Fragmented identity: A sign of the future?
David Stiles, Cardiff University
Although organizations may have multiple identities (Albert & Whetten, 1985), there has been little research on how members identify with organizations where identity conflict is apparent and destructive, resulting fragmented identities rather than just ambiguity (Corley & Gioia, 2004; Foreman & Whetten, 2002). In the 1990s, popular management texts celebrated a relatively manageable level of superficial ‘chaos’ (Peters, 1992). More recent work has focussed on cognitive disorganization resulting from restructuring (McKinley & Scherer, 2000), dialectical institutional processes of organization and disorganization (Farjoun, 2002), and emotional disorganization through grieving over organizational decline and failure (Shepherd, 2003). The question is whether chaos and disorganization will result in future organizational catastrophe or become the norm in many organizations.
It is important to consider how and why organizational identities may fragment because of the myriad of forces at work from society. Following Saussure and Derrida, disorganization can be viewed as a loss of place or displacement (Cooper, 1986; 1989). Organizations are incomplete and transient entities constantly under threat from intrusions and displacements from the wider social context. Organizations are only enacted because organization and disorganization are interdependent and mutually constitutive (Bloomfield and Vurdabakis, 1999). Therefore, in the future, a focus on the organizing dimensions of society may be myopic. It is just as feasible to conceptualize organization as emerging from and interacting with a ‘disorganizing society’. A weakening of norms, or anomie, may be associated with institutional and cultural changes brought about by modernization, where there is a decline in controls based on traditional familial and social relationships (Durkheim, 1964; 1966). Where the forces for disintegration are strong, organizations may be disorganizations: collections of individuals with highly complex, fragmented identities continually on the verge of destruction. Disintegration may only be prevented by limited physical or virtual infrastructure and/or structural, cultural and ideological bonds vulnerable to sudden disruptions (Weick, 1983).
The study uses informal pictorial human metaphors to explore organizational discourse. While there is a case for avoiding inadvertent anthropomorphization, I argue that it is legitimate to use informal human metaphors to explore organizational identity in a deliberate and systematic way because they are prevalent in discourse from the wider organizing society. People articulate their feelings and perspectives towards organizations through constructs such as the degree of friendliness/enmity, compassion/disinterestedness or happiness/sadness. These may say more about an organization to the people intimately involved with it than whether or not it is a spider plant or economic system. This paper presents a longitudinal discourse analysis of a major British university business school from 1990-2006 to show how various groups identified with the organization in a highly fragmented way. Discourse concerning the school is presented in verbal and pictorial form to illustrate the competing cacophony of metaphorical images competing to construct and deconstruct organizational identity (Stiles, 2004). The result is a series of fascinating accounts of a decade-and-a-half in the life of an organization tending towards disorganization, but somehow managing to retain a sufficient sense of fragmented identity to survive and even prosper.