Strategies for Cultural Change

309 Pages·1996·9.748 MB·English

by  Paul Bate (Auth.)

For Wendy, Steve and Chris
Butterworth-Heinemann
An imprint of Elsevier Science
Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP
225 Wildwood Avenue, Wobum MA 01801-2041
First published 1994
Paperback edition 1995
Transferred to digital printing 2002
Copyright 0 1994, Stuart P. Bate. All rights reserved
The right of Stuart Bate to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including
photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether
or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without
the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of
a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London, England W1T 4LP. Applications for the copyright holder’s written
permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed
to the publisher
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7506 0519 7
I I
For information on all Butterworth-Heinemann publications
visit our website at www.bh.com
I I
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastboume
Acknowledgements
Paul Valkry once said that works are never finished, only abandoned.
This book would have been abandoned a good deal sooner - indeed
would probably never have got started -had it not been for the following
people: my students in the School of Management at the University of
Bath, especially the final year undergraduates in my organization analysis
and development class and the MBA students in my organization
behaviour class; my colleagues and clients in industry, especially those in
British Rail whose struggles to bring about cultural change provided the
inspiration and leitmotiv for the present book; my fellow ‘warriors’ in
SCOS who have done so much to put ‘culture’ on the map (generating a
lot of energy and insanity in the process); my publishers who encouraged
this project in the first place - and no doubt regretted it as deadlines
passed m e t ; my own university for granting me a year’s sabbatical
leave which enabled me to devote myself to writing; the College of
Business Administration at the University of Massachusetts and the
Norwegian School of Management for allowing me to spend this period
in truly delightful company and lovely surroundings. To them all I
express my deepest thanks.
A book that goes into the world with such a heavy load of gratitude is
almost a community venture, and I suppose this is how it should be with
a book on culture. However, cultures are also made up of individuals,
and there are particular individuals whom I would like to take this
opportunity to thank - for their practical help, support and friendship:
Alan Savage, Bjsrn Hennestad, John Barker, Ian Colville, Linda
Smircich, Marta Calks, Suzanne Wilson Higgins, Alison Boyd, Paul
Hills, Marc Chapman, Pete Huskinson, the consulting staff of A.I.M. in
Oslo, and my colleagues in the School of Management and -the Centre for
the Study of Organizational Change. And finally there are thanks to
those whom I have never met, the great scholars whose writings
profoundly affected my thinking, indeed my whole being: Georg
Simmel, Susanne Langer, Clifford Geertz, Hermann Hesse, Paul
Watzlawick, Pitirim Sorokin and Morse Peckham. I take this
opportunity of apologizing to them for my own less worthy efforts.
Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of
material used and the author would like to thank the following for
viii Acknowledgements
granting permission to include material copyrighted to them in the book:
Geertz C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected excerpts.
Copyright 0 1973 by BasicBooks Inc. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins, Publishers, Inc; Geertz C. (1974) From the native’s point
of view. On the nature of anthropological understanding. Reprinted by
permission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28 (1); Gilot F.
and Lake C. (1964) Life with Picasso, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher; Green S. (1988)
Strategy, organizational culture and symbolism. Long Range Planning,
21 (4), 121-9, with kind permission from Pergamon Press Ltd,
Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW; Fox A. (1966) Industrial
sociology and industrial relations. Royal Commission on Trade Unions
and Employers’ Associations 1965-1968, Research Paper No. 3,
reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office; Kundera M. (1980) The Book of Laughter and
0
Forgetting, trans, Michael Heim. English translation copyright 1980
by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher;
Langer S. K. (1953) Feeling and Form. Reprinted with permission of
Macmillan College Publishing Company. Copyright 1953 Charles
Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed 0 1981 Susanne K. Langer; Laurent
A. (1989) A cultural view of organizational change. In Human Resource
Management in International Firms. Change, Globalization, Innovation
(eds P. Evans, Y. Doz and A. Laurent). Reprinted with permission of
Macmillan Ltd, London and St Martin’s Press, Inc; Masuch M. (1985)
Vicious circles in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30, 14-
33. Reprinted by permission of Administrative Science Quarterly; Rosen
C. and Zerner H. (1984) Romanticism and Realism. Copyright 0 by
Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner. Used by permission of Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc; Solomon R. C. (1976) The
Passions, Anchor Press Doubleday, New York. Reissued (1993) as The
Passions, Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Hackett, Indianapolis.
Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Then there are the most important thanks of all. First to my children,
Steve and Chris, who steadfastly refused to accept a closed study door as
a sign to ‘keep out’, and whose very presence has kept this whole venture
in a proper perspective. Their wit, intelligence and unselfish love have
kept me sane. And then to my wife and closest friend, Wendy, who
despite the huge demands of her own work has given an inordinate
amount of time to this project, reading and correcting various drafts, and
discussing and clarifying ideas - while at the same time managing to keep
house and home together. Wendy, I wish I had half your intellect,
humanity, energy and application. This book is dedicated to the three of
you.
1 Turtles all the way
down
Introduction
Writing a book about cultural change is a daunting task. One cannot
simply take the advice of the storyteller or policeman and ‘begin at the
beginning’, and tell it ‘how it happened’. In matters of change there is
rarely a clear beginning - nor, for that matter, a discernible middle or
end, and few people ever agree on what ‘really happened’, or if indeed
anything happened at all. Even fewer will be able to say with any
certainty what change is, or precisely what has changed, especially where
matters of cultural change are involved. And, as we are well aware, the
concept of culture is itself surrounded by a myriad of problems relating to
meaning and definition. Therefore, put ‘culture’ and ‘change’ together
and the chance of anything coherent emerging becomes all the more
unlikely.
Change, as writers have pointed out on many previous occasions, is a
highly complex business, difficult to understand, and because of its non-
linear nature almost impossible to deal with systematically, or to write
about convincingly. Pettigrew, for example, invites us to ‘observe other
men consciously attempting to move large and small systems in different
directions, or attempt it yourself, and one sees what a difficult and
complicated human process change is’ (1985: 1). Certainly, if one’s
ambition is to tell it ‘how it really is’ - or was - the result is almost certain
to be a story as labyrinthine and multilayered as an Agatha Christie
whodunit. Things, as they say, are going to take a whole lot of
explaining.
Talking of stories, Clifford Geertz’s story of the elephant captures
perfectly the many difficulties and frustrations one experiences when
trying to work with the concept of culture:
There is an Indian story - at least I heard it as an Indian story - about an
Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform
which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a
4 Strategies for Cultural Change
turtle, asked . . . what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle?
‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’. (Geertz, 1973: 29)
In matters of culture it is nearly always a case of ‘turtles all the way
down’: one just never seems to get to the bottom of things. As Geertz
says, cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete: ‘And, worse than that,
the more deeply it goes the less complete it is’ (p. 29). Working with
culture, one is constantly being reminded of the Chinese saying that the
more you know the more confused you become, or the theoretical
physicist John Wheeler’s comment that ‘The greater the island of
knowledge grows, the greater becomes the shoreline of the unknown’
(1980: 9). The question ‘why bother?’ is therefore never far from one’s
mind. Nor can one ever be sure that things will all come right in the end.
Working with complexity
cultural analysis runs counter to the preference for simplification that is
prevalent in social science research. A greater tolerance for complexity,
however, will reward investigators with a deeper understanding of the
phenomena they are studying and a fmer basis for interpreting the data
they collect. (LeVine, 1984: 84)
At a moment when the authors of best-selling business books are
exhorting us to keep things simple, follow what our commonsense tells
us, and practise the ‘technology of the obvious’, one is conscious of the
risks involved in drawing attention to complexity - especially in
proposing that we, in fact, need to confront complexity head on,
recognize it for what it is, and learn to work with it. The danger of
advocating this kind of philosophy is that one exposes oneself to
accusations of over-complicating the issues, using mystifying jargon,
being over-theoretical and anti-practical, and generally refusing to ‘come
clean’ on the straightforward answers that people in the real world are
seeking. Borrowing a phrase used by Renfrew (1979: 4) when he found
himself in a similar corner, my response would be that if the concepts in
the book are sometimes difficult, so undoubtedly is the task.
Nevertheless, we cannot escape the fact that the siren-call of the
simplifiers is extremely seductive, promising things far beyond the reach
of our heavy-footed, land-locked complicators. Who, after all, could
resist the song which says
‘everything is what it is and not another thing’. . .The world is what the
wide-awake, uncomplicated person takes it to be. Sobriety, not subtlety,
realism, not imagination are the keys to wisdom; the really important facts
Turtles all the way down 5
of life lie scattered openly along its surface, not cunningly secreted in its
depths. There is no need, indeed it is a fatal mistake, to deny, as poets,
intellectuals, priests, and other professional complicators of the world so
often do, the obviousness of the obvious. Truth is as plain, as the Dutch
proverb has it, as a pikestaff over water. (Geertz, 1974 89)
Given this highly attractive alternative, one might well ask what would
induce anyone (practitioners especially) to read a book that promises no
‘keys’, no ‘solutions’, no ‘simple secrets’, not even an eight-point guide to
‘excellence’ or a single two-by-two matrix of strategic options for change!
My reply would be to invite the reader seriously to consider how far the
‘paradigm of simplicity’ accords with his or her actual experience of
organizational life. I believe the answer for the great majority would be
that there is little correspondence: we all want things to be simple, but we
know they rarely are; we all want the ‘solution’ but we know it will not
always present itself, or that when it does it may not actually achieve the
desired effect. It may be that the ‘keep it simple’ philosophy has a role in
expressing some kind of ideal-world position, or even in providing a not
unwelcome form of escapism or reverie for the user, but as a philosophy
for action it is woefully inadequate. The thrust of my argument is that
one ends up ‘working with complexity’ not out of choice or preference
but because reality dictates that it cannot be otherwise. In saying this, one
does not rule out the possibility in the end of having to make
simplifications (which is arguably an essential part of the process of
taking action), but that, of course, is very different from beginning with
them.
The guiding maxim of the philosophy being proposed is that one
should meet complexity with complexity, that is develop a framework
sufficiently complex to embrace the complexity within the subject matter
it is seeking to describe, but not so complex and lifesize as to be as
confusing as the ‘real thing’. Unfortunately, it is here at the very first
stage of conceptualization that one encounters a major problem: there
are apparently no frameworks like this available! Kennedy (1985: 325)
writes: ‘we don’t even seem to have a reasonable way, i.e., a conceptual
framework, for thinking about change’. As it stands the statement is
probably incorrect - most researchers would probably agree that there is
no shortage of frameworks for thinking about change (and culture) - but
where cultural change is concerned it is unfortunately probably true. The
implication for this particular ‘story’ is that one does not have the luxury
of beginning at the beginning, using a framework that is already
available, but needs to take several steps backwards in order to work on
putting one together. This is where this first chapter finds itself.
Developing a conceptual framework is like learning a language. This
book is based on this idea. First we need the vocabulary - the concepts -
6 Strategies for Cultural Change
and then we need the grammar - the thinking structures - and finally we
need the ‘oral’ practice - the applications.
As Simmel says, frameworks are
languages into which the world or aspects of it may be translated. These
languages may be conceived as general schemata which constitutec onditions
for the intelligibility of the world as a whole or specific aspects of it.
(Oakes, 1980: 10)
The overall aim of this book is to create one such ‘language’, albeit a
fairly rudimentary one, for the world of cultural change.
Asking good questions
Our ignorance grows with our knowledge. . . We will always have more
questions than answers. (K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)
Thinking conceptually, whether it be for analytical, strategic or action
purposes, is itself a complex business. What it all seems to boil down to
in the end, however, is the knack of being able to ask ‘good’ questions.
The stress is on questions rather than answers since the answers you get
depend on the questions you ask. Contrary to the normal way of
thinking, ‘answers’ are not independent phenomena that are in some way
unlocked or ‘released’ by questions, but phenomena that are actually
created by them. The form of the original question is therefore absolutely
crucial because it frames one’s entire perspective on this or that issue.
And perspective, as the artist is constantly reminding us, is everything.
The point I am making has been summed up as follows:
It is vital to recognize this ‘correlativity’ of questions and answers . . . An
answer assumes all that the question presupposes. (Crick, 1976: 131)
If we are to take this point seriously, it means that we need to exercise
special care in our selection of the main questions - the primary form of
interrogative - for our framework on cultural change. This choice will
determine what the shape of the framework will be (structure), what we
subsequently ‘see’ and do not see (perspective and focus of attention),
and where we finally stand on the subject (judgement).
The definition of what constitutes a ‘good’ question will obviously
vary, depending on our reasons for asking it in the first place, but I
believe one of the more important requirements is that it addresses and,
where necessary, challenges the fundamental and ‘taken for granted’
Turtles all the way down 7
views that may have grown up around a subject or in our own minds. A
question must truly ‘question’ something: this idea is part of that larger
(originally Greek) philosophy of scepticism which says that learning
proceeds as the result of constantly challenging the prevailing views and
conventions of the time. Asking questions provides an effective safeguard
against dogmatism - that closed frame of mind which foolishly claims to
know how things actually are, and which is always discouraging us from
looking further. There is always the temptation in management, as no
doubt in other commercially influenced subjects, to give the client what
he or she ‘wants to hear’, the unfortunate consequence being that
prejudices, whims and dogmas are reinforced, and a cosy, self-
congratulatory atmosphere created. My position is that while not averse
to pleasing (who would want to be accused of being a spoil-sport and not
joining in?), I would always reserve the right to ask questions that may be
disturbing.
The questions below form the organizing framework for this book.
They are all directed towards certain ‘taken for granteds’ that have grown
up in the field. They are summarized here, and will be discussed in detail
as the book unfolds:
Why change culture?
A functional, ‘so what? question which examines the grounds upon
which we might assume or believe that a strategy for cultural change
would serve any useful function or purpose, or offer anything of value or
interest. The question is really twofold: why change, and why culture?
Is planned cultural change possible?
A question which asks what potential, if any, there exists for conscious
and deliberately planned intervention in an organization’s cultural
change processes. If there is such potential, the question is intervention
by whom, in what way, and for what purpose? If culture cannot be
changed by deliberate human agency, why bother to try?
What kind of dtural change is envisaged?
Questions relating to the scale or level of cultural change: change ‘what’
precisely, and to what end? Questions about what is supposedly in line to
be changed draw us away from generalized views about the subject and
towards consideration of the different types and ‘orders’ of cultural
8 Strategies for Cultural Change
change that exist, and the different change strategies that each may
require.
How does cultural change occur?
The factual question for which sadly there seem to be few available
‘facts’. An assumption seems to have grown up that an understanding of
the cultural process is not absolutely necessary before an attempt is made
to change it (which may explain why so little is known about the cultural
change process in organizations). The question here signifies a departure
from this view, being prompted by the opposite argument that any theory
of (and strategy for) cultural change needs to grow from a thorough
understanding of the processes that produce and maintain cultural order,
and the processes that transform it.
So much for the point about ‘asking good questions’. Another point -
a twist on this one - is that ‘asking questions is good‘. It suspends our
certainties and puts us in a healthily doubtful (and fumbling) frame of
mind. To use Ott’s phrase (1984), it turns us from self-satisfied know-alls
into ‘honest grapplers’ after truth. A questioning frame of mind suspends
our assumptions about the existence of ‘one reality’ and puts us in an
interpretive (multiperspectival) frame of mind; and it frees us from the
world of ‘facts’, enabling us to engage in the fruitful process of
‘imaginative abstraction’ (Geertz, 1973: 24). With this in mind,
‘progress’ has to be redefined, being ‘marked less by perfection of
consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the
precision with which we vex each other’ (1973: 29).
You can’t judge a book by its cover
Still on the subject of questions, we might begin by questioning the title of
the book itself: ‘Strategies for Cultural Change (in Organizations)’. On
the face of it, the title seems fairly innocuous and straightforward, and it
does trip rather easily off the tongue. Yet the more we think about it the
more we need to avoid being taken in by it! The truth of the matter is that
any book with this title - which is too sensible and managerial by half -
could easily end up glossing over problems, and perpetuating the very
misconceptions that need to be challenged. Drawing critical attention to
the title of one’s own book may sound rather like shooting oneself
through the foot. Nevertheless, this will be a small price to pay if it
succeeds in highlighting some of the common fallacies about ‘changing
culture’, and enables us to consider the possibility of an alternative
perspective.