Follow the Money

Chapter 4. Culture And The Limits of the Patron Model

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 4th chapter of the final book.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

The previous chapter showed how patronage shapes organisations. If these arguments are taken too far, it is easy to be tempted into a highly deterministic (and fatalistic!) view of making change within a business. It’s not the intention of this book to support such a fatalistic view of making software change within business. Rather, it’s to encourage you to be aware of the constraints that businesses operate under so that you can make change more effectively.

In this chapter, we will look at the historical (diachronic) and personal factors that might mitigate against the synchronic and deterministic view of patronage we have taken so far.¹ Armed with the understanding of both structural and non-structural factors, we can begin to understand how and why an organisation has the culture it has, and are in a better position to understand how to make change within it. We’re going to look at three closely related strands: Culture(shared behaviours and assumptions), DNA (the company’s history), and leadership ...