Culture: The Missing Concept in Organization Studies

Critical Analysis

Schein argues that historically, organizational studies have looked at groups from the perspective of a person who is taking actions, which is an individualistic perspective on how someone behaves inside of an organizational structure. Through this lens, an organization is a place someone can control. Their attitudes and perspectives shape their understanding of the place (and subsequently, what they do in it). It follows that an organizational leader is in a position of power, where they can do certain things in order to design and run a certain type of organization. If the things they do can be understood, they can be taught to others; leadership is a thing that can be developed and then deployed.

These views have ignored the culture in which individuals exist, and how the norms and shared behaviors of the group itself impact the individual; historically, research aimed at an individual has failed to realize that “norms held tacitly across large social units were much more likely to change leaders than be changed by them” (231). This is a result of method as much as viewpoint. Questionnaires and other instruments have often been deployed to assess what an individual says or describes, whereas ethnographic immersion would be a more appropriate method for someone to learn about what a culture does or is. Method itself has been selected with the goal of quickly developing “elegant abstractions” (232) which Schein argues have missed larger issues of culture. The issues that have been ignored include “organizational implications, to the concept of milieu control… [and] the role of a shared belief system in integrating the various components of a social system” (233).

An opaque understanding of studio is one that over-emphasizes the volition an instructor may have over what happens in their classroom, and overstates how changes in structure and pedagogy selection (and application) may impact what students learn and how they learn it. Studio is and has a culture, and exists within larger organizations of of schools, colleges, universities, and even university systems. Each of these has norms and accepted ways of being and doing; more importantly, they all have their own priorities, pressures, and views of success. It’s likely that the frictions studio educators continually describe are evidence of these organizational norms and shared views colliding with one-another. One of the most obvious examples is the studio norm of small groups of students working in close proximity with an instructor, at odds with the university norm of large groups of students, sitting abstractly away from an instructor who is likely a researcher first and a teacher last, and only grudgingly.

It's unclear what it means to insert one culture in another—to attempt to scale a studio, or at least something called a studio, into the norms of a modern university. It is logistically possible, but it may be culturally impossible; the norms of both groups may be so entrenched that one desired outcome (the training of designers) cannot actually be achieved, although other desired outcomes—generation of revenue, and thruput of graduates—can.