College aantekeningen
College aantekeningen OCC
Aantekeningen van alle colleges van Organizational Culture and Change
[Meer zien]Voorbeeld 3 van de 16 pagina's
Voorbeeld 3 van de 16 pagina's
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Voorbeeld van de inhoud
Organisational Culture and Change – LecturesLecture 1 – 30 October
- Introduction: the concept of organizational culture and what South Africa has to do with it
- Institutional transformation: to get rid of the inequalities, in terms of access for young people in
South Africa, to get rid of privilege given to white universities. For black students there were no
universities.
- Apartheid: strong influence on organisational culture on African universities, want to create a space
where white and black students feel at home
- Tensions in multicultural societies, white privilege
- Students in South Africa are impatient for change and are protesting. Response of the government
with a lot of police force
- You cannot avoid issues of race and racism
- Alvesson doesn’t talk about racism, Tabensky does. The global north vs. de global south. The books
have something to tell to each other. Alvesson’s book is universalistic, Tabensky’s is local and grabs
you. The question is ‘do you need local context to write about organisational culture?’ We should
sometimes be more aware of local contexts, organisational cultural change is not innocent,
everybody is a part of it. Engagement is important, being part of cultural processes.
- Vrije Universiteit has a strong bond with South Africa, reformed brothers (Afrikaans speaking white
people in Afrika) live there, fought against the British. Afrikaners are supporting the Germans to give
the British a beating, that the Dutch ended up at the allied side is a coincidence, much more engaged
with German industry.
- Societal and historical context are important for organisational change
- Organisational cultures can destroy, they are not only for the better or a good thing to stimulate and
change. It is not innocent
Mats Alvesson Chapter 1
- Page 2: Culture is not a ‘tool’, it is underlaying the whole process happening in the organisation
- Page 3: Assumptions about cultural phenomena
- They are related to history and tradition
- They have some depth, are difficult to grasp and account for, and must be interpreted
- They are collective and shared by members of groups
- They are primarily ideational in character, having to do with meanings, understandings,
beliefs, knowledge and other intangibles
- They are holistic, intersubjective and emotional rather than strictly rational and analytical
Lecture 2 – 2 November
Lecture 1 continued
- Page 4-5: Key concepts: ‘meanings’ and ‘symbols’
Alvesson actually not speaks about one meaning, but about more and various meanings.
Meaning refers to how an object or an utterance is interpreted
Symbol is an object – a word or statement, a kind of action or material phenomenon – that
stands ambiguously for something else and/or something more than the object self.
Interpretations come from many angles, very personal
Symbols are full of meaning, they come together
- Page 6: Differences between ‘culture’ and ‘social structure’
Distinction: culture is regarded as a more or less cohesive system of symbols, in terms of
which social interaction takes place (creation of meaning). Social structure is regarded as the
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, behavioural patterns which the social interaction itself gives rise to (the form which action
takes or network of social relations). Culture is about meaning and something of the mind,
social structure is about behaviour and what we do.
- Page 14: Levels of culture
Culture as a concept refers to different levels, levels on which it occurs and levels that are
interconnected. We live by levels of culture, although it comes with pitfalls and dangers. The
levels are connected, but they also differentiate. How the levels interconnect is often a matter
of interpretation
Tabensky and Matthews Introduction
- What’s in a name: Cecil John Rhodes, company may operate on behalf of the government in Great
Britain, charted company. The Cape to Cairo. Prime minister of the cape colony. Private and public
hand in hand. Rhodes is not an easy name to survive in the 21th century, not easy that it is the name
of a university. There is a lot of symbolism and meaning attached to the name Rhodes
- Universities before and after 1994 (Mandela):
Before: separated universities for all nationalities (white, black, colour, British, Indian, etc.)
White universities where better positioned and endowed
Mandela was first black elected president, wanted to get rid of segregation
- ‘Race’ in relation to organizational culture: if you talk about transformation, you can’t do away with
the word ‘race’. Danger: by thinking about transformation you keep this classification intact, you keep
referring back, irony.
- How much local knowledge do you have to put on Alvesson to make sense of it?
- Why is 23 years later still so much in South Africa reminding of the past? In many ways the
government still follows the same roots as the apartheid government.
Metaphors and culture (lecture 2)
- Jonathan Jansen: the voice arguing for transformation. First black dean of the biggest faculty of the
university of Pretoria. Reitz incident UFS
- Organisational culture has totally changed, from Afrikaans to English, from white to 50-50 white and
black
Alvesson chapter 2
- A metaphor allows an object to be perceived and understood from the viewpoint of another object
- Metaphors and human understandings of reality have to do with each other. We can only look at
reality through metaphors. Reality depends on how you look at it, always a construction of the mind.
Metaphors are an important avenue of that constructing.
- An organisation has a culture / an organisation is a culture <- Alvesson agrees with is. Even
organisation itself is a metaphor and culture is a metaphor for how we look at organisations
- No metaphor can beat empirical fieldwork in organisations
- Metaphors are ‘tools’ not ‘truths’
Samantha Vice in T&M, chapter 2
- Vice’s 2010 philosophical article shook and divided white South Africa (note 2, page 64)
What does white privilege do to you in the context of South Africa?
Isn’t it time for the whites to be humble, they’re not even 10%, why do they dominate?
As a privileged person you will never be able to be the voice of the less privileged
Idea comes from post-colonial theory, stop talking on behalf of less privileged, they don’t
know what it is to live as less powerful, no need to speak on behalf of less powerful
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, - ‘Home replaced by ‘being in one’s element’, which the OED describes as ‘the surrounding in which
one feels at home’
Lecture 3 – 6 November
Alvesson: Culture is not the same as identity, although they overlap to a large extent. P.44 bottom of
the page: organizational identity represents the forms by which organizational members define
themselves a social group in relation to their external environment…
constructions where we distinguish ourselves from others. We consider ourselves as different from
others but we also distinguish others as different from ourselves? This can be done at so many
domains: colour, religion, lifestyle etc. identity is in that sense a really device kind of approach to how
we stand in this world. Organizational affiliation is often used as identity marker. Identity was an
interest/hot word to use in 2000, but in 80’s and 90’s everyone talked about organizational culture.
P.38 alvesson (three quotes):
- ‘while identity refers to ideas on how people in an organization define what is distinct and
unique about the organization, culture covers broader terrain including meanings and beliefs
about a wider set of issues of more indirect relevance of self-definition’. Identity is about
uniqueness, how you identify yourself and culture is more about reflectiveness.
Reflexivity is about how am I positioned in this society, in this conversation so that I come up
with this particular argument. What explains my role on this social reality? Positionality!
Where do I stand and what has my positionality to do with what I become? (you are
positioning you but others are also positioning you: white people can go to the toilets but
black people can’t). positionality is also a kind of repertoire: you build it up, you take your
experiences with you and this changes your positionality.
- ‘culture as being relatively more easily placed.. .emergent than identity, which compared with
culture is more textual implicit and incidental’ identity is of direct use (who am I and who am
I in relation to others, sometimes you use others to identify yourselves and sometimes you
use yourself to identify others). Culture is again more reflective.
- ‘even though strict separation between identity and culture themes are difficult to uphold,
difficult to separate them from each other’. On an analytical level it is helpful to make a
difference. Social realities are a mess, to make sense of them, to give it meaning you have to
use concepts. Concepts are a tool to understand social realities and to control them.
There is overlap between identity and culture but there is also difference, they are tools to be
able to understand and control social realities.
Culture as a concept compared to identity is deeper, it explains a lot of what identity does. In
order to understand identity processes you have to understand cultural processes. It is more
difficult to use culture in an instrumental way than you can use identity in an instrumental way
(you can wear a suit, you can play to be Feyenoordfan) . Culture is often more taken for granted,
it is unconscious because culture is about normality and it is incredibly difficult to be explicit
about your normality as it seems to speak so much for itself. When challenged, people often
response angry because normality is as it should be (it is normal), it is how you should behave.
When you break it, you have to return back to normality. The power of normality is basically the
power of culture. The unconscious ideas about how things should be, but whose normality
whose culture are we talking about? If you ask this question in an multicultural society, the
answers will differ. If you ask these questions in south African universities there are different
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