Organizational Culture

Organizational culture can be taken to mean the work-related worldviews (assumptions, understandings, beliefs, values, etc.) and life ways (norms and practices) that are purportedly shared by members of a bureaucratic institution. Such bodies—also known as formal organizations—are deliberately designed; have explicitly defined goals, roles, and subdivisions; use standardized procedures; and are oriented to universalism and rationality. They are hierarchical in terms of authority and in function, with differentiated subunits being incorporated into more inclusive, higher order ones.

Formal organizations are typical of the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The first of these has received most attention in the organizational culture literature, so much so that the term corporate culture—more appropriate to the world of business—has been used as a synonym for the broader category. This conflation of labels is not surprising, because the notion of organizational culture initially became popular in the early 1980s among management specialists, especially those like Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy or Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, who were writing to offer pragmatic advice to a nonacademic audience of corporate managers.

The case study approach is near and dear to management researchers, and formal organizations—as clearly bounded and well defined social bodies—are quite suited to it. The field of management studies is also an applied one, and organizational culture promised to serve as a new key to productivity and profitability. At a different point on the disciplinary spectrum, the anthropology of industrial and industrializing societies was continuing to grow. Large-scale societies (globalizing nation–states) needed to be carved to fit anthropology's in-depth, qualitative approach. Plants and offices became some of the suitable new venues for research. The notion of organizational culture inevitably attracted anthropologists' attention; in North America, culture has been the central, integrating concept of the discipline since its late 19th-century inception.

The culture concept, and the model of humanity on which it rests, has generated controversy in the organizational culture literature. Central to the discourse are issues about how a single, collective mind set could govern so complex a social structure and about whether management can deliberately create, inculcate, and maintain it.