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Trethewey, A 1997. ‘Organizational Culture’ in Peggy Y. Byers Ed., Organizational Communication, Boston: Allyn and Bacon pp203-234

She approaches the concept of organisational culture from three perspectives:

• culture as a variable (Functionalist; 1940s to mid 1980s)
• culture as shared symbols (Interpretative, Social Constructionist; mid 1980s to present)
• culture as an oppressive regime (Critical, Marxist? (power relationships are considered, which pure interpretative studies don’t consider, nor the interplay of society at large and the organization under the microscope); late 1980s to present)

Additionally, she considers there to be seven key elements to organizational culture:

1. Metaphors
2. Rituals
3. Stories
4. Heroes
5. Cultural artifacts
6. Performances
7. Values

One could add an eighth element: Lindlof & Taylor’s ‘Practices’ [p6], although equally they could also be subsumed by ’Rituals’.

Trethewey also considers feminist approaches to organizational analysis, noting that there is no one, unified, overarching ’feminist theory’ per se. She finds that:

1. organizations are gendered (despite the rhetoric, unofficial and official processes and contexts are dominated by male values and forms [Marshall, 1993:126);
2. the challenges of being a woman in the workplace, including adequate child care, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, inflexible work and leave arrangements, inter alia;
3. feminist models of leadership revolve more around 'inspire and communicate' co-operative models than more masculine 'command and control' models;
4. there are alternative organizations that are based on feminist principles: [after Martin 1990] has feminist ideology, and/or has feminist guiding values, and/or has feminist goals, and/or produces feminist outcomes and/or was founded during the period of the women’s movement as part or a subpart of it (e.g. NOW, rape crisis centres).

 

With regard to 1. above, the stereotypes around males (Wood’s male oaks, fighters and breadwinners [Wood 1994]) often leave men open to ill-health and poor performance, as well as accusations of workaholism.

Conversely, the stereotypes around women [Kanter 1977] see women as mother, seductress, pet or iron maiden — none of which are reflective of the ‘real’ person and all of which are negatively imbued with subtexts.

Trethewey also turns the whole table upside down by considering the deconstruction of meaning, hinging on Derrida’s ‘middle voice’ to de-binarise meanings and embrace ambiguity.

The challenge of post-modern deconstructionism is, of course, that coherency within a culture or organization cannot exist, because ‘meaning’ is created individually, is event specific and contingent on the other players both present and not present (such as, for example, formal hierarchies, normative expectations, formal and informal discourse [see Foucault 1978,1979, 1980], Marxist ideas on power and control, and human propensity to structure one’s life around the corporation — for example by timing of children around career or corporate commitments [see Deetz, 1992].

As Trethewey herself acknowledges, these five lenses — functionalist, interpretive, critical, feminist and postmodern — and seven elements — metaphors, rituals, stories, heroes, artifacts, performances and values — create different ways of looking at organisations, none of which are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but instead are tools a researcher can work with and within.

 

Bibliography

Deetz, S 1992. Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life. Ithaca, N.Y.: State University of New York Press

Derrida, J (1976). Of Grammatology (G. Spivak trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Foucault, M 1978. The History of Sexuality (R. Hurley trans.) New York: Pantheon

Foucault, M 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan trans.) New York: Vintage

Foucault, M 1980. Power/Knowledge (Ed. Colin Gordon) New York: Pantheon

Kanter, R.M 1977. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books

Lindlof, T.R & Taylor, B.C 2002. Qualitative Communication Research Methods (2nd ed.). London: Sage

Marshall, J 1993. Viewing organizational communication from a feminist perspective: A critique and some offerings. In S. Deetz (ed.) Communication Yearbook, 16 (pp122-143. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage

Martin, J 1990. Deconstructing organizational taboos: The suppression of gender conflict in organizations. Organizational Science, 1, 339-359

Trethewey, A 1997. ‘Organizational Culture’ in Peggy Y. Byers Ed., Organizational Communication, Boston: Allyn and Bacon pp203-234

Wood, J.T 1994. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth

 

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