Cultural Approach to Organizations

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Cultural Approach to Organizations

• Of Clifford Geertz and Micahel Pacanowsky

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Summary

• Effective org change requires understanding of
  its culture
• Orgs have cultures, and sub-cultures (e.g. sales
  / accountants)
• Cultures represent peoples values and meanings
• Cultures are expressed through actions or
  performances
• Aspects of culture that provide insight into how
  the orgn is actually experienced include
• the stories that management tells about the org
  (idealist)
• that employees tell about themselves (promoting
  or defensive)
• that employees tell about others (revealing how
  they think the org actually works in practice)

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Organizations as Cultures

• Culture as system of shared meaning
• Reject notions of high culture and low culture
• Cultures have subcultures and counter-cultures
• Culture made manifest through performance the
  actions which constitute and reveal peoples
  culture (symbolic expression)
• Culture includes task and non task-related
  performance
• Performances seen as texts, available to be read
• Reading performances requires seeing an
  organization as its members experience it
  ethnographic method.

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Ethnography the tool to investigate culture

• Thick description - extensive observation
• Radical naiveté organization as strange.
• Focus on non-obvious but significant, including
  language, metaphors, stories, nonverbal rites and
  rituals.

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Ethnographers focus (1) The Metaphor

• Ethnographer pays attention to metaphors that
  organizational participants use to describe the
  organization and its practices
• Also constructs metaphors of his/her own

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Ethnographers focus (2) The Story

• Ethnographers watch for stories that participants
  tell often encapsulate memorable
  performances/values
• Three kinds of story include
• corporate (ideology of management),
• personal (told by employees about themselves),
  collegial (told about others often reveal how
  employees think organization really works.
• Sometimes the results can be reported in
  fictional form.

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Ethnographers focus (3) The Ritual or way that
it has always been

• Some rituals are texts that articulate multiple
  aspects of cultural life but they should be
  interpreted according to the meanings that they
  have for the participants

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Practical and ethical issues

• Should managers change culture?
• Can culture be changed?
• Should ethnographers work for management?

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Critique

• Do corporations have cultures that are
  identifiably isolated from culture in society?
• Should ethnographers remain neutral in the face
  of all cultural practices? Or should they expose
  repression, wrong-doing, etc.?