For your Bookshelf: Identity in Organizations: Building Theory Through Conversations
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Volume 2 Number 3
For Your Bookshelf Barbara Czarniawska of the School of Economics and Commercial Law in Sweden reviews a book on identity in organizations written by David Whetten and Paul Godfrey. This book is innovative in two ways; its experimental form Ð a `structured conversation' Ð and its topic, currently commanding much attention. Through the unusual form the attention of the reader is turned away from personalities and focuses on what they say. Additionally, it is an excellent form for curious readers, who can jump from one subtopic
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to another, and will always ®nd something suitable for their tastes and level of understanding. There are some commonalities among the contributors; they all believe in `the fundamental character of organizational identity', quoting the text on the cover. In other words, they all believe that there is a need for a collective identity deeply felt by organizational members. Moreover, the authors usefully attempt to recount and classify all possible ways in which identity is constructed in organizations.
Corporate Reputation Review
Volume 2 Number 3
Identity in Organizations: Building Theory Through Conversations David A. Whetten and Paul C. Godfrey (1998) Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA; 0-7619-0948-6; £23.99
This book must be seen as an innovative enterprise on two counts: its experimental form (`structured conversation', as the editors call it), and its topic, which concerns a phenomenon that is currently commanding much attention in both organizational theory and practice. In structuring their book as a conversation, or as a polyphony of voices ranging from short philosophical essays through cases from practice to the actual conversations of the participants in three identity conferences, the editors pay a tribute to the view of science as conversation, most clearly expressed by Michael Oakeshott when he said `As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulated body of information, but of a conversation begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.' (1959/1991, 490). Does this form work for the reader? As in most cases of formal experiments, it works in some parts but not in others. The weakest part is actual conversations (but this opinion comes from a person who never understood the point of talk shows). It is interesting to compare it to a famous case where the same technique was used with success: the classic article by Kluckhohn and Kelly, `The Concept of Culture' (1945). The Kluckhohn and Kelly article also contains fragments of an actual conversation (between people who at least now are very famous), but diers from the way conversation has been used by Whet-
ten and Godfrey on several points. The identities of the participants are hidden behind the disciplines they represent (which prevents gossipy readers, like myself, from checking what the people I know happened to say). In other words, the attention of the reader is turne
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