially constructed, rhetorical constructs, concerned with what organizations stand for and what senior managers want them to become. Articulations of identity occur in conversations between insiders and between insiders and outsiders, and may be communicated in various ways - orally, and through memos, letters, reports, videos and web-based materials. Any individual statement of identity may or may not be widely shared by organizational participants and/or external stakeholders, but all such rhetorical acts help to constitute an organization's identity. An organization's identity is the sum of the identityrelevant statements that internal participants in a collective make about it, and is generally likely to be in continuous flux and complex (Brown, 2006).1 Our conception is consonant with Christensen's (2008: 1016) definition of organizational identity as 'the way an organization is commonly represented'. Web-based accounts constitute one genre of collective identity that are particularly interesting because they are sanctioned by senior managers ...