Lens Three: The Culture Theorists

"Looking At The Organizational Village"

 

As we have already seen, although the "Blueprint" metaphor [Structuralist Theories] gives us important insights into organizations, the lens is inadequate by itself to really help us understand and problem-solve in our organizations. Structuralists tend to overlook the environmental factors and think of organization as in a "closed system". Structuralists also tend to over-concentrate on structure at the expense of functioning, focusing on "how" we organize production, not "what and why" we produce. Some of these weaknesses are addressed by a group of theorists we examine in the previous unit known as the "Systems Theorists". Systems theorists tended to think about organizations in terms of life-cycles, and processes. This lens encourages us to consider how organizations work over time and how the organization grows and interacts with its broader super-systems of other organizations., much like examining a living organisms growing and interacting with a broader eco-system. While providing valuable additional insights beyond the structuralist into organizational functioning, the systems theories are inadequate by themselves because such theories tend to overlook the human factor - the social and interpersonal dynamics of human organizations. It is this "human factor" that our third lens, the "Culture Theorists" incorporate into their analysis of organizational life.

Cultural Theorists think about organizations from the framework of a Culture, or "Village". Culture theorists believe that organizations are socially-constructed realities. Thus critical factors in organizational life are much more an issue of how people perceive each other and the organization than merely structures or a systems. Cultural theorists argue that to understand organizational life, we must understand the values, beliefs, and role expectations of the people who make up the organization. Drawing upon a concept from the system theories from the previous unit, organizations with same "Genotypic function" can have vastly different working cultures. Thus we must know more than genotypic function to understand what is actually going on in an organization. What is most important about an event is how people UNDERSTAND IT, not the event itself. Thus understanding "meanings" are a key to understanding organizational life and problems.

So how does a manager go about discovering the "meanings" people hold within the organization? The answer proposed by the cultural theorists is to use "culture tools" to discern the nature of the culture of the organization. These "Culture Tools" help reveal the basic "bent", as well as the specific ''peculiarities'' of the organization. Learning to read the Macro-Culture define the basic "bent" of organization. Learning to read the Micro-Culture reveals the specific "peculiarities" of organization. Let's turn now to the tools to read both the macro and micro culture of an organization.