Mary Jo Hatch

Conversation at the Border Between Organizational Culture Theory and Institutional Theory

This paper reflects our conversation at the border - a dividing line but also a potential meeting place – of organizational culture theory and institutional theory. First, we discuss the border between institutional theory and organizational culture theory by exploring two notions central to both - taken for grantedness and meanings. We ask what is taken for granted about institutions and organizational culture and how institutions and organizational cultures materialize? Our conversation reveals that although the notion of the taken for granted is important to institutional theory and organizational culture theory, what this means and implies is quite different for each. We also found that even though institutions and cultures involve meaning and evolve through meaning making, the two are understood and hence explored methodologically in quite different ways. So what seemed to be similar in these two theoretical frameworks actually differentiates them. Nevertheless, and still optimistically, we move on to suggest possible ways to bridge organizational culture theory and institutional theory, specifically through the notion of identity - both individual, organizational and interorganizational.

Truth or Consequences An Improvised Collective Story Construction

What follows is a collectively improvised story that emerged as four authors set out to explore their experiences and thoughts concerning organizational stories. The story is a reflection of their collective, creative, improvisational sense making via the construction of a narrative. The authors were selected because of their experience in the fields of organizational storytelling, narrative theory, and improvisation. They began by asking themselves “What would happen if we engaged in improvisation to collectively create a story that makes sense of organizational research?” After several rounds of reviews, they added reader voices, along with their own insights gained from their experience in constructing “Truth or Consequences.”

The pragmatics of branding: an application of Dewey's theory of aesthetic expression

Purpose – This article aims to explore the potential of Deweys theory of aesthetic expression to expand knowledge about aesthetics in branding and better understand how brands work. The paper aims to mine the pragmatic theory of aesthetic expression as involving artistry, intention and imagination to reveal the role beauty plays alongside usefulness in defining and refining brand image and meaning.Design/methodology/approach – Deweys dialectical method of holistically combining tensions such as beauty and usefulness is applied to brand theory and used to critique current brand management practices.Findings – The application of the theory of aesthetic expression emphasizes: understanding humans holistically in order to explain how beauty and expression create value and enrich lives; redefining brand ownership and use to accommodate the aesthetic ways people handle expression/expressiveness; and managing brands with appreciation of how beauty empowers them to attract users.Research limitations/implication...

Bringing Culture Back From Institutional Siberia

At the symposium that initiated this conversation, presenters were subjected to an Academy of Management protocol: the 10-min limit on speakers. That institutionalized restriction made it impossible for me to share in a meaningful way a passage from Stienbeck’s Log From the Sea of Cortez that was intended to illustrate the difference between organizational culture and institutional theories. The emotional and aesthetic implications of the passage only come alive when read expressively at a reasonable pace, and my reading in front of an engaged audience was intended to exemplify doing culture meaningfully together. However, the institutionalized time frame robbed us of this aspect of the experience, ironically providing a terrific example of how institutionalization kills meaning and thus denies culture, the argument I wanted to make then and turn to now. In the symposium, I used a series of quotations, culminating in the Steinbeck passage. There was little time to do much else, so let me bring you up to speed with the ideas I selected to make my case for culture. Tammar Zilber had just quoted Clifford Geertz’s (1973, p. 5) most famous reference to culture: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” and to these words, still echoing in the room, I appended those of William James and Alfred Kroeber:

Writing From Teaching: A Textbook Writer's Tale

A textbook author tells of her early struggle to become a textbook writer, the long journey and the many detours she took along the way to getting her first textbook published. Having identified early in her career that writing a textbook was her chosen way to have an impact on her field of organization theory, she encountered many obstacles to realizing her ambition. She ultimately found a way to use her teaching to facilitate getting her book published. To those others who also aspire to author texts as part of their scholarly endeavor, she offers her lessons learned with the hope that they do not have to follow the roundabout route that she took.