The Many Faces of Culture: Making Sense of 30 Years of Research on Culture in Organization Studies

Varieties of Transformational Solutions to Institutional Ethics Logic Conflicts

“…More broadly, we extend their insightful work by identifying four possible qualitative transformational change solutions. Our theorizing also underlines the idea that, in some cases, logics may operate like a set of flexible cultural ''tools'' (Swidler 1986(Swidler , 2001; see also Giorgi et al 2015;Thornton et al 2012) amenable to creating novel ethical solutions (Nielsen and Massa 2013), rather than serving as hard and fast rules impervious to change.…”

BeyondHomo Entrepreneurus: Judgment and the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship

“…Work in this tradition dates at least to Max Weber and his famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002[1905), in which he highlighted the role of religion and other important social and cultural shifts in facilitating entrepreneurship and economic change (Ruef and Lounsbury, 2007). These literatures include many notions of culture (see Giorgi et al, 2015 for a recent review), although all point to the importance of culture in entrepreneurship.…”

“…In their article, Lounsbury and Glynn (2001, p. 549) embrace Swidler (1986), defining culture as 'a flexible set of tools that can be actively and strategically created and deployed as actors struggle to make sense of the world.' More recently, as Gehman and Soublière (2017 : Table I) noted, there has been a shift toward a view of culture as a 'code of many colors,' one which is traceable in multiple registers such as values, stories, frames, toolkits, and categories (Giorgi et al, 2015). Moving beyond the TOCE's original focus on the process of meaning making, whereby entrepreneurs draw on institutional and resource capital to construct legitimating identity stories that culturally resonate with key resource-providers and other audiences (Dalpiaz et al, 2016;Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001;Martens et al, 2007;Rindova et al, 2011), recent studies have drawn attention to more varied processes related to entrepreneurial storytelling, identity, legitimation, and value creation.…”

“…Importantly, culture was theorized not only as a mechanism by which entrepreneurs achieved legitimacy (e.g., storytelling), but also as a context of resources (institutional and resource capital) that constituted the possibilities for communicative efforts aimed at identity construction and legitimacy attainment (i.e., what stories can and cannot be told). Looking ahead, the core insight from contemporary conceptualizations of culture as a set of resources -a toolkit that can be agentically drawn upon by skilled actors (e.g., Giorgi et al, 2015;Lounsbury and Glynn, 2018;Swidler, 1986;Überbacher et al, 2015) -has yet to be taken seriously in economic analyses (but see Shiller, 2017 for a recent move in this direction). Accordingly, in this article, we take seriously this formulation of culture in entrepreneurial activities, develop it further, and use it as a jumping-off point for broadening the research agenda on entrepreneurship.…”

Professional Development for Institutional Research

“…The work of Giorgi, Lockwood & Glynn (2015) on organisational culture can be used to understand organisational culture and the challenges described above, and can be used to address some of the concerns raised above concerning cultural aspects.…”