What exactly is culture? The answer is complicated as the long list of books, articles, and social media posts dedicated to the concept attest. Despite this significant dedicated effort, there remains much squabbling over the term’s meaning, application, and usefulness. There are many reasons for this. Among others has been its historic application within various domains[i], the embedment of early theories within seminal educational programs, a desire to provide simple explanations for complex social phenomenon, and, as an example of that desire, a need to generalise reasons for human actions and outcomes in the same rule-like (deterministic) way that the natural sciences explain their objects of enquiry[ii]. Paradoxically, the word itself simplifies its “clumpish” nature which further clouds culture’s “bundle” of “activities and attributes[iii]”.
Under a cloud of its 300 plus year legacy, and the ambiguity resulting from its continual evolution over that time, an effective deployment into organisations of culture as an analytic apparatus is impeded, leaving its potential just that, potential.
This short blog peers into the cloud enveloping today’s notion of culture to briefly explore two aspects relevant to an organisational context:
- Culture as content
- Culture as an analytical approach
Culture as content
When countries are described as multicultural that adjective under describes its true nature. In such countries it’s easy to see and experience a multitude of customs, clothing, food, entertainment, consumption, language, and interaction all recognisable as cultural forms or content. The analysis of culture extends the list of content to include cognitive categories, schema (or frames), binary codes, genre, norms, values and narratives.
The first group, multicultural, commonly associated with traditions – how notions of who we are and how best to live in the world embody ideas that are enculturated from an early age and which become so second nature they slip from consciousness.
The second group, cultural analysis, are ideas, too: ways of thinking about, analysing and expressing culture from a certain perspective[iv], that of an enquirer.
Culture as an analytical approach
Culture is an important concept for its role in influencing, and therefore understanding, actions. The nature of its study, though, has resulted in research that has become fragmented along the fault lines of specialists who study the concept. Consequently, schools such as philosophy, psychology, and social science (sociology, anthropology, politics, and economics to name a few) have pursued culture from the perspectives of their scholarly worldviews and practices.
The result is that there are now many fields from which bona fide experts explain the concept of culture; notions that are, often inadvertently, shaped by the cultures of those fields[v]. For example, psychologists often orient their explanations around mental phenomenon; anthropologists and archaeologists, by contrast, have a leaning towards explanations that favour whole civilisations; whereas cultural studies academics have preferences towards communications, especially media, flavoured with notions of structural inequality.
So what?
The promise of specialisation was greater depth and knowledge creation, however, in narrowing the focus reintegration of the varieties of specialist output has become an ever-increasing challenge. Domain specific fragmentation has resulted in a lack of a single, clear, uniformly agreed definition of culture. There, however, are areas of increasing agreement and importance:
Culture is a construct relating to social phenomenon and contributing to the social constitution of meaning
As a construct culture is distinguished from related constructs by focusing on the ideas and symbolic meanings it conveys, learned through socialisation, enculturation, and participation
Although various disciplines claim culture as text, mental structures, values, toolkits, or behaviours these aspects are partial, each contributing to but also constraining a cultural purview
Organisations are always shaped by culture. Cultural dispositions mediate all aspects of the continual processes of organising including attention, sense-making, problem solving, technology, practices, communication, coordination, collaboration, innovation, governance and order
How does this background help?
When it comes to working with culture in and around organisations, there are a plethora of approaches promoted normatively as ‘best’. In deciding which of these, if any, to employ, it is useful to understand their origins, assumptions, and limitations and how these fit with the specific issue your organisation is working with.
At Org Change, we don’t see one approach as best, rather, we suggest that all the cultural perspectives discussed in this blog are valuable; more so when they integrated. A broad perspective helps illuminate the complexity of cultural effects across every area of the organisation. For example, we have helped uncover cultural influences that were previously hidden in:
- Strategy
- Risk
- Decision-making
- Leadership and management
- Process and routines
- Teamwork
- Identity
In short, culture infuses all area of work-life. In the absence of understanding how culture pervades organisations, teams are operating with diminished vision, risking sub-optimal decision-making. Whilst it might be impossible to entirely step outside of the effects of culture, an ongoing effort to understand how culture permeates activities at work will lead to better outcomes for all.
Notes
[i] Especially in academia: methods (mostly qualitative) are widely employed, research communities remain commitment to theories, and topics such as popular culture, identity, political control, status groups, and equity remain current
[ii] Parsons, whose work has had a lasting legacy as it remains deeply embedded in economic and organisation theory, drew a ridged line between instrumental (adaptation & goal attainment) and cultural action (integration & latency)
[iii] E. P. Thompson Customs In Common: Studies In Traditional Popular Culture 1993
[iv] In relation to culture synonyms of ‘perspective’ include frame, mental model, and discursive field
[v] See, for example, research on epistemic cultures https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674039681
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash