What happened is prologue: creative divergence and corporate culture fabrication

Abstract

Culture is an overarching phenomenon that helps individuals make sense of their world. However, culture is not an unchanging “given.” Members of a society actively create culture and, through their activities and interactions, sustain or change this culture. In an organizational setting, culture gives meaning to each person’s membership in the social stage that is the workplace. In the process of cultural creation and sustenance, the past is often used as a harbinger of things to come. How an organization effectively uses the past to shape its present culture is a major focus of this study. This article is an ethnographic study of how culture is fabricated, sustained, and renewed in a small advertising firm. The authors propose three interpretive themes – nightmare avoidance, “Richardism,” and dream building – and develop these into a framework using Drucker’s three entrepreneurial strategies. A fourth strategy, creative divergence, emerges from our in‐depth analysis of EMC.

Strategic management accounting and sense-making in a multinational company

“…It has been discussed in connection with strategic management (Steinthorsson and Söderholm, 2002), strategic change (Ericson, 2001;Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991;Gioia et al, 1994;Gioia and Thomas, 1996;Isabella, 1990), culture (Harris, 1994;McLarney and Chung, 2000), organisational disasters (Gephart, 1993;Weick, 1993) and various other management-related issues (Eisenhardt, 1989a;Hasan and Gould, 2001;Hill and Levenhagen, 1995;Daft and Weick, 1984).…”

A “Spiritual Turn” in Organizational Studies: Meaning Making or Meaningless?

“…Important starting points for empirical investigations are lived personal experiences in organizations that can be expressed in, for example, narratives of existential meaning making and in which programmatic or imposed meaning can be teased out from freely uncovered, subjective meaning. In other words, personal experiences and stories (Boje, 1991; 2001) in which not just content but process are revealed, not just the meaning uncovered but also the process of uncovering, within a research paradigm that is unobtrusive enough to allow for thick descriptions of lived experiences and the social construction of meaning making (Cunliffe, 2002;McLarney and Chung, 2000).…”

“…To uncover meaning in organizations, it may be necessary to confront the futility of meaning making that seeks to prescribe what is meaningful for another as a meaningless task in the existential sense and move beyond programmatic meaning making in organizations (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992). Programmatic meaning making is commonly undertaken as a central activity of charismatic leadership (Sosik, 2000) and by managers engaging in sense making (Du Toit, 2003;Weick, 1995), symbolic activities and interpretive decision-making (pfeffer, 1981;Sharon, 1994), the shaping of corporate culture (McLarney and Chung, 2000) and meaning making as a means for socializing members into such a culture (Gundry and Rousseau, 1994) as well as the meaning making during key organizational events such as, for example, downsizing (Darling and Nurmi, 1995) or crisis management (pauchant et al, 1996). It may be all the more important to discern when programmatic meaning making may be used to support legitimate organizational outcomes, versus when it interferes with existential and spiritual meaning making.…”

Heroic medicine and business downsizing: management’s dark ages

“…In an ethnographic study of an entrepreneurial advertising firm in Canada, McLarney and Chung (2000) painted a broad description of a smaller firm that was undergoing cultural transformation, rising from the ashes of a best-forgotten past. The company was guided by the entrepreneur's high energy/high stress devotion, which the people referred to as getting``zooed'' a lot.…”

“…She called it``Richardism''. Richard was seen by many of the staff as``frenetic and disorganized'' (the essence of Richardism), but the untold frustrations caused by these attributes notwithstanding, McLarney and Chung (2000) noted that these aspects of`R ichardism'' may have created the ambiguity and complexity that Miller (1993) encourages as ways to avoid routinization and simplicity. If Richard was zealous about the company and its business, he was equally passionate about what the company stood for ± its core values.…”