Week 5: Cultural approaches

This lecture had presented approaches that view organisation and communication through the lens of cultural metaphor. Culture is the sum of values, symbols, rites, rituals and behaviours that represent a society. We were introduced two books about business practices that popularized the notion of organisational culture. These books by Deal & Kennedy (1982) and Peter & Waterman (1982) treat culture as a ‘thing’ that an organisation ‘has’. There is no single formula as scholars have taken an approach that emphasizes the description and understanding of culture. These approaches put much importance of culture being complex, are socially constructed through the communicative interaction of organisational members, are composed of fragmented subcultural units and may be fraught with ambiguity. Schein’s approach put emphasis on the emergent and complex nature of culture. He argues cultures can be best conceptualized as having three layers, behaviours and artifacts, espoused organisational values and taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world works. Finally, some studies on organisational culture such as ethnography typically use qualitative methods to build a grounded theory that enhances cultural understanding. Research results are then communicated to the audience through telling of cultural tales.