Culture

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socialization – in effect, the standardization of norms; it uses indoctrination as its main design parameter; and its dominant part is ideology, a sixth part, in fact, of every organization, representing a pull towards a sense of mission’ (1980: 339, my emphasis). Unlike the other five configurations, which all are concerned with the formal structure of organisation, this sixth candidate appears to capture and also rely on more informal workings of organisational structure – what we may examine as organisational culture.

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way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 2004:

17, my emphasis)

Culture is a deep underlying unity, and as Schein (2004: 11) states, ‘the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture’. Culture affects organisational behaviour. It disciplines people through socialisation, identity and community. And it affects organisational structure, which becomes a combination of formal and informal workings. There is a depth and a breadth to organisational culture in the sense that – even though it is often unconscious, less tangible – it spreads to all organisational functioning. Culture formation is, as stated in the quote above, a striving towards patterning and integration, which happens through rituals, values, traditions, etc.

Schein (2004) presents three levels of culture, which are often described through the metaphor of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg resembles artefacts, which are the visible organisational structures and processes that, in spite of their visibility, are hard to decipher. You can observe that people in a given organisation do things in particular, perhaps even peculiar, ways; yet this observation does not help to understand why people in the organisation are behaving in these specific ways, nor how they have come to do so. Artefacts include all organisational phenomena that one sees, hears and feels when encountering a new culture, including architecture, language, technology, products, clothing, manners, emotional displays, myths and stories, published values, rituals, etc.

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Moving downward from the tip of the iceberg to the water’s surface, we find what Schein calls ‘espoused values’. These are the strategies, goals and philosophies of the organisation; that is, the espoused justifications that can give us some clue as to why organisational structures and processes are the way they are. Espoused values are a group’s learned rationalisations and aspirations and may reflect original values (e.g. those of the founder or leader) and represent a shared perception of success.

That is, espoused values are the start of processes of cognitive transformation where an original belief is turned into an assumption.

This takes us underneath the water surface to the third and final level where we find the biggest proportion of the iceberg, what Schein (2004) in his definition of culture above labels basic underlying assumptions. These are the base and what keep the iceberg afloat. They are the ultimate source of value and actions, but they are also less explicit than both espoused values and artefacts (the reason why they are compared to the part of an iceberg that is hidden under water); they consist of unconscious, taken-for-granted, non-questionable beliefs, perceptions, thoughts and feelings. Underlying assumptions are, in other words, theories-in-use that have gone from a hunch to becoming organisational reality.

When a solution to a problem works repeatedly, it comes to be taken for granted. What was once a hypothesis, supported only by a hunch or a value, gradually comes to be treated as a reality. We come to believe that nature really works this way. […] Basic (underlying) assumptions, in the sense defined here, have become so taken for granted that you find little variation within a social unit. The degree of consensus results from repeated success in implementing certain beliefs and values, as previously described. In fact, if a

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basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable. (Schein, 2004: 30–31)

Schein (2004: 12), in other words, writes that shared assumptions derive their power from the fact that they begin to operate outside awareness and are taken for granted.

Culture, in this way, can become a form of organisational control – an ideology – just like Mintzberg (1980) predicted with his missionary configuration that operates through standardisation of norms. Another word for this kind of ideology is

‘religion’, as Kunda (1992) shows:

Power plays don’t work. You can’t make ’em do anything. They have to want to. So you have to work through the culture. The idea is to educate people without them knowing it. Have the religion and not know how they ever got it! (Kunda, 1992: 353, emphasis in original)

These words are not Kunda’s (1992), but come from one of the Tech (company pseudonym) employees studied – a ‘Techie’. Kunda defines this way of living and breathing an organisation’s culture as normative control, as the ‘attempt to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experiences, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions’ (1992: 356). Employees, in other words, internalise the values of the organisation and act accordingly, but not because they are coerced to do so. As the culture is internalised by employees, it, in a sense, replaces formal structure, meaning it is no longer work tasks that are standardised (cf. one of Mintzberg’s (1983) five coordination mechanisms). Rather, it is the employee’s relationship with herself that is standardised to fit the organisation’s

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culture (cf. Mintzberg’s (1980) suggestion of an ideological part that relies of the standardisation of norms). This form of organisational control has spawned a separate research agenda on organisations’ roles in regulating identities (and thereby also diversity insofar as it draws on social identity categories); that is, regulating the

‘inner’ selves of employees to produce the appropriate individuals. I shall elaborate on identity and also emotion in organisation studies in the next subheading. First, I see it necessary to highlight alternatives to Schein (2004), whose work does not stand uncontested.

Organisational culture from the perspective of Schein (2004) is something that gives structural stability. It serves to normalise irrational behaviour (irrational as judged from the state of normality that is the existing culture). It is the way that things are done. But his view on culture in organisations is extremely functionalistic: culture is something organisations have. And the purpose of a culture is to ensure integration. This becomes clear from his view on organisational change:

Such learning is intrinsically difficult because the reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety. Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around. It is in this psychological process that culture has its ultimate power. Culture as a set of basic assumptions defines for us what to pay attention to, what things mean, how to react emotionally to what is going on, and what actions to take in various kinds of situations. (Schein, 2004: 31–32)

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Change is a matter of unfreezing the culture in order to make changes, after which the leader refreezes the culture. As such, culture – and the organisation – is taken as something static, an organisation-wide phenomenon with little to no variance.

Culture is, after all, a shared narrative that presupposes consistency and consensus, meaning any ambiguity is rejected. The culture is what makes an organisation unique; it is what allows members of the organisation ‘Tech’ in Kunda’s (1992) text to refer to themselves as ‘Techies’ when identifying themselves with the organisation. Other views in organisation studies treat culture as either something organisations are or something they do – or both. Hatch (1993), for instance, extends Schien’s (2004) work with a dynamic model that emphasises processes of cultural symbolisation. Another example is from Meyerson and Martin (1987: 623), who write about cultures (plural) as socially constructed realities and treat cultures as a metaphor for organisation and not just as a discrete variable to be manipulated at will. From such a vantage point, organisations are viewed as patterns of meaning, values and behaviour. They list three cultural paradigms to explain their own contradictory statement that organisational cultures can be resistant to change, incrementally adaptive and in constant flux. The paradigms are: 1) integration; 2) differentiation; and 3) ambiguity.

The first paradigm, integration, corresponds with Schein’s view of culture. The first and second put together present a structural view of organisational culture, congruent with Lawrence and Lorsch’s (1967) differentiation and integration mechanisms: ‘In cultural terms this means that an organisation would probably be composed of a diverse set of subcultures that share some integrating elements of a dominant culture’ (Meyerson & Martin, 1987: 631, my emphasis). The differentiation paradigm opens up an understanding of culture as influenced by

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disagreements in the organisation rather than consensus alone. Culture from this perspective is driven by professional groups, divisions, hierarchies, etc., and it includes subcultures that overlap. Ambiguity is not rejected but channelled to the different subcultures, and change happens incrementally at a local level – not universally as a revolution that overthrows everything that came before. The third paradigm, ambiguity, corresponds more with a processual understanding of organisation: ‘One metaphor for paradigm 3 enacted culture is a web. Individuals are nodes in the web, temporarily connected by shared concerns to some but not all the surrounding nodes’ (Meyerson & Martin, 1987: 638). Instead of rejecting or channelling it, ambiguity is the point of departure. We may say that the only consensus is dissensus, since disorder and paradoxes are what characterise culture and create meaning. Thus, culture is temporary and fluid, and it depends on case-specific cultural agreements. This, of course, also makes it very difficult to draw clear boundaries and explain exactly what culture consists of.

In spite of the differences among cultural approaches to organisations and organisational structure, I find it helpful to clarify that the different definitions of organisational structure and culture share some similarities. Interestingly, they all have in common that they define organisation in terms of a productive tension between diametrically opposed forces. This process has gone by different labels:

differentiation and integration, division and coordination, patterning and integration, diversification and integration, each teasing out nuances and placing emphasis on different aspects of organisation, such as culture over structure. But they all stress the dynamism; that is, that organisation consists of both a degree of differentiation and a level of integration. In spite of the conflictual relationship, given that differentiation and integration each pull in opposite directions, organisation is a function of both factors.

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This understanding of organisation as a process of differentiation and integration is fundamental to my argument that diversity is organisation, since the diversity literature applies a similar duality; that of diversity and inclusion. If only diversifying/differentiating at the expense of inclusion/integration, the organisation process results in marginalisation. Inclusion with little or no regard for diversity and difference, however, may easily turn into assimilation. Yet, there is no organisation without exclusion, as the boundaries of any organisation are constituted by that which they exclude. Unlimited inclusion would cause the organisation to become the same as and, hence, indistinguishable from its environment. I will get back to these points under the last subheading about diversity and its organisation. To this end, to be able to address these points properly, I find it beneficial to elaborate on power in organisation – a concern raised in organisational structure and culture alike, and a concern that is closely connected to organisational identities and emotions.