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Narrow, managerially centered notions of organizational culture remain hegemonic, marginalizing richer, anthropological approaches as well as efforts to understand how the beliefs and practices of organizations are fundamentally shaped by the wider societal dynamics within which they are embedded. In this paper, the authors draw upon recent efforts to explore the interface of scholarship on practice and the institutional logics perspective to highlight the utility of a practice-driven institutional approach to the study of organizational culture that brings society back in. Empirically, the authors present a longitudinal case study of a Chinese private enterprise, and analyze how the unfolding dynamics of a strong community logic increasingly affected by a rising market logic, shaped the formation of political coalitions internally and externally as organizational members aimed to maintain truces between the push and pull of logics over a period of 22 years. Through an analysis of seven episodes that we conceptualize as “cultural encounters,” the authors find that a combination of compartmentalization and overall integration of logics contributes to provisional truces, and that people in the same cohort who share common geographic socialization are more likely to form allies. Our aim is to encourage future scholars to study how societal beliefs and practices work their way into organizations in a variety of explicit as well as more mundane, hidden ways.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organisational culture affects the internationalisation proclivity of international new ventures (INVs).

In this paper, a resource advantage (R-A) framework is adopted to examine how organisational culture can be a resource for INVs to leverage efficiently and/or effectively in order to make up for their challenges in internationalisation and create value for their international customers. In doing so, this study makes use of examples of five INVs from India, which have successfully achieved international business prowess and superior performance immediately after their foundation.

The findings reveal that an organisational culture including continuous learning, creativity and innovation, collaboration and sharing, and customer-centricity as traits have a positive influence on INV internationalisation proclivity. Most importantly, fostering a culture of collaboration and sharing can help INVs address resource limitations and augment opportunity discovery in the international market. Furthermore, INVs can benefit more from the “learning advantages of newness” by nurturing continuous learning as part of their culture.

A key limitation of this study is that all the firms selected here are from a single country, India, and it may have effects on the way firms leverage these cultural traits.

Founders of INVs should develop organisational arrangements that encourage openness, creativity, and allows employees to contribute freely and fearlessly through new ideas, process innovations, and so on, and firms should recognise such contributions regularly. INVs can adopt policies and develop mechanisms that encourage employees to share knowledge and resources freely with others in the organisation.

Growth of INVs is closely linked to job creation and economic progress. Policy makers in emerging economies can benefit from this study by developing infrastructure and creating social conditions that support the survival and growth of INVs. Adopting the findings of this study could possibly help INVs succeed in international markets and avoid failures, and thus save societal resources.

The paper highlights the critical role of organisational culture in INVs’ internationalisation thrust. The paper develops testable propositions that delineate both the main effects as well as the other effects of organisational culture on INV internationalisation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the findings from longitudinal study conducted with women leaders in tech cities to understand the cultural and discursive burden affecting their professional experiences and the dominant cultural boundaries they regularly have to cross to legitimise their knowledge and expertise.

The paper draws on research from the Gender in Tech City project that included serial interviews with 50 senior women leaders over three years at three different tech city sites.

The paper illustrates the differing spatialities that women continue to face within tech culture and how terms such as “women in tech” are problematic.

This study adds to the conceptualisation of tech culture and gendered constructions within a spatial context; there is a need to strengthen this path of investigation beyond gender as a lone issue.

The study contributes to the literature on spatial context, examining a new micro-context within tech culture that amplifies hidden biases and restricts the movement of women professionals.

Although much can be learned from schools that regularly foster deeper learning, little research has been undertaken into how and why these schools have been effective or to elucidate key leadership and cultural characteristics. Moreover, there has been limited attention toward deeper learning within schools that focus on career and technical education (CTE), a major omission given the potentially elevated potential for deeper learning in these contexts. This study aims to partially rectify these issues by examining the intersections of leadership and culture at an innovative school that has demonstrated excellence whilst providing a curriculum centered on CTE.

This instrumental, insider, single-case study is focused on how leadership–cultural interactions have fostered and shaped students' opportunities to experience deeper learning. The authors take the perspective that it is largely through these leadership–cultural intersections that an organization and the work that happens within it takes on a particular meaning, direction and value. This study applies ethnographic methods, drawing upon formally and informally collected data over the past three years – e.g. from field notes, from leadership meetings and site visits; focus group interviews with students, parents, teachers, partners and school leaders; and additional artifacts.

The authors detail three interrelated features at this school, noting that it is: (1) driven by moral purpose; (2) open, collaborative and trusting; and (3) ambitious and entrepreneurial. The authors explain how/why such a culture has developed and to what effects, especially in relation to facilitating deeper learning.

Study findings meaningfully add to the literature regarding leadership for deeper learning, broadly and in relation to career and technical education and yield recommendations for educational leaders and policymakers.

The influx of mainland capital to different media sectors in Hong Kong has been commonly seen throughout the last decade (Leung, 2019). While the changes in ownership have been shaping the ecology of Hong Kong’s media industry, the rapid development of digital technology such as the internet and social media has also been important in the industry’s transformation. This study aims to investigate how and to what extent technology has shaped the Hong Kong media work culture.

Alibaba, the powerful e-commerce conglomerate, has sought to advance its development in the media industry and leverage its technological expertise by acquiring the century-old Hong Kong English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in 2016. This essay, by using the SCMP as a case study, focuses on the workers and their use of technologies in their daily work practices, which offers an alternative lens to investigate the influence of a Chinese tech ownership in transforming a Hong Kong media outlet’s culture.

This case study illustrates how the implementation of Alibaba work culture at the SCMP through technological application remained minimal over the four years following this Chinese tech giant’s acquisition, whereas a Silicon Valley-style start-up culture and techno-organisational gaze were profoundly found at this workplace and received both acceptance and resistance by the employees.

This study results in a revealing unique type of techno-organisational culture change that deviates from the previous Chinese organisational studies within and outside the Chinese contexts.

Identify, compare and contrast current and aspirational organisational cultures. Describe desired leadership capacities and how these contribute to building a culture and strategy. Describe ways to align culture with strategy including building an ambidextrous organisation.

Growth remained flat for Tech SA towards the end of 2016. As a subsidiary of a global information technology services firm, Tech SA was under pressure to meet its growth plan. With this in mind, a new culture and values framework to be more innovative, collaborative and responsive had been adopted. This was to match the demands of the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world the company finds itself in. While the organisation had a tradition of serving long-standing clients and contracts to high standards, it was not used to working with radical change and disruptive innovation. To achieve this, significant changes in leadership behaviours were required. The organisation had recognised the need for these changes and a leadership development programme was devised to enable 200 of its top leaders to make the required cultural and behavioural shifts to lead in these times. Although the leadership programme was well into its second year, the targets of the growth plan had not been achieved and the leadership behaviours had not yet been instilled across the business. If the growth plan was not achieved, John would need to consider cost-cutting and retrenching. This was the last thing John wanted to do as he had worked alongside his colleagues for 12 years. What else could John do and say to the leaders to make the required changes urgently needed as a matter of survival? What would it take to deliver to existing clients and explore new products and markets?

Masters, Masters of Business Administration (MBA), Executive MBA and Executive leadership.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.

Hackathons, time-bounded events where participants write computer code and build apps, have become a popular means of socializing tech students and workers to produce “innovation” despite little promise of material reward. Although they offer participants opportunities for learning new skills and face-to-face networking and set up interaction rituals that create an emotional “high,” potential advantage is even greater for the events’ corporate sponsors, who use them to outsource work, crowdsource innovation, and enhance their reputation. Ethnographic observations and informal interviews at seven hackathons held in New York during the course of a single school year show how the format of the event and sponsors’ discursive tropes, within a dominant cultural frame reflecting the appeal of Silicon Valley, reshape unpaid and precarious work as an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all, a powerful strategy for manufacturing workers’ consent in the “new” economy.