After a week of running around with appointments it'll be nice to not have so many today and maybe catch up on some things at home a bit. I have my medical paper strewn out in the living room to put in binders. Since I've had so many health issues I've taken to keeping track of things and sometimes it's proven very helpful. I already put all the test results in a binder, and I've been whittling away at putting appointments in a database. So maybe today I'll work on putting appointment notes in one of the binders. And for each appointment I put a sticker identifying the appointment so that I can flip through the pages and quickly identify the appointments.
I always have some project or the other to work on. Then there's all the music cassettes that need conversion to digital format and my recipes projects....
But back to this project, which is a major one. The next text is as follows:
Smircich, Linda (1983). Concepts of culture and organizational analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 339-358
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"The concept of culture has been linked increasingly with the study of organizations. With the recognition of the symbolic aspects of organized settings have come calls for a cultural perspective on organizations... The idea that business orgazniations have a cultural quality was recognized recently by Business Week (1980) in the cover storey, "Corporate Culture: The hard-to-change values that spell success or failure." There is even a "Corporate Cultures" section in Fortune Magazine (e.g., Fortunite Magainze, March 22, 1982)." (p. 339)
You will notice that the year (1983) precedes my time in Vienna by some 4 years, and hence my perspective at the time that the mission's h.r. director's accusation that I had culture shock and my belief that any culture shock that I might have had came only from the mission might have been well within the current theory of the day, in as much as it was even then acknowledged that organizations did have culture (i.e., that might result in culture shock).
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"This paper in particular traces the ways culture has been developed in organization studies: as a critical variable and as a root metaphor." (p. 339)I just included this quote to give an idea where the author is going with this article.
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This is the first major section of the article: "Underlying Assumptions and Metaphors."
"[S]ome have argued that all scientists create knowledge about the world through the drawing out of implications of different metaphoric insights for their subject of study. Others point out that the metaphoric process, seeing one thing in terms of another, is a fundamental aspect of human thought; ' it is houw we come to know our world...
...The metaphors of machine and organism have been used most frequently to facilitate understanding and communication about the complex phenomenen of organization..." (p. 340)
So far the author is just demonstrating that administrative scientists use metaphors to describe organizational processes.
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"Meadows... has argued that organization theory is always rooted in the imagery of order and asserts that 'the development of theories of organization is a history of the metaphor of orderliness.
Organization is a function of the problem of order and orderliness; similarly, conceptualizations of social organization have been a function of the problem of order and orderliness..." (p. 341)
This portion of the text is in the context of a discussion as to whether the use of metaphor is appropriate in describing organizations, and the author sides with Meadows in saying that it is.
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"Given the metaphorical nature of human knowledge, the suggestion that we in organization theory avoid metaphor misdirects our cautionary efforts. Rather than avoid metaphor, what we can aim for is critical examination of the ways in which our thinking is shaped and constrained by our choice of metaphors. This paper and this special issue are in line with that aim." (p. 341)
I'm not sure how things were in 1983, but more recently this kind of self awareness among theoreticians and researchers is much more common and expected; maybe for 1983 this thought was more in the vanguard. It's the thought of trying to get out of one's skin to being aware of one's assumptions and biases and trying to lay them on the table so that readers would be able to take them into account as well when reading your report or article.
At some point I need to try to redirect this back to the Vienna mission. I think on the one hand the mission was hard to fit into one metaphor in any pure sense, but also they didn't like members going too much out of the accepted metaphors, unless in a very narrow way, such as for preparing a lesson for an upcoming trip. But as far as anyone thinking in terms of different metaphors about the mission? I expect the mission would have wanted to vet that kind of thing.
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"If, following Meadows, we see organization theory as dominated by the concern for the problem of social order, the current interest in the concept of culture is no surprise. In anthropology, culture is the foundational term through which the orderliness and patterning of much of our life experience is explained." (p. 341)
So this is a different aspect of culture that what we've been thinking of in regard to organizations, but it's a significant issue, and I think the social order and wielding of power in the Vienna mission could well be seen in cultural terms.
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"The intersection of organizatino theory and culture theory is manifest in several 'thematic' or content areas that are of interest to organization and management scholars... Different conceptions of organization and culture underlie research in these content areas: comparative management, corporate culture, organizational cognition, organizatinal symbolism, and unconscious processes and organization... The balance of the paper briefly summarizes five different programs of research that flow out of linking the terms culture and organization and examines their underlying assumptions and metaphors. In the first two, culture is either an independent or dependent, external or internal, organizational variable. In the final three, culture is not a variable at all, but is a root metaphor for conceptualizing organization." (p. 341-342)
So we'll start next time on going through these 5 content areas one by one.
