Page 379 - Cultures and Organizations

344 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

the United States in 1982. The usage became common parlance through
the success of a companion volume—like the former, from a McKinsey–
Harvard Business School team: Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s
2
In Search of Excellence, which appeared in the same year. After that, an
extensive literature in different languages developed on the topic.
Peters and Waterman wrote:

Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be
an essential quality of the excellent companies. Moreover, the stronger the
culture and the more it was directed toward the marketplace, the less need
was there for policy manuals, organization charts, or detailed procedures
and rules. In these companies, people way down the line know what they
are supposed to do in most situations because the handful of guiding values
is crystal clear. 3

Talking about the culture of a company or organization became a fad,
among managers, among consultants, and, with somewhat different con-
cerns, among academics. Fads pass, and so did this one, but not without
having left its traces. Organizational, or corporate, culture has become as
fashionable a topic as organizational structure, strategy, and control. There
is no standard definition of the concept, but most people who write about it

would probably agree that organizational culture is all of the following:

■ Holistic: referring to a whole that is more than the sum of its parts

■ Historically determined: reflecting the history of the organization
■ Related to the things anthropologists study: such as rituals and
symbols
■ Socially constructed: created and preserved by the group of people
who together form the organization

■ Soft: although Peters and Waterman assured their readers that “soft
is hard”

■ Difficult to change: although authors disagree on how diffi cult

In Chapter 1 culture in general was defined as “the collective program-
ming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category
of people from others.” Consequently, organizational culture can be defi ned
as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the mem-
bers of one organization from others.” An organization’s culture, however,