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Summary Understanding Organizational Culture Mats Alvesson
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Summary Understanding Organizational Culture Mats Alvesson. English summary of the main points, quotes and definitions mentioned by Alvesson
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Chapter 1 The concept of Organizational CultureAlvesson: a cultural focus offers a way of understanding organizations. The cultural dimension is central in all
aspects of organizational life; e.g. how people in a company think, feel, value and act; guided by ideas, meanings
and beliefs of a cultural (socially shared) nature.
Grey: the key concern in culture management is that it aspires to intervene + regulate being, so there is no distance
between individual purposes and the organization’s purposes. But, there is often a lack of deeper understanding,
you need a well-elaborated framework and vocabulary of the core concepts:
1) culture;
2) meaning;
3) symbolism.
Knowledge is crucial for success. Knowledge issues are closely interlinked with organizational culture; e.g.
strategic change, everyday leadership, interaction with customers and how knowledge is created, shared,
maintained and utilized.
Alvesson: organizational culture is significant as a way of understanding organizational life in all its richness and
variations;
Smircich: organizations exist as systems of meanings that are shared to various degrees.
there is a sense of common, taken-for-granted ideas: this is necessary for continuing organized activity.
Palmer and Hardy: culture is about collectively shared forms of, for example, ideas and cognition, as symbols
and meanings, as values and ideologies, as rules and norms, as emotions and expressiveness, as the collective
unconscious, as behaviour patterns, structures and practices etc.
Culture is a tricky concept as it is easily used to cover everything and consequently nothing.
Hofstede: assumptions about cultural phenomena:
1. Related to history and tradition;
2. Difficult to grasp and account for and must be interpreted;
3. Collective and shared by members of groups;
4. Primarily ideational in character, having to do with meanings, understandings, beliefs, knowledge and
other intangibles;
5. Holistic, intersubjective and emotional rather than strictly rational and analytic.
The term ‘organizational culture’ can be used as an umbrella concept for a way of thinking which takes a serious
interest in cultural and symbolic phenomena.
Frost: organizational culture is like talking about the importance for people of symbolism (rituals, myths, stories
and legends) and the interpretation of events, ideas and experiences influenced and shaped by their groups.
Culture is not primarily inside people’s head, but somewhere ‘between’ the heads of a group of people where
symbols and meanings are publicly expressed.
It is important here not to overemphasize (overschatten) the static elements of culture: even if tradition, framework,
rules and fairly stable meanings are part of the picture, culture is not best understood as a homogeneous, cohesive
(samenhangend) and causal force, but as something that people do – this is partly because individuals and groups
are meaning-seeking creatures, partly because the multiplicity of complex meanings is set in motion in specific
settings and interactions.
Alvesson: the key concepts of culture are 1) symbols and 2) meanings:
1. Symbols: an object/ word/ statement etc. that stands ambiguously (dubbelzinnig) for something else/
something more than the object itself;
2. Meanings: how an object or utterance is interpreted.
Individual meanings are certainly important and they may vary considerably within groups. But a cultural
understanding concentrates not on individual idiosyncrasies (eigenaardigheden): it is the shared orientations
within an organization or another group that is of interest.
1
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