Understanding Organizational Culture

Mats Alvesson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446289662
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

With his usual engaging and inimitable style, Mats Alvesson takes the reader on a riveting journey through the diverse ways in which culture itself can be understood and how these powerfully inform organizational life.? - Blake E. Ashforth, Arizona State University

?Understanding Organizational Culture comunicates complex ideas in a manner that will illuminate for those who are less familiar with the concepts discussed, as well as providing a depth and critique of interest to those familiar with the topics.? - Claire Valentin, The University of Edinburgh

Unlike prescriptive books about organizations, Understanding Organizational Culture challenges and provokes the reader to think critically. It provides an insight into organizational culture, aided by numerous empirical illustrations from ethnographic studies that develop and illustrate how cultural thinking can be used in managerial and non-managerial organizational theory and practice.

Mats Alvesson answers questions of definition, explores alternative perspectives and exands on substantive issues, before discussing key issues of research and developing his framework. Further more, the advances in the field of organizational culture are synthesized for the reader by drawing upon the range of relevant literature within organization studies.

Understanding Organizational Culture provides great breadth within a textbook approach - covering a wide spectrum of management and organization while at the same time developing a new theoretical approach to organizational culture. The new edition contains improved pedagogy and expanded coverage of topics such as identity and organizational change.

It is essential reading for students taking undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Organizational Behaviour and Organizational Theory on Management and Organization Studies programmes, including MBA.

1

The Concept of Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is one of the major issues in academic research and education, in organization theory as well as in management practice. There are good reasons for this: the cultural dimension is central in all aspects of organizational life. Even in those organizations where cultural issues receive little explicit attention, how people in a company think, feel, value and act is guided by ideas, meanings and beliefs of a cultural (socially shared) nature. Whether managers think that culture is too soft or too complicated to bother about or whether there is no unique corporate culture does not reduce the significance of culture. Senior organizational members are always, in one way or another, ‘managing culture’ – underscoring what is important and what is less so and framing how the corporate world should be understood. Organizations practising intensive ‘numbers management’ may develop and reproduce a culture celebrating performance indicators and rituals around the handling of these. In most contemporary organizations, corporate culture receives a lot of attention and is seen as crucial. A key concern is that ‘culture management aspires to intervene in and regulate being, so that there is no distance between individuals’ purposes and those of the organization for which they work’ (Grey, 2005: 68).

However, even in those cases where top managers have a strong awareness of the significance of culture, there is often a lack of a deeper understanding of how people and organizations function in terms of culture. High ambitions in attaining cultural control are seldom fully realized. Culture is as significant and complex as it is difficult to understand and ‘use’ in a thoughtful way. Awareness of and interest in culture vary between managers and companies. It is often difficult to attain a high level of cultural awareness to guide actions. The interest in quick fixes in much management writing and thinking is unhelpful. Instead a well-elaborated framework and a vocabulary in which core concepts – culture, meaning, symbolism – are sorted out are necessary for understanding and for qualified organizational practice by consultants, managers and others.

It is tempting to emphasize the significance of corporate cultures for performance, growth and success. At the beginning of the 1980s books identifying characteristics of excellent companies in the USA (Peters and Waterman, 1982) and the secrets behind the at-the-time highly successful Japanese companies (e.g. Ouchi, 1981) highlighted corporate culture. These books, in combination with journalistic writings, created a widespread belief in corporate cultures being perhaps the significant factor behind the performance of companies. This belief has been shaken by problems in many of the companies portrayed by Peters and Waterman as ‘excellent’ some years after the publication of their book as well as by a downturn in performance among Japanese companies in recent years. In addition, other more ‘rationalistic’ business recipes partly replaced culture and the focus on ‘people’ as the latest fashion for companies and managers during the first half of the 1990s. Some of the interest in culture has moved over to the nearby and overlapping field of organizational identity (Albert and Whetten, 1985; Ashforth et al., 2010), to be addressed in Chapter 3.

Still, a strong case can be made for taking an interest in corporate culture in relation to performance. Managers frequently ascribe successes such as rapid growth to their culture. ‘Companies win or lose based on the cultures they create’, the chief executive officer (CEO) of CompUSA, the largest retailer in the USA of personal computers, says (Puffer, 1999: 34). Many of the most influential management writers and academics agree. Kanter (2008: 44) recognizes that talk about values is fashionable in corporate circles, but for ‘the vanguard companies we studied, values truly are a primary consideration’. Pfeffer (1994: 6) argues that the traditional sources of success – product and process technology, access to regulated markets, economies of scale, etc. – matter less today than in the past, ‘leaving organizational culture and capabilities, derived from how people are managed, as comparatively more vital’. Knowledge is said to be the crucial factor behind sustainable advantage and success for companies, and knowledge issues are closely interlinked with organizational culture (Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Knowledge management then partly becomes a matter of cultural management (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001; Jonsson and Foss, 2011; McDermott, 1999). Culture is thus highly significant for how companies and other organizations function: from strategic change to everyday leadership and how managers and employees relate to and interact with customers, as well as to how knowledge is created, shared, maintained and utilized.

My major point is not, however, to preach culture as the principal means to corporate effectiveness, growth and success. It is, as will be elaborated in Chapter 3, difficult to establish clear and causal links between culture and something else. Trying to do so easily implicates a rather simplistic view on culture that seriously underestimates its theoretical potential and value. Nor is my interest to offer new recipes for effective management of culture. For me, organizational culture is significant as a way of understanding organizational life in all its richness and variations. The centrality of the culture concept follows from the profound importance of shared meanings for any coordinated action. As Smircich (1985) says, organizations exist as systems of meanings that are shared to various degrees. A sense of common, taken-for-granted ideas, beliefs and meanings is necessary for continuing organized activity. This makes interaction possible without constant confusion or intense interpretation and reinterpretation of meanings. For organizational practitioners – managers and others shaping organizational life – a developed capacity to think in terms of organizational culture facilitates acting wisely. Insights and reflections may be useful in relation to getting people to do the ‘right’ things in terms of effectiveness, but also for promoting more autonomous standpoints in relation to dominant ideologies, myths, fashions, etc. We need to learn about culture also in order to encourage and facilitate the critical thinking-through of various taken-for-granted aspects of values, beliefs and assumptions in industry, occupations and organizations. This book tries to make a contribution in this direction.

The book deals with the why and how of cultural understandings of organizations. I try to suggest novel ways of making us more alert to the possibilities of cultural analysis, showing how it can lead to insightful interpretations of organizations, management and working life. The general aims are thus to contribute to a more reflective mode of research and to more reflective corporate practitioners. ‘Reflective’ thus not only refers to how we relate to instrumental concerns in a more varied, thoughtful and learning-oriented way, but also includes the critical thinking-through of objectives, arrangements and acts in terms of how they contribute to, or work against, the common good. It draws attention to hidden ethical and political dimensions of organizational life.

The Meaning(s) of Culture

A glance at just a few works that use the term ‘organizational culture’ will reveal enormous variation in the definitions of this term and even more in the use of the term ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ has no fixed or broadly agreed meaning even in anthropology (Borowsky, 1994; Ortner, 1984), but variation in its use is especially noticeable in the literature on organizational culture. This is partly related to strong differences in the purpose and depth of books and articles. But also the broad variation of scientific disciplines and research orientations involved in organizational culture studies makes the field very heterogeneous.1 The concept of culture seems to lend itself to very different uses as collectively shared forms of, for example, ideas and cognition, as symbols and meanings, as values and ideologies, as rules and norms, as emotions and expressiveness, as the collective unconscious, as behaviour patterns, structures and practices, etc., all of which may be made targets of study. Of course, culture is not unique in this way. Actually, most if not all significant concepts in organization studies and social science tend to be accompanied by a variety of different meanings and definitions (Palmer and Hardy, 2000).

Culture is, however, a tricky concept as it is easily used to cover everything and consequently nothing. That certain researchers are interested in ‘culture’ – or at least use the term – does not mean that they have very much in common. Frequently ‘culture’ seems to refer to little more than a social pattern – for example, it refers to surface phenomena rather than exploring the meanings and ideas behind them. It could therefore be advocated that in many cases the term should be abandoned in favour of something like ‘informal behaviour patterns’, ‘norm system’ or simply ‘social pattern’. Many people referring to culture seem to do so in a very vague way, and it is important to use the concept without losing focus, direction and interpretive depth.

This book treats a variety of ways of using ideas on culture in research and organizational practice. This calls for a balance between freezing a definite view on culture and letting the concept stand for anything and nothing. Most of the diverse perspectives surveyed here share the following assumptions about cultural phenomena (cf. Hofstede et al., 1990; Trice and Beyer, 1993):

• they are related to history and tradition;
• they have some depth, are difficult to grasp and account for, and must be interpreted;
• they are collective and shared by members of groups;
• they are primarily ideational in character, having to do with meanings, understandings, beliefs, knowledge and other intangibles;
• they are holistic, intersubjective and emotional rather than strictly rational and analytical.

Viewing culture broadly as a shared and learned world of experiences, meanings, values and understandings which inform people and which are expressed, reproduced and communicated partly in symbolic form is consistent with a variety of approaches to the conduct of concrete studies. More precise ways of viewing culture and what they can reveal will be explored, compared, assessed and developed in this book.

I use the term ‘organizational culture’ as an umbrella concept for a way of thinking which takes a serious interest in cultural and symbolic phenomena. This term directs the spotlight in a particular direction rather than mirroring a concrete reality for possible study. I agree with Frost et al.’s (1985: 17) ‘definition’ of organizational culture: ‘Talking about organizational culture seems to mean talking about the importance for people of symbolism – of rituals, myths, stories and legends – and about the interpretation of events, ideas, and experiences that are influenced and shaped by the groups within which they live.’ I will also, however, take organizational culture to include values and assumptions about social reality, but for me values are less central and less useful than meanings and symbolism in cultural analysis. This position is in line with the view broadly shared by many modern anthropologists (especially Geertz, 1973). Culture is then understood to be a system of common symbols and meanings. It provides ‘the shared rules governing cognitive and affective aspects of membership in an organization, and the means whereby they are shaped and expressed’ (Kunda, 1992: 8).

Culture is not primarily ‘inside’ people’s heads, but somewhere ‘between’ the heads of a group of people where symbols and meanings are publicly expressed – in work group interactions, in board meetings, but also in material objects. It is the meaning aspect of what is being socially expressed and it is thus visible and invisible at the same time.

Culture, then, is central in governing the understanding of behaviour, social events, institutions and processes. Culture is the setting in which these phenomena become comprehensible and meaningful. It is important here not to overemphasize the static elements of culture: even if tradition, framework, rules and fairly stable meanings are part of the picture, culture is not best understood as a homogeneous, cohesive and causal force, but as something that people do; it is emergent, dynamic, situationally adaptive and co-created in dialogue (Heijes, 2011). This is partly because individuals and groups are meaning-seeking creatures, partly because the multiplicity of complex meanings is set in motion in specific settings and interactions. Meanings need to be negotiated and processed, not rigidly applied. There is, for example, no static and uniform meaning of ‘managerial authority’ in a workplace; the cultural context provides a framework for its negotiation, aiding interactions (Lundholm, 2011). Is the manager clearly a superior figure, someone you are supposed to have deep respect for, or is s/he more like first among equals? Culture helps sort this out, on a general organizational level, and offers some framing and reduction of uncertainty in the specific relations between individual managers and subordinates (if now subordinates is the right word).

Key Concepts of Culture: Symbols and Meanings

Even though there are a number of concepts of significance for a cultural understanding – including assumptions, beliefs, ideas, rites, rituals, myths, identity and values – I see symbols and meanings as clearly the most significant ones.

Meaning refers to how an object or an utterance is interpreted. It points at what something is seen as standing for. Meaning has a subjective referent in the sense that it appeals to an expectation, a way of relating to things. Meaning makes an object relevant and meaningful. In a cultural context, it is socially shared and not personally idiosyncratic meanings that are of interest. I will give an example: a formal rule in a company says that factory management can only decide on investments up to £50,000, and that larger investments must be sanctioned by a higher authority. This can be seen as a simple, objective, structural arrangement. The exact meaning of the rule, however, calls for interpretation – and this is where culture comes in. Various meanings are possible: (a) it is under all circumstances intolerable and leads to automatic dismissal for a factory manager to make larger purchases or investments; (b) ‘investment’ can be interpreted or divided up in different ways and £50,000 is a rough guideline rather than a precise figure; (c) as a general principle one should consult top management before significantly, or without strong reasons, exceeding this level, etc., but it is understood that this is often difficult or unnecessary and that people should act with discretion. Another option could be that this rule is read and applied or responded to with much variation: it may be seen as a strict guideline for younger factory managers and for managers of units seen as performing below or around average, while experienced managers heading high-performing units are not expected to obey the rule at all. A rule differs in how strictly and uniformly it is interpreted and taken seriously owing to the cultural context giving the rule its exact meaning. We can imagine different organizational cultures in which the same rule is given very different meanings and thus leads to different behaviours and consequences of the rule. In some organizations version (a) (of the three alternatives above) may dominate; in others a more decentralized and flexible understanding may be central (i.e. one agrees in general with (b)) or there is clear differentiation contingent upon the standing of managers (i.e. situation (c)). But also within one and the same culture the situation-specific and dynamic element needs to be considered. Even in a rule-focused culture there are situation-specific efforts to sort out when it is good to rely on well-established structures and when one should avoid mindless rigidity.

In a cultural context it is always socially shared meanings that are of interest, not so much highly personal meanings. Individuals may be more or less authority-bound and obey the rules or they may dislike and rebel against bureaucracy – they may as individuals see rules as indicators of order and rationality or as a straitjacket and an obstacle to the exercise of judgement and responsibility. Individual meanings are certainly important and they may vary considerably within a group. But a cultural understanding concentrates not on individual idiosyncrasies: it is the shared orientations within an organization or another group that is of interest. Even though people in work and other contexts always have their idiosyncrasies and, as expressed by Starbuck (2010: 1398), ‘everyone’s perceptions blend prior beliefs with new observations’, idiosyncrasies are reduced, and perceptions and beliefs are becoming more socially homogeneous (less heterogeneous) through culture. This creates a shared sense of reality through common frameworks, values and definitions of reality.

A symbol can be defined as an object – a word or statement, a kind of action or a material phenomenon – that stands ambiguously for something else and/or something more than the object itself (Cohen, 1974). A symbol is rich in meaning – it condenses a more complex set of meanings in a particular object and thus communicates meaning in an economic way. Occasionally, the complexity of a symbol and the meaning it expresses will call for considerable interpretation and deciphering. People have private symbols, but in an organizational context it is collective symbolism that is of most interest.2

When thinking about culture it is important to bear in mind what culture is not, that is, what a cultural perspective does not focus on. Making a distinction between culture and social structure is helpful here. Culture is regarded as a more or less cohesive system of meanings and symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place. Social structure is regarded as the behavioural patterns which the social interaction itself gives rise to. In the case of culture, then, we have a frame of reference of beliefs, expressive symbols and values, by means of which individuals define their environment, express their feelings and make judgements. At the social structural level, we have a continuous process of interaction. As Geertz (1973: 145) states, culture is the creation of meaning through which human beings interpret their experiences and guide their actions, while social structure is the form which action takes or the network of social relationships which actually exists.

What Culture is Not

This means that culture and social structure represent different abstractions of the same phenomenon. Culture describes social action as depending on the meaning it has for those involved, while social structure describes social action from the point of view of its consequences on the functioning of the social system. This understanding permits treatment of the tension arising between culture and social structure. A reasonable assumption is that culture and social str...