From spring to winter: a pathology of culture management

Roberts, Ashley James Byron 2014. From spring to winter: a pathology of culture management. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The concept of organizational culture has been an enduring managerial fad, with more recent studies highlighting the benefits of fun workplace cultures. This thesis presents the findings from a longitudinal ethnographic study of the I.T organization, WebCo; an organization that emphasizes its unitary culture as the central driver of its success. The author conducted two separate periods of ethnographic research and interviews in order to understand the managerial attempts at sustaining WebCo’s strong organizational culture that exhibited many elements of fun. The dynamics between employees and the on-going managerial attempts at sustaining normative forms of control are used to explore the manageability of organizational culture debate. Furthermore, this thesis comprehensively analyzes the interrelationship between organizational culture and structure. Through the longitudinal research design, this study explores the use of a range of introduced structural practices in order to sustain the organizational culture through a period of rapid growth in organizational members. The results of this study contradict any notion of unitary culture and indicate major fractures between different sub-cultures located within WebCo. The highlighted complexity of social relationships critiques the dominance of functional literature in the area of organizational culture and attention is drawn to the knowledgeable employees and their agentic power in circumventing normative forms of control. A further finding of this study is that the management of culture can be effective, but only when supported with other aspects of ‘good work’. The study concludes therefore, by noting how organizational culture can be managed, yet not as a distinct and separate activity. iii

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2016 23:53
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/70425

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