organizational culture

54: Measuring Organizational Cultures – Hofstede

May 2, 2019 Tom Galvin
We cover Hofstede's classic 1990 paper, "Measuring Organizational Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study Across Twenty Cases." Through surveys and interviews among members of twenty units within ten large organizations, Geert Hofstede's team proposed six distinct determinants of organizational culture that could be compared and contrasted across all organizations.Read More

49: Engineered Culture and Normative Control – Gideon Kunda

October 30, 2018 Ralph Soule
Originally published in 1992, Gideon Kunda's ethnographic study of a high-tech corporation altered the discourse on organizational culture. "Tech," the firm being studied, was a firm on the rise and saw itself as a leader and ground breaker in the rapidly growing high-tech industries of the 1980s. But as the firm grew, it began indoctrinating its tried-and-true hard-work formula in aggressive and unhelpful ways.Read More

47: Organizational Identity — Albert & Whetten

September 18, 2018 Ralph Soule
"Who are WE?" The pursuit of an answer to this tantalizingly simple question began with a book chapter written in 1985 by organization theorists Stuart Albert and David Whetten. "Organizational Identity" established the construct of identity at the organizational level and described it as the sum of three types of claims -- claims of an organization's central character, claims of its distinctiveness from other organizations, and claims of temporal continuity that tie the present organization to its history.Read More

30: Corporate Culturalism — Hugh Willmott

August 2, 2017 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:16:54
Hugh Willmott Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations was Hugh Willmott’s critique of corporate culturalism, a dominant theme in management studies in the 1980s. In 1993, when the paper appeared in the Journal of Management Studies, strengthening corporate culture was seen as a way to improve organizational performance. But instead of an academic response, Willmott used George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to explain his objections.Read More

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11: Culture and High Reliability – Bierly and Spender

May 31, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko 0:13:15
We discuss Culture and High Reliability Organizing (HRO). While not universally known within management and organization studies, High Reliability is concerned with formal structure and process, as well as informal commitment, motivation and trust. HRO describes a subset of hazardous organizations that enjoy a high level of safety over long periods of time. What distinguishes types of high-risk systems is the source of risk, whether it is the technical or social factors that the system must control or whether the environment, itself, constantly changes.Read More

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