The key to a market-oriented culture?
355Given such goals the audience of this paper is marketing academics and executives as well as those researchers who are interested in the interface between organizational behaviour and marketing.So, what is organizational culture? Cultural theorists propose and develop multiple perspectives of organizational culture, the diversity derived from discrepancies in the assumptions which researchers make about both "organization" and "culture" (Martin, 1992;Smircich, 1983). Smircich (1983, pp. 343; 347) examines the intersection of organizational culture and organizational theory and contends that researchers in the area can be divided along two dimensions; those which view culture as a "root metaphor" and those which emphasise culture as a "variable" of analysis. Briefly, researchers who view culture as a variable either present culture as an independent variable which is imported into the organization or as an internal variable which is created and maintained by the organization. Culture viewed as a root metaphor, presents organizational culture as either generated by cognitions, constituted of symbols or as an expression of unconscious processes (respectively being cognitive, symbolic and psychodynamic perspectives of organizational culture). The framework developed by Smircich (1983) is applied to research in marketing in the seminal paper of Deshpande and Webster (1989). Utilising the fivefold classification of Smircich (1983), for each perspective, Deshpande and Webster (1989) develop implications for marketing research and methodology.This paper is a response to the suggestions of Deshpande and Webster's (1989, p. 13) that marketing researchers first, "delve into the rapidly developing literature on organizational culture" and second, "develop theoretical structures" to gain greater understanding of marketing phenomena. Overall, Deshpande and Webster (1989) echo the conclusion of Smircich (1983) that researchers use different themes and perspectives for, contrasting reasons, the theme being dependent on the particular needs of the researchers. Consequently, for the purposes of this paper, organizational culture is defined as a dynamic set of assumptions, values and artefacts whose shared meaning can be acquired by members of the organization. This definition is synthesised from the definitions of Schein (1985) which focuses on the components of culture, DiBella (1993) which concentrates on shared meaning, and Hatch (1993) which emphasises the processual dynamics between components of organizational culture. Hence, the presented definition illustrates three major ramifications of contemporary organizational culture theory -that culture is composed of distinguishable components (assumptions, values and artefacts), that components are dynamic (that is linked by two-way processes) and that culture is not a unitary concept. These implications are discussed in turn below.
EuropeanJournal of Marketing 32,3/4
356The components of culture Schein (1985) presents a view of culture o...