organizational culture

Chapter 5 on organizational culture is one of my favorite in the text. My first introduction to organizational communication was a communication audit course in my doctoral program. Although the course took a process view of organizations, the interviews, focus groups, and survey items didn't directly address culture. Then I took a course in organizational culture and found it provided a very different way of thinking about organizations. At the time, the practical and interpretive views of organizational culture were quite popular. The practical view considers culture a variable that can be manipulated in an organization, as with managers telling stories that will influence employees' values. The interpretive view is concerned with organizational sensemaking. For me, the major contribution of this approach is recognizing that there's more going on in organizations than just getting the work done. Organization members know that, but researchers were slow to examine the more intangible aspects of organizational life.

The critical perspective highlights the ways in which organizations reinforce the status quo and current power relationships, framing organizations as instruments of domination. This approach to organizational culture leads organization members and scholars to question ways of organizing and examine how organizational practices may disenfranchise and exclude individuals and groups. I was watching the PGA U.S. Open Championship with friends over the weekend and one person commented that many of the courses Tiger Woods plays on now he couldn't have played on 30 years ago due to golf course use and country club membership restrictions based on race. That type of institutional structure is an example of organizations as instruments of domination.

The web lecture on metaphors and culture discusses how metaphors influence our thinking about organizations. In spite of the many new metaphors that have been applied to organizations in recent years, most organizations still embody the organizations as machines metaphor--which has negative implications for the people in those organizations.

Plenty of interesting concepts to blog about this week!

--Professor Cyborg