Page 62 - Cultures and Organizations

Studying Cultural Differences 47

Organizational Cultures

Organizational, or corporate, cultures have been a fashionable topic in the
management literature since the early 1980s. At that time, authors began
to popularize the claim that the “excellence” of an organization is contained
in the common ways by which its members have learned to think, feel, and
act. Corporate culture is a soft, holistic concept with, however, presumed
hard consequences.
Organization sociologists have stressed the role of the soft factor in
organizations for more than half a century. Using the label culture for the
shared mental software of the people in an organization is a convenient
way of repopularizing these sociological views. However, organizational
cultures are a phenomenon by themselves, different in many respects from
national cultures. An organization is a social system of a different nature
from that of a nation, if only because the organization’s members usually

did not grow up in it. On the contrary, they had a certain influence in their
decision to join it, are involved in it only during working hours, and will
one day leave it.
Research results regarding national cultures and their dimensions
proved to be only partly useful for the understanding of organizational
cultures. The part of this book that deals with organizational culture dif-
ferences (Chapter 10) is based not on the IBM studies but rather on a spe-
cial research project carried out in the 1980s within twenty organizational
units in Denmark and the Netherlands.

Reading Mental Programs: Suggestions
for Researchers

The manner in which animals learn has been much studied in recent years,
with a great deal of patient observation and experiment. Certain results
have been obtained as regards the kinds of problems that have been investi-
gated, but on general principles there is still much controversy. One may say
broadly that all the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved

so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his
observations began. Nay, more, they have all displayed the national charac-
teristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans rush about franti-
cally, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the
desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think,