“Organizational Culture Is Fundamentally About Symbolic Meaning and as Such Cannot Be Managed. Discuss”

“Organizational culture is fundamentally about symbolic meaning and as such cannot be managed. Discuss”

Organizational culture, also otherwise known as corporate culture, is most succinctly defined as the way an organization conducts its business and interacts with the other members of the business cycle, i.e. customers, employees and suppliers. It also shows, in what way there is freedom when making social, financial and management decisions, and finally it explains how flow of information through a business hierarchy occurs. Today I am planning to discuss to what extent organizational culture can be managed, and whether it has more of a symbolic meaning, ergo a theory, which occurs and grows organically in any healthy corporate environment.

The concept of culture as a whole has been studied fervently by researchers for decades. The two main ideas in terms of manageability of culture however are, that it can be managed, or that it cannot. Though not necessarily specifically related to culture in a corporation, yet highly relevant nonetheless, in Allaire’s and Mihaela’s (1984) research on organizational culture it is said that Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and ethnologist believed that “culture is made up of shared symbolic systems that are cumulative products of mind…unconscious processes of mind that underlie cultural manifestations” (Allaire et al., 1984: 198). Though many early anthropologists may have agreed with this, more modern ideas began evolving, which contradicted this notion, as best described by Geertz (1973), who thinks it should not be seen as a natural traditional process, “but as a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions… for the governing of behavior. (Geertz, 1973: 44). In my view this is a much more modern approach, which is more applicable to our more modern society, as an organizational culture is symbolic and traditional, yet at the same time this tradition can and must be influenced at times, with...