From Nutley to Paris: How the Culture of Communities Shapes Organizational Identity

We explore the role of geographic communities in the construction of an organization's identity as narrated in the pages of Martha Stewart Living magazine, the flagship product of the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia organization. We content analyzed 253 columns published between 1990 and 2004. We found that communities figured prominently in the emergence and institutionalization of the organization's identity, with over 800 mentions of specific places, from Stewart's childhood home of Nutley, New Jersey, to storied Paris, France. We examined how Stewart's use of places compared with descriptions of these same places in the Lonely Planet Travel. Our evidence suggests that the invocation of community enabled the organization to legitimate its product offerings as well as claim and partition complex and sometimes contradictory identity elements that included both highbrow culture and Americana “rural apple-pie goodness.”