Organisational Culture: Organisational Change?

Citation

Carr, A. (2002), "Organisational Culture: Organisational Change?", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 425-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2002.15.4.425.2

Peter Elsmore completed his PhD and decided to publish some of that work as a book that has the curious title Organisational Culture: Organisational Change?. We all know that the rate of conversion of PhD work into any published form is abysmal. This said, a PhD does not always convert well to a book for a variety of reasons. On this occasion, Elsmore needs to be congratulated on not only converting his PhD into a published form, but also producing a volume that gives a fine‐grain view of organisational cultural and organisational change.

In undertaking any review, whether it be a manuscript submitted for a journal or that of a published book, reviewers tend to have ways in which they work. In my case I like to read the book from cover to cover noting key phrases, sentences and paragraphs as I go. I also like to seek to identify the key authors and family of thinking and research on which the author is depending for their argument. Sometimes one might try to understand the text, and prepare oneself in advance for what is expected to follow, by quickly identifying which “sacred” knowledge in the field is being drawn on and the type of journey the author is intending to take the reader. Of course we might expect the interesting twist in the story and, at times, also expect some departures and even “profane” statements along the way. In noting the key theorists and family of theory, as well as specific sentences, I usually record my “free‐association” along the way. It has often proved useful to look back at this after I have reached the last page. In adopting this methodology with this book, it is interesting to record the impression to the first few pages of the introduction.

Elsmore tells us in the preface that he is going to investigate the links between organisation culture and organisation change and to do this he will be offering us an analysis of two organisations (British Telecom and British Gas (Eastern)) that had undergone significant change, moving from a public sector organisation to an organisation that is now privatised. Elsmore declares that “this work is an empirical and theoretical investigation of the links between organisational cultures and organisational change … ” (p. vii). He says that the methodology is rooted in interpretative theory and the empirical aspect is mostly derived from interviews of 72 middle managers. The approach, amongst other things is designed “to make the voices more audible than they might otherwise have been” (p. vii). My free association (from now on will be referred to as FA) was basically that I can understand the genre from which this journey is to be taken. Chapter 1 now beckons and is entitled “A general introduction”. The first couple of pages are as I would expect in what Adorno (1973) would describe as the “jargon of authenticity”. Not that this work has much “jargon” as we would commonly understand it – this book is relatively free from that kind of jargon and inclusive of any readership, but jargon in the sense of replicating a tradition and using language in a familiar and expected manner.

I now reach pages 3 and 4 and read that Elsmore is going to analyse his “soft” data using a computer software package (FA). Hmm, isn’t this reductionist and rationalist and profane to interpretative theory which claims to try to get a fine‐grain view? Now on page 5, I am told that much of the literature on organisational change and culture comes from a tradition that is very managerialist in its intellectual orientation “and in doing so seems to miss addressing simple but significant questions. One such question is: “who benefits from organisational cultural change?” (p. 5) (FA). I would certainly agree with that appraisal and he seems to be setting up for an advocacy of interpretative theory. Elsmore then starts to assemble the likely suspects of researchers/theoreticians in interpretative theory and tells us of Garfinkel, Berger and Luckmann, Schutz and Husserl (FA). Hmm, what happened to the seminal work of Strauss (1959, 1978) who emphasised individual meaning was “negotiated” and so wonderfully revealed how the term culture itself was a reductionist term (see Hocking and Carr, 1996). Strauss emphasised the multiple realities in organisations such that the structures are continually being redefined, although his emphasis was more on the symbolic interactionism – but, still one of the most significant members of the interpretativist family and one who focussed upon culture in work organisations. Strauss is not in the author list either!

I am now on pages 8 and 9 and Elsmore now invokes the work of Edgar Schein and seems to give praise to his work (FA) Oh no! Schein’s concept of culture is very much a cognitivist and structural‐functionalist view that is very much in the tradition of Talcott Parsons. Schein talks about roles, norms, integration of systems and alike. Just like Parsons’ “AGIL” paradigm (adaptation, goal‐attainment, integration and latency), Schein defines his own system in organisations in terms of recruitment, the utilisation of human resources, integration of parts of the organisation and organisation effectiveness in terms of our capacity to adapt to and manage change. Schein’s work has always reminded me of that humorous tale recited by many a psychiatrist which is “schizophrenics build castles in the air and psychiatrists play in them”. It seems the ideological prism was created by Parsons, and like many others in organisation studies Schein has simply used that prism in understanding organisations. The whole organisation is seen, by Schein, as though it were an organism – which is the common structural‐functionalist “metaphor”. Indeed, in the same structural‐functionalist myopia Schein argued that organisations should be thought of as “a complex social system which must be studied as a total system if individual behavior within it is to be truly understood” (1970, p. 3, italics is my added emphasis; see Carr, 1989). Such a focus would seem the antithesis of interpretative approaches.

From other encounters with Elsmore’s work in journals and at conferences, I thought he was much more skeptical and self‐reflexive. Perhaps I need to dump the idea of reading further and respectfully decline the invitation to review this book. Pages 10 and 11, and I now read:

Schein … casts the idea (of organisational culture) in a peculiarly American and structural functionalist manner itself derived from the “functional prerequisites” of Parsons. (p. 10) …   Schein’s thinking seems ambiguous. On the one hand he seems to adopt an interpretivist set of opening premises, that individual organisation members create their own social world. He then seems to reify his expression of culture by arguing that it is the social institutions that shape individual behaviour. Of course these appear mutually exclusive (pp. 10 and 11).

(FA) Wow, we are now seeing how a fine reading of different works can lead to research openings. This is the kind of self‐reflexiveness we need in this area of organisational culture and change.

The opening chapter and my free association with it, is the kind of dynamic the reader can expect throughout the book, particularly the “theoretical” chapters. Elsmore nicely introduces an issue or concept and just when you wonder how this “fits” into an interpretativist perspective he provides a depth of scholarship and understanding of the literature that is as engaging as it is illuminating.

This said, I sometimes get the feeling that Elsmore is apologetic for the subjectivist label that the social sciences seem to attract, or at least at different junctures he wishes to explain how he is addressing the positivists charge that interpretativist enquiry lacks rigour (see for example p. 14). We then find, at other points in the volume, a really well argued case of how the “social” in social sciences makes the “subjective” a potentially rich source of enquiry. In this regard he cites work very familiar to me, that of Carr and Kemmis (1996) and quotes the following:

To say, for example, that “metal expands when heated” reflects the way that the behaviour of heated metal is endowed with meaning by the causal explanation of the scientist. It is not to say anything about the way that metal interprets its own behaviour (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p. 88 cited by Elsmore, 2001, p. 29).

This quote and orientation is very reminiscent of the argument by one of the “Gods” of educational administration, Thomas Barr Greenfield. When discussing the work of Weber, Greenfield argued that Weber believed it was “impossible for the cultural sciences to penetrate behind social perception to reach objective reality. Paradoxically, this limitation on the cultural sciences is also their strength, since it permits them to do what is never possible in the physical sciences: the cultural scientist may enter into and take the viewpoint of the actor whose behaviour is to be explained” (Greenfield, 1993a, p. 9). Greenfield (1993b, pp. 114‐15) was later to expand on his understanding of Weber in the context of the problem of meaning arguing:

Weber made the distinction between knowledge that came from acts of Verstehen and those which came from acts of Erklären. The former rests on understanding, the latter on explanation. For Weber understanding arises from the viewpoint of the observer. In the natural sciences, he argues, we can do nothing else but explain behaviour from an external vantage‐point … Natural scientists can do nothing but impose their meaning on atoms, cells, and pigeons since these entities cannot (or do not) speak for themselves.

Greenfield attacked much of the organisation theory discourse for studying organisations as though they were natural objects. Greenfield (1993a, pp. 5‐6) observes “the crux of the issue is whether social reality is based upon naturally existing systems or upon human invention of social forms … in one perspective, organisations are natural objects – systems of being which man discovers; in the other, organisations are cultural artefacts which man shapes within limits given only by his perception and the boundaries of his life as a human animal”. Organisations, for Greenfield (1993b, p. 103), were an “invented social reality” and “are essentially arbitrary definitions of reality woven in symbols and expressed in language” (Greenfield, 1993b, p. 109).

Elsmore’s assumptions and justification for the methodology taken in his study can be thought of as being very similar to those expressed by Greenfield, but are not as succinctly argued. Elsmore is a little more gentle with his reader and does not assume the reader is as conversant with his genre of discourse. I found this to be a very positive feature of the book as people are not “excluded” by what might otherwise be regarded as a “strangely” different language. The arguments are very accessible.

Elsmore combines the use of interview, questionnaire and non‐participant observation to try to grasp the sets of subjective meanings of the actions of organisational members. Using this combination of methodologies, “data” is gathered and subsequently analysed, in large part, through a software package called Graphics COPE. The manner in which this software package is used is beyond the scope of this review, however the key intent is to produce “cognitive maps” which seek to capture the responses to the questions asked of the respondents. The connection between the maps that are generated for each question into a “supermodel”, Elsmore cheerfully admits is “the result of the researcher interpretation. There is no wish to attempt to add a gloss of scientificity to the research outcomes. That would be entirely spurious” (p. 95). The basic issue here is to apply “common sense” to a data set that is extremely large and seemingly unmanageable without the aid of some clustering technique or avenue. The focus was to ensure that the “integrity of the meaning” was preserved through the analytic process. The key questions to which this analysis is applied are:

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  How do people in your organisation learn about the senior management’s policy objectives for the organisation?

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  To what do the leaders of your organisation seem to pay most attention?

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  When things go wrong in your organisation, what happens?

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  When things go right in your organisation, what happened?

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  Who are the really influential opinion formers who work around you and who are senior to you in the organisation?

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  Looking at the people who work around you, who would you identify as likely to be promoted at some future stage; what would be the promotable characteristics?

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  Could you say anything about the day‐to‐day working relationships between the people you regard as promotable and their colleagues?

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  How are people chosen for promotion?

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  When a new job arises, what criteria do selectors use to make new appointments if they want to attract new people into the organisation?

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  In the history of your organisation, are there any really significant people whose contribution to the place is still remembered?

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  Have you always worked for your organisation from this particular building?

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  Has information technology changed your job recently?

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  When did your part of the organisation last restructure? With what benefits …? … problems …? In the case of the latter, were they anticipated?

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  What do your competitors say about your organisation?

A number of these questions are reminiscent of critical incident questions. Questions three and four in particular remind me of Herzberg et al.’s (1959) study in which motivation and hygiene factors “emerged”. The set of questions, in Elsmore’s study, were formulated from Schein’s (1985) notions of how to make best sense of an organisational culture and, in particular, the “markers” assumed to be important here were:

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  what leaders pay most attention to;

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  how leaders react to crises;

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  the nature of any role modelling or coaching;

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  the criteria for allocating rewards; and

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  the criteria for selection and promotion.

I think there would be some robust debate over whether these markers of culture, derived from the work of Schein, are indeed indicative of organisational culture. It would be nice to see how Elsmore would respond to the strident criticisms of Schein’s work by people like, for example, Trice and Beyer (1993). It may be that the volume in which Trice and Beyer performed a comprehensive demolition job on much of the past thinking on organisation culture, was not available when Elsmore worked through the literature for his study. The data were collected in 1993‐1994. The complete absence of symbolism, for example, in the cultural milieu of what Schein describes is more than a small oversight. And, of course, we psychoanalytic types, have critiqued his concept of the psychological contract for being, conceptually, an issue of negotiated compliance – an unfolding interactive process of mutual influence and bargaining (see Carr, 1996). The lack of acknowledgment of the unconscious psychodynamics that are at play in employees forming an attachment to leaders and organization ideals, is a major oversight as to how culture is transmitted. To be fair to Elsmore, notwithstanding the entry point of his enquiry, he does flag important symbolic issues that figure in the data he has collected through his regime of questions. It would be nice to see such a reflexive mind, like that of Elsmore, undertake some further meta‐analysis to explore how his data might be analysed using other indicators of cultural transmission and content.

The “results” of Elsmore’s study are nicely assembled in the penultimate chapter of the book and, like interpretative studies, we do not emerge with a new recipe to more effectively achieve change in organisations. What the chapter does, is to show the way in which interpretative work captures that which other methodologies either lead us to over‐look or to place in the background. The richness of the discipline of the researcher, in using a qualitative approach, is very much on display in this and the previous chapter. The conclusions reached from the study, succinctly (and inadequately expressed in this review) are as follows:

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  Attempts to change corporate culture on a massive scale seem destined to failure, certainly in the short term. Deeply held attitudes and values are very resilient to change.

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  Organisational culture as experienced by those in organisations, is different from that currently reflected in the management texts. The study reveals that sub‐cultures and sets of anti‐cultures are part of a rich tapestry which is unique for these organisations and contains a large element that is more based upon “personalisation” than that which has been previously presumed.

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  Top‐down attempts to change organisation culture have a number of unintended consequences, amongst which is an emotional fall‐out that becomes manifested in higher rates of absenteeism.

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  Sub‐cultures and anti‐cultures can be just as potent in shaping individual behaviour as any official attempts to install an organisation culture. The field work in this study provides excellent examples of just how “jaundiced” aspects of the “official culture” can be interpreted by organisation members in lower echelons.

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  Members of the organisation may remain loyal to it notwithstanding how inept and difficult management and the “organisational realities” made life.

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  Non‐pecuniary rewards, “part of which may be called the ‘psychological contract”’ (p. 195), seem to have been largely overlooked in a reward‐based approach to organisation change.

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  Lack of promotion seemed to be attributed, by those who had not achieved promotion, to a personal failure to measure up rather than factors outside of their locus of control.

Elsmore concludes this penultimate chapter with some recommendations for managers of organisation change and the very last chapter, entitled “A research endpiece”, seeks to update the theoretical threads of the study by recognising work that has appeared since he commenced his field work in 1993.

In conclusion, I would say of this book that it is a very nice transparent account of two organisations who went through organisation change. The rigour and discipline that comes through in this work is something that is a great model for research students. To those of us already in the field, the findings of this study not only provide new issues for us to research, but also remind us of the richness that can come from interpretativist approaches.

A postscript to the publisher

The cost of the book is not cheap – hopefully Gower will produce a paperback version to make this volume more accessible, or perhaps they could re‐think the pricing of this hard cover volume.