Studying Culture as an Integral Aggregate Variable: Organizational Culture and Innovation in a Group of Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

The appropriate level of analysis for the study of culture has been contested. There is a tradition of conceptualizing culture apart from the individuals who interact within a society. Alternately, there is a tradition of seeing culture only in the minds of individuals in society. The authors’ contention is that there is no choice here; both perspectives are valid and can be integrated within a single framework. Borrowing the concept of integral aggregate variable from epidemiology, they argue that there are both integral aggregate properties of culture and integral individual properties of culture. Both dimensions of culture can be examined using cultural consensus analysis. With data on organizational culture, the authors show how an investigator can move from one level of analysis to another. These results illustrate how integral aggregate properties of culture can be extracted from individual data using consensus analysis and be used as measures of aggregate units of analysis.

A new context for understanding civic responsibility: Relating Culture to Action at a Research University

“…This definition, broad like Swidler's, emphasizes that both individuals and groups (that is, institutions) have ideologies. Decker further supports the notion that in the research of organizations, it is futile to study the ideologies of individuals but not those of the organization, or vice versa, because individual and institutional ideologies influence one another (Jaskyte and Dressler, 2004). This notion is reflected in the research methodology for this study.…”

Cognitive Organization of Cultural Values: Cross-Cultural Analysis of Data from Sweden and the usa

“…This is not to say that values theory does not make a conceptual distinction between the social and the individual aspects in values -far from it. The discrepancy between individ ual and collective levels of cultural knowledge was inductively formulated by different researchers on several occasions in the past (see Inglehart (1985) on mass beliefs; Jaskyte and Dressier (2004) on organizational culture; Matsumoto (2003) on levels of culture; Chan (1998) and Klein et al (2001) on within-group agreement; D' Andrade (2008) on institutionalized values). One of the funda mental assumptions of consensus analysis model (Romney et al, 1986) -one of the leading techniques for measuring the degree of cultural sharingspecifically divorces knowledge of social aggregates from individual inform ants' competence, as correctly perceived by Dressier (2009: 92).…”

Cultura da Inovação: Um Ensaio Teórico sobre Conceitos e Definições Teóricas

“…Seguindo os conceitos oriundos da epidemiologia, é proposto de duas variáveis distintas a primeira é uma variável individual integral, na qual refere-se sobre às propriedades dos seres humanos e a segunda apresenta-se como uma variável integral na qual agrega a descrição das propriedades existente em grupos de seres humanos. (JASKYTE;DRESSLER;2004).…”