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.