Hofstede's National Culture Research and Handy's Cultures

We covered organisation culture this evening. How cultures are made, the different types, how culture can (or can't) be changed, the kind of cultures people prefer and the ones they don't.

Geert Hofstede (I'm going to resist the urge to stick a "van" in there at exam time, it couldn't be more Dutch) conducted research in 1980 in the form of employee surveys across the international divisions of IBM to find out what cultural differences could be identified across the organisation. The four variables were:

Long Power Distance - Short Power Distance (how different are subordinates from their immediate superiors)
Individualism - Collectivism (how likely are employees likely to put collective interests before their own)
High Uncertainty Avoidance - Low Uncertainty Avoidance (how comfortable is a culture with taking on the unknown)
Masculine - Femine (How agressive, target driven and activist is a culture contrasted with its empathetic, responsible and measured characteristics)

Of course this is a hugely Western liberal capitalist classification of culture, and the quantifiable results are only applicable to IBM, not the rest of the world. Also, the world has changed hugely since 1980 (fax, internet, low cost air travel, satellite communication) so you could question whether discriminating culture as "nations" is a valid excercise when an organisation's workforce could be scattered all over the globe and 6 months later have changed completely again. It also ignores resource and political legacies and the different objectives a global organisation might have in different countries. But apparently it's a test that has endured the test of time.

We covered the Pluralist/Elitist/Unitary/Radical/Marxist descriptions of power - it's Mr Gardner's AS Level politics and Sheffield's POL103 all over again!

The other nugget I prised from the seam of this evening's lecture was Handy's four cultural descriptions of organisations, viz:

Role-based: Forms! Tick boxes! Policies! If the idea of any of those gives you a wet dream, that's you.
Power-based: The Cult of Personality (like the song) Charisma and domination prevail in the hands of a few.
People-based: People get together and act out of mutual self interest
Task-based: You get the job done, all else is peripheral.