¶ … Organizational Culture:
An Analysis Based on Morgan's Cultural Metaphor
When one thinks about the word "culture," one tends to think about some far-away, exotic place where people in elaborate costumes perform mysterious rituals. While it is certainly true that people on the other side of the world from wherever one lives certainly have their own culture, it is vital to remember that all people have their lives deeply influenced by culture. We each live in a number of different cultures: The culture of our family, of our neighborhood, of the place where we work, sometimes of a religious and ethnic community. Culture is simply an agreement among the members of a group about how they will behave, what their values are, and how they will communicate with each other. Culture determines how we each interact with each other on a daily basis.
The paper examines the organizational culture of a family-owned business, using a model developed by Gareth Morgan. The idea of organizational culture -- as opposed to organic culture, which is the kind of culture that develops spontaneously among people who live together in a geographically defined community. Organizational culture is defined by the habitual way of doing things in various types of groups, including workplaces, schools, hospitals, armies -- even prisons. Whenever a group of people spend a large percentage of their time together, they create a culture, a common way of doing things. This is certainly true in the family business that I participate in.
The following provides a good overview of what organizational culture is and how it functions:
The culture of a group can now be defined as: A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein 373-374)
This definition summarizes how organizational culture comprises both values and cognitive strategies.
An important point must be made before proceeding to an explanation of Morgan's concept of the cultural metaphor and how it applies to organizational culture in general and to my family's business in particular. While culture is a set of shared behaviors and values, this does not mean that everyone in a culture has the same amount of power to determine the rules of that culture. In fact, democratic processes within a cultural group are the exception rather than the rule. In most cultures, some individuals (or institutions) have far greater power than do others.
In essentially every natural culture (that is, one that arises in an unpremeditated way), men have more (and often substantially more) power than do women, and older people often have more power than younger people. Both of these conditions are true in my family business: My father has the most power to determine how the company is run, what will be the rules and values of the organization by virtue of being the patriarch. While there are certainly good reasons to honor those who have experience in a field, there are also good reasons to honor those who are bringing fresh ideas into a company. While the former is true in my family's company, the latter is not.
The result of the way in which my father controls the organizational culture of our company is that the company is not able to be as flexible as it needs to be to keep up with its competitors. This is a source of frustration to many of us. This paper presents an analysis of the specific ways in which the organizational culture of the company might be changed through a better understanding of the way in which organizational culture is created and maintained. The theoretical model that I will be using throughout this paper is that of Morgan, who brought a number of anthropological and ethnographic concepts to his analysis of how organizations work over time.
It's All in Your Head -- Except That It's Not
Morgan's model of how organizations establish and replicate their particular culture draws heavily from central concepts in anthropology. One of these is that culture is often carried out on a subconscious level: We are often not consciously aware of the reason that we do what we do until we are challenged about it. For example, most Westerners have never questioned why it is in their cultures that women can wear both pants and dresses while...
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However, this does not happen always. An organization's structure is in reality an extremely powerful control technique, as the alternative to structure will automatically favor some groups and put others in trouble. In case managers are employing structure to extend power to some groups or individuals they are not just wielding power rather are getting involved in political movement. Therefore, strategic choices relating to structure might not be coherent
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