It is rather common to assume that organisations are coherent, and that all organisational members share a similar kind of values. When you consider the likes of an insurance company, with its actuaries busy calculating risk tables, and sales people busy talking up the benefits of various policies, it does not take much to appreciate that in fact there are multiple groups in organisations and they do not share the same values necessarily.
Take for example any of the classic organisational battles between groups such as sales and marketing, R & D and marketing, sales and finance, HR and line managers and it becomes very evident that not everyone in the organisation shares the same values or culture.
Organisations are characterised by rather complex differentiation of work tasks, departments and hierarchical levels and this differentiation fosters strong differences in meanings, values and symbols. The variety of generations, classes, occupational groups and genders tends to produce and sustain variety and fragmentation of cultures rather than unity of ONE culture in the organisation (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008).
Perhaps the concept of corporate culture refers to the beliefs of the senior managers about what the culture should be. The beliefs of top managers can marginalise the beliefs of others in the organisation.
Is the idea of habitus helpful here? For Norbert Elias habitus is the regular patterning of power relations that arises between people, of which no one is in control. Meanwhile for Bourdieu, who partly derived his theory of habitus from Elias, it is the enduring disposition to act in a particular way. In other words, it might be possible to talk about organisational culture to some degree if we thought about this as the way that events, artefacts and history had formed and shaped the narratives that are told in organisations about ‘organisational identity’. In most organisations these narratives are used as forms of social control. However, and I agree with you, there are also different narratives that staff of particular disciplines tell themselves, say actuaries or accountants, where there is a parallel story about we believe as a group of accountants. This leads to cross ‘cultural’ turbulence between disciplines, but also within discplines as they are taken up in a particular organisation with a particular history. Complicated, innit?
Comment by Chris Mowles — August 26, 2009 @ 2:29 am
Thanks Chris.
Can you help me on habitus please? I am thinking about the relationship of habitus as thought of by Bourdieu, and its relationship to a Heidegger phenomenological view of the world, which would include background meaning, embodied intelligence, concern and the situation. Would habitus be equivalent to background meaning and concern, which I think are the main components of a disposition to act in a particular way? Very interested to hear your thoughts. Cheers, Stephen
Comment by Stephen — September 3, 2009 @ 1:05 am
Organizational culture can be understood or interpreted in many ways. For example, one could point to the goals that the employees should pursue. Does the organization as an entity then has a culture? I think this can be seen as culture perceived from the outside. For example to clients of the organization.
Another approach is that culture is defined by its employees. Different employees, with different individual goals. How do employees perceive culture? It’s rather different than how clients perceive it in the first example.
It depends on the perspective you take.
Comment by Bas Reus — September 17, 2009 @ 2:01 am
Bas, Thanks for your comment.
I agree that everything depends on the perspective you take. A customer can have multiple perspectives of the organisation. As a customer of Telecom trying to fix my home phone, I find that the undertakings to get my phone connected by a certain date are not mixed. When I call directory service I can’t understand the accents of the people that answer my call, and they can’t understand what address I’m saying because the service has been outsourced to another country. Then I get a call from Telecom to say that the mobile pricing plan I’m on is not the best one for my needs, and would I like to change. I say “yes”, delighted to be saving some money.
This is one organisation, all with the same goals. As a customer, I have three different experiences of it. So the internal employee experience of different cultures (if there is such a thing) does affect the external customer, especially when there are multiple channels of contact.
Comment by Stephen — September 17, 2009 @ 2:23 am
Nice post Stephen, I am glad to see people breaking down what corporate culture actually means.
I agree Chris, it is complicated. In fact I would say it is complex. All these interactions are hard if not impossible to track and extend beyond normal corporate communications facets to include personal interactions, misinterpretations based on past experiences outside the business and of course interaction with norms and world-views gained from employees other cultural spheres like family, local community, sports organisations, etc.
However after having seen some amazingly dysfunctional companies manage to somehow be successful, I really believe these overlapping cultural pressures form a complex adaptive system.
As a result Bas, there will be different ways of trying to generalise the local culture and build principles or frameworks. These will sometimes be successful tools, however it seems transferring them into a different context and still expecting them to work is dangerous at best.
That said, these interactions aren’t chaotic, standing patterns are created for both long and short time-frames and small changes can have large effects, suggesting that there is a complex adaptive system at work (although Stephen may disagree with me after his last post!). In this case, I agree with Stephen’s concerns that senior managers see culture as a “thing” to be managed and that they should effect culture through their personal interactions and communications. However I would like to add another arrow to their quiver.
Once culture is seen as a complex adaptive system, complexity theory comes into play. This can be used not so much to control the culture, but to design your systems, policies and procedures in such a way to adapt themselves to the most effective configuration for your companies culture. David Snowden speaks about this with tools like safe-fail implementations and Andrew McAfee of Enterprise 2.0 fame captures this in his evolutionary software development methodologies.
This is in fact the real Best Practice. Not some idea that there is a perfect way to do a task, but that there is a way that your organisation’s culture can be most effective when harnessed in a certain way that must be progressively discovered.
I’m enjoying your thought process Stephen. Keep blogging and maybe if we both find ourselves in Melbourne one day we can discuss over a coffee?
Comment by Stuart French — October 11, 2009 @ 10:00 pm