Cultural Approach to Organizations

Communication Theory and Research                                                            
                                                                               Instructor: Michal Chmielecki, PhD
                                                                               Clark University, Campus Poland

Justyna Kulinska
Michał Paszkowski
Adil Nasrawi
Szymon Szczepanski
Przemysław Arabski

Cultural Approach to Organizations of Clifford Geertz and Michael Pacanowsky
(Chapter 20,  E. Griffin, A first look)

      Considering Geertz and Pacanowsky Cultural Approach to Organizations we should not forget about wider context and background of this theory. According to socio–cultural tradition, this approach would be an alternative to the classical management theory and traditional approach to management in overall. In Images of Organizations, professor Gareth Morgan (York University, Toronto) uses a metaphor of machine to emphasize the similarities between the way managers traditionally think about organizations (focused mostly on productivity, precision and efficiency) and the way well-designed mechanical device is smoothly running. In the Mechanistic Approach the role of employees is reduced to a role of components of vast machine. Figure 1 shows some important elements of Morgan’s theory.
      Geertz’s and Pacanowsky’s theory rejects this mechanistic parallels and considers bureaucratic organizations approach as an outmoded (the same as Critical Theory of Communication in Organizations of Stanley Deetz). In contrary to the mechanistic model, this theory is based on image of organization which anticipates shared meanings that are specific and unique for each particular organization.

[pic 1]Figure 1. Important elements of Gareth Morgan’s approach (Images of Organization, 1986)

        Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz has focused his research on Third World cultures.  He came to a conclusion that culture should be considered as a webs of significance, systems of shared understanding and shared sensemaking.  His ethnographic model has been applied by Michael Pacanowsky to organizations environment. Author of this application claims that communication creates and constitutes the reality. In accordance with Geertz’s symbolic model he considers culture as more that single variable in organization: culture is not something an organization has, a culture is something an organization is . If we want to narrow the area of our interests to culture as a metaphor of organizational life, in relation to corporate culture – we can speak about meanings such as surrounding environment that constrains a company’s freedom of action or an image, character or climate controlled by a corporation. Accordingly, in essential part the analysis of Cultural approach to Organizations we will introduce a few examples related with corporate culture. It is worth to highlight that the approach of Michael Pacanowsky as an ethnographer, stays in the opposite to behavioral method of conducting research. Ethnographers are more interested in the significance of behavior than in statistical analysis – as the behaviorists do. Pacanowsky even warns that statistical analysis and classification across organizations yields superficial results. Therefore, we would like to proceed to the presentation and analysis some cases corresponding to the organizational and corporate field in details.