Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

Part OneDEFINING THE STRUCTUREOF CULTURE

To understand how culture works we need to differentiate two perspectives. The most obvious and immediate impulse is to look for culture content. What is the culture about, what are the key values that we need to understand, what are the rules of behavior? Different people have different biases and assumptions about what is important. In the current national context we see a great emphasis on the cultural content pertaining to the role of government, leadership, and management in deciding what is good for everyone and focusing on the values of individual freedom and autonomy. Another culture analysis might, however, say that this is totally irrelevant to what the values are around saving the planet and becoming environmentally responsible. A third person chimes in with the importance of family values and the threat to “our culture” of allowing civil marriage. Parents lament or praise the new values that their children are bringing into the culture, or are just plain puzzled about what this new “millennial” generation is all about. We have to watch our language lest we say something “politically incorrect” about racial or gender issues.

The point is that culture content, the values we care about are all over the map. To make some sense of this variety, we have to look first at the structure of culture and develop a perspective on how to analyze the complex cultural landscape we encounter. In the next four chapters I will develop a “model” ...