Understanding Organization Through Culture and Structure

Relational and Other Lessons From the African American Organization

Anne Maydan Nicotera, Marcia J. Clinkscales, Felicia R. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135653040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Understanding Organization Through Culture and Structure: Relational and Other Lessons From the African American Organization presents an innovative view of organizations and the communication processes that constitute them. Arguing that human beings are communicatively embedded in their cultures, Anne Maydan Nicotera and Marcia J. Clinkscales, working with Felicia R. Walker, examine issues concerning task and relational orientations and the ways they and other cultural dimensions connect with organizational structure and function for predominantly African American organizations. Utilizing the results of their own research on organizations, they develop a set of humanistically-based models that illustrate how hidden cultural processes suffuse organizational life and are manifest through communication. Emphasizing the development of alternative theories and models of organizing which are rooted in African-American culture, such as team-based versus hierarchy-based interactions, this book explores such organizational functions as leadership and management, power, authority and control, communication and interpersonal dynamics, and cultural identity and human development. Applying their findings in a broader analysis of contemporary practices in organizational restructuring, the authors present research that serves as the foundation for generating several emergent models with significant implications for organizational systems. Understanding Organization Through Culture and Structure stimulates and inspires current researchers of organizational communication, and is certain to raise greater awareness of the operation of culture in organizing. The text is intended for scholars and students in organizational communication, management, organizational psychology, African studies, and related areas.

Chapter
1
Culture and Organizations

Organization and Culture

Two basic and complementary assumptions undergird this work. The first is that organizations are constituted by communication. The second is that culture, which is accomplished communicatively, suffuses organizations. Thanks to the ground-breaking work of Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo (1982, 1983), the field of communication widely recognizes the pervasiveness of culture in organizational life. Communication scholars are quick to point out that organizations are cultures, and thanks to the early influence of Karl Weick (1969, 1979, 1995), we have long been sensitive to their processual nature. Organizations, as entities, are also embedded in cultures, and “organizing” is a communication process. An “organization” in the static sense exists only as an abstraction and can be defined in a variety of ways, depending on one’s theoretic stance and the practical purpose at hand. Our understanding of organization as communication is grounded in a body of work that theorizes the process of the constitution of organization communicatively (most notably, Browning, 1992; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Before engaging in this literature, however, we must provide a context for the discussion. First, we must discuss culture; our assumptions about culture are central to our understanding of organization.

The co-operation of organization and culture is complex and rich. Through interaction processes, organizational members create and re-create unique organizational cultures; while, at the same time, organizational entities are embedded and saturated in a cultural milieu. Just as individual human organizational members are cultural members of their organizations, organizations are cultural members of the societies in which they are embedded. In a multicultural society, like the United States, organizational members bring a multitude of cultures with them in their constitution of organization, and the organizational entity is embedded in a multicultural environment. U.S. organizations are rich with a potential for the study of culture and communication that has not been realized by communication scholars.

Culture has been commonly defined by scholars in a variety of social disciplines by focusing on norms, mores, values, beliefs, customs, rituals, ceremonies, morals, attitudes, practices, and other such concepts. We contend that culture underlies these things and that values, norms, beliefs, practices, and other such constructs are the manifestations of culture, but they are not culture itself. Chen and Starosta (1998) define culture as “a negotiated set of shared symbolic systems that guide individuals’ behaviors and incline them to function as a group” (p. 26). This definition is an excellent start because it does not essentialize culture, ethnicity, or nationality, but rather identifies a common cognitive set from which persons draw at the individual and group levels.

Culture, at its deepest level, embodies the very way that an individual apprehends the world (through his or her learned symbolic system). Culture is not just the way a person perceives something, but the way a person perceives.

We are programmed by our culture to do what we do and to be what we are. In other words, culture is the software of the human mind that provides an operating environment for human behaviors. Although individual behaviors may be varied, all members within the same operating environment share important characteristics of the culture.

(Chen & Starosta, 1998, p. 25)

People socialized in different cultures perceive things differently because they perceive differently—following Chen and Starosta’s analogy, they are “programmed” on a different operating system. Because they perceive differently, they organize differently. Culture is reflected not simply in organizational behavior, but in organizational forms because culture drives the ways in which individuals interact to coordinate their actions. Culture drives individual cognition, which is intimately interrelated with social cognition. For example, the “quality circle” is a form of organization that blends quite naturally with Japanese culture. Culture drives the ways in which individuals apprehend the realities of their interactive functioning and thus drives the organizational structures they create and/or adopt. Culture drives the ways in which people arrange themselves structurally to accomplish the coordination necessary for organizing.

Theorizing Organization

The central argument for this book is that our theorizing, design, and practice in American organizational and institutional life has been culturally embedded in a Eurocentric understanding of social reality. The argument is not entirely new; feminist theorists have done a thorough job of deconstructing patriarchal features of organizing, such as objectivity, reductionism, and mind–body separation (even though much feminist theory maintains a Euro-centric bias). Although race/ethnicity and its associated organizational communication issues are becoming a concern to the field of communication, most treatments of the area focus on “diversity issues” in predominantly White organizations (Allen, 1995). Several difficulties that we seek to overcome are inherent in such an approach.

Discussions of culture and organization that reference ethnic or racial culture tend to devolve into discussions about diversity defined as group differences and based on demographic characteristics. However, if we take a deeper approach to culture, any organization with multiple national, ethnic, racial, or societal cultures influencing its design and operation must be defined as culturally diverse, even though its human membership may have relatively high demographic, or even cultural, homogeneity. To understand cultural diversity beyond the demographic level, we must create a deeper definition of diversity that focuses not on demographic categories, but on culture at its deepest level—the very structures and systems that drive human interaction. This requires a structurational framework (Giddens, 1979, 1984; Poole & McPhee, 1983; Poole, McPhee, & Seibold, 1982; Poole, Seibold, & McPhee, 1985, 1986; Seibold & Meyers, 1986). This framework is reviewed later in this chapter.

This research focuses on organizations whose membership is predominantly African-American. The field’s focus on organizations with predominantly European-descended memberships both stems from and entrenches an implicit and erroneous assumption that basic organizational processes are devoid of fundamental cultural underpinnings. Theories of organizational design are fundamentally European-based; their foundations are goals, values, and practices of European culture, such as materialism, individualism, competition, and vertical hierarchy. (These and other features of Eurocentric organizing are discussed later.) As such, the contemporary American organization is a European cultural construction. This cultural foundation remains invisible when both the management and the majority of organizational members are European-descended. The organizations from which data were gathered for this research are organized with a European-based structure; the fact that both the management and membership are predominantly African-descended allows cultural foundations to be problematized rather than glossed over. This is precisely why they were chosen for analysis. As a collection of individuals with a common base of shared symbolic systems from which to draw, these organizational memberships are fairly culturally homogenous. However, given the understanding of culture we promote here, the European culturally based design and structure of these organizations dispose us to identify them as culturally diverse. This definition of cultural diversity rests not on demographic or surface-level categories of human members, or even on characteristics of or differences between members at all. It rests, rather, upon the identification of multiple and diverse cultural symbol systems operating simultaneously in the structure and function of these organizations.

Organization as Communication

It is crucial to develop here a processual conceptualization of organization for this research—organization is constituted by communication, and so, the structure and function of any organizational entity are accomplished communicatively. Cynthia Stohl’s (1997) book, Organizational Communication: Connectedness in Action, was the first major work in the field of organizational communication to rest its treatment of organizational process on the assumption that organizations exist fundamentally as a set of connections among persons. The organizing process is a process of connection (Stohl, 1997), and organizations, as entities, result from connections between people. Communication is, of course, the means by which human beings achieve that connection.

Earlier, Larry Browning (1992) examined how lists and stories, both of which he carefully conceptualizes, are the major types of communication that structure organizations. Lists are conceptualized as technical communication, legitimized by their scientific root and presentation as a formula for action leading to controllable outcomes. As such, “the list represents standards, accountability, certainty, and reportability. Conversely, the story is romantic, humorous, conflicted, tragic, and most of all, dramatic” (pp. 281–282). Stories are conceptualized as “communications about personal experience told in everyday discourse” (p. 285). Stories are a narrative form of knowledge that is context-sensitive.

In a basic way, lists and stories can be seen to correspond, respectively, with formal and informal aspects of organization. Browning’s (1992) treatment of lists and stories is, however, far deeper and richer. He claims that all organizational communication is composed of these two types. He goes on to present two detailed case analyses that illustrate the interaction of lists and stories. In his conclusion, he suggests that the interaction of lists and stories corresponds with the interaction of, respectively, structure and system as put forth in structuration theory (examined in detailed below as the major theoretic foundation to the present work).

The contrasting qualities of lists and stories allow for an axiological focus on the central descriptive question of how individuals organize. . . . Lists lead to structure, and stories create variety. However, these data show a more complicated, embedded relationship between these two communicative types. Stories can operate to provide order. . . but in doing so they are transformed into Lyotard’s (1984) grand narrative, which is a list. Conversely, lists can enhance freedom, and discipline can increase play as it does for the child in the snow who is reminded to put her gloves on.

(pp. 298–299)

Whereas Stohl (1997) and Browning (1992) assume that organization is constituted communicatively and go on to illustrate that process, James Taylor and his associates (Cooren & Taylor, 1997; Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) provide thought-provoking in-depth analysis of the ontology of organization, directly theorizing the process. Taylor and his associates call into direct question the implicit assumption in most organizational communication research that organization can exist independently of communication. Indeed, they point out that organizational communication scholars have implicitly equated “organization” with formalization. It is this erroneous implicit assumption that has set the ground for implicit container metaphors of organization and for the treatment of communication as a variable. “We err in thinking of communication as a transparent window on organizations; the properties that we recognize as organizational are in the communicational lens, not in the object they are focused on” (Taylor et al., 1996, pp. 2–3, emphasis added). The theories of communication and organization outlined by Taylor et al. (1996) are more fully developed and expanded by Taylor and Van Every (2000). In part, the process described illustrates how the organization emerges in the communication. The process is circular and self-organizing. The basis of the theory is a dialectic of interpretation: “as people collectively produce an interpretation they leave their actions open to interpretation” (Taylor et al., 1996, p. 4). Communication is conceptualized according to its two central functions, to represent and to act.

Representation is accomplished through the production and comprehension of text; action is mediated by text, but only when the text has been submitted to an interpretation. The text is not the action, but merely its token. The action unfolds interactively in the context of a conversation. Communication thus has two modalities: text and conversation.

(Taylor et al., 1996, p. 6)

Interpretive activities constitute conversation; the subject matter and goal of interpretation are text. Conversation and text are multiply enfolded over each other, as conversations become the subject matter for more interpretation, and it is in this dialectic between conversation and text that organizing occurs. The essence of the theoretic move here is that organization is not an objective “thing.” “That (organization) must be born and recreated in the equivocal interpretations that are intrinsic to communication does not make it less real—just not ‘real’ in the material sense” (Taylor et al., 1996, p. 5). Thus, the theory of organization developed is essentially a discourse theory.

Taylor’s theories of communication and organization are necessarily embedded in narrative theory. Communication is seen as ongoing process of sensemaking. People collectively find themselves in particular circumstances and collectively find themselves affected by events. Through conversation, they interact to make sense of their existences. “Sensemaking, however, involves translating experience into language through the production of texts, spoken or written” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 58). The sequence of communication must always be seen as it occurs in the larger context of situated action; according to Taylor and Van Every (2000), this is the essence of a narrative approach. The organization emerges from communication only after the articulation that links the cognitive to the pragmatic is accomplished. “The forms of narrative, realized as the fundamental semantics in the ordinary language of people in interaction, serve to structure experience and provide the surface of emergence of organization” (p. 68). Organization emerges in communication. Communication is constrained by conversational contextual form as it is experienced by participants in an ongoing discourse-world. “The organization being generated in that discourse-world is only recognizable when it is itself translated into a text-world” (p. 104). Communication thus furnishes

both a site and a surface for the emergence of organization: a site, because whatever organization is, ontologically speaking, it is clear that it must be realized in the interactive arena of communication for it to take on a tangible existence, and a surface because, we claim, it is language that makes the agencies and objects of organization available to us for the knowing.

(p. 135)

Organization, then, emerges in the space between text and conversation; texts “reflexively map the organization. . . (and) constitute what makes the organization visible and tangible. . . . Yet the production of text is inherently a social event. . . so the production of a text-world is simultaneously the production of a discourse-world, realized in conversation” (p. 325). Because the process is self-reflexive, its production in discourse (conversation) continually renders the tangible organization (text) “obsolete in the very act of its own generation” (p. 325). Therein lies the perpetual organizational dance between stability and change, represented respectively by text and conversation.

Taylor and Van Every (2000) define an organization both as a society and as a form of life. “It (organization) is a structuring of the social and cultural world to produce an environment whose forms both express social life and create the context for it to thrive” (p. 324). They take what they term a “flatland view,” treating micro and macro distinctions as artificial and arbitrary because all organizational processes are interactive phenomena. The mapping (text) is social. Organization (society) is constituted by the field of boundaried discourse that is the conversation. The text (mapping) exteriorizes cognition so that organization exists in socially distributed cognition (following Weick & Roberts’, 1993, notion of collective mind). Finally, individual cognition is the interiorization of conversation. In short, where Weick, Giddens, and others explicate the social construction of reality, Taylor and Van Every (2000) explicate the construction of social reality. Mapping is the social construction; the map (text) is social reality; and these are mutually constituted through the conversation. They continue to build the theory to a rich consideration of organization as agent that thereby illustrates the tenuous distinction between “micro” and “macro” levels. However, the operation of organization as agent is far beyond the scope of this present work. Our focus is upon the human interactive (organizing) experience at the nexus of the interpenetration of cultural structures.

Communication, Cultural Processes, and the African-American Organization

To tap into these fundamental communicational organizing processes, this research focuses on communication problems as experienced by members of predominantly African-American organizations. Cultural processes remain invisible and taken-for-granted in the absence of effortful or problematic interaction. The taken-for-granted usually remains unremarked upon because it is unremarkable to the actors. Focusing on those interactions and communication issues and events that the organizational membership finds to be problematic, puzzling, and/or difficult therefore offers the most promising entry for an examination of deep cultural processes.

The processes that occur in predominantly African-American organizations with Eurocentric structures have been documented as a common set of patterns that constitute the unique phenomenon of the “enculturated organization” (Warfield-Coppock, 1995; this theory is discussed in detail in chaps. 3 and 4). We stand to learn much from these organizations about the ways in which culture, at the deep structural level, operates in organizations. To accomplish this, the analyses in chapters 2–5 are contextualized with historic and theoretic foundations that bring a precise problematization of the cultural bases of organizational structures. The traditional practice of studying “diverse others” in organizations with predominantly European-descended memberships casts those “others” as a single entity, implicitly defined by how they are different from the cultural majority—not by their own particular cultural realities and experiences (Chung, 1997; Cox, 1990, 1994).

Beyond organizational design, the communication field’s failure to recognize cultural foundations of organizing has led to the indiscriminant application of European-based theories of organizational communication analysis. Our criti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• List of tables
• List of Figures
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION
• 2. COMMUNICATION AND TWO PREDOMINANTLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS
• 3. AFRICAN-AMERICAN RULES AND RESOURCES
• 4. INTERPENETRATION OF CONTRADICTING STRUCTURES: THE DIVERGENT ORGANIZATION
• 5. THE DIVERGENT ORGANIZATION'S COMMUNICATIVE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
• 6. THEORETIC APPLICATIONS
• 7. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? CONCEPTUALIZING THE CONVERGENT ORGANIZATION
• EPILOGUE: SOME LESSONS LEARNED
• APPENDIX: Gender of Interviewees by Interview Number
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX