Allen W. Batteau

Cultural Change Management in Organizations from Competing Perspectives

Since the 1980s, it has generally been accepted that corporations have cultures, and that corporate culture bears an important, if poorly understood, relationship to corporate performance. Figuring out how to measure, fine-tune, and adjust corporate culture has been a cottage industry within management consulting ever since, employing numerous psychologists, sociologists, management theorists, communication specialists, and occasionally anthropologists. Corporate cultures have been variously characterized as strong, weak, open, closed, flexible, rigid, innovative, traditional, or (more typically) some melange of all of these. To better understand the relationship between corporate culture and corporate performance, perhaps it would be better to understand culture as a living, breathing entity, not a museum specimen to be examined under laboratory conditions – ethnographically, that is, in a natural rather than artificial environment. In this paper we attempt to construct a dialogue between two contrasting perspectives on organizational culture, that of anthropology and that of management studies. One of us (Batteau) is an anthropologist with 10 years’ experience working in industry and 30 years’ experience in academia; the other (Villegas) is an engineer and management scholar with 6 years’ experience in industry and 22 years’ experience in academia. As we have looked into these competing perspectives, we have begun to realize that anthropological and management perspectives on culture are, as George Bernard Shaw said about the English and the Americans, divided by a common language. We first describe the problem, of how a firm can “manage” its culture. We follow this with three case studies in the US and Colombia where cultural interventions had mixed results. We then contrast two bodies of theory, managerial and anthropological, to show that the contrasts between these two approaches to organizational culture derive primarily from the contrasting agendas of anthropology and management, and finally, we contribute a review of some concepts to take into consideration when making a path between the praxes of Anthropology and Management.

Project highlights: multiple agency and jurisdiction organized response (M.A.J.O.R.) disaster research (NSF award # 428216)

This paper gives recent accomplishments of the MAJOR (Multiple Agency and Jurisdiction Organized Response) Disaster Management Project (NSF #428216), including publications, model development, and field research findings.

A report from the Internet2 “ sociotechnical”

After viewing demonstrations at the Internet2 “Sociotechnical Summit,” the author observes that the range in capability and infrastructure between that of advanced developers and that of beginning users is widening and that in production environments there are inevitably constraints not found in the laboratory, where these applications work so well. These constraints are not just a matter of the “real world” failing to catch up with the laboratory in terms of bandwidth and technical skills; rather, these constraints are inherent in the nature of the processes of production in a complex, diverse world.

Digital Society, Analog Theory

Advanced information technology creates a new context for information, a context in which the investments required to produce and transport information are obscured by the visually stimulating images accompanying the information. Anthropological theory, with its heritage in the expansion of industrial society, may be ill equipped to understand the self-reinforcing constellation of consciousness and productive relationships that constitute digital society.