Organizational culture has come of age. Not only did the concepthave staying power but it is even being broadened to occupationalcultures and community cultures. Culture at the national level ismore important than ever in helping us to understand intergroupconflict. As it turns out, culture is essential to understanding intergroupconflict at the organizational level as well. My years of consultingexperience with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)provided useful case material (as the Action Company) in my previouseditions, but it was only through my attempt to fully understandwhy DEC initially succeededand, in the end, failed as abusinessthat I came to realize the true importance of organizationalculture as an explanatory concept. What happens in organizationsis fairly easy to observe; for example, leadership failures,marketing myopia, arrogance based on past success, and so on; butin the effort to understand why such things happen, culture as aconcept comes into its own (Schein, 2003).In an age in which leadership is touted over and over again as acritical variable in defining the success or failure of organizations, itbecomes all the more important to look at the other side of the leadershipcoinhow leaders create culture and how culture defines andcreates leaders. The first and second editions of this book attemptedto show this connection, and I hope that I have been able tostrengthen the connection even more in this third edition.The conceptual models of how to think about the structure andfunctioning of organizational culture, and the role that leadershipplays in the creation and management of culture have remainedximore or less the same in this third edition. However, I have beenable to add material based on more recent clinical research and tomake the concepts more vivid by identifying more of the organizationswith whom I have worked over the years.All of the chapters have been redone and edited. Some havebeen shortened; more have been lengthened with additional casematerial that I was able to incorporate. In addition, I have selectivelyincorporated relevant material from a great many other booksand papers that have been written about organizational culturesince the last edition. It is clear that there are still different modelsavailable to scholars and practitioners on how to think about culture.I have not reviewed all of them in detail but have tried toshow, wherever possible, variations in point of view. I apologize tothose colleagues whose work I may have overlooked or chosen notto include, but my purpose is not to write the definitive textbook onculture; rather, it is to explore a way of thinking about culture thatI believe best suits our efforts to understand groups, organizations,and occupations.This edition is organized into three parts. Part One focuses onorganizational and occupational cultureshow to think aboutthem, how to define them, and how to analyze them. Leadershipis referred to throughout and leadership issues are highlighted,but the focus is clearly on getting a better feel for what culture isand does.Part Two focuses on the content of culture. In a sense, culturecovers all of a given groups life; hence the content is, in principle,endless and vast. Yet we need categories for analysis, and here wecan draw on anthropology and group dynamics to develop a set ofdimensions that are most likely to be useful in making some conceptualsense of the cultural landscape as applied to organizations.In Part Three the focus shifts to the leader as founder, manager,and, ultimately, a victim of culture if the leader does not understandhow to manage culture. A crucial element in this analysis is tounderstand how culture coevolves with the organization as successxii P R E FA C Ebrings growth and aging. The issues that leaders face at each ofthese different organizational growth stages are completely different,partly because the role that culture plays at each stage is completelydifferent. This aspect of leadership is almost completelyignored in most leadership books.AcknowledgmentsMy most profound gratitude is to the readers of the first and secondedition. Were it not for their positive and critical feedback, andtheir use of this book in their courses and their consulting work, Iwould not have had the energy to write a third edition. Support andstimulation from colleagues again played a key role, especially thefeedback from John Van Maanen, Otto Scharmer, Joanne Martin,Mary Jo Hatch, Majken Schultz, and Peter Frost.The publisher, Jossey-Bass, has always been totally encouragingand their editorial staff, especially Byron Schneider, urged me onrelentlessly but in a positive and supportive way. The reviews theyprovided were essential to gaining perspective on a book that wasfirst published in 1985. I got many good ideas about what was workingand should be preserved, what needed to be cut out, and whatneeded to be added or enhanced. I thank each of them.I think it is also important to acknowledge the tremendous positiveimpact of word processing technology. Work on this editionwas launched with a set of chapters scanned in from the second edition,permitting immediate on-line editing. Material from the firstedition that I decided to bring back in the third edition could bescanned and immediately incorporated where it belonged. Feedbackfrom readers could be incorporated into the text directly andused or not used, without additional retyping. Final copy could besent to the publisher directly on discs or electronically. Once errorswere corrected they stayed corrected. All of this is a most unusualand pleasant experience for an author who can remember whatwriting was like with carbons, ditto paper, and endless retyping.P R E FA C E xiiiLast but not least I thank my wife, Mary, for sitting by patientlywhile I disappeared to work at the computer from time to time. Butshe too has gotten hooked on the power of e-mail and other electronicmarvels, so she is now more understanding of how screenscapture our attention.May 2004 Edgar H. ScheinCambridge, Massachusettsxiv P R E FA C EThe AuthorEdgar H. Schein was educated at the University of Chicago; atStanford University, where he received a masters degree in psychologyin 1949; and at Harvard University, where he received hisPh.D. in social psychology in 1952. He was chief of the Social PsychologySection of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Researchwhile serving in the U.S. Army as a captain from 1952 to 1956. Hejoined the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology (MIT) in 1956 and was made a professor oforganizational psychology and management in 1964.From 1968 to 1971 Schein was the undergraduate planningprofessor for MIT, and in 1972 he became the chairman of theOrganization Studies Group at the Sloan School, a position heheld until 1982. He was honored in 1978 when he was named theSloan Fellows Professor of Management, a chair he held until 1990.At present he is Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritusand continues at the Sloan School part time as a senior lecturer.He is also the founding editor of Reflections, the journal ofthe Society for Organizational Learning, which is devoted to connectingacademics, consultants, and practitioners around the issuesof knowledge creation, dissemination, and utilization.Schein has been a prolific researcher, writer, teacher, and consultant.Besides his numerous articles in professional journals, hehas authored fourteen books, including Organizational Psychology(third edition, 1980), Career Dynamics (1978), Organizational Cultureand Leadership (1985, 1992), Process Consultation Vol. 1 and Vol. 2xv(1969, 1987, 1988), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), and TheCorporate Culture Survival Guide (1999).Schein wrote a cultural analysis of the Singapore EconomicDevelopment Board, entitled Strategic Pragmatism (MIT Press, 1997),and he has published an extended case analysis of the rise and fall ofDigital Equipment Corporation, entitled DEC Is Dead; Long LiveDEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). He was coeditor with the late Richard Beckhard ofthe Addison Wesley Series on Organization Development, which haspublished over thirty titles since its inception in 1969.His consultation focuses on organizational culture, organizationdevelopment, process consultation, and career dynamics; among hispast and current clients are major corporations both in the U.S. andoverseas, such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Ciba-Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Procter & Gamble, ImperialChemical Industries (ICI), Saab Combitech, Steinbergs, Alcoa,Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Con Edison,the Economic Development Board of Singapore, and the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency (on the subject of safety culture).Schein has received many honors and awards for his writing,most recently the Lifetime Achievement Award in Workplace Learningand Performance of the American Society of Training Directors,February 3, 2000; the Everett Cherrington Hughes Award forCareer Scholarship from the Careers Division of the Academy ofManagement, August 8, 2000; and the Marion Gislason Award forLeadership in Executive Development from the Boston UniversitySchool of Management Executive Development Roundtable,December 11, 2002.He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association andthe Academy of Management. Schein is married and has three childrenand seven grandchildren. He and his wife, Mary, live in Cambridge,Massachusetts.