Defining “Culture” and “Organizational Culture”: From ...

1 Defining culture and organizational culture : From Anthropology to the Office by: Bruce M. Tharp Defining culture and organizational culture : From Anthropology to the Office / The topic of organizational culture is Usually the domain of top executives and upper- management, for most within an organization its increasingly understood as a company culture remains implicit often with only its effects asset that can be used to increase and implications discussed. Despite this, as decades of business performance. While important, research suggest, an explicit, integrated, accepted, and consistent organizational culture seems important in organizational culture is a slippery concept achieving long-term health and other performance to concretely define.

2 This paper deals with successes. Yet, as in most arenas of social science where the intricate webs of various and varying human the historical development and foundational influences exist, distinct and conclusive causal links are understandings of both the term culture , difficult to establish. Keeping this in mind, it is still very from anthropology, and its appropriation likely that the richness and dynamism of organizational activity the life of an organization may be seen, and by industrial organization researchers to therefore shaped and improved, through the lens of organizational culture . A foundational culture . definition by Edgar Schein of MIT's Sloan Anthropological Origins of culture .

3 School of Management is arrived at as well as the notion that culture can be observed What exactly is culture ? Unfortunately a fixed, universal understanding does not exist; there is little consensus at three levels of the organization: artifacts, within, let alone, across disciplines. Often culture is espoused values, and basic assumptions. applied so broadly, merely as social pattern, that it means very little. Highly specific, idiosyncratic definitions Contents: also abound where the term is used in various contexts in support of any agenda. Anthropological Origins of culture . Understanding culture When culture first appeared in the Oxford English Origins of organizational culture Dictionary around 1430 it meant cultivation or tending the soil, based on the Latin culture .

4 Into the 19th Understanding organizational culture century culture was associated with the phrase high culture , meaning the cultivation or refinement of mind, taste, and manners. This generally held to the mid-20th For some, culture is considered the glue that holds century when its meaning shifted toward its present an organization together and for others, the compass American Heritage English Dictionary definition: The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, that provides directions. beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.. The culture of an organization eminently influences its myriad decisions and actions.

5 A company's prevailing Aspects of culture ideas, values, attitudes, and beliefs guide the way in which its employees think, feel, and act quite often INVISIBLE. unconsciously. Therefore, understanding culture is VALUE . ATTITUDE . ASSUMPTIONS . BELIEFS. fundamental to the description and analysis of organizational phenomena. For some, culture is considered the glue that holds an organization VISIBLE BEHAVIORS: together and for others, the compass that provides ARTIFACTS: FINANCIAL REPORTING. direction. These are but two of many such metaphors HIRING /. ( , magnet, lighthouse, exchange-regulator, EMPLOYEE DRESS FIRING PRACTICES. affect-regulator, need satisfier, sacred cow), illustrating PRODUCT LINE EMPLOYEE TRAINING.

6 That organizational culture is indeed very important, SIGNAGE RECYCLING PROGRAMS. but whose definition is slippery and often contested. PUBLICATIONS. INTERIOR. ARCHITECTURE. FURNITURE. 2. Defining culture and organizational culture : From Anthropology to the Office / While the dictionary definition helps to Understanding culture In 1973 anthropologist Clifford Geertz close in on its meaning in general published, The Interpretation of parlance, the term is also used by many While the complexities of the culture Cultures, in which he writes: culture disciplines in unique ways. To move concept were being debated in the is the fabric of meaning in terms of toward a more specific and applied mid-20th century, surveys of its which human beings interpret their understanding of culture , anthropology different definitions yielded a few experience and guide their action and can be helpful.

7 It is this social scientific common threads that are helpful in that culture is an ordered system of discipline that has contributed the most organizational research. Most simply, meaning and of symbols in terms of to its practical application within the culture involves three basic human which social interaction takes place.. field of organizational research. activities: what people think, what This semiotic (symbolic or language Originally the notion of culture people do, and what people make. based) notion of culture gained great described the rituals, myths, languages, Further, several common properties popularity in the postmodern values, beliefs, and practices of distant arise: culture is shared, learned, movement of the 1980's, when the peoples often in exotic places the transmitted crossgenerationally, relatively mature discipline of objects of traditional anthropological symbolic, adaptive, and integrated.

8 organizational behavior first began inquiry. Even within the field however, to talk broadly about organizational numerous approaches to culture To speak of culture as being shared culture . Geertz's anthropological abound as evident in one seminal 1952 narrows the field of relevant activity to definition was the most cited in the study that identified 164 different that which is common and social. A literature at that time and still has great definitions. particular action is not cultural if it is purchase in contemporary research. unique to one or relatively insignificant British anthropologist Edward Tyler is number of individuals.

9 Also, culture is Origins of organizational culture . widely credited with the first (1871) learned (actively or passively) and is modern definition of culture : that transmitted cross-generationally The field of organizational behavior and complex whole which includes through formal or informal social the related discipline of management knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, interaction we are not born with the science began investigating custom, and any other capabilities and understanding that stealing is wrong or organizations in terms of culture as habits acquired by man as a member of that diamonds show you care. early as the 1930s.

10 The final phase of society. Undoubtedly this definition the famous Hawthorne studies at the influenced the shift toward current One of the primary characteristics of Western Electric Company marked the dictionary definitions. human life, over animal life, is that we first systematic attempt to use a assign symbolic meaning to ideas, concept of culture to understand the behavior, and objects, as well as have work environment. While an important For some, culture is considered language and speech. We say that step forward in qualitative research, the humans have culture while animals do investigation was rather blunt and the the glue that holds an not.