Week 3, blog 4
The last section of the web lecture Metaphors & Culture talks about the "Fragmentation Perspective of Organizational Culture." Martin defined the fragmented perspective of culture as "a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely connected by their changing positions on a variety of issues. Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their individual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issues are activated at a given moment."
I have seen the traces of fragmented culture in social context, especially families/households. A family/household is a type of social organization. I have discovered characteristics of fragmented culture in families with large number of young children, teenagers, and young adults versus families with large number of middle-aged adults and seniors adults. As the author mentions, this perspective is postmodern so obviously a key element of this perspective on culture is the age or the generation to which a person belongs to. Therefore, organizational communication and organizational culture students, researchers and scholars can really benefit by comparing companies that have high percentage of young employees with companies that do not, There will be a lot of critical information that would emerge from such study that can be further used to improve organizational communication practices.
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I had a conversation once in regards to this with a top management person at a community college and he was working with people of all ages. He said that he was putting much effort in learning how to manage people of differnt ages. He mentioned that the way older people approached their work was differnt than younger people. This is one example that demonstrates what you and the author mention. I think it also depends on how these people grow up and this influences their work ethic.
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