Corporate Cultures: Managing Values?

Abstract

In recent years, organzational culture has become one of the most popular subjects of management theory and practice.¹ According to Morgan (1986), understanding organizations as cultures has two particular strenghts: it focuses attention on the symbolic meaning, or mystique, of many of the ,most rational features of organizational life, and it demonstrates that organizations are based on systems of shared meanings and frameworks of interpretation that create and re-create these meanings. This approach has introduced a whole new language in organizational studies — symbols, meanings, interpretative frameworks, etc. — a language which, at least initially, does not address the issues one assumes should be addressed when studying organizations: performance, efficiency, effectiveness, and the like.