The Concept of Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is one of the major issues in academic research and education, in organization theory as well as in management practice. There are good reasons for this: the cultural dimension is central in all aspects of organizational life. Even in those organizations where cultural issues receive little explicit attention, how people in a company think, feel, value and act is guided by ideas, meanings and beliefs of a cultural (socially shared) nature. Whether managers think that culture is too soft or too complicated to bother about or whether there is no unique corporate culture does not reduce the significance of culture. Senior organizational members are always, in one way or another, ‘managing culture’ – underscoring what is important and what is less so and framing how the corporate world should be understood. Organizations practising intensive ‘numbers management’ may develop and reproduce a culture celebrating performance indicators and rituals around the handling of these. In most contemporary organizations, corporate culture receives a lot of attention and is seen as crucial. A key concern is that ‘culture management aspires to intervene in and regulate being, so that there is no distance between individuals’ purposes and those of the organization for which they work’ (Grey, 2005: 68). However, even in those cases where top managers have a strong awareness of the significance of culture, there is often a lack of a deeper understanding of how people and organizations function in terms of culture. High ambitions in attaining cultural control are seldom fully realized. Culture is as significant and complex as it is difficult to understand and ‘use’ in a thoughtful way. Awareness of and interest in culture vary between managers and companies. It is often difficult to attain a high level of cultural awareness to guide actions. The interest in quick fixes in much management writing and thinking is unhelpful. Instead a well-elaborated framework and a vocabulary in which core concepts – culture, meaning, symbolism – are sorted out are necessary for understanding and for qualified organizational practice by consultants, managers and others. It is tempting to emphasize the significance of corporate cultures for performance, growth and success. At the beginning of the 1980s books identifying characteristics of excellent companies in the USA (Peters and Waterman, 1982) and the secrets behind the at-the-time highly successful Japanese companies (e.g. Ouchi, 1981) highlighted corporate culture. These books, in combination with journalistic writings, created a widespread belief in corporate cultures being perhaps the significant factor behind the performance of companies. This belief has been shaken by problems in many of the companies portrayed by Peters and Waterman as ‘excellent’ some years after the publication of their book as well as by a downturn in performance among Japanese companies in recent years. In addition, other more ‘rationalistic’ business recipes partly replaced culture and the focus on ‘people’ as the latest fashion for companies and managers during the first half of the 1990s. Some