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The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 347

FIGURE 10.1 The Balance of Values and Practices
for Various Levels of Culture

Level

Gender
National Family

Social class Values

Occupational School

Industry
Practices
Organizational
Corporate Work

possibilities of ascent or descent; an occupational level, linked to the kind
of education chosen; and an industry level between occupation and orga-
nization. An industry, or line of business, employs specifi c occupations

and maintains specific organizational practices, for logical or traditional
reasons.
Among national cultures—comparing otherwise similar people—the
IBM studies found considerable differences in values, in the sense described
in Chapter 1 of broad, nonspecific feelings of good and evil, and so on.

This is notwithstanding similarities in practices among IBM employees
in similar jobs but in different national subsidiaries.
When people write about national cultures in the modern world
becoming more similar, the evidence cited is usually taken from the level

of practices: people dress the same, buy the same products, and use the
same fashionable words (symbols); they see the same television shows and
movies (heroes); they engage in the same sports and leisure activities (ritu-
als). These relatively superficial manifestations of culture are sometimes

mistaken for all there is; the deeper, underlying level of the values, which
moreover determine the meaning for people of their practices, is over-
looked. Studies at the values level continue to show impressive differences
among nations; this is true for not only the IBM studies and their various
replications (Table 2.1) but also the successive rounds of the World Values
Survey based on representative samples of entire populations. 12