Team Presentation: Culture and organization theory , Morrill, C. (Yee & Soule)
Team Presentations : Prepare and deliver a 10-minute slide presentation on article assigned. Identify 2-3 questions to be discussed in your 30-40 minute session a) prepare 3-5 slides (summary of the article) b) addresses topics (3-5 points we think are worth emphasizing or with which we want to take issue) for a class discussion that c) we will lead for a duration of d) 30-40 minutes, possibly with some instructor moderation.
Slide 1 Key Points
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Early studies of organizations focused on how they should operate
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Cultural aspect of organizational theory neglected until recently (70s and 80s)
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Ideological pendulum swings back and forth
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Cultural insights provide richer images and understanding (change, boundaries, deviance)
Notes:

Early studies of organizations focused on how they should operate to be most effective
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Culture was considered superfluous or a threat to improved organizational performance
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Ideological pendulum historically swings back and forth between eras of organization
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Cultural insights provide richer images and understandings of organizations have emerged than could have been produced by rationalist approaches alone
Slide 2 Rationalist Frameworks
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Taylor focused on task efficiency o Time/motion studies, redesign using “scientific management” o Deskilled jobs (so anybody could do them)
 Fayol’s principles of management
 Weber’s technical superiority of bureaucracies
 Barnard: individuals’ commitment key
Notes:
 Taylor’s practices led to decades of strong labor strife (not sourced)
 Fayol’s principles of management: (plan, organize, coordinate, command, control)
 Weber’s technical superiority of bureaucracies, rule-governed, hierarchical meritocracies with specialized career lines, like machines to hand production
 Barnard: importance of individuals’ commitments to morally infused collective goals

Slide 3 Chinks in Rationalist Edifice
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Hawthorne Effect foundation for HR movement -> managerial interest improved performance
 Selznick ’47 study of TVA, unwritten laws and informal associations
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Univ of Chicago studies dove deep into informal sides of organizations
Notes:
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Hawthorne lighting changes, 20s, foundations for the human relations (HR) school, [elevating] workplace norms and sentiments to unprecedented importance in organization theory, HR movement foundered in 1950s as its evidentiary basis and techniques came under intense criticism
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TVA-If organizations are to functionally adapt to broader social contexts, managers must become leaders by “infusing” their organizations with “morally sustaining ideas” and social myths from the broader culture
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University of Chicago sociologists challenged the idea that formal organizations function as static, uniformly rational enterprises
Slide 4 The Rise of Culture
Business consultants building communities, moral dimensions of organizational membership
Japanese and German economic ascendance -> magic potion (mostly USA)
Led to richer understandings of organizations
Notes
 Business consultants … building communities, … argued for pushing culture more deeply into individual and group psyches by transforming people’s identities and selves … moral dimensions of organizational membership. (p. 24)

Cultural interventions into managerial practice caught fire in the crux of Japanese and German economic ascendance. … new panacea for all that ailed American corporations … Culture became one of the central totems of American managerial practice … a wave of critics, … never became as powerful a managerial elixir outside the United States.

Richer images and understandings of organizations have emerged than could have been produced by rationalist approaches alone
Slide 5 Key questions in the study of organizational cultur
How does organizational cultural change?
What role do boundaries play (symbolic, social)?
How does culture impact deviance and our understanding of it?

Notes
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Changes typically result from external, unanticipated “shocks, unclear how change occurs in the absence of external shocks, new practices encounter resistance
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Boundaries breaking down, not fixed, reduced commitment to/from workers o symbolic (distinctions to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space, necessary for creating social boundaries) o social (unequal access to unequal distributions of resources (material or nonmaterial) and social opportunities) o Impacts communication and collaboration

Deviance o deviance and responses to it [can be] culturally constructed o the power of cultural explanations for organizational deviance (Vaughan,
Challenger) o what is considered deviant and what is not ambiguous, culturally defined.
(opportunistic deviance to “normal” work routines)
Discussion Questions
1.
The author appears critical of Taylor’s “deskilling” of jobs and views his scientific management as a form of manipulation. He says that it led to years of labor strife. Given that this occurred during the early stages of manufacturing and mass production, could a case be made this was the most appropriate approach?
2.
Weber’s extolled the technical superiority of bureaucracies, but now the term is almost a pejorative. Are they always bad? In which instances are bureaucracies a good thing and when do they become counter productive?
3.
The new American interest in fostering more collaborative and communicative workplace cultures. Was it just a fad or was it a long overdue reaction to
Taylorism?
4.
If organizational deviance is culturally defined (and differs across nationalities as well as organizations), does this imply that managers have to give up expecting employees to follow rules?
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Ralph’s notes from the article culture in organization theory occupied a marginal place relative to rationalist frameworks until recently (Morrill, p. 15) discusses key culturally inflected questions about organizational change, boundaries, and deviance. (Morrill, p. 16)
Unacknowledged Use of Culture in Early Organization Theory
Early organization theory emerged in the crux of the nineteenth- and early- twentiethcentury project of creating self-regulating markets in Europe and across the globe… early

organizational researchers … often viewed culture as superfluous to rational organizations, if not regarding it with outright hostility. … applied theorists viewed culture as threat (workers’ traditions and local practices regarding the pace of factory work as disruptive to rational production) and resource (domain knowledge about how factories operate), developing ideas for scrubbing away from workers their decades-old work traditions, early theorists insinuated culture into their work without explicitly acknowledging they were doing so. (Morrill, p. 17)
Frederick Taylor (1912/1984) … rationalist theory of work, purest and most famous expression of early applied organization theory, [his] primary question focused on the efficient construction of workers’ tasks, used two steps: gather traditional practices using time/motion studies, use “scientific management” to redesign into task sequences for easier deployment/control (stripped only workers of collective knowledge and returned as
“scientific practices”), fueled ideology that jobs should be deskilled and undermined factory work traditions, producing decades of strong labor strife. (Morrill, p. 17) [ strong opinion here ]
French theorist Henri Fayol, same time as Taylor, provided the best known rationalist theory of management, postulated principles of management (plan, org, coordinate, command, control), recognized importance of managerial flexibility in applying the principles as well as building organizational “esprit de corps” (Morrill, p. 18)
Weber’s classic description of “ideal-typical” rational-legal bureaucracies as rulegoverned, hierarchical meritocracies with specialized career lines and rational accounting, “decisive reasons for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over … other forms, like machines to hand production (precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs are optimized). (Morrill, p. 18)
Parsons (1956) explicitly built on Weber’s differentiation between cultural [messy, no rational truth thus needing sociologist interpretation] and instrumental action by arguing that the “concrete” functions of organizations, involving goal attainment and instrumentality, could be separated from the nonrational “human element” … [Barnard defined] organizations as cooperative systems in which members voluntarily commit themselves to organization goals. … Executives … key roles in … setting the moral tone for members’ full participation and effectiveness … investing organizations with a kind of morality, Barnard could argue that rational organization emerged out of individuals’ commitments to morally infused collective goals.
… distinction between culture and rationality … split organizational research into two camps: [one] investigating instrumental action (largely without reference to culture)
[large]and [one] concerned with the “softer” side of organizations, such as norms, symbols, and legitimacy [small]. (Morrill, p. 19)
Norms and Sentiments on the Shop Floor: The Rise of Human Relations

Researchers realized as early as the 1920s that culture might offer additional resources for accomplishing managerial prerogatives. (Morrill, p. 19), [AT&T Hawthorne plant near Chicago, adjusting light and other studies 24-27, productivity improved even when light was reduced (surprising)]
[Hawthorne Effect: management attention helped workers feel important and worked harder regardless of physical conditions], workers develop collective beliefs and
“nonrational” values that influence their productivity, insights laid the foundations for the human relations (HR) school, [elevating] workplace norms and sentiments to unprecedented importance in organization theory, HR movement foundered in 1950s as its evidentiary basis and techniques came under intense criticism (Morrill, p. 20)
From Informal Relations and Institutions to Negotiated Orders
In his 1947 study of TVA, Selznick argued internal “unwritten laws” and “informal associations” both subverted and facilitated the accomplishment of “official” goals in formal organizations. Rather than only asking how formal structure constrained the irrationality of the informal, he investigated how the informal could channel rationality by “expand[ing] executive control” to achieve organizational goals … [In] Leadership in
Administration, [he argued] that the job of leadership is to guide “the transition from organization to institution so that the ultimate result effectively embodies desired aims and standards.” … early stages, managers can effectively be engineers (paying attention to technical efficiency). If organizations are to functionally adapt to broader social contexts, managers must become leaders by “infusing” their organizations with “morally sustaining ideas” and social myths from the broader culture.
[University of Chicago sociologists dived] deep into informal sides of bureaucracies. (p.
21) and challenged the idea that formal organizations function as static, uniformly rational enterprises. … everyday negotiations among diverse occupational groups
(doctors, nurses, patients, lay workers) about the meanings, routines, and tacit agreements of work, construction of meaning in organizations via social interaction
In “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Erving Goffman wrote about how people navigate the less visible sides of formal organizations. … for understanding how organizations are sustained via individual and collective “performances” of roles and identities, in “Asylums,” he wrote about maintenance of the self as key to organizational functioning ideological pendulum historically swings back and forth between eras of organization theory that are almost purely rationalist (e.g., scientific management during the first two decades of the twentieth century) and eras during which aspects of culture creep into prevailing rationalist frameworks (e.g., HR, institutionalism, and the Chicago-style fieldwork/negotiated order approaches during the 1930s— 1950s). (p. 22)

Systems of Meaning and the Cultural Construction of Rationality: Organizational Culture and Neoinstitutional Frameworks scholars did not systematically apply the term “culture” to organizations until the late
1970s and early 1980s, when they began to refer to organizations as “socially constructed systems of meaning,” … explicitly began studying and referring to organizational culture
(questions of meaning, worker satisfaction and commitment), … way to analytically capture organizational dynamics ignored by mainstream organization theory (p. 23) … groundings from cultural anthropology and interpretive sociology, no agreed definition of culture
… newer generations of scholars departed from the emphases of the first generation….
[approaches grew into] a chaotic archipelago of “warring” factions fighting over differences in theory, method, assumptions about the unity or fragmentation of culture, and, especially, cultural interventions into managerial practice. …
Business consultants … building communities, … argued for pushing culture more deeply into individual and group psyches by transforming people’s identities and selves
… moral dimensions of organizational membership. (p. 24)
Cultural interventions into managerial practice caught fire in the crux of Japanese and
German economic ascendance. … new panacea for all that ailed American corporations
… Culture became one of the central totems of American managerial practice … a wave of critics, … never became as powerful a managerial elixir outside the United States. neoinstitutional framework … cultural constitution of organizational rationality and structure. … rational instrumental organizations symbolize broad cultural myths about rationality that have come to be regarded as objective truths. … It is not rationality that is technically superior but rationality that communicates appropriateness, which, in turn, leads to perceptions of legitimacy and resources necessary for survival. (p. 25)
Neoinstitutional researchers demonstrated the cultural construction of a broad range of corporate dynamics, including efficiency and control, equity and due process in affirmative action policies and grievance procedures… neoinstitutional theoretical agenda [asked questions like] Why did instrumental rational organizations come to dominate all other forms of social organization? (p. 26)
Change
What are the key questions in the study of cultural organization?
How does cultural organization change at the micro, organizational, and broader (e.g., field, institutional) levels? What is the role of collective action and everyday social interaction in shaping these dynamics?

An early (and still current in some circles) strategy for explaining cultural organizational change rests in exogenous (external, unanticipated “shocks) …. scholars recognize analogous processes, such as when hostile takeovers dramatically alter extant corporate cultures, creating the need for reconstruction and symbolic reframing of shared institutionalized beliefs, values, and practices (p. 28-9) … it is unclear how change occurs in the absence of external shocks endogenous models of change … in the crux of institutional contradictions, the
“legitimacy” of established ways of doing things becomes something of a moving target, which leads to opportunities for institutional change. … New beliefs, templates, and practices for organizations that emerge under these conditions typically encounter resistance from those with material and cultural stakes in the status quo. (p. 29) cultural-political approaches…highlight the contested nature of culture, including how it can both shape and be a target of change efforts. (p. 29) [and]… importance of culture in organizational effectiveness of contesting groups (p. 30)
Boundaries
In recent years, organizational researchers have argued that organizations as fixed, discrete units with seemingly immutable physical boundaries … have all but disappeared in many fields, … dynamics … at work: interdependent, network structures; breakdown of commitment between organizations and their members; increasing mobility and globalization of organizations and their members; development of technologies that facilitate distant, asynchronous communication; and increasingly blurred distinctions between public, private, and nonprofit sectors (p. 31-32) two types of boundaries: symbolic (distinctions people make to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space, necessary for creating social boundaries) and social (unequal access to unequal distributions of resources (material or nonmaterial) and social opportunities), Symbolic and social boundaries also constitute organizational ethnic and racial inequality … Boundaries in and through organizations do not only involve gender, race, or ethnicity [can include job categories (p. 32), challenges of crossboundary collaboration [can be acute in global contexts due to a lack of face-to-face communication, ambiguous lines of authority, and/or the heterogeneity of personnel.] (p.
33)
Deviance deviance and responses to it [can be] culturally constructed, … Vaughan (1999, 273) defined organizational deviance as “violations of formal [organizational] design goals and normative expectations . . . that produce suboptimal outcomes.” (p. 33-34) [Her study] demonstrated … the power of cultural explanations for organizational deviance,
Cultural practices and assumptions not only frame organizational deviance but also what occurs in its aftermath, as would-be agents of social control from internal organizational officials to governments to the public-at-large investigate “what went wrong.” (p. 34)

A cultural approach to organizational deviance also suggests that the boundaries can be blurred between what is considered deviant and what is not. … same practices can appear to be everything from opportunistic deviance to “normal” work routines (p. 34-35)
Conclusion
Questions about organizations have become harder and the answers more complex and contingent… [yet] richer images and understandings of organizations have emerged than could have been produced by rationalist approaches alone. Topics rarely considered, new takes on old topics, and limitations and possibilities of concepts such as rationality and efficiency are have been revealed. … places more emphasis on agency [and] a realignment of organization theory that is bringing together theoretical approaches to power, culture, and agency into a useful analytic nexus. … What is needed now is … reworking of existing organization theory and research through an analytic window that can integrate the cultural, power, and agentic sides of the house…. to tackle a … theory of society. (a goal that sociologists have largely… given up during the past several decades) (p. 35)