Organizational Subcultures

Conceptual Overview

In general, a subcultural perspective emphasizes what it is people must learn and do to become acceptable and, to a degree, self-conscious members of a distinctive group among other groups in an organization. To [Page 1189]study organizational subcultures is to examine the different meanings people assign to their respective work experiences given where they are located in the organization. People are thus more than cogs in a machine, nodes in a network, sources of intellectual capital, or self-interested political actors. They are meaning makers, identity carriers, moral actors, symbol users, storytellers who are actively engaged in organizational life, and through intensive interaction with one another, they continually create, sustain, and modify organizational events, processes, services, and products.

Subculture is then a multidimensional concept and can be used in a number of ways. The term covers much ground, but most scholars consider organizational subcultures to refer to identifiable groups of people who share common identities based on characteristics that may well transcend or override their organizationally prescribed work roles and relationships. They often transcend managerially sanctioned group (division or department) boundaries and sometimes cut across the boundaries of organizations.

Moreover, subcultures emerge more or less autonomously in all organizational settings and influence the behavior of organization members in a variety of ways. Certainly, groups of people who work together and interact day in, day out produce their own cultural understandings, but cultural production in organizations is not confined strictly to fixed work units or positions and prescribed or proximity-dependent interaction patterns. The larger social context in which people live beyond the organization can be expected to play a role, and here is where the idea of subculture is particularly relevant. For example, even though ethnicity is not supposed to count when performing a particular job, it certainly counts in the external world, and members of different groups bring different cultures with them to work. Employee subcultures may then form along class or ethnic lines because broader subcultural similarities are strongly felt and people are drawn to others who share their meaning systems.

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