Jelinek, Mariann, Linda Smircich and Paul Hirsch. 1983. “Introduction: A Code of Many Colors.” Aministrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Organizational Culture (September). 331 – 338.
· Pettigrew (1979) noted that culture comes with ‘a family of concepts’ like symbol, language, social drama, and ritual that highlight organizing (rather than ‘organization’) as the major focus.
· Culture – another word for social reality – is both product and process, the sharper of human interaction and the outcome of it, continually created and recreated by people’s on going interactions.
· Culture is defined as ‘a system of meanings that accompany the myriad of behaviours and practices recognised as a distinct way of life.
· Culture enables organizations to function.
Gregory, Kathleen L.. 1983. Native-view paradigms: Multiple cultures and culture conflicts in organizations. Aministrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Organizational Culture (September). 359-376
· Within our own societies organization members similarly engange in rituals, pass along corporate myths and stories and use arcane (known to few) jargon and that these informal practices may foster or hinder management’s goals for the organization (baker, 1980; Schwartz and Davis, 1981; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982)
· Subgroups with different occupational, divisional, ethnic, or other cultures approach organizational interactions with their own meanings and senses of priorities. Ethnocentrism, the tendency to take for granted one’s own cultural view and to evaluate others’ behaviour in terms of it, increases the tendency for misunderstandings and conflict occur.
· Culture is defined as learned ways coping with experience.
· Spradley and McCurdy’s (1975:5) – the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate social behaviour.
· Werner and Topper (1979:34) – system of knowledge that explains the social and physical universe and provides plans and decisions for coping.
· People participate in many groups and acquire culture in all experiences (e.g. as family members, residents, citizens, employees)
· Organizations that lack integration may be comprised of members acting from numerous internally consistent but externally conflicting cultures.
Lakomski, Gabriele. 2005. Managing without leadership: Towards a theory of organizational functioning. Elsevier Ltd.
· Schein (1992). It is organizations’s culture that causes resistance and that needs changing.
· The prime mover of change is the leader, who transform the current stagnating culture into a productive one.
· Following Smircich’s (1983) discussion, culture-as-independent-variable is a feature characteristic of comparative (cross cultural) management studies, where it is considered as a background factor that helps determine variation in managerial and employee practices and attitude across countries.
· Culture in this management persepective is imported into the organization by the members and subsequent ‘shows’ itself in the ways they act and the attitudes they display.
· A variant of the culture-as-independent-variable concept is the belief that organizations themselves create cultural phenomena in form of organizational rituals, stories, ceromonies, legends and myths, often to do with the remarkable features and feats of the organization’s founding father/leader.
· Culture is the ‘social glue’ that holds the organization together through members’ shared beliefs and ideals.
· Culture is no longer an add-on, something an organization possesses, but is considered as something an organization is.
· Cultures are created by the human mind – understanding of culture is explicitly epistemological, in that organization is understood as the product of human cognition.
· The managing of culture is acknowledge as a difficult task requiring quite different means depending on which aspect is stressed.
· Krober and Kluckhohn’s (1952) traditional anthropological definition is widely accepted in management literature:
o Culture consists of patterns, explicit an implicit of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting and distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts: the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on one hand, be considered as products of action; on the other, as conditioning elements of future action (as cited in Holden, 2002, p. 27).
· The mental programs we carry in our heads; that is, the ‘patterns of thinking, feeling and acting’ developed in interaction with our environments, determine our views of the world and make us different from one another (Hofstede work 1984, 1991 and 2001) – software of mind
· Hofstede, 1991 p.5) culture is defined as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
· Schein, 1992, p.5) culture is viewed as
o …. The accumulated shared learning of a given group, covering behaviourial, emotional, and cognitive elements of the group members’ total psychological functioning. For shared learning to occur, there must be a history of shared experience, which in turn implies some stability of membership in the group. Given such stability and a shared history, the human need for parsimony, consistency, and meaning will cause the various shared elements to form into patterns that eventually can be called a culture (Schein, 1992, p.10).
· Culture of group can be defined as:
o A pattern of shared basic assumption that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 1992, p.12)
· The relationship between culture and leadership:
o Two sides of the same coin in that leaders first create cultures when they create groups and organisations. Once culture exists, they determine that criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be leader, But if cultures become dysfunctional, it is the unique function of leadership to perceive the functional and dysfunctional elements of the existing culture and to mange cultural evolution and change in such a way that the group can survive in a changing environment. (Schein, 1992, p.15)
Holden, Nigel. 2002. Cross-cultural management: A knowledge management persepective. Prentice Hall.
· Culture is a problem area for management.
· Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1871) definition:
o Culture… is that complex whoel which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Encylopedia Britannica, 2000)
· Culture referring to an aspect of a national or ethnic grouping, including summations of characteristics with reference to distinctive (culture specified management style of negotiating style)
· Culture referring to the special qualities an organization (corporate culture)
