Interpreting the Impact of Culture on Structure

Abstract

Research in multinational organizational structures has traditionally used either a rational, conscious perspective in which decision makers, through a single-loop change process, strategically choose to interpret the environmental culture to shape the organization's structure or a nationalistic view, in which through a double-loop change process, organizational members of one culture impose their favored structures on organizational members of a different culture. This article considers a third perspective, one in which organizational culture and structure are socially constructed phenomena. Through a case study of a multinational office staffed by members of two distinct national cultures (Japanese and American), this research demonstrates how cultures and structures can be simultaneously created through single-, double-, and triple-loop change processes. These processes can lead to a third-order level of change. Ideas for "actionizing" this concept are discussed.

Culturally diverse collaborations: a focus on communication and shared understanding

“…So for example, individuals talk about organizational cultures being more or less conducive to collaborative working and national cultures being too laid-back to foster businesslike attitudes. In encountering differences, therefore, partners may conceive of one culture as superior to another or seek to impose a specific culture over the collaboration (Salk and Shenkar, 2001;Sheer and Chen, 2003;Walsh, 2004).…”

Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence

“…Working within the fields of social epistemology and epistemologies of ignorance (e.g., Alcoff and Potter 1992, Anzaldúa 1999, Code 1995, 2008Collins 2000;Fricker 2007;Medina 2012;Mignolo 2007Mignolo , 2009Mills 1999;Pohlhaus 2011;Sullivan and Tuana 2007), Dotson sets out to conceptualize epistemic oppression, which she defines as persistent and unwarranted epistemic exclusions that hinder subjects' ability to contribute to knowledge production (2014,115). In the course of her analysis, she creatively appropriates an "orders of change" model of organizational change from the cognitive behavioral science of organizational development (Bartunek and Moch 1987;Walsh 2004) in order to theorize the magnitude of the epistemic shifts required to motivate different kinds of social change-from organizational and institutional change to structural sociopolitical change. Dotson analyzes the specifically epistemic exclusions that hinder subjects' ability to engage in social change by infringing on their capacity to participate in the requisite processes of imagining uncharted possibilities, producing new knowledge, revising existing shared epistemic resources, and (in some cases) detecting and transforming the limits of the very epistemological systems or instituted social imaginaries within which their shared epistemic resources are situated.…”

“…It is typically a response to discovering that the shared epistemic resources of an organization are themselves insufficient in some way given the overarching goals of the organization. Second-order change involves both single-and double-loop processes in which individuals "hold their governing and often unconscious values open for examination" and shift the conceptual, habitual, and normative constructs and processes upon which they rely in directing, evaluating, and making sense of their actions (Walsh 2004). Secondorder change results when individuals shift their behaviors to reflect these altered schemas.…”

Declared versus actual organizational culture as indicated by an organization's performance appraisal

“…a second-order level of change (Walsh 2004). That is, individuals engage in conversation whereby they hold their governing values open for conscious modifications and creating new frameworks of operating which guide organizational members' behaviors (Bartunek and Moch 1987), namely breaking out organization-wide norms (theories of action) by exploring qualitatively different ways of thinking and doing things (Argyris and Schön 1996).…”