In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the notion of "organizational culture" gained some prominence among academics and management consultant-types as a means of both explaining and controlling some aspects of organizational life.

As an explanation of organizational behavior and the behavior of individuals within organizations, culture enabled organizational theorists to explain the persistence of organizational practices and the stability of organizational routines in a way that rational- actor models of organizations could not. A concept of culture could also be used to explain change in organizations over time, as well as resistance to change. Essentially, an organization's culture consisted of a set of widely shared ideas and narratives and their associated social practices. This culture shaped the way that organizational members behaved, and so -- to some managers, at least -- it seemed reasonable to induce change in an organization, if such were desired, by attempting to modify that set of widely shared ideas and narratives. By shaping the stories organizational members told themselves about themselves and the organization, in other words, control could be exerted over the behavior of those members.

Initially, organizational scholars paid attention to cross-cultural comparisons -- the difference between American and Japanese organizations, for example. In this view, "culture" referred to the national culture in which an organization was embedded -- this is an example of the "contextualized discourse" perspective that Conrad and Poole (1998) refer to. Such comparisons are categorized by Smirchich and Calas (1987)⁽¹⁾ as ethnocentric (can findings from research in Culture A also be found in Culture B?), polycentric (how can Culture B be described?), or comparative (how are Culture A and Culture B different? How are they alike?). In a historical context where American managers saw Japanese (and to a lesser extent German) firms as highly competitive and successful rivals, such comparisons held a great deal of interest.

Triandis and Albert (1987)⁽²⁾ discuss the major dimensions of cultural variation investigated in such cross-cultural comparisons. They include:

Categorization. Different cultures utilized different cognitive schemata to organize and make sense of an individual's environment -- to classify people, actions, and objects, in other words. Categories vary in terms of breadth, level of abstraction, level of complexity, and amount of interrelation.

Cognitive Frames. Different cultures place different amounts of emphasis on (a) people, ideas, or action; (b) values such as time-orientation, individualism vs. collectivism and so forth; (c) process- versus goal-orientation; and (d) patterns of information processing (associative versus abstractive communication).

Patterns of Actions. Different cultures have different norms in terms of (a) the use of touch and gesture; (b) physical distance and personal space; (c) eye contact; and (d) body orientation as well as (e) kinds of behavior and the pace of life.

This led to the notion that some form of cultural engineering could be performed in order to influence the cohesion and unity of an organization. Providing a "strong culture" was seen as a strategy that could be used as a means of exercising control and extending the influence of managers throughout the organization; the strategy could be executed via the use of symbols and ceremonies that emphasized desired ideologies and eschewed undesired ones.

Conrad and Poole (1998) emphasize that culture has two domains, already alluded to here. These may be called the (1) narrative domain, instantiated in the metaphors and stories used to explain the organization to its members and provide exemplars of required, encouraged, and frowned-upon behavior, and the (2) ritual or ceremonial domain, present in the various communal activities in which members take part, and which serve to mark various status transitions within the organization. Such ceremonies include rites of passage, degradation, enhancement, renewal, and integration. Framing these domains in terms of their contribution to a strategy of unobtrusive control, Conrad and Poole point out that in addition to influencing individuals' cognitive behavior (their attitudes and beliefs), one effect of "cultural engineering" is the management of emotions -- what Hochschild (1983)⁽³⁾ calls "emotional labor." By demanding a type of "deep acting" on the part of workers -- especially those involved in service interactions -- organizations require employees to feel a particular way as part of their job. The roles that workers are thus required to enact serve as scripts that regulate emotional expression as well as the performance of job-related duties. Hochschild (1983) also suggested that emotional labor has typically been a feature of stereotypically "female jobs."

But a more nuanced version of the cultural perspective regarded culture not as something that an organization has; instead, it saw culture as something that an organization is. Drawing upon anthropological studies of different cultures, this perspective emphasized the role that culture played in shaping social reality. Culture, in this view, consists not only of narratives and rituals but also of practices -- the routine, taken-for-granted activities that comprise the bulk of everyday life. Culture, in this sense, is the "enactment of a shared reality" (Morgan, 1997, p. 141).⁽⁴⁾ Corporate culture seen this way is not limited to the "mission statements," "corporate credos," and other slogans issued in attempts at cultural engineering; it also includes the daily practices of organizational life: commuting, cubicles, and so forth.

From a cultural perspective, the role of the leader becomes one of transformation: it is the leader's vision of what the organization should be, and the steps he or she takes to enact that vision, that creates and sustains the cultural practices that are the organization. If under classical management the leader is primarily an administrator and under the human relations approach mainly a coach, then under the organizational culture perspective the leader is essentially a visionary. The role of the leader becomes one of communicating a particular view of reality that shapes how his or her followers interpret their current situation, devise goals and the strategies with which to reach them, and regard their central or overriding purpose. The leader's primary qualification is his or her charisma, a hard-to-define quality that has something to do with the leader's ability to inspire others to place their trust in and give their loyalty to him or her; Max Weber referred to this as the numinous authority possessed by the charismatic leader, in contrast to formal authority derived from hierarchical position or rank.

2. Triandis, H.C. & Albert, R.D. (1987). Cross-cultural perspectives. In F.M. Jablin, L.L. Putnam, K.H. Roberts, & L.W. Porter (Eds.). Handbook of organizational communication: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 264-295). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

3. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4. Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization (2^nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.