Organizational Culture: Beyond Struggles for Intellectual Dominance

This review is not structured in the usual way — a departure from tradition that merits an explanation. Literature reviews generally have a linear, often chronological structure, with attention to “who was first?” The tone is apparently objective and decisively authoritative: “this study demonstrated that…” The goal is to present the objective truth about what we’ve learned. The result is an enlightenment tale of cumulative progress, as one “original” contribution after another builds a deeper and broader understanding than was available before. In a traditionally structured review, intellectual differences of opinion are usually handled with indirection and tact, an approach that helps scholars co-exist in a close-knit field while continuing to have cordial intellectual exchanges. Most often, an author focuses predominantly on one point of view, relegating competing perspectives to brief summaries or the margins of a text (for example, in a parenthetical aside, a separate chapter in a book, or a footnote) or simply not citing them at all. This popular strategy permits full exploration and delineation of a favored point of view, while not creating a need to criticize, or even draw attention to, conflicting perspectives. Whether silence, marginalization, or tactful understatement is used, these commonly utilized strategies mask intellectual disagreements. The reader is forced to attend to silences and “read between the lines” of what is published in order to decipher what fundamental issues are disputed.