Organizational Culture

How do people come together and do things? It's too rich an area to be contained by any one idea. You need a gene pool of different ideas to explain how that happens and that's what the theory of organizational culture is. Culture is a condition, contained within people, yet bigger than than individuals. But also not in a systemic manner. It's how organizations learn new things but retain old things. It's also this concept that leads directly to designing organizations.

Edgar Schein ("Defining Organizational Culture") posits that culture is something used to give structural stability through repeating patterns that organizations have in order to achieve things over a sustained period of time. In "Culture and Organizational Learning," Scott Cook and Dvora Yanow examine how organizations, not individuals, learn. Or, in other words, how an organization constitutes and reconstitutes itself. For them, it's about the interaction of people with their things. Culture is an environment--an interactive environment. The artifacts of an organization are transmitters of meanings that are shared between people. The learning is about the making of things. Which brings us to Design.

Designers make stuff. We design the things that people live with: objects, information and how it's shared, activities, processes. The more subtle and rich we make things, the more we can affect people and thus the culture of organizations.

Originally posted on Tuesday, March 1, 2005

 
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O Danny Boy is About Me, Dan Saffer, and has my Portfolio, Resumé, Blog, and some Extras. It also has the blog I kept of my graduate studies and ways to Contact Me.