Cultural Integration and Differentiation in Groups and Organizations
Experimental and field research has demonstrated a pervasive tendency toward pairwise conformity among individuals connected by positive social ties, and work using formal models has shown that opinions on connected influence networks should thus converge
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Cultural Integration and Differentiation in Groups and Organizations Michael Mäs, Andreas Flache, and James A. Kitts
5.1 Introduction Extensive research has documented the importance of organizational culture, but we are only beginning to understand the processes by which organizational cultures emerge, persist, and sometimes change or split into subcultures. Organizational cultures often prove to be remarkably stable, despite membership turnover, change of leaders, shifting social networks, or disruptive external forces. Enriching our understanding of the basic dynamics of organizational culture will foster theoretical advances with important practical implications, especially in preparing for challenges such as organizational change, growth, or merger. To provide a rigorous microfoundation, we focus here on the dynamics of cultural influence in a simple, stylized model that allows us to generate testable predictions about the conditions of cultural consensus, cultural diversity, and polarization of cultures in organizations. Our analyses focus on the effects of “social differentiation”, the tendency of individuals to adjust their opinions and values in order to increase differences to others. Social differentiation appears to be a critical assumption in models that seek to explain cultural diversity and has been supported by empirical research. However, we show that existing models are based on two different conceptualizations of social differentiation. Using computational M. Mäs () Chair of Sociology, in Particular of Modeling and Simulation, ETH Zürich, Clausiussstrasse 50, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] A. Flache Department of Sociology/ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands J.A. Kitts Computational Social Science Institute, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, 200 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003-9277, USA V. Dignum and F. Dignum (eds.), Perspectives on Culture and Agent-based Simulations, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01952-9__5, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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experiments, we demonstrate that these conceptualizations imply critically different patterns of polarization, radicalization, and factionalism. In addition, they generate cultural diversity under different initial conditions. Most relevant research has employed formal theory to account for the emergence and persistence of cultural groups, showing how a population of agents with arbitrary opinions and social relations may over time develop a coherent collective culture. This work has overwhelmingly built on one of the starkest regularities in the social world: the tendency of social ties to connect individuals who are similar in attributes, attitudes, or behaviors. This observed lawlike regularity of differential attraction or homophily has inspired prominent “first principles” for models of local cultural emergence. First is the tendency for actors to build positive ties to interaction partners
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