Buffering Organizational Identity in the Marketing Culture

Organization Studies · 1995 · Volume 16 · Issue 4

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of organizational identity and the role played by marketing in attempts to manage this issue in a complex and turbulent environment. Within prevalent management discourse, marketing is described as a boundary function that ensures a steady conformance of the organization to external expectations and demands. With its strong emphasis on the con sumer and the changing needs of the market, marketing, accordingly, repres ents an attempt to impose and control a flexible identity, that is, an identity without distinctive traits independent of a market-based strategy. In the cultural perspective laid out in this paper, marketing, by contrast, is described as a self-referential system of organizing that enables the organization to establish and maintain a flexible buffer between itself and the environment. Within this buffer, defined by marketing, the organization is able to display a high degree of adaptiveness while upholding and confirming itself. In the marketing- managed organization, identity and flexibility thus become closely inter twined.

Keywords

Descriptors: organizational identity, marketing, auto-communication, culture, self-reference, buffer

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