Management in context: an essay on the relevance of culture to the understanding of organizational change

Article Abstract:

The recent interest in cultural analysis of organizations is based on the belief that organizations have symbolic aspects that affect organizational behaviour. Underlying this research, however, are different assumptions about the nature of symbols and the role they play in organizations. The majority of writers has assumed that symbols perform an expressive function and are used in a type of action they call 'symbolic action' which they contrast with 'substantive action.' This dichotomy between symbolic and substantive action has resulted in the development of modes that assume culture is a causal factor in organizational change, and should be controlled by the management of symbols. In this article, this approach - the management as symbolic action approach - is examined and found to be inadequate. An alternative approach is developed - the culture-as-context approach - that assumes all actions have a symbolic aspect, all actions are value-laden, symbols are meaningful only in terms of their relations with other symbols, and symbols are dispositions to action, not causes of it. The study of culture is seen, then, as the explication of action in terms of the system of symbolic forms - goals, plans, ideas, roles and traditions - that people use to give meaning and order to their experience. This approach is applied to the interactions of the members of the 'Transition Team' in a Bell Telephone operating company preparing for the deregulation of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, its parent corporation, in 1981. It is demonstrated empirically and explained conceptually that culture leads to a certain class of possible actions which makes certain attempts at change, or reactions to change, probable in a given situation. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Social aspects, Research, Management science, Usage, Organizational change, Social change, Change, Change (Philosophy)

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Playing with the pieces: deconstruction and the loss of moral culture

Article Abstract:

This paper investigates the assumptions and implications of the notion of deconstruction as they are found in writers concerned with organization theory and organization ethnography. Deconstruction, and postmodernism generally, is shown to be a continuation of modernity's attack on cultural authority and its celebration of the ideology of individualism with its concomitant of endless criticism. Deconstruction posits the oppositional nature of language and symbolism as a 'violent hierarchy' and seeks to overturn this hierarchy to achieve human freedom. This reading of the repressive aspects of culture is shown to undermine the essential dynamic of culture, which is a recurrent splitting of what is from what is not in the process of forming meaning. By opening up structures of meaning to expose their repressed contents, deconstruction aspires to question all authority. This is particularly threatening to the ethical aspects of organizational culture, because it suggests a continuous attempt to question the boundary between right and wrong. Indeed, orders of right and wrong are seen by deconstruction as mere political attempts at controlling an organization. Ethics is reduced to politics; authority is confused with power. I argue here, instead, that stable structures of meaning are needed over time to found a traditional and thus legitimate base for business ethics. Contrary to deconstruction's goal of opening meaning to its repressed opposite, I assert that memory should be seen as a moral decision based on past experience. Business ethics requires stable moral standards and, no less, the capacity to believe in them. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Corporate culture, Deconstruction

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The ethics of shifting ties: management theory and the breakdown of culture in modernity

Article Abstract:

Despite a long tradition of documenting unethical practices in organizations, the sociology of organization literature has seldom addressed the question of management ethics. One early work in the field, Melville Dalton's 'Men Who Manage' (1959), did develop a contingent approach to ethics that is seen as a precursor to contemporary discussions in modern and postmodern organization theory. In this essay, Dalton's work is interpreted in terms of a premodern or traditional view of moral theory. It is concluded that Dalton and those who have followed him have reduced morality to politics and have provided an intellectual rationale for the contemporary dark ages of moral behaviour with its worship of the cult of the individual. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Management, Organizational research

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