Organizational Culture

History

The organizational culture movement rose in the early 1980s in response to previous system-oriented explanations. Researchers began to move beyond the transmission model of communication to instead examine how relationships, cultures, and organizations are constituted by communication. This linguistic turn signified not only a methodological shift from studying communication as a measurable outcome, but also a fundamental change in the way organizations were interpreted and known. Communication came to be viewed not just as another organizational variable to control, but as an important phenomenon in and of itself. From this point of view, researchers began to see how meanings do not reside in messages, channels, or screens, but they rather are socially constructed through interaction and sense-making activities.

Management and Interpretive Approaches

Organizational culture stems from two different camps. The management approach focuses on the way organizations can control and improve their corporate culture. From this approach, culture and communication are things the organization has. The interpretive approach, in contrast, views and studies organizations as cultures constituted by communication. Communication is what the organization is.

In the 1980s, managers began to notice that organizations with strong cultures—such as Disneyland, Coca-Cola, IBM, and Japanese car manufacturers—were extremely successful. This spurred the notion that by being able to engineer an appropriate corporate culture, managers could increase productivity. A number of groundbreaking management books encouraged American corporate leaders to focus on organizational values, visions, rites and rituals, and leadership. Perhaps most popular was Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence, which featured organizations that were extremely successful at the time and found that they had in common strong cultures with close customer relations, employee empowerment, clear missions, and a flat organizational hierarchy.

Pioneering players for the communication study of organizational culture drew on Clifford Geertz's interpretivism. An interpretive approach examines organizations as tribes and views the familiar as strange, wondrous, and exotic. Specialized meaning [Page 714]is not waiting to be discovered, but is socially constructed through organizational values, folk tales, rituals, and practices. The interpretive approach frames the organizations as a stage or a text. Understanding comes through analyzing performances, scripts, and props from the point of view of participants.

Cultural Levels and Types