Organizational Culture and Institutional Forces
This chapter reviews culture in organizations and the institutional theory. An overview and definitions on culture is described, followed by review on organizational culture dimensions. Managing organizational culture and its benefits are also discussed.
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Organizational Culture and Institutional Forces
4.1
Introduction
This chapter reviews culture in organizations and the institutional theory. An overview and definitions on culture is described, followed by review on organizational culture dimensions. Managing organizational culture and its benefits are also discussed. The second section discusses the institutional theory, including its definitions and the three pillars or forces of institutions.
4.2 4.2.1
Culture in Organization Culture Overview
The roots of cultural studies are from the science of anthropology and have impacts on the knowledge areas of the social and human sciences. In 1872, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) produced an inventory of cultural categories in the form of an anthropological field manual that listed 76 unordered culture topics. In 1938, a more comprehensive manual was published which was titled Outline of Cultural Materials that listed 79 major and 637 subdivisions of culture topics. Moreover, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, an anthropologist who worked with the BAAS, published a book named Anthropology which is still considered to be relevant in terms of its cultural concepts and theories. Up to today, enthusiastic debate has continued among anthropologists to evolve a universally acceptable definition of culture and its technical attributes (Coffey 2010). According to Coffey (2010), along with the importance of systems and contingency theory in relation to describing organizations, the following schools of thought also described the effect of these theories on the concept of organizational culture studies: © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 L.S.R. Supriadi, L. Sui Pheng, Business Continuity Management in Construction, Management in the Built Environment, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5487-7_4
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4 Organizational Culture and Institutional Forces
• Human relations This theory described that organizations existed to serve human needs by motivating individuals and developing group dynamics which made organizations more efficient. Research about values, beliefs and attitudes in individuals and groups had a great influence on understanding human relations in organizations, which also have impacts on the growing interest in organizational culture studies. • Power and politics This school of thought is influenced by Pfeffer (1981), Kanter (1983) and Mintzberg (1987) and associated with French and Raven (1959), Porter (1991) and Handy (1993). It proposes that organizations are complex coalitions of groups and subcultures with competing values and preferences. This view is in line with the culture view that organizations are irrational entities that achieve their goals through a mixture of compromise negotiation, conflict dynamics and influence of leaders and subordinates. The perspective on organizational culture itself has been developed by several scholars and will be described in the following sections.
4.2.2
Definitions of Culture
Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) defined culture as the collective programm
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