CULTURAL APPROACH to ORGANIZATIONS

Clifford Geertz & Michael Pacanowsky

Chapter 20

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Anthropologist Clifford Geertz views cultures as webs of shared ,meaning, shared understandings, and shared sense making.

Geertz’s work has focused on third world cultures, but his ethnographic approach has been applied by others to organizations. In the field of speech communication, Michael Pacanowsky has applied Geertz’s approach in his research of organizations

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“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun”

Geertz is referring to the influence of culture on human beings.

Geertz is saying humans have the ability to create and modify their cultures, but their cultures serve to define the world around them.

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In order to travel across the web toward it’s center, outsiders must discover the common interpretations that hold the web together.

To become an integral member of the web we as outsiders need to understand the common culture of a business to become part of it.

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Introduced theory:

Culture as a metaphor of organizational life

Culture as a root metaphor was undoubtedly stimulated by western fascination with the economic success of Japanese corporations in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Our industrial leaders travelled to the far east to study their methods of production, what they discovered was their superior output and quality was not so much technology driven. It was a shared culture among the workers and loyalty to the corporation.

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The Japanese methods of production that our leaders went to the Orient to study weren’t solely their ideas or based on their culture.

Edward Deming – The father of the Quality Evolution

In the 1950’s in Japan, he taught top management how to improve design through various methods.

He is regarded as having more impact on Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage.

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Now corporate culture means different things depending on who you ask.

Some use the term to describe the environment that limits a companies freedom of action.

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Others look at it as image, character, or work environment

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Pacanowsky believes in Geertz symbolic approach and considers culture as more than a single variable in organizational research.

Culture is not a piece of the puzzle, it is the puzzle.

An organization becomes what it is based on the people who work within the organization

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Introduced theory

What Culture is; What Culture is Not

Geertz admits that the concept of culture as “Systems of Shared Meaning” as somewhat vague and is difficult to grasp

Geertz and his colleagues do not distinguish between high and low culture

The elusive nature of culture prompts Geertz to label its study as a “Soft Science”

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Culture is not whole or undivided

Geertz points out that even close knit societies have subcultures within their boundaries.

The sales and accounting departments might eye each other warily:Accountants are number crunchers or bean counters

Salesmen are fast talkers and glad hander's

You may also have those seen as slackers and brown noser’s

All of these groups may or may not look at another groups non work activities as being normal or important as they do their own

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Pacanowsky views the web of organizational culture as the residue of employee performances

The very actions by which members constitute and reveal their culture to themselves and others.

Job performance may play only a minor role in how a corporate culture is created

People get the job done. Not only by performing the actual steps required to complete a task. They talk, joke, pick on each other, while doing the least amount of work required to not get in trouble with superiors

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Introduced theory:

Thick Description: What Ethnographers Do

Ethnography – Discovering who people within a culture think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end do they think that they are doing it.

Social discourse –

Thick descriptions are powerful reconstructions, not just detailed observations

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Most Ethnographers realize that their task is to:

1. Accurately describe talk and actions, and the context in which they occur

2. Capture the thoughts, emotions, or purpose to what people say and do

3. Assign motivation, intention, or purpose to what people say and do

4. Artfully write this up so readers feel they’ve experienced the events

5. Interpret what happened: Explain what it means within this culture

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Thick description starts with a state of bewilderment

-What is going on

-The only way to reduce this feeling is to observe as if you were a stranger in a foreign land

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Introduced theory:

Metaphors: Taking Language Seriously

Metaphors can be a starting place for accessing the shared meaning of a corporate culture

Example: Lattice Organization

One on one communication is more important than traditional top down communication

No one group is more important to the outcome than another

Everyone is free to talk to another employee in another department

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Introduced theory:

The Symbolic Interpretation of a Story

Stories provide windows into organizational culture. Pacanowsky suggests three types of narrative that dramatize organizational life

1. Corporate stories – Carry the ideology of management and reinforce company policy

2. Personal stories -Those that the company personnel tell about themselves, often defining how they would like to be seen within the organization

3. Collegial stories – Are positive and negative anecdotes told about others in the organization

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Introduced theory:

Ritual: This is the way its always been and always will be

Einstein described lunacy this way – Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different outcome

Said differently – If we continue to do what we’ve always done, we will get what we always did

Staying with what has always worked – The fear of change

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Introduced theory:

Can Management be an Agent of Cultural Change

The popularity of the cultural metaphor when it was first introduced to the corporate world in the 1980’s was undoubtedly due to business leaders’ desire to shape interpretation within the organization

Symbols are the tools of management

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Executives don’t operate forklifts or produce widgets; they cast vision, state goals, process information, send memos, and engage in other symbolic behavior.

If they believe that culture is the key to worker commitment, productivity, and sales, the possibility of changing culture becomes a seductive idea

Creating favorable metaphors, planting organizational stories, and establishing rites would seem an ideal way to create a corporate myth that would serve managerial interests

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But once corporate culture exists, can it be altered by a manager?

Geertz regards shared interpretations as naturally emerging from all members of a group rather than consciously engineered by leaders.

Shared meanings are hard to dispel. Symbol watchers within a company quickly discount the words of management if they don’t square with performance.

But even if culture could be changed, there remains the question of whether it should be

Managers who regard themselves as agents of cultural change create bull-in-a-china-shop fears for ethnographers who have ethical concerns about how their corporate analysis might be used

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Is the Cultural Approach Useful?

The cultural approach adopts and refines qualitative research methodology of ethnography to gain a new understanding of a specific group of people

A crucial part of that understanding is a clarification of values within the culture under study.

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Today the cultural approach to organizations isn’t as important to interpretive scholars as it was in the 1980’s.

This may be because many researchers trained in organizational communication are hired as consultants by corporate managers looking for change

Geertz would regard this quest to alter culture as inappropriate and virtually impossible. This purist position exposes him and his admirers within our discipline to criticism from corporate consultants who not only desire to understand organizational communication but also want to influence it

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Sources:

A First Look at Communication Theory - Eight Edition

ANSWERS.COM

Wikipedia – Biography of W. Edwards Deming