Organizational Culture

Mapping the Terrain

Joanne Martin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780803972957, 9780803972940
• eBook ISBN: 9781483364445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Organizational Culture provides a sweeping interdisciplinary overview of the organizational culture literature, showing how and why researchers have disagreed about such fundamental questions as: What is organizational culture? What are the major theoretical perspectives used to understand cultures in organizations? How can a researcher decipher the political interests inherent in research that claims to be political neutral -- merely "descriptive"?

Expert author Joanne Martin examines a variety of conflicting ways to study cultures in organizations, including different theoretical orientations, political ideologies (managerial, critical, and apparently neutral); methods (qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid approaches), and styles of writing about culture (ranging from traditional to postmodern and experimental). In addition, she offers a guide for those who might want to study culture themselves, addressing such issues as: What qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid methods can be used to study culture? What standards are used when reviewers evaluate these various types of research? What innovative ways of writing about culture have been introduced? And finally, what are the most important unanswered questions for future organizational culture researchers?

Intended for graduate students and established scholars who need to understand, value, and utilize highly divergent approaches to the study of culture. The book will also be useful for researchers who do not study culture, but who are interested in the ways political interests affect scholarly writing, the ways critical and managerial approaches to theory differ, the use and justification of qualitative methods in domains where quantitative methods are the norm.

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I

Mapping the Cultural Terrain

1

Introduction and Overview

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When organizations are examined from a cultural viewpoint, attention is drawn to aspects of organizational life that historically have often been ignored or understudied, such as the stories people tell to newcomers to explain “how things are done around here,” the ways in which offices are arranged and personal items are or are not displayed, jokes people tell, the working atmosphere (hushed and luxurious or dirty and noisy), the relations among people (affectionate in some areas of an office and obviously angry and perhaps competitive in another place), and so on. Cultural observers also often attend to aspects of working life that other researchers study, such as the organization’s official policies, the amounts of money different employees earn, reporting relationships, and so on. A cultural observer is interested in the surfaces of these cultural manifestations because details can be informative, but he or she also seeks an in-depth understanding of the patterns of meanings that link these manifestations together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in bitter conflicts between groups, and sometimes in webs of ambiguity, paradox, and contradiction.

Culture as a Metaphor and Culture as a Variable

The long-winded definition of culture in the prior paragraph takes positions on some of the issues that divide cultural researchers. One of the most important is Smircich’s (1983a) distinction between studies of culture as a metaphor for organizational life and studies of culture as a variable. Studies that assume culture can be treated as a variable are usually assuming a functionalist viewpoint. Functionalist studies of culture offer the promise, to the delight of many managers, that a “strong” culture (one that generates much consensus among employees of an organization) will lead to outcomes most top executives desire to maximize, such as greater productivity and profitability. Functionalist studies bring a kind of cultural research into the mainstream of organizational behavior, where research streams that fail to establish a causal link to performance-related outcomes have seldom managed to achieve long-term prominence. Critics of functional cultural research react with dismay at the intrusion of mainstream preoccupations into “their” cultural domain. For example, Calás and Smircich (1987) declared that cultural research had, by the end of the 1980s, become “dominant, but dead.” Although this death knell was premature, many cultural researchers continue to oppose a functionalist approach to the study of culture. Cultural studies that eschew functionalism generally prefer a symbolic approach (Alvesson & Berg, 1992; Pondy, Frost, Morgan, & Dandridge, 1983; Schultz & Hatch, 1996), focusing on the symbolic meanings associated with cultural forms such as rituals and physical arrangements (Schultz, 1995). Although functional approaches often treat culture as a variable, used to predict outcomes, symbolic approaches tend to view culture as a lens for studying organizational life (Smircich, 1983b).

The definition I previously offered assumes that culture is a metaphor, a lens for examining organizational life. That does not mean that culture encompasses and eclipses all other ways of studying organizations. It does mean that, along with many others, I believe a cultural study should include detailed accounts of a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar aspects of organizational life in a “thick description” (a phrase coined by Geertz [1973] that means an account full of detailed observations). What distinguishes a cultural study from an inventory, however, is a willingness to look beneath the surface, to gain an in-depth understanding of how people interpret the meanings of these manifestations and how these interpretations form patterns of clarity, inconsistency, and ambiguity that can be used to characterize understandings of working lives.

In this book, I also include cultural studies that define culture differently—as a variable that can be conceptually distinguished and measured separately from other more familiar organizational variables. Culture-as-a-variable studies usually focus on a single cultural manifestation, such as top executives’ espoused values or employees’ self-reports of the informal norms. As will be shown, these different approaches to defining culture—as a metaphor for organizational life and as a variable—are only the first of a long list of issues about which cultural researchers vehemently disagree.

Focus of the Book:
Cultures in Organizations as a Vortex

When culture is defined as a way of studying everyday life in organizations, the question of scope quickly arises. What is not culture? Is culture just another word for organization? Does cultural theory and research encompass all organizational theory and research? The scope of cultural studies of organizations is much narrower than these questions imply. Cultural theory and research is just one of many organizational domains, and it certainly does not encompass all the others. People cannot learn all they need to know about organizations by studying culture. Simultaneously, however, cultural theory and research is a broad area of organizational inquiry. The field has become a vortex, drawing in people who are studying culture for very different reasons and working from very different scholarly assumptions.

Some people have been drawn to the study of culture in organizations because they find noncultural studies of organizations—for example, those that focus on variables such as size, structure, technology, and demography—dry and narrowly focused. These researchers revel in the kinds of topics—rituals, symbolic meanings, and humor—that some cultural studies examine. Some researchers have been drawn to cultural studies because this domain has been open to qualitative methods, such as long-term participant observation, discourse analysis, and textual deconstruction, that have not readily been accepted in many mainstream organizational topic domains. These qualitative methods seemed to offer particularly useful ways to deepen understanding of cultural phenomena. For some, cultural research fills a void—offering the promise of clarity and unity in a confusing and ambiguous world. For others, culture offers a way to capture and express complexities central to everyday life in organizations. Many applied researchers have been excited by the potential of culture research to provide some solutions for managers searching for new ways to motivate and control employees, using values to generate commitment and increase productivity and perhaps even profitability. These are not the only reasons for studying culture, but they are representative.

Because of the range of reasons why organizational researchers have been drawn to cultural studies, the major controversies that have polarized and sometimes revolutionized disciplines in the humanities and other social sciences are represented within the field of organizational culture studies as well. Neopositivist cultural research (like much of mainstream organizational research) uses the scientific method to develop and test theory, working from deductively derived hypotheses that can be empirically tested and potentially proven false. Therefore, a neopositivist cultural study’s empirically based conclusions are usually described as objectively true (“Our study demonstrated that . . .”), with the goal of developing generalizable theory. In contrast, interpretive studies of culture describe a context in great detail, usually seeking to develop context-specific understandings rather than generalizable theory. Interpretive studies focus on socially constructed knowledge—how people interpret what happens to them. Some interpretive studies frame their conclusions in terms that implicitly claim to be the best available or even an objectively true representation of the culture studied. Other interpretive studies of culture, including those written from a postmodern position, implicitly or explicitly challenge any objective truth claim, explaining that other subjective interpretations are always possible. Postmodern cultural studies, for example, use deconstruction to show how a study’s textual rhetoric hides its own inevitable weaknesses if it attempts to claim an inviolable place from which objective truth can be presented. Such postmodern analysis attempts to show that literally any argument contains the seeds of its own destruction. Intellectual traditions, such as neopositivism, interpretive approaches, and postmodernism, all have contributed to cultural studies of organizations and to other domains of organizational research.

Because of the range of scholarly assumptions these researchers hold, the body of literature that focuses on organizational culture is large and diverse, crossing disciplinary and methodological barriers. Also, given that the field of organizational culture research has become a vortex, drawing in scholars who take differing positions on the controversies that have polarized the humanities and social sciences during the past few decades, it can sometimes be difficult to discern which disputes pertain only to the study of culture and which pertain, more broadly, to the study of organizations. Therefore, readers familiar with other volumes in this Foundations for Organizational Science series will find that the domain of this book is necessarily broader.

In this book, my focus, unless stated otherwise, is on cultural issues at the organizational level of analysis. (Many of these ideas will also be of relevance to work group and national cultures, and when this relevance becomes salient I discuss it usually in footnotes.) When I discuss broader issues that have application to all organizational studies, not just studies of cultures in organizations, I signal this change of focus. For example, Chapter 2 examines a range of epistemological, methodological, and theoretical issues that are of particular interest to cultural researchers but that have applicability to all organizational theory and research.

Managerial Fads, Seductive Promises, and Where I Stand

Given the range of reasons for studying culture, and the range of intellectual traditions represented in organizational culture research, it is no wonder that there is little agreement about what culture is, what it is not, how to study it, and what we know and do not know about it. In this book, my goal is to represent the complexity of this body of literature, capturing the range of conflicting assumptions about what theories, political interests, methods, and styles of writing are most appropriate for studying cultures in organizations. Before proceeding, however, it is important to acknowledge that although I attempt to offer a balanced portrait of opposing views, my opinions and biases will come through, whether I want them to or not. Although I am more comfortable with the usual impersonal academic writing style, I believe it will help you as a reader to distinguish what I believe from what others believe if I am honest and explicit about where I stand on some of these issues. I do this here, and again whenever I view it as necessary. This kind of discussion of the preferences and opinions of an author is reflexivity, and it is particularly important in cultural studies, in which so many divergent assumptions are often left unsaid or asserted as truth.

Beginning in the early 1980s, when I first began to do cultural research, some cultural studies offered companies a soothing promise: Organizations could supposedly develop “strong” cultures, becoming havens of harmony in which employees shared their leader’s beliefs, assumptions, and vision for the company. Sometimes, this “strong” culture argument went one step further, offering the holy grail: If an organization could build a sufficiently “strong” culture, improved productivity and profitability would result. This was a seductive promise for managers, particularly those who held high-ranking positions in large, internally diverse organizations. It offered a leader-focused way to achieve agreement, on issues where it mattered most, in organizational domains that seemed riddled with misunderstanding, confusion, unspoken dissent, and, sometimes, overt conflict. Not surprisingly, many organizations invested considerable sums of money trying to build a “strong” culture (seeking organizational consensus regarding values and goals of top executives) and capture the competitive advantages of this new route to profitability.

Unfortunately, many of these cultural claims were oversimplified—yet another managerial fad that failed to deliver on its promises. For example, many of the “strong” culture companies of the early 1980s encountered severe financial problems shortly after their praises had been sung. Eager advocates of cultural solutions suddenly began asking culture researchers pointed questions about missing control and comparison groups: Were there equally profitable companies that lacked “strong” cultures? Did other “strong” culture organizations have troubled financial histories? Organizational consensus, across hierarchical ranks and functional divisions, is very difficult to achieve except with regard to values and goals (such as “quality” or “customer satisfaction”) that are relatively abstract and as controversial as apple pie. Many practitioners who had invested time and money in cultural change interventions became disillusioned. “Strong” culture claims had been oversimplified and ultimately were less than useful—an expensive mistake for many companies.

Despite these failings, the promise of a leader-centered, unified culture as a key to financial performance has kept its allure, particularly but not exclusively in the United States. This is a Lazarus of an idea; it appears to die and then is resurrected. In every decade, organizations face new problems and become enamored of what appear to be new solutions. In the 1990s, hierarchies were flattened, downsizing and restructuring thinned managerial and other ranks, and boundaries between functional divisions (“silos”) were breached. Also, as women and other underrepresented groups have entered the labor market in unprecedented numbers and attempted to rise through the ranks, discord and complaint have often ensued because rules designed by and for members of one group may place others at a subtle, or not so subtle, disadvantage. The Internet has revolutionized, at least temporarily, presumptions about finance, marketing, labor markets, and compensation. A global economy, new organizational forms, the Internet, and a more diverse workforce have left complex problems and unanswered questions in their wake. The new cultural answers to these dilemmas are too often variants of the old: With the right corporate vision, mission statement, or leader, an organization can build a highly committed, unified culture that fosters productivity and profitability.

I have no fondness for this Lazarus of a cultural “theory.” For reasons I discuss later, I believe that the evidence on balance does not support these contentions. Furthermore, the purpose of a social science theory is not to comfort managers with promises of relatively easy solutions but to capture and perhaps even construct organizational experiences, in all their discomforting complexity, conflict, ambiguity, and flux. I believe that only a small part of an organization’s culture consists of issues and perceptions that people see clearly and agree on. The rest is characterized by incompletely understood conflicts between groups; inconsistencies between, for example, what people say they value and what they do; ambiguities about what frequently used phrases and goal statements actually mean; and irreconcilable paradoxes and contradictions. An oversimplified theory, however comforting and appealing, is not likely to be useful if it ignores important complexities in the world it attempts, imperfectly, to represent. Application of an oversimplified theory is not only a potential waste of organizational resources; it can also undermine society’s shaky commitments to the academic enterprises of education and research.

Fortunately, cultural theory and research have more to offer than easy promises of culture as a key to profitability. For example, offering an understanding of a culture, or cultures, is a worthy goal in its own right. Studies of organizational culture have proliferated in the past two decades. At first, this literature seems to offer a confusing morass of conflicting findings. This book dissects and sifts through cultural studies based on very different intellectual traditions and shows how, taken in combination, these cultural studies reveal insights not available from other types of organizational research. The key to this argument is the phrase “taken in combination.” If cultural studies are to offer more than easy answers that do not live up to their promise, cultural researchers will need to learn to understand, value, and use highly divergent approaches to the study of culture.

Occam’s Razor:
The Case for and Against Simple Theories

To understand culture using divergent approaches taken in combination will inevitably produce complexity. It is tempting, therefore, to offer an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: MAPPING THE CULTURAL TERRAIN
• PART II: DOING CULTURAL RESEARCH
• PART III: EXPLORING THE EDGES OF CULTURAL THEORY
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author