Page 380 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 345

is maintained not only in the mind of its members but also in the minds
of its other “stakeholders,” everybody who interacts with the organization
(such as customers, suppliers, labor organizations, neighbors, authorities,
and the press).
Organizations with strong cultures, in the sense of the quote from
Peters and Waterman, arouse positive feelings in some people, negative
in other people. The universal desirability of having a strong culture from
an organizational point of view has frequently been questioned; it could
4
be a source of fatal rigidity. The attitude toward strong organizational
cultures is partly affected by national culture elements. The culture of IBM
Corporation, one of Peters and Waterman’s most excellent companies, was
depicted with horror by Max Pagès, a leading French social psychologist,
in a 1979 study of IBM France; he called it “la nouvelle église” (“the new
5
church”). French society as compared with U.S. society is characterized
by a greater dependence of the average citizen on hierarchy and on rules
(see Chapters 3, 6, and 9). French academics are also children of their
society and therefore more likely than American academics to stress intel-
lectual rules—that is, rational elements in organizations. At the same time,
French culture according to Chapter 4 is individual istic, so there is a need
to defend the individual against the rational system. 6
Dutch sociologist Joseph Soeters showed the similarity between the
descriptions of Peters and Waterman’s “excellent companies” and of social
movements preaching civil rights, women’s liberation, religious conver-
sion, or withdrawal from civilization. In the United States itself, postcards
were sold with the slogan “I’d rather be dead than excellent.” In a more
dispassionate way, Soeters’s compatriot Cornelis Lammers showed that the
“excellent companies” were simply the latest scion of an entire genealogy
within organizational sociology of ideal types of “organic organizations”
described already by the German sociologist Joseph Pieper in 1931, if not

by others before, and reiterated in the sociological literature on both sides
of the Atlantic. 7
Another type of reaction was found in the Nordic countries Denmark,
Sweden, and, to some extent, Norway and Finland. In their case society
is less built on hierarchy and rules than in the United States. The idea of
“organizational cultures” in these feminine, uncertainty-tolerant countries
was greeted with approval, because it tended to stress the irrational and
the paradoxical. This attribute did not at all prevent a basically positive
attitude toward organizations. 8