The authors suggest that the importance of the culture at large has not been adequately addressed in the literature on organizational culture. Technical rationality represents a central part of the culture at large in the modern age. The roots of technical rationality are traced to the beginning of this century, and it is suggested that technical rationality constitutes a powerful set of beliefs in the organizational world, called here the managerial metamyth. The Washington State Ferry System provides a case example in which the managerial metamyth became the overt content of the imposition of cultural elements on that organization. The authors argue the importance of attention to the culture at large for the study of organizations.
Since ancient times, literature has served as a medium for instructing youth in the manners and morals of society, and for instructing them on the major problems of adult life. The books young people read, therefore, often provide reflections of what society assumes to be valuable, and of the standards it holds.' Abstract A person's approach to organizational life is grounded in an elaborate and largely unarticulated meaning map, which provides tools for analysing situations, beliefs about how things ought to be done and rationales for those beliefs. This meaning map is socially constructed. We argue in this article that children's literature is a part of this process of social construction, and that these stories in the United States are reflective of one of the dominant strands of the U.S. national culture, namely, technical rationality. We analyse thematically a set of twenty-nine children's stories, and discuss the repeating themes which emerged from that analysis. The implications for the study of organizations are discussed.
Many of the meanings of organizational symbols, rituals, stories and roles are ultimately given by the larger social context in which all organizations operate, so to understand the symbolic properties of an organization fully it is important to look beyond any individual system. This paper examines a set of beliefs called the managerial metamyth, a portion of the belief system that underlies much organizational symbolic activity. Examples are given of the metamyth `s presence in the macroculture, in the academic subculture, and in the managerial subculture.
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