Reading :: The Myth of Organizational Culture

 The Myth of Organizational Culture: How Leaders Misunderstand the Role of Paradigms and Power

By J.W. Traphagan

Until he retired last year, John Traphagan and I taught together in UT’s Human Dimensions of Organizations MA program. I really liked working with him because he is unfiltered in a way that I don’t allow myself to be, and was thus very entertaining. For John, I’m pretty sure there are no sacred cows, so he had no compunction against disparaging ideas he thought were useless. 

One idea that he reliably and loudly disparaged was the idea of organizational culture. (In fact, this became an in-joke among members of some of our cohorts.) Now, in this accessibly written book, written for the public (I suspect he had our HDO MAs in mind), he lays out his argument against this idea. And he’s pretty convincing.

In Chapter 1 he argues that corporations do not make up a culture in themselves. Rather, they are embedded in larger cultural flows (p.9). A corporation might instead have an organizational paradigm — “a broadly recognized framework used for identifying what constitutes achievement or success and determining what are accepted and acceptable modes of practice for members of an organization or institution” (p.12, his emphasis). This paradigm is shaped by at least one ideology: “a largely coherent system of ideas and beliefs that rely on a set of basic assumptions people use to give those ideas legitimacy” (p.13, his emphasis). He warns that people often mistake organizational paradigms for organizational cultures. But, he warns, organizations can fail because “leadership often doesn’t clearly see when an organization’s way of doing things is poorly aligned to the larger cultural context” (p.18). 

In Chapter 2, he defines culture more precisely, a necessary step for having a better discussion (p.25). Culture, he concludes, is not a thing but a process: an ongoing improvisation within parameters (pp.48-49). Organizations, on the other hand, are conglomerations of various subgroupings and individuals who have overlapping interests and ideas (p.32). When an organization posts and promotes values, people in the organization interpret those values, bringing their own ideas to bear. It’s simply not possible for everyone to hold exactly the same values (p.37). 

In Chapter 3, he further argues why organizations don’t have cultures. Organizations, he says, reflect a larger culture rather than being cultures in themselves. so “The organizational culture concept reduces a complex process to an overly simple property of organizations that does not reflect reality” (p.67, his emphasis). 

Chapter 4 goes into organizational ideologies and paradigms, while Chapter 5 goes into the question of power in organizations, specifically power as a productive force. Chapter 6 addresses promoting organizations by understanding power. 

In Chapter 7, he advocates cultivating an anthropological mindset — that is, understanding identity in relation to self and other, which he says is central to any organizational research (p.140). And finally, in Chapter 8, he argues that an organization is not an object but a process (p.144); good organizational paradigms show awareness of the larger cultural contexts in which they operate (p.154).

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It’s written accessibly, bluntly (of course), and with a deep anthropological understanding of organizations. If you’re interested in how organizations operate, but haven’t been able to use more precise language than “corporate culture,” I highly recommend it. 

Reading :: Listening to Beauty

 Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound

By Megan Poole

We hired Megan in my department a couple of years ago, and I’m really happy we did. This year, she published this book on beauty in science — specifically, how “encounters with beauty advance scientific discovery,” as the back of the book puts it. 

Megan takes deep dives into different cases via interviews and experiences. In Chapter 2, she interviews Katy Payne about her discovery that humpback whales were singing. In Chapter 3, she takes up Payne’s discovery that elephants communicate infrasonically, interviewing the head scientists of the Elephant Listening Project. In Chapter 4, she interviews marine biologists Laura May-Collado and Michelle Fournet about how human noise (boat motors, offshore drilling) stresses marine mammals. 

Through each of these evocatively written case studies, she argues for the value of listening, and for attending to beauty, in the sciences. This is a welcome addition to the rhetoric-of-science literature. If you read this literature, or even if you just appreciate the beauty of nature, I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Deliberating Ghana

 Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy

By Stephen Kwame Dadugblor

It was my privilege to serve on Stephen Dadugblor’s dissertation committee and see the stellar dissertation he produced, a dissertation that focused on Ghana’s close 2012 election. This election’s results were disputed, and Dadugblor drew on a cultural rhetorics approach to examine some of the ways in which that dispute played out: In court cases, in forms that declared poll results, and in social media. The dispute wasn’t just about this election, it was about postcoloniality in Ghana.

That dissertation, heavily revised, became this book. I highly recommend it. Through concrete examinations of the dispute, Dadugblor explores the tensions of postcoloniality in Ghana, tensions that are played across genres, media, court proceedings, and other concrete encounters. But it is not just about Ghana, as Dadugblor concludes that Western democracies must also decolonialize (p.132). 

If you’re interested in cultural rhetorics, genre, decolonialization, or just good case studies of communication, I highly recommend this book. I’ll be returning to it as I continue to think through genres in terms of cultural heritage. 

Reading :: Academic and professional discourse genres in Spanish

 Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish

Edited by Giovanni Parodi

Parodi’s work was recently recommended to me by the editors of a collection for which I am coauthoring a chapter. I had been dimly aware of his work, but reading this 2010 book got me up to speed in a hurry. Although it’s technically a collection, each chapter was authored by Parodi either solo or with coauthors. Analyzing the PUCV-2006 corpus, a 60-million-word Spanish-language corpus, the authors perform a sociocognitive genre analysis with a multi-dimensional perspective: social, linguistic, and cognitive.

As a work of applied linguistics, this book is not in the genre tradition in which I operate. I’m in the genre-as-social-action tradition of Miller, Bazerman, Russell, and others, tracing back to Bakhtin and Voloshinov. In this tradition, we tend to see genre in sociological or sociocultural terms, as regularized actions in complex social systems, and thus we tend to examine genre use in situ through observations, or how people interpret genres via interviews. Parodi is in the sociocognitivist tradition, with Swales, Hyland, and Bhatia, examining genres as “communicative instruments” that ultimately are constructed in individuals’ minds (p.21) — “genre knowledge, which is both socially and individually constructed, is stored in the form of cognitive representations” (p.22). This tradition emphasizes corpus linguistics. 

From Parodi’s view, Bakhtin’s concept of genre is “exclusively contextualist” and yields “theoretical and methodological reductionism” (p.22). In contrast, he says, his sociocognitive approach takes account of the dialectical interrelationships among linguistic structures, cognitive representations, and psycholinguistic processing (p.24). 

With this background in mind, Parodi defines genre as “a constellation of potential discourse conventions, sustained by previous knowledge of the speakers/writers and listeners/readers (stored in the memory of each subject), based on contextual, social, linguistic, and cognitive possibilities and/or constraints. This sociocognitively constructed knowledge is operationally codified using highly dynamic mental representations. … genres are not static entities but are in fact highly dynamic …. These groups of linguistic-textual features may be identified by means of a corpus description” (p.25). He later summarizes: “Most essentially, genres are cognitive constructs” (p.35).

With this background, Parodi considers the corpus. To identify discourse genres, he and his collaborators use criteria and variables such as relation between participants, modalities, communicative macro-purpose, discourse organization mode, and context of circulation (p.42). These criteria and variables yield to genre classifications that are (for the lack of a better word) lumpier than what I would expect, with some exceedingly broad categories (“law,” “lecture,” “report”) next to narrower ones (“medical order,” “bidding specification”) (pp.47-57). Parodi ends up taxonomizing the genres in the corpus.

Overall, the results were really interesting, but they also reaffirmed to me that I am in the genre-as-social-action camp — I really want to see how people use, interpret, and live ecologically with the genres they produce and interpret. Still, Parodi’s approach unlocks other insights. If you’re interested in genre and/or corpus linguistics, certainly take a look.