Organizational Culture - Critical Views

Critical Views

Criticism of the usage of the term by managers began already in its emergence in the early 80s. Most of the criticism comes from the writers in critical management studies who for example express skepticism about the functionalist and unitarist views about culture that are put forward by mainstream management writers. They stress the ways in which these cultural assumptions can stifle dissent management and reproduce propaganda and ideology. They suggest that organizations do not have a single culture and cultural engineering may not reflect the interests of all stakeholders within an organization.

Parker (2000) has suggested that many of the assumptions of those putting forward theories of organizational culture are not new. They reflect a long-standing tension between cultural and structural (or informal and formal) versions of what organizations are. Further, it is reasonable to suggest that complex organizations might have many cultures, and that such sub-cultures might overlap and contradict each other. The neat typologies of cultural forms found in textbooks rarely acknowledge such complexities, or the various economic contradictions that exist in capitalist organizations.

Among the strongest and widely recognized writers on corporate culture with a long list of articles on leadership, culture, gender and their intersection is Linda Smircich, as a part of the of critical management studies, she criticises theories that attempt to categorize or 'pigeonhole' organizational culture. She uses the metaphor of a plant root to represent culture, describing that it drives organizations rather than vice versa. Organizations are the product of organizational culture, we are unaware of how it shapes behavior and interaction (also recognized through Scheins (2002) underlying assumptions) and so how can we categorize it and define what it is?