Organisational Culture and the Management of Technological Change: A Theoretical Perspective

The modern business environment is characterised by constant economic upheaval and incessant technological changes and the pace of change has accelerated with the emergence of the Internet. Consequently the management of technological change has become a major challenge for almost all organisations. Increasingly researchers have refocused their attention from planned models of change management to understanding the emergent nature of change. It is now widely acknowledged that one of the major obstacles to managing change is organisational culture. Since cultural concepts have their origins in anthropology, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution which anthropology can make in the study of organisational culture and, by implication, the management of technological change. This paper recognises some of the inherent weaknesses with existing cultural models and approaches within the literature; most studies assume that culture is static over time; that culture is homogenous (disregarding cultural pluralism) and there is a tendency to represent culture in terms of conceptual dichotomies. In this paper, a theoretical framework originating from anthropology (grid and group cultural theory) is put forward as a more coherent and interpretive research framework for examining organisational culture and the management of technological change.