U8D1-12 - How does culture cross boundaries in public administration organizations? Analyze government examples from the United States and in other countries to support your post. Describe the implications this has for public administrators -SEE DETAILS
6 - Organizations in a Multicultural World
People who work for organizations think of themselves as practical types, looking to get the job done, improve the bottom line, or implement the policy. Yet just like those who tackle social problems, organization men and women often find themselves dealing with the expressive and the symbolic—in other words, with culture. Many of the ambiguities of organizational life derive from the role that cultural objects play, both within the organization and impinging on its operations from outside. In this chapter, we explore how culture affects the ways people conduct business transactions, how governments try to implement programs, and how organizations try to produce and market products—like hamburgers, for instance.
McDonald’s in Israel wrestles with reconciling fast food business objectives with Israel’s religious laws and ethnic sensibilities (McGreal 2006). Israelis adore American popular culture, and nothing is more emblematic of all things American than a Big Mac. Nothing is less kosher, either, and therein lies the problem.
Two faces of Israeli religious culture bear upon the issue. On the one hand, most Israelis are Jews who do not actively practice their religion. Israel has many thriving non-kosher restaurants, and the stratum most likely to patronize McDonald’s, the young and with-it, are the least likely to be religiously observant. On the other hand, Orthodox Jews act as a cultural watchdog, ready to pounce on anything that seems too blatantly disrespectful of religious doctrines.
With 120 outlets in Israel, of which 11 are strictly kosher, McDonald’s has made numerous accommodations—all controversial—to the cultural context:
It changed its iconic yellow and red signs to blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, for the kosher restaurants.
It uses only kosher beef, potatoes, and milkshake mix in all of its restaurants.
It will open no branches in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
It insists that Arabic-speaking employees use only Hebrew when working.
The endless dilemmas facing McDonald’s typify the complexities of reconciling global and local cultures. Global culture, strongly influenced by American popular culture and spread by the media and travelers, makes the Big Mac available as a cultural object, as shown in Figure 6.1. In this case, the cultural object is created indirectly by an American corporation and directly by Israeli franchisers aiming for Israeli consumers. The global burger as a cultural object means (Meaning #1) up to date, American, fresh, youthful, and trendy. But locally, the Big Mac and other McDonald’s fare are cultural objects, too. As constructed by religious conservatives, they are (Meaning #2) non-kosher, non-Jewish, alien, assimilationist, and an affront to religion and Jewish identity. McDonald’s franchisers want to capitalize on the first set of meanings and reach the audience with whom it resonates and to isolate the second set—McDonald’s knows an Orthodox Jew is never going to chow down on a Quarter Pounder with Cheese anyway—and keep it from influencing the national market.
Making profits, doing business generally, getting results—these activities are more complicated in a global economy where local and international cultures clash, where incompatible meaning systems must be reconciled, and where the people doing business or working for an organization cannot avoid managing meanings just as much as they manage money, products, and people. This chapter explores three ways in which culture affects the ways organizations accomplish their objectives, or fail to, in a rapidly changing world. We begin by considering organizational cultures, first at the individual level, examining the relationship between culture and motivation, and then at the group level, examining cultures that can emerge within organizations. Second, we look at some research on the ways in which national cultures shape organizational outcomes. And finally, we explore the problems of those organizations and programs that must operate across a multiplicity of cultures.
Figure 6.1 McDonald’s in Israel
Organizational Cultures
Organizations operate within and across cultures, but they also produce cultures of their own. Managers and workers create and receive cultural objects—shared meanings embodied in forms—that may facilitate or obstruct the organization’s operations. We can think of this exchange of meanings as operating at two levels: the individual or small group level and the level of the larger group (“the workers”) or even the organization as a whole. Let us first consider the microlevel, where group subcultures arise to create a meaningful working world.
Culture and Motivation
Any organization has goals, and therefore any organization faces the problem of motivating its members to work for these goals. We see this most clearly in organizations that seek to make a profit, but it is true for all types of organizations. For example, Penny Becker (1999) has shown that churches of the same denomination can have wildly different congregational cultures. Motivating the members of a church that thinks of itself as a family is very different from motivating members of a church that thinks of itself as a community activist or as a detached provider of religious services. Leaders and communicators have to work with and through the local culture, regardless of the organizational type.
How does a leader or a manager get people to work hard, cooperate, extend themselves for the good of the whole, or do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do? This is a standard problem faced by the management of every organization, whether a corner grocery, a religious sect, a government agency, or a transnational corporation. The most direct way to motivate compliance is through the exercise of force: Most people will respond most of the time if they are threatened with a whip or a gun. But raw power is inefficient, not to mention inhumane. Prison labor or slave systems are seldom cost-effective in the long run; nor are they options for most contemporary organizations. So how do managers motivate people to work?
One theory is based on the idea of economic man, which goes like this: Human beings want money and the things money will buy. Because their wants and desires are always greater than their means, they will work more for more pay. This theory is the basis for wage payment systems such as piecework, whereby a worker’s pay is a direct function of his output. In such a system, a company may calculate that the average worker can turn out nine widgets per hour, and the standard pay is pegged to this output. If a worker exceeds the established standard of production—in other words, if he makes ten widgets per hour when the standard is nine—he gets a bonus. If he only turns out six widgets, on the other hand, his earnings may get docked.
As plausible as it sounds, the economic incentive theory often doesn’t seem to work. Studies of work units have repeatedly shown that a group will establish a reasonable rate of production, one that its members can achieve without much difficulty, and most individuals in the group will not exceed it (Homans 1950). Those who produce more are derisively called “rate busters,” just as overachievers in school are sometimes scorned as “teacher’s pets.” The social pressure exerted by the group will usually bring the rate busters into line. Similarly, those who fall behind will be helped by other group members even though it is not in the latter’s economic interest to do so.
We have seen this phenomenon before: the creation of a subculture, with its own meanings and practices, that buffers its members from external influences. The same thing that happens in Little League teams and among pot smokers also happens in government bureaucracies and business firms. As with those examples, we can reinterpret organizational subcultures in terms of the cultural diamond. What the external culture creates as a cultural object—an incentive system wherein extra effort “means” more pay—is received by subculture members who have a distinctively different horizon of expectations. For them, the piecework system “means” inequalities within the group that make everyone’s life more difficult and that, perhaps, encourage management to raise the standard level of expected production. So the group creates its own cultural object, an amount of output that “means” a reasonable level of production and group harmony. However, the managerial audience for such an output level sees it as indicating workers’ recalcitrance and inability to perceive their own economic interests.
Saleswomen in department stores of the early twentieth century, for example, set up their own “counter cultures,” whereby they ignored the management incentive system in favor of a “stint,” an amount of sales they judged to be a fair day’s work (Benson 1986). Each worker monitored her sales, and as she approached her day’s stint, she would slacken her selling efforts, perhaps by doing some stock work off the selling floor. Those who had already made their stint for the day would steer sales to those who were behind. Eager beavers who ignored the stint and tried to generate too many sales were labeled “grabbers” and risked social isolation from the department’s subculture unless they changed their ways.
Similar accounts of the subversion of managerial objectives by small-group worker cultures occur worldwide. When American firms open operations in other countries, for instance, they often have a problem with nepotism or other forms of particular favoritism. To the American executives, individual employees should be judged and treated on their own merits; showing favoritism is a form of corruption. But to the local employees, favoring someone from your home village (in China), your family (in Italy), or your ethnic group (in Nigeria) by promoting that person over others who are equally qualified means expressing appropriate group solidarity. Similarly, what looks like a bribe to Westerners looks like a legitimate monetary show of respect and gratitude, perhaps delivered before the fact, to many people in developing countries.
If neither sheer economic incentives nor the forceful imposition of bureaucratic rules can be counted on to motivate desired behavior in workers, then, what does work? Organizations have tried a variety of approaches, all involving the attempt to create a certain type of organizational culture in which hard work and commitment to the goals of the organization are part of a meaningful complex of activities and attitudes. Some organizations have applied structural solutions to the problem of bureaucratic alienation—for example, by having few hierarchical steps and by locating decision making at relatively low levels (cf. Burns and Stalker 1961). Instead of a tall, thin organizational chart, these firms have a short, fat one; they typically stress informality and accessibility, encourage innovation, and avoid such status markers as executive cafeterias. The closer the average employees are to the centers of decision and control, managerial reasoning runs, the greater influence they have over outcomes, and the less social distance there is between top management and everyone else, the more “everyone else” will identify with and contribute to achieving the goals of the organization.
A second way of ensuring that employees share the goals of the organization is to foster a preferred type of organizational culture directly by selectivity at the recruitment stage and by active socialization. This strategy is perhaps most notable among Japanese organizations. With sufficient selectivity and intense socialization, even high employee turnover may not disturb the organizational culture (Harrison and Carroll 1991). In her study of flight attendants, Arlie Hochschild (1983) analyzed how airlines promote an organizational culture of caring for customers by (1) selecting flight attendants who are naturally sympathetic, extroverted people and (2) training them to have the proper emotional responses, including feeling genuine concern for the passengers’ comfort and genuine satisfaction when a passenger is happy. Hochschild calls this “emotion labor,” or the selling of feelings for wages, and she regards it as a little-noticed form of gender discrimination (the airlines and the passengers expect more emotion labor from women than from men). The point here, however, is not whether or not the airlines’ recruitment and training are exploitative but simply their success in instilling an organizational culture among their employees.
Structural and cultural attempts to motivate organizational commitment often go hand in hand. Typical of this combination is a high-tech engineering company studied by Gideon Kunda (1992). The firm’s organizational structure, all parties agree, is decentralized, vague, and constantly changing. This ambiguous structure is compatible with the firm’s strong and oft-asserted culture of self-management (lines of authority aren’t important), joint decision making (specified positional responsibilities are beside the point), and profit-oriented creativity (which a heavy-handed bureaucratic structure might stifle). “Tech culture,” repeatedly instilled through both organizational rituals and everyday routines, produces employee commitment through normative control, which is an organizational “attempt to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experiences, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions” (11). Normative control, in other words, is what any social group’s dominant culture is usually about. This company’s managers happen to be exceptionally aware of this fact and thus promote an organizational culture to serve the firm’s interests. At the same time, organizations cannot simply impose a culture or set of meanings on their supine members. Organizational cultures are “negotiated orders” that emerge or fail as employees’ perspectives interact with the organization’s goals (Grant, Morales, and Sallaz 2009).
A third way managers motivate employees is by setting up models of thought and behavior in the form of exemplary actors and organizational stories. Model actors, like Lowenthal’s “heroes of production,” are both personally honored and presented as worthy of emulation. Hospital walls may display pictures of the “employee of the month,” for example, just as real estate firms publicly honor those agents with the highest sales. The functions of honoring the exceptional and rewarding the faithful may contradict each other at times; in a grocery store where there are always several “employees of the week,” the honor is devalued and its motivational capacity diminished because of its ubiquity. If it is not overdone, however, the model actor becomes a cultural object, simultaneously a model of good behavior and a model for other members of the organization (Geertz 1973).
The Chinese government has made conspicuous use of exemplary models. In 1963, Lin Biao, chosen by Mao to head the People’s Liberation Army, initiated a campaign to remind the PLA’s soldiers that their first obligation was service to the Chinese Communist Party (Spence 1990). The campaign centered on the Diary of Lei Feng, a posthumously discovered journal in which a young soldier recorded his loyalty to the CCP, Chairman Mao, and his duty. Lei Feng was an army truck driver whose peasant family had suffered cruelly under the pre-revolutionary landlords. Lei Feng’s army career exemplified faithful service and sacrifice; he once declared, “I will be a screw that never rusts and will glitter anywhere I am placed.” He died as he had lived, run over by a truck while he was helping a comrade. The diary became required reading in Chinese schools, promoted by Mao himself as a model of how the entire nation should “learn from the PLA.” In reality, this model actor was a fiction. The fact that Lei Feng’s diary had been concocted by the propaganda wing of the PLA did not seem to detract from its exemplary power, however, even if some Chinese suspected the truth. As late as 1987, as the CCP grew increasingly resistant to the pro-democracy movement, the party launched a new campaign honoring the “Lei Feng spirit.”
Exemplary actors are one type of model; another comes from organizational stories. Some stories are aimed at outsiders; advertising would be the most familiar case. Organizations use stories to garner support from those upon whom they depend, as when firms that supply organs encourage donations from bereaved families through narratives extolling “the last best gift” (Healy 2006). Others are for organizational insiders. In orientation and training sessions, managers tell anecdotes that illustrate desired organizational values and practices. A well-known case in the sociology of organizations literature is that retold by Chester Barnard (1939) about the telephone operator who stayed at her switchboard even though she knew her mother was trapped in a burning house; Barnard, a former telephone company executive, hastened to point out that the mother survived. Such stories, managers assume, instill organizational loyalty and motivate desired behavior. But as we have seen in our discussion of worker subcultures, another type of story can emerge from interactions among the workers themselves, over and above the accounts sanctioned by management. We need to take a closer look now at how employees make their organizational lives meaningful.
Cultures of Solidarity and Ambiguity
When we hear “organizational culture,” we assume an undifferentiated set of symbols and meanings that most of the organization’s participants understand and accept. High schools have cultures in this sense, where students and teachers—regardless of their degree of loyalty or alienation—all understand the particular cultural characteristics of their schools. Organizations have such shared cultures as well. Diane Vaughan (1996) has shown, for example, how the culture of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) tolerated risk taking and cost cutting. Minor, organizationally legitimate decisions to cut corners cumulated, and the 1986 Challenger disaster, she suggests, was the result.
Organizational cultures are not necessarily unitary, however. Organizations have subcultures, different cultural worlds experienced by different levels and nodes of the organization—anyone who has ever seen The Office recognizes this—and these subcultures may be the basis for conflict. Like all cultures and subcultures, they organization maintain themselves through stories. From her study of Swedish public administration, Barbara Czarniawska (1997) concludes that members use stories to organize their experience, with the key genres being drama and autobiography. People interact with others and make sense of their own lives using these narrative resources. Gary Alan Fine has brilliantly analyzed diverse workplace cultures—from restaurant kitchens (1996) to the National Weather Service (2007)—and shown how professional norms, external audiences (clients, customers, reviewers, “the public”), and the concrete specifics of the job interplay to produce shared occupational micro-cultures.
Having raised the issue of solidarity within organizations, we have moved to a different type of organizational culture, one that emerges rather than one that is constructed more or less intentionally. Groups of people who work (or play) together produce their own subcultures or idiocultures, but this kind of cultural creation through interaction is not entirely independent of the larger social context. In other words, we must not forget the link on our cultural diamond between the social world and the creators of some cultural objects. In any organization, power matters, including symbolic power (Hallett 2003).
For example, even though race, ethnicity, or gender may not “matter” in performing a certain type of job, and although all such categories may be represented in a certain office or factory unit, these characteristics matter powerfully to the outside world. Moreover, members of these groups bring bits and pieces of different cultures with them to work; Puerto Ricans, on average, have knowledge of common friends, relatives, and institutions that Mexican Americans don’t share. For this reason, worker subcultures may break down along ethnic or gender lines. Managers, who hold the symbolic power to “explain things” (Hallett 2003), try to discourage this form of partition because it works against functional equivalence. From a boss’s point of view, a trained female African American should be the same as a trained male Samoan, and either one should be capable of task assignments without regard to ascribed characteristics. Cultural affinities are strongly felt, however, and people are drawn to other people who share their meaning systems. Organizational symbolic power can only go so far when it runs into other powerful symbols that come from outside the organization.
Perhaps the most influential division that affects the emergence of subgroups is that between labor and management. Here, most firms and organizations draw clear distinctions, as with soldiers and officers in the Army. Usually there are a few intermediate or bridging positions, such as the noncommissioned officers or foremen in a plant, and these positions may be unusually stressful because of divided loyalties; incumbents have often “risen from the ranks” yet no longer share solidarity with those whom they now supervise. The placement of most members of an organization, however, is unambiguous. Symbolism reinforces the divide: the officer’s club, the executive cafeteria, the faculty lounge. Practical distinctions abound as well; workers are paid an hourly wage and management earns a monthly salary, for example, or workers are often unionized and managers rarely are.
How does the labor/management divide affect subcultures within an organization? On the one hand, the sharp class consciousness that Marx envisioned does not seem to apply in many places. In the United States, most working people view themselves as “middle class” regardless of their position, whereas in China a similarly placed person might well define himself as “a worker” or one of “the people.” In a homogeneous society such as Japan, company unions and worker-manager socializing bridges the gap, whereas in a heterogeneous society such as Nigeria, ethnicity both bridges the gap and works against solidarity at either the labor or management level.
Because Marxian class consciousness seems to represent a nineteenth-century European model that has grown less relevant over time, some sociologists have concluded that class solidarities themselves are irrelevant to organizational analysis. In American firms, so the argument goes, workers are individualistic, seeking their own personal advancement and comfort. Subgroups may emerge to curb and channel individualism, but they are neither class based nor devoted to pursuing class interests. In his study of instances where worker solidarity did emerge in American firms, Rick Fantasia (1988) showed that class consciousness is neither irrelevant nor unproblematically given but instead is a cognitive frame that emerges during certain labor/management struggles. “Cultures of solidarity” arise in times of organizational crisis, such as a strike or layoff, when systems of meaning and action among the workers oppose the dominant regime within the organization. Not synonymous with unions, “cultures of solidarity are more or less bounded groupings that may or may not develop a clear organizational identity and structure, but represent the active expression of worker solidarity within an industrial system and a society hostile to it” (19). Although a high level of class consciousness is not always present, conflict and consciousness do emerge under certain specific conditions within an organization, and the workers’ solidarities that result are likely to persist well after the conflict that initiated them.
Fantasia analyzed three emerging cultures of solidarity. One of his cases was the mobilization and collective action carried out by nurses and other women workers in a Vermont hospital. For a decade and more, nurses had labored under a contradiction: The greater need for them to acquire specialized technical skills had been offset by cost-cutting measures that appeared to denigrate these skills. The nurses experienced simultaneous professionalization and proletarianization, and many felt that the demand for greater technical skill, coupled with the demand that they care for an increasing number of patients, resulted in their inability to do their jobs properly. Other employees, such as housekeeping and cafeteria workers, were disgruntled over low pay levels and blocked opportunities. Conditions were ripe for unionization. Ironically, management recognized this fact and sought to ward off labor organization through a worker/management policy advisory committee. When a new hospital administrator, concerned that the committee was developing into a collective bargaining vehicle, abolished it, the workers were affronted, and the idea of some form of collective representation in opposition to the administration became firmly planted. In this promising context, representatives of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees began working to organize the hospital in 1981.
The following months saw a series of actions and reactions as management and workers responded to one another with hardening lines of division and, at least on the workers’ part, a growing solidarity that fed on its own successes and failures. Management initiated “one-on-ones” in which supervisors attempted to dissuade undecided workers from supporting the union; pro-union workers responded by intruding on these conferences, thereby modifying the impact of the confrontation with authority. Union supporters tried to exhort fellow workers to join their side; management responded by keeping a close eye on pro-union leaders and preventing them from holding union-related discussions on the job. In such an atmosphere, class consciousness did indeed emerge and permeated not only the hospital (in the final election, the union was voted in) but also the homes of many workers, where traditional sexual divisions of labor often had to be modified in light of the long hours required by the wife’s organizing activities. Husbands who were themselves union members proved especially supportive because they shared a common set of meanings with their wives.
Research like Fantasia’s shows how a workers’ culture can emerge. But what about a managerial culture? Do the upper echelons of an organization simply represent the dominant national culture, or is there a distinct culture of managers and owners representing the elite, the bourgeoisie? Max Weber suggested “both of the above.” Attitudes toward the link between hard work and worldly success (the latter being a token of heavenly success) persisted long after their basis in religious belief had atrophied. Because these attitudes were held by the dominant middle class—and had, in fact, assisted in its rise—they tended toward cultural domination, as a perusal of nineteenth-century schoolbooks with their penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned maxims made clear. Until well into the twentieth century, the link between hard work and success, and between the success of a firm and the prosperity of the social order (“What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.”), was confidently upheld by the business class and was little questioned by everyone else.
No one believes in these links anymore, least of all managers in business, contends Robert Jackall (1988). Instead, managers attempt to negotiate their way through “moral mazes” where success is more a function of propitious alliances and avoiding blame than hard work or productivity and where managers take their ethical bearings not from an internal moral code but from what their boss wants and what influences seem to be currently ascendant—“looking up and looking around,” Jackall calls it. In the upper levels of corporate culture, a bureaucratic ethic has replaced Weber’s Protestant ethic, with the result that a firm’s contribution to social welfare is a public relations problem. This managerial subculture upholds an increasing abstraction of organizational functions and a “psychic asceticism” whereby the manager’s rationalized self becomes a tool for advancement in his work life that is increasingly removed from home or extra-work relationships.
So far we have looked at two models of organizational culture, one emphasizing consensus, the other cleavage. In the consensus model, shared goals and values within an organization are the norm, and dissidence is a problem requiring correction. This model, which assumes a single organizational culture, is essentially functionalist. In the cleavage model, groups within an organization have different interests; the classic fault line falls between labor and management, but gender, ethnicity, or organizational location (e.g., engineering vs. marketing) can give rise to comparable cultures of solidarity. These differing interests predictably generate intraorganization conflict. The cleavage model, rooted in Marxism and other conflict sociologies, sees apparent consensus as a problem because it constitutes the subordination of group interests under the dominant ideology of the capitalist class.
Joanne Martin (1992) has pointed out a third model, one she labels “fragmentation,” that questions both the harmony of the consensus model (“integration,” in Martin’s terms) and the stability and predictability of the cleavage model (“differentiation”). In the fragmentation model, organizations are riddled with ambiguity, and people hold multiple perspectives. A single person in an organization is not so much an organizational actor (an IBM man) or a member of a salient group (an engineer) as he is a node of intersection of various groups, categories, and affinities (a male Korean American Presbyterian engineer who works for IBM, has a large family, and is politically liberal). Successive issues will activate different identities. A dispute over a new product introduction may find him allied with other engineers, all advocating moving slowly and getting all of the technological bugs worked out, against the marketing department’s eagerness to get the product into the field; on the question of company-provided child care, on the other hand, he may be oriented according to his family interests and liberal leanings; and if IBM suddenly loses market share, he may hunker down as a loyal company man and accept a freeze in pay. This being the case, the organizational analyst, rather than looking for a single organizational culture or for conflicting subcultures, should look for the types of issues that call up different meaning systems. Indeed, Martin urges the analyst to adopt all three perspectives, at least provisionally, for a richer understanding of how cultural processes—people making meanings—influence organizational outcomes.
Organizations in Cultural Contexts
We have been looking at internal organizational cultures from the walls in, so to speak. Now let’s look from the walls out. What is the relationship between an organization—a business firm, a school, a government bureaucracy—and the cultural context in which it operates?
In this area of research, the oscillating emphasis between culture and structure parallels the pattern we have seen before. Sociological theories of bureaucracy, especially that of Max Weber, posited that organizations in modern societies converge toward a single highly efficient model: a rationalized bureaucratic structure of positions having clear lines of authority, functional specialization, and a separation of the personal from the bureaucratic. In other words, from an employee’s point of view, you know who your boss is, you know what your job is, and your private life is separate from your work life (e.g., you don’t own your desk). This is the structure represented by the typical organizational chart of a firm or a government bureau (Weber himself used the Prussian army as his model).
During the 1950s and 1960s, people who studied organizations became increasingly impressed with the variations in this bureaucratic pattern from place to place. Accounting for such differences produced what we might call “national character” accounts, which had as their premise that different societies produced systematic deviations from the Weberian model even though such distinctive bureaucratic forms might impede organizational efficiency. Convergence toward a rationalized bureaucratic norm, what Weber referred to as the “iron cage,” was not about to happen across cultures. In a classic study of this type, French sociologist Michel Crozier (1964) revealed that firms in his country proliferated formal rules and exquisite functional distinctions of the “tightening-that-screw-is-not-in-my-job-description” sort—a bureaucratic inflexibility that was often at odds with the organizational goal of getting the job done. Crozier argued that French culture was highly individualistic and that the French had an aversion to personal dependency relations on the job. Thus, the excessive rules and rigidities, although bureaucratically irrational, were culturally rational in minimizing managerial discretion and employee dependency. In other words, French culture valued autonomy over productivity, and French organizations reflected this value.
Such national culture studies never entirely went out of fashion, in part because Americans and Europeans continued to be fascinated by Japanese forms of business organization, so different and so infuriatingly successful. But the emphasis on structural analysis that generally prevailed from the late 1960s through the early 1980s combined with a certain unease over national culture models, which seemed both to imply that less-developed societies suffered from an inferior culture and to import Eurocentric assumptions where they didn’t belong. Even though this line of research did not die out, for some time it was dormant.
By the mid-1980s, the interest in the relationship between organizations and their surrounding cultures came roaring back. The globalization of the economy was the principal reason for this development. Many companies that had formerly been exclusively American or European extended their reach globally, with respect to finance, production, and/or markets. This rapid expansion across national boundaries meant that individual firms, some for the first time, were concerned with understanding cultural differences. The continued success of Japan now was joined with the aggressive “Four Little Dragons” (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) and new players such as Mexico and Brazil in reshaping the global economy and the way Westerners conceived it. Finally, new theoretical moves within the social sciences were bridging the culture-structure gap, rendering work that explored their mutual influence both plausible and even fashionable.
James Lincoln and Arne Kalleberg’s research (1990) offers a good example of the new interest in the interaction of structure and culture to produce organizational outcomes. Lincoln and Kalleberg began by observing that American business managers and scholars, intrigued by the success of Japanese management techniques, continue to wonder which of these techniques might be successfully imported. From surveys of matched firms in the United States and Japan, Lincoln and Kalleberg set out to compare structural versus cultural explanations for differences in worker commitment to firms and in job satisfaction. They labeled as “structural theory” the view that welfare corporatism, widely practiced by Japanese firms, accounts for differences in commitment and job satisfaction; welfare corporatism entailed job security, labor-management cooperation, decentralized decision making with a high degree of worker participation, and corporate sponsorship of employee welfare benefits and social activities. What they called “cultural theory,” on the other hand, suggested that national differences in workers’ values accounted for national differences in commitment and job satisfaction. The structuralist position implies that welfare corporatism increases worker commitment and satisfaction whenever it is applied; Japanese firms, especially those of the core industries, tend to have more of it, but the same principles would be beneficial anywhere. A strictly “culturalist” (their term) approach, on the other hand, would maintain that the Japanese organizational forms were suited to Japanese culture, which valued the collectivity over the individual, cooperation, and a dependent personal relationship between employees and supervisors (the exact opposite of French values, according to Crozier); according to this view, these forms would not be as successful if exported to other cultures.
Meticulous comparisons both supported the general thrust of the welfare corporatist hypothesis, which the authors initially favored, and suggested persistent cultural differences. As expected, work commitment was higher among the Japanese workers than among the Americans, but—surprisingly—actual job satisfaction was lower. As expected, the quality of the relationships between workers and their coworkers and supervisors was positively associated with commitment and satisfaction, but friendships had no bearing on these outcomes. (Quality of the relationship was measured by such questions as “How satisfied are you with your supervisor?” whereas friendship was measured by such questions as “How often do you get together with your supervisor outside of work?”) In the United States, this finding was not surprising—outside get-togethers are not regarded as having much bearing on organizational commitment but instead are considered matters of personal choice. Japan, however, is noted for company social functions and the common pattern in which supervisors and employees go out drinking or to a restaurant, all of which the company sponsors and encourages. Although we might assume that such activities are assiduously cultivated by the Japanese firms because they bind the employees to the organization, such is not the case. It appears that expectations are different; Japanese worker-manager social contacts are routine and therefore are regarded as no big deal, whereas American workers and managers socialize within their own groups but not with each other (so worker get-togethers could be occasions for bitching about the boss!). In neither culture is the presence or absence of such friendships seen as affecting life on the job.
More generally, the two countries show distinct differences in work values. The Japanese favor close relations with supervisors, working in groups, and a variety of reciprocal ties; the Americans prefer independence in all of these areas. These differences affect work attitudes, but they do not mediate the effect of the job variables associated with the welfare corporatist hypothesis; such things as employee participation in decision making raise commitment independently of worker values. In other words, although distinct cultural differences affect workers’ relations to the firm, at the same time the participatory style of welfare corporatism can produce benefits of commitment and satisfaction in any cultural setting. Once again we see that posing the culture-versus-structure explanation in either/or terms belies the complexities of real social life.
New institutionalism directly addresses the interpenetration of culture and structure (Powell and DiMaggio 1992). New institutionalist thinking regards organizations not as tightly integrated bureaucracies mobilized to pursue certain goals but as loosely connected assemblages of people, structures, and systems (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Moreover, instead of being organized according to a single, rational efficiency principle, organizations and their subunits tend to conform to their institutional contexts. For example, American schools engage in certain symbolic rituals such as the preparation of report cards (cultural objects) because, although learning and educational progress are notoriously hard to measure, the institutional context in which schools find themselves expects organizations to show a bottom line. Report cards or an emphasis on test scores are ways that the school establishes “institutional isomorphism” with its context; making up the report card represents a “ritual of good faith” prepared for the external audience (parents, school boards, politicians) and is a way of turning aside a more critical inspection of what might really be going on in the school. At the level of colleges and universities it is “the rankings,” especially in U.S. News and World Report, that discipline the system toward a reactive conformity (Espeland and Sauder 2007).
Another type of institutional fit, this one internal, is that between an organizations ideology and its structure. Wilde (2007) examines Vatican II as a social movement in order to explain its progressive results, results such as changing the Mass from Latin to spoken languages and having priests face the congregation, that were unexpected by everyone. She found that the progressives did not have much in terms of resources or power, but they did have an organizational model of “collegiality” whereby their inclusive, egalitarian ideology supported the horizontal Episcopal Conferences that allowed them to communicate and operate effectively, while the conservatives’ model of hierarchical top-down authority, parallel to their theology of “God orders and humans obey,” paralyzed them in struggles over church practices.
Given a certain plasticity of structure, organizations and organizational relationships match and mirror their institutional contexts. This may be particularly true of such organizations as school, church, and government bureaucracies, for which there is no clear “bottom line,” but it applies to business firms as well. Moreover, cross-cultural organizational comparisons can readily benefit from a new institutionalist approach. A team of organizational sociologists (Orrù, Biggart, and Hamilton 1991) compared the structures of business enterprise groups (stable aggregates of firms related by shared ownership or management, mutual financial transactions, and/or other forms of interdependency) in Japan and two of the “Little Dragons”—Taiwan and South Korea. All three countries featured stable enterprise groups having no exact counterparts in the United States. But the structures of enterprise groups differ among the three countries. Japan’s groups involve stable, noncompeting horizontal links, “a community of equals” intersected by some vertical, hierarchical links. South Korea, in contrast, has fewer horizontal links; its enterprise groups are centralized outgrowths of a founding patriarch’s firm and exhibit “vertical domination.” Taiwan is different still; its enterprise groups are small, less central, and both controlled and financed by single families. These different organizational patterns, the authors contended, are isomorphic with other enterprise groups and other institutions within the same society. They represent different cultural principles—communitarianism in Japan, patrimonialism in South Korea, and familialism in Taiwan—that are manifest in a variety of institutional settings. This kind of comparison suggests how new institutionalist thinking can reveal connections between national or local culture on the one hand and organizational structure on the other.
Given the global orientation of this book, it is appropriate that we have been considering work that compares organizational operations cross-nationally. At the same time, we need to remember that all organizations must operate in an external cultural context, and the relationship between organization and context is never simple.
Consider the connection between church and community. Most people assume that churches are “good for” their communities. In the poor areas of American cities, the presence of churches—storefront churches and the more substantial kind—suggests stability, a bulwark against chaos, and a source of resources and positive role models for the church’s neighbors. Omar McRoberts (2003), who has studied inner-city churches in Boston, finds this popular conception to be inaccurate. The churches he studied, mainly African American and West Indian, moved around a lot, finding storefronts and halls in buildings that could no longer attract commercial tenants. Their congregations commuted to wherever the church happened to be located. Often the parishioners were very loyal to their church, its pastor, or its ethnic complexion. What they weren’t loyal to was the neighborhood, for they just passed through, coming to services but having virtually no other contact with the community. Nor were the pastors or church officials focused on the neighborhood and its needs; they tended to think in universal terms (bringing all people to the word of God) and/or in terms of the needs of the parishioners. So most of these churches made little effort to adapt to, or improve, their communities.
Many organizations don’t have this option of simply ignoring the context in which they operate. For profit-oriented firms or NGOs, such adaptation is essential to their missions. Organizations have to figure out their external contexts, and the more these differ from the cultural assumptions built into the organization, the trickier this can get. In the next section we will look at some of the ways organizations try to fit into their cultural contexts.
Working Across Cultures
It is one thing to recognize that cultural differences have some effect on “getting it done” and that planners or business managers must employ different organizational forms and incentives in Accra than they do in Los Angeles. Comparative research can enable the manager or program implementer trying to transact business in a foreign culture to proceed circumspectly and effectively. To an ever-increasing extent, however, organizational goals involve actively synchronizing operations within a variety of cultures. This is as true for the firm in Los Angeles trying to set up incentives for its multilingual workforce as for the transnational firm trying to coordinate its production flow in six different countries. Such transactions involve recognition of and negotiation with multiple cultural systems.
One way of working in various cultural contexts is to hold on to your main mission while adapting on the minor issues. McDonald’s’ pattern of quick in-and-out customers might seem inviolable, but since the company’s goal is to sell food and not to shuffle people, it can adjust to the local culture so long as its mission is not jeopardized. In Chinese cities, McDonald’s offers a safe and clean place for grandmothers to spend the day while waiting for their grandchildren to get out of school (Watson 1997). They sit in McDonald’s, chatting and nursing cups of tea. Though this is not especially profitable, McDonald’s managers recognize that allowing these women to sit for hours means that hoards of hungry kids—consumers of the future as well as the present—will pour in at the end of the school day. It’s both culturally sensitive and shrewd from a business standpoint to let the grandmothers alone.
While selling Big Macs in China is a one-way cultural adaptation where an American firm adjusts its practices to the local context, sometimes the adaptation is two-way and ongoing. In a remarkable study that asks how Israelis and Arabs can work together at a multinational production site where the managers are both colleagues and, at times, enemies, Mizrachi, Drori, and Anspach (2007) conducted two years of ethnographic study—in Arabic, English, and Hebrew—of an Israeli textile company’s Israeli and Jordanian managers running three plants in Jordan. The study constituted a natural experiment in that it occurred during both a period of normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world (1998 to 2000) and a period of conflict (late 2000 following the Intifada El-Aqsa [Palestinian Uprising]). They found that during the normalization period, “Jordanian managers relied on normative modes of trust [I trust this guy because I know him], whereas Israelis used paternalistic and calculative strategies [I trust this guy insofar as he is following the rules]” (156). During the phase of political unrest this pattern reversed, with Israelis turning to normative trust relations (as one Israeli manager put it when talking about his Jordanian colleagues, “I trust them on the basis of our personal friendship, and I know that they won’t let me down”) while the Jordanians turned to calculative trust (as one put it, “We are working now according to the book”). Mizrachi, Drori, and Anspach argue that trust has three dimensions: (1) agency (the managers were active manipulators of the forms and symbols of trust), (2) culture (the managers drew from complex repertoires rather than being bound by any strict set of cultural schemas), and (3) political context (the political meaning of trust relations changed according to the context, and managers adjusted their behavior in light of the shifting situation).
The pitfalls for organizations attempting to juggle cultural multiplicity are legion. Everyone has heard, for example, of the disastrous General Motors promotion of its Chevy Nova in Mexico, in which no one had pointed out that, in Spanish, No va means “It doesn’t go.” The problems involved go deeper than understanding a simple relationship between words and what they refer to, however. If culture involves shared meanings, moving in different cultures requires understanding different systems of meaning and the assumptions, principles, and nuances that any particular cultural object may evoke in these systems.
In his aptly titled book Cultures in Conflict, Stanley Heginbotham (1975) set out a memorable case of how lack of cultural coordination can undermine the most rationally conceived program. His subject was the implementation of the agricultural Green Revolution, specifically a high-yield variety of rice, in India. The plan was simple: Trained village workers called Gram Sevaks, under central coordination from New Delhi, were to serve as onsite agricultural extension officers whose job was to convince the local farmers to try the new rice, along with new fertilizers and other farming techniques promoted by Green Revolution advocates. The problems came from the fact that four cultures and, hence, four distinct ways of thinking were engaged in the plan’s implementation. Many of the higher-level agricultural extension officers (AEOs) had been trained at such places as the University of Iowa and were aglow with American theories of community development and local empowerment. A Gandhian culture of individual responsibility animated some of the local extension workers. The Indian bureaucracy, however, still followed the British colonial model of tight central control and elaborated paper passing, without much concern for the end results as long as the proper routines were carried out. The peasant farmers, meanwhile, operated under yet a fourth cultural model, that of traditional dharma, which emphasized doing one’s duty and submitting to one’s fate. Thus, the people responsible for implementing the program held four cognitive models—community development, Gandhian, colonial bureaucratic, and dharmaic. The first two models emphasized change and flexibility in order to meet specific goals; the second two stressed stability and following the correct procedure regardless of the consequences.
The results were predictably disastrous. Extension agents gave enthusiastic speeches about crop rotation to patient farmers who smiled and paid no attention, assuming the agents were simply performing some obscure duty. Bureaucrats sought to meet quotas on seed distribution without expressing any great interest in whether the seeds were actually planted. And the Gram Sevaks and extension officers improvised like crazy. In the case of “green manure”—a fast-growing, high-foliage crop that farmers were to plant when the fields would otherwise be fallow and then plow under to enrich the soil—most farmers were not persuaded by the scientific rationale of soil improvement. To them, “green manure” sounded like a waste of time and energy. The extension officers had quotas of green manure seed distribution to fill, however—quotas established by the bureaucrats in New Delhi. So, the AEOs and the Gram Sevaks induced the farmers to take the green manure seeds, which they did not want, in return for being able to buy cheap fertilizer, which they did. Heginbotham reported,
As a result of such a quid pro quo, a farmer might count himself fortunate to have obtained a permit to buy fertilizer at a subsidized rate and an AEO would be relieved to have made progress toward fulfilling his target for the sale of green manure seeds nobody wanted. Neither would be particularly disturbed by the fact that the farmer would simply throw out the seeds. (169)
Given the pitfalls of cultures in conflict, and given the increasing necessity for individuals and organizations to work in and with a variety of cultures, what help can cultural sociology offer? At the most basic level, it can focus attention on the fact that even a tangible, physical “thing” like fertilizer is a cultural object. As such, it is a bearer of meaning, but its meanings vary with the human beings—producers and recipients—who interact with it. Although everyone agrees that green manure is a seed for a type of plant, they most definitely do not agree about what it represents as a cultural object. Green manure was produced by Western scientists, to whom it meant one shot fired in a revolution in Third World agriculture. But it also meant low-cost organic fertilizers to the Gram Sevaks, more work to the farmer, and a means of furthering his civil service career to the bureaucrat. Once more we are reminded that meanings are not implanted in a cultural object; they are constructed by those human beings who interact with the object. An astute, culturally aware member of the implementation team might have anticipated some of these different meaning constructions and made provision for them.
The need to be alert to multiple meanings and culturally based nuances carries over to intangible cultural objects such as words. Considerable intercultural confusion comes from translations that, though accurate on a word-to-word basis, do not capture the nimbus of implications with which a culture surrounds a word. For example, President Clinton once complained that the Japanese say yes when they mean no. A writer familiar with both cultures pointed out that hai, the Japanese equivalent of yes, can mean that the speaker has heard you and is weighing a reply or that the speaker understands your request and would like to accommodate you but unfortunately cannot (Hatsumi 1993). A Japanese speaker is not intending to be deceitful in such “yes” responses, merely polite. Nigerians behave similarly when they have bad news to report. Because breaking bad news too abruptly is considered insensitive, if a Nigerian has news that the other party wants—the answer to a question such as “Is he dead?” or “Did the deal go through?”—he will often equivocate for some time, saying, “Things are well” or “The story is a complicated one,” before telling the painful truth. Outsiders who understand such cultural patterns can avoid either misinterpreting the response or drawing the mistaken conclusion that the party with whom they are interacting is a liar.
The multiple interpretations of intangible cultural objects can be understood through the cultural diamond framework. A Japanese produces a hai as a cultural object; his period eye, his collective consciousness, imbues his hai with a set of meanings and implications. A Japanese recipient, coming from the same social world, would have no trouble comprehending his meaning. But an American, coming from a social world that overlaps but is not identical to that of the Japanese, has a different horizon of expectations. She constructs different meanings out of the cultural object hai, especially if it has been translated as a simple yes. A general rule might be this: In any situation wherein the creator of a cultural object and its receiver come from different cultures, an individual or organization must be alert at all times to the possibility of different meaning constructions, for these nonequivalent meanings may have significant consequences for “getting things done.”
SUMMARY
The international flows of people, goods, images, and information mean that virtually every organization must contend with cultural multiplicity. From the viewpoint of a business firm, a government agency, or another organization trying to get something done, multiple cultures are always potentially cultures in conflict. A sociological understanding of cultures and how they operate will help predict areas of conflict, reduce the conflict if possible, and manage it when it does arise. In this chapter, we have considered the impact of culture on organizations at a number of levels:
1. Culture and motivation. Organizations need to motivate their employees to behave in ways beneficial to the organization’s goals. Both internal subcultures of work groups and external cultural influences can interfere with this process by motivating different types of behavior. Management needs to create an organizational culture using some combination of structural means, recruitment, socialization, rituals, model actors, and illuminating stories so that the desired behavior becomes meaningful and satisfying to the employees.
2. Organizational subcultures. In spite of managerial efforts to exert normative control by creating an organizational culture, subcultures emerge that to some extent resist the dominant culture. Such subcultures and the stories they tell often reproduce social cleavages of class, ethnicity, and gender. Within a particular organization, each subculture is both a meaning-making unit, such as Fantasia’s nurses, and a medium through which meanings from the external culture find expression and enactment. If we consider a new product, program, or policy as a cultural object, we can anticipate some of the different meanings that object will have for different groups and their implications for attitudes and behavior.
3. Cross-cultural differences. People’s ways of thinking and acting vary enormously from place to place, and much scholarly ink has been spilled trying to assess the impact these variations have on organizational effectiveness. In the past, a culturalist model, which claimed that national or local cultural values explained organizational differences, opposed a structuralist model, which contended that similar organizational structures produced similar consequences regardless of culture. Recent thinking has moved beyond the either/or terms of these two models to explain how culture influences structure and how structures are interpreted through cultures.
4. Organizations in multicultural environments. Organizations that operate in more than one country or involve several cultural groups in a single country face multiple systems of meaning creation. Although managers cannot control the cognitive frames that will make their organization’s products and programs meaningful in different cultures, they can first recognize this lack of control rather than assume that the characteristics and meanings of something like a Big Mac are transparent and unitary. Second, managers can anticipate when meaning construction will seriously challenge the goals of the organization and act in light of this understanding.
All such levels of cultural contention suggest that success in a firm, an NGO, or a government bureaucracy may rest as much on cultural sensitivity and flexibility as it does on the mastery of finance and law.
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION
Describe the culture of an organization where you have worked. What are the stories and symbols that everyone who works there knows? What are the subcultures, and what forms of conflict take place between them? How do the heads of the organization use symbolic power to motivate people?
Discuss the question of how culture does and does not cross organizational boundaries. If people come into an organization with certain values and beliefs based on their external identities and networks, to what extent can an organization modify these to meet its goals? To what extent should it?
Imagine that you represent a Western firm that is doing business in a non-Western country that has very different cultural assumptions. Some of these assumptions involve forms of discrimination (e.g., against women or religious minorities) that would not be tolerated in the firm’s home country. Local managers say that in order not to alienate local suppliers and customers, these local customs must be followed. Drawing on your knowledge of the relationship between organizations and culture, how would you handle this situation?
RECOMMENDED FOR FURTHER READING
Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fantasia presents rich case studies of the creation and reception of the image of worker solidarity as a cultural object.
Fine, Gary Alan. 2007. Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fine shows how weather forecasters occupy a series of intermediary positions—for example, between science and the public—and how the tensions that come from being pulled in multiple directions plus the inherent ambiguity of their work shape an occupational culture.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. This book discusses how organizations control what Geertz calls the moods and motivations of its employees. Hochschild studied airlines, which train flight attendants to be nice, and collection agencies, which use similar techniques to train their employees to be mean.
Kunda, Gideon. 1992. Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High Tech Organization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. From ethnographic fieldwork, Kunda depicts an organization that is highly aware of its organizational culture and highly skilled at manipulating it.
Ogasawara, Yuko. 1998. Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ogasawara shows how “office ladies,” disadvantaged by their gender and their exclusion from lifetime employment, develop cultural repertoires to resist the male domination and exert control despite their lowly official status.
