Organisational Culture

Organisational Change?

Peter Elsmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351738521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2001. When organizational change occurs, members of the organization can feel insecure in the face of a seemingly uncertain future. This work investigates the links between organizational culture and organizational change by looking at two businesses that have been privatized - British Gas and British Telecom - and the processes surrounding the ways these organizations changed in the mid 1990s. It includes interviews with middle-ranking and senior officals, illustrating that anguish is experienced not only by those on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder.

1	A General Introduction

The Focus of the Study

This work has a clear objective: it seeks to examine and understand the organisational cultures of two large organisations. Coupled with this, it attempts also to examine and understand processes surrounding the ways that these organisations changed in the middle of the decade of the 1990s. In so doing, the study raises a number of significant theoretical, methodological and operational dimensions that arise directly from the study’s empirical investigation. They are treated in more detail at appropriate places throughout the work as a whole, but their identification and exploration begins in this chapter. The cultural analysis of the two organisations is a worthwhile objective in the context of the middle and late 1990s in Great Britain, because the two organisations were formerly in the public sector. However, at the time of presentation of this study they have each been part of the private sector for more than ten years. In the early and middle years of the 1980s each organisation became subject to fundamental review as a consequence of the privatisation measures of the Conservative political administrations of that time. Each of these internal reviews, following on from the government statutory intervention, identified the need to render each organisation studied much more accountable to a number of constituencies (of course, a number of other organisations that were not part of this study faced a similar task as a consequence of similar privatisation measures). So, attempting to understand what happened as a result of the impact of enforced organisational change is judged to be an interesting task.

The first of these constituencies was to the new groups of shareholders (many of them with very modest holdings and who were, in many cases, equity holders for the first time). The second constituency was that of the service users. It was widely held at that time to be the case that consumers had rights, and here, for example, at the measurable level the quality or the value of the service and its delivery both to commercial and individual customers was regarded as problematic. At a more politically transparent level, issues around the relative levels of power and influence of the public sector trades unions of that time had also surfaced. A number of Conservative Secretaries of State for Trade identified over-powerful trades unions as a significant part of the explanation for relatively low standards of service to these corporate and domestic consumers. The third constituency to which attention seemed to be paid was the concept and practice of competition. Preceding notions about ‘public service’ may have had their origins in the post-war economic and social settlement. These ideas came to be regarded as old fashioned and inappropriate as a modus vivendi to underpin service delivery in the late century. Rather, the governments elected since 1979 were quick to replace such thinking with ideas of ‘the market’, ‘the marketplace’ and ‘competition’, and then attempt to realise or ground such aspirations by legislative intervention in the constitutions of what then comprised the public sector. In some cases where such economic and social phenomena as these were not easily observable, each was artificially created. However, where even a modest level of competition was not easy to fabricate, then, as a temporary measure, the office of ‘the Regulator’ was created to ensure that organisations that were monopolies or virtually monopolies would not be able to take undue advantage of their trading position. Subsequent reported comments about the Regulator contained in this work as interview data need to be understood within a context where this office was manufactured in lieu of a similar sized competitor.

One other highly noticeable element of the spirit of the 1980s in this respect was the view promulgated by successive governments of the period that, in words attributed to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, ‘there was no alternative’. What amounted to a battle cry from the political right of that time might have referred to the power of government to decide issues, or the perceived failings of public sector institutions, dependent upon usage and context. If, however, the nostrum is taken at its face value, then it seems reasonable to ask about its consequences. Hence, another key strand of this study examines the impact on organisational members of the initiation of widespread changes to the two existing organisational cultures. Such changes may have been initiated by organisational senior managers and/or other equity holders (including institutions) in the organisations, or ‘businesses’, as they eventually came to be understood. The study is not about either ‘leadership’ or ‘leadership styles’. Such an individualistic focus would endanger full recognition of the group and processual elements of organisational life. Explicitly, such a concentration would move uncomfortably close to a view of organisational power relations which identifies individuals as solely responsible for outcomes.

The Justification For the Study

The related purpose of the balance of this chapter is to open up the significant theoretical, methodological and operational dimensions of the above issues, as mentioned in the opening lines of this study. To achieve this will require a reflection upon the nature of the term ‘organisational culture’ itself, and this is attempted shortly. It will be the first of a number of times that the concept will be addressed throughout this study. In this first chapter, the objective of the addressal is to consider the notion in a general way and so to use the idea as an organising proposition that will help to identify other, key, propositions in the study. Hence, a reading of some of the available scholarly literature in the interrelated fields of organisational culture and organisational change is an early area of interest for the study. In the next chapter there is an account of the methodology, but also contained within it is a second consideration of the concept of organisational culture. The purpose of that is to turn the phrase from a notion into one that can be measured or considered in a systematic way; it is operationalised. An overview of some of the relevant organisational culture literature is the subject matter for chapter three of this study. Hence, in the third chapter, the concept of organisational culture is considered again. There, the orientation is different again. It is to set out a broad understanding of the idea, but in the particular context of the theorising developed in this research. What follows in this chapter is an attempt to furnish a clear but general statement of some of the inadequacies and/or shortcomings of the existing material in the areas of organisational culture and organisational change that has been produced from within the discipline of management studies.

Overall, the study as a whole is intended to be a significant contribution to knowledge on two interrelated fronts. Firstly, it contributes by identifying empirically and then analysing some key dimensions and outcomes of change processes set underway by senior managers in two large organisations. It has not been possible to trace any similar study of the two organisations concerned. Secondly, it goes on to demonstrate and apply a relatively new method of data analysis through the use of an information and communication technology package generated as a means of helping to analyse the data developed by such empiricism. The package attempts to make sense of qualitative data through a logic not normally associated with qualitative research. Similarly, then, such an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) approach is believed never to have been attempted before in respect of the analysis of ‘soft’ data from the organisations studied as a pair.

The genesis of the project was in its author’s own experiences of organisational/workplace cultural change, as a manager approximately half way up the organisational hierarchy in one branch of the public services, in two sequential employments in two separate locations. Sometimes these workplace organisational changes could be judged to be effective by a number of performance measures, and at other times other changes could be judged to be ineffective using the same or similar performance measures. On further occasions still, it was possible to perceive that organisational effectiveness had simultaneously seemed to improve and deteriorate: some indicators suggested effective change had occurred and others the opposite. In every effective case, personal experience appeared to suggest that it was the strategies with which the leaders led, and the areas where they directed their energies, that appeared to make a significant difference in terms of the quality and consistency of the outcomes. However, this study is not directed towards an understanding of leadership per se, rather a main concern of the work is to make sense of the impact of some of the strategies and behaviours exercised by organisational leaders on organisation members. The central argument of this research is that managers and organisational consultants need to recognise the all pervasive power and influence of an organisation’s culture (as understood in the subsequent discussions of the meaning of the notion). There is no attempt to reify here; the central argument proposes that the deeply held attitudes, values and beliefs of organisation members have produced unintended consequences when such people are confronted with ‘top-down’ attempts to change the organisational status quo through the manipulation of an organisation’s culture. Unless this recognition of complexity that may border on perversity in terms of members’ responses is achieved, then strategies aimed at delivering organisational change to the constituencies identified in the first paragraphs of this chapter will not be successful. The whole issue of the nature and measurement of the cultural changes that senior organisational managers set in train is also, of course, another significant element of the overall study and it is properly considered both methodologically and theoretically in the next two chapters.

To make sense of the notion of organisational culture in an effective (and possibly even pragmatically useful) way, there seem to be at least two sets of problems. Firstly, there is the over-arching difficulty of generating an adequate understanding of the many speculations, hypotheses and observations that presently exist in the academic literature. Secondly, these diverse views of culture demand a new and more adequate analysis of them in the contemporary context of the empirically derived evidence generated from contemporary fieldwork. There is a long tradition of studying organisational cultures empirically and theoretically, each by various means. A significant amount of this literature originates outside of Britain, but there is also much written from within a British perspective. Collectively, and at the macro level of analysis, it amounts to an instrument to help understand British organisational life. However, at the more micro end of the research continuum, there remains a need to provide a contribution to the increasing volume of evidence generated from British cultural contexts that is both empirical and critical. So much of the literature identified both explicitly and more tacitly in the forthcoming literature search integral to this study comes from a deeply managerialist intellectual position, and in so doing seems to miss addressing simple but significant questions. One such question is: ‘who benefits from organisational cultural change?’ Paradoxically, major assistance for this aim was developed in the USA over thirty years ago. Garfinkel (1967) decided to attempt to disrupt the social order of the world of the taken-for-granted in order to render visible the previously invisible. His study, from a previous generation ago, allows this work to identify as crucial the role of organisational leaders in general and in particular the ways that their decisions are interpreted and implemented. Even though his fieldwork was derived from family and education networks in the USA, it is nevertheless a methodological approach that is attractive in other empirical contexts. Through developing an insight into how different activities of different managements facilitate and enable cultural change (or the opposite of these), it will still be possible to use Garfinkelian logic. He advocated that the best way to make sense of a status quo was to disrupt it. Through this cleavage of the social ‘terrain’ he argued that the processes would be visible by which social actors repaired fractures in the sets of rules, routines and taken-for-granted assumptions which guided social and organisational behaviour and this very visibility would also make meanings more transparent. The methodological orientation of this study is sympathetic to contemporaneous work by Berger and Luckmann (1966). They contributed to this elaboration of a new theoretical, and hence also methodological, paradigm. Both of these important works have a debt to the seminal work of Schutz (1932) who developed ideas around phenomenology in the inter-war period, and who was himself influenced by scholars such as Husserl (1931). All this thinking pointed to the way that members of social institutions actively collaborated in producing a version of social reality which, for its producers, was perceived as real and hence was real in its consequences. The supporting methodology of this study is largely sympathetic to this theoretical orientation. It is sensitive to individual differences between people, organisations and groups in those organisations. The methodology largely rejects the logic of positivism and a fuller account of methodology appears elsewhere in the next chapter.

A General Understanding of the Concept of Organisational Culture

An initial examination of the concept of organisational culture seems an appropriate next step. In the existing scholarly literature, while the term ‘organisational culture’ increasingly has become a dominant construct, it is difficult to argue convincingly that the meaning of the phenomenon is widely agreed and understood. It is more difficult to propose that it is uniformly handled, and impossible to assert that careful empiricism underpins the theorising in every case. No doubt as a result of such thinking, Pettigrew (1990) concludes:

The most serious cause for concern [in the following respect] is the lack of empirical study of organisation culture in the 1980s.

This work from the following decade is an attempt to deliver such empiricism. Hence, it is judged that this makes this study both intrinsically interesting and also a useful one in terms of assisting the advancement of knowledge about how organisations work. Indeed, the present decade of the 1990s has now generated many different responses to Pettigrew’s manifest anxiety, and some of these are considered in the literature overview chapter, chapter three of this study. This research aims to support the notion of organisational culture’s academic validity by delivering an empirical investigation of the culture of two large-scale organisations. In so doing, it may perhaps prepare the ground for a subsequent and even more comprehensive national and/or international analysis. One of the two organisational cultures was examined in the context of a recognition of its national character, the second was examined in its own, regional, context.

To make sense, then, of the complexity of the concept of organisation culture is a central aim and activity of the whole of this study. Reflecting the proposition that achieving this will require the full length of the study, the task is handled in the incremental way set out above rather than as a matter that may be dealt with as an initial consideration then dismissed, more or less summarily. So, Schein (1985) supports the view that ‘culture’ is manifested in three major ways - through the language forms of its users, through their social, economic, political and other behaviours, and through the artefacts they produce. By adopting Schein’s typologies of primary and secondary mechanisms, which enable leaders to create cultures, it becomes possible to examine the links between them. By ‘primary mechanisms’ Schein includes how leaders role model and coach; how they react to crises; how they allocate rewards including initial selection and subsequent promotion; and significantly, the matters to which they pay most attention. The exhortation adopted perhaps most notably by Peters and Waterman (1982) (viz., that managers need to adopt the newer orientation of ‘coach, cheerleader and developer of product champions’) seems to derive from Schein’s perspective. Schein’s ‘secondary mechanisms’ concern how organisations are structured; how the physical reality of both building/artefacts and the organisational environment is handled; the impact - if any - of formally promulgated policy statements; and the impact - again if any - of stories and legends about the organisation upon the organisation. These are promising constructs insofar as they provide a helpful way of explaining and ordering the mass of acculturated behaviour which is such a significant part of the highly routinised everyday life of the members of the organisations. Some of these notions are a feature of latter parts of this study. In particular, some have been operationalised as interview questions, and chapter four of this study examines the responses to such questions whilst chapter five sets about analysing the replies.

Turning to the concept of organisational culture, its origins are unclear because of the multiplicity of meanings with which the concept is presently imbued. It is likely that its origin is set in the cultural anthropology of North America, in particular from the work of Kluckhohn, and her associates (see, especially Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), or her collaboration (1961) with Strodbeck). This lack of definitional clarity is clearly reflected in the development of the notion provided in Brown (1995). He identifies Jacques (1951) as the first user of the term and a full account of its development is reserved for chapter three of this study, the literature search proper. For the present purposes, there can be little controversy in identifying the roots of the idea of ‘culture’ from a social scientific perspective. The greater part of the current spread of meanings though is to be found in more recent scholarship. In particular, the publication by Deal and Kennedy (1982) seems to have been influential in setting the term in one of its more enduring meanings in Britain. Since then, Schein (1985, also 1990, 1992, and 1994) has developed the term in both a theoretical and empirical fashion in the North American context. Contemporaneously Hofstede (1984, 1988, 1992) has examined the notion quantitatively in the context of national cultures on the mainland of Europe and elsewhere.

It is necessary to make sense of the usage of the idea in this study, recognising that such usage is in the context of two of the large-scale players in the telecommunications and energy industries. The organisations studied were British Telecommunications pic and British Gas (Eastern Region) pic. Consequently, it is to the history of the usage of the concept that we must now turn, recognising that a review of its academic development is in the province of the literature search chapter.

The confused applications and meanings of the term ‘organisational culture’ is a significant issue. These vary along a continuum, and at one pole a definition might be ‘those patterns of behaviour, which some or all organisation members have in common’. This loose and social scientific insight contrasts with the opposite pole, that which has been developed and elaborated by (frequently also expensively funded by) attempts by senior managers to set not only the organisational agenda for action, but also its modus operandi. Perhaps an illustration of the latter is the number of possibly apocryphal accounts of the ‘Bill and Dave way’ to deliver a task within the (William) Hewlett and (David) Packard Corporation. Referencing such observations is made more difficult because they are relatively rarely written down in conventional, academic ways. The most important aspect of this part of this discussion, then, is the recognition that high volumes of reports about such matters is of itself interesting, whether or not such reportage is verifiably accurate beyond doubt. There are clear differences, then, in the way that the concept has been handled - clearly demonstrated in the next chapter - and these originate in the differing parent social scientific perspectives from which they are initially generated; sociology, social psychology and anthropology. It is equally evident that they spring from a managerialist rhetoric which has overtones of a form of cultural imperialism, given the ‘top down’ emphasis of much of the current usage. This issue itself features later...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A General Introduction
• 2 The Penetration of Large-Scale Organisations
• 3 Some of the Wider Context
• 4 Penetrating Two Large-Scale Organisations
• 5 Presentation and Analysis of the Evidence
• 6 Empirical and Theoretical Conclusions and Management Recommendations
• 7 A Research Endpiece
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1 Graphics COPE Maps
• Appendix 2 Domain Analysis
• Index of Authors
• Index