Despite the ubiquity of the term organisational culture in both popular and scholarly management literature, it remains an ambiguous concept, whose practical application is recognised as being far from universally successful. Models which seem to be preferred by practitioners are often criticised as being static or mechanistic, while more dynamic scholarly approaches tend to discount the possibility of deliberately influencing organisations at the cultural level. This dissertation, instead of focussing on culture as some sort of objective or unchanging attribute of an organisation, treats it as a phenomenon emerging from social interaction and individual sense-making. It draws on, and extends, George Kellys Personal Construct Psychology to build a framework for understanding the production of meaning by individuals in their social context, and how this contributes to the establishment of the collective boundaries between which cultural effects are observed. This framework is applied to the case of a business school attached to a large university, which is first absorbed into its Commerce Faculty, and then dissolved into a new Department, as the overall university structure is modified. Grounded Theory methodology is used to develop an approach to the description of the cultural interaction and changes that occur, and to generate theory that goes some way to explaining how and why they do. The theory gives insight into how latent cultural distinctions become, or are made, salient and the different means by which divisions may be resolved or superseded, sometimes resulting in conflict. Implications are explored for the management of organisations undergoing change, particularly where this involves merging or restructuring organisational units, and for the training and development of managers who are to be involved in such activities.
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At a theoretical level, building on a constructivist and processual ontological base, the dissertation makes contributions to the understanding of behaviour in organisations and draws on pragmatic epistemologies such as those advanced by George Herbert Mead. It brings concepts from psychology, sociology and management disciplines to bear on the problem of cultural interaction, and suggests that integrating them in this way may enhance their value in this context.
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By focussing on culture as a phenomenon produced at the interface of collective constructions, the dissertation proposes that it be viewed as fundamentally dynamic once eloquently described as multiple cross-cutting contexts but, nevertheless, explains how it may be recognised more through its apparent intractability than its fluidity. Whilst rejecting managerialist approaches which would suggest that culture and, through it, people, can be manipulated at will to reliably produce desired effects, the dissertation suggests ways in which insight into cultural interactions might be generated for those who are participating in them, and options developed to influence these interactions that might otherwise not have been available. It therefore has potentially valuable implications for management practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216857 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Britton, Garth Murray, garth.britton@netspeed.com.au |
| Publisher | The Australian National University. College of Business and Economics |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.anu.edu.au/legal/copyrit.html), Copyright Garth Murray Britton |
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