organizational culture

organizational culture The values, norms, and patterns of action that characterize social relationships within a formal organization. This concept came to the fore in a series of British and American management texts of the 1980s, which attempted to explain either (or sometimes both) the difficulties of Western businesses in coping with economic recession, and the challenge of the Japanese. Many of these texts— including best-selling accounts by William G. Ouchi (Theory Z, 1981)
, Thomas J. Peters and and Robert H. Waterman (In Search of Excellence, 1982)
, Walter Goldsmith and and David Clutterbuck (The Winning Streak, 1984)
, Richard Tanner Pascale and and Anthony G. Athos , The Art of Japanese Management, 1981)
, and Terence Deal and and Alan Kennedy (Corporate Cultures, 1988)
— simply reiterate the insights of the Human Relations perspective on industrial relations. ( Ouchi, for example, explicitly calls for ‘a redirection of attention to human relations in the corporate world’.) Deal and Kennedy, on the other hand, largely reiterate the analysis and conclusions reached earlier by Tom Burns and and G. M. Stalker (in The Management of Innovation, 1961)
, notably those regarding the workings of plural social systems within organizations, and the necessity of matching management systems to their economic and political environments. In short, this is an extensive and curiously influential concept and literature, given that it seems to be just so much rediscovering of some commonplace sociological wheels. See also CONTINGENCY THEORY.