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The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 369

school, apprenticeship, or university, and the time is between childhood
and entering work.
We know of no broad cross-occupational study that allows identifying

dimensions of occupational cultures. Neither the five national culture (val-
ues) dimensions nor the six organizational culture (practices) dimensions
will automatically apply to the occupational level. From the fi ve cross-
national dimensions, only power distance and masculinity-femininity were
applicable to occupational differences in IBM. Chapter 4 showed that IBM
occupations could not be described in terms of “individualist” or “collec-
tivist,” but rather as “intrinsic” or “extrinsic” according to what motivated
most of those engaged in the occupation, the work itself or the conditions
and the material rewards provided.
From a review of the literature and some guesswork, we predict that
in a systematic cross-occupational study the following dimensions of occu-
pational cultures may well be found: 31

1. Handling people versus handling things (for example, nurse versus
engineer)
2. Specialist versus generalist—or, from a different perspective, profes-
sional versus amateur (for example, psychologist versus politician)
3. Disciplined versus independent (for example, police offi cer versus
shopkeeper) 32
4. Structured versus unstructured (for example, systems analyst versus
fashion designer)
5. Theoretical versus practical (for example, professor versus sales
manager)
6. Normative versus pragmatic (for example, judge versus advertising
agent)

These dimensions will have stronger associations with practices than the
national culture dimensions and stronger associations with values than
the organizational culture dimensions. They may also be used for distinc-
tions within professions; for example, medical specialists can be placed on
a “handling people versus handling things” continuum, with pediatricians
landing far on the handling people side (they often deal with not only the
child but the family as well) and surgeons and pathologists, who focus on
details of the body, far on the handling things side.