1st Edition
Rethinking Organizational Culture Redeeming Culture through Stories
What is organizational culture? Why does it matter? This book demonstrates that conventional wisdom on this fundamental business topic has surpassed its usefulness. The author wants neither to praise scholarship on culture nor to bury it – rather he wants to build something fit for purpose by reflecting on the power of stories and storytelling.
Rethinking Organizational Culture argues that that the entrenched models of organizational culture wrench thinking, feeling, and action from a context that intuition warns us are complex and problematic. Arguing that novels and novelists offer an opportunity to redeem ‘organizational culture’, the text invites readers to recognise that stories of organization offer connections with organizational profanity, organized polyphony, and the organizationally prosaic.
A stimulating and provocative read, this book will be welcomed by students, scholars, and reflective practitioners across the business field.
Introduction: Rethinking Organizational Culture
Foundations of Cultural Studies
The Pre-History of Organizational Culture
Models of Organizational Culture
Sexism, Racism and other Common Cultural Practices
Redeeming Organizational Culture: Stories and Storytelling
Concluding Comments
Biography
David Collins is Professor in Management at Northumbria University, UK, and Visiting Professor in Management at the University of the Faroe Islands. His previous books include Organizational Change, Management Fads and Buzzwords, Narrating the Management Guru, Stories for Management Success, Management Gurus, and The Organizational Storytelling Workbook.
"This is a fantastic book. It offers a timely, refreshing and insightful antidote to the popular, highly sanitized, mainstream accounts of what organizational culture is and how it works. It is written in a rigorous, incisive and humorous way. In this regard, rather than seeing Collins as purely being an academic, it is better to also at least figuratively think of him as part public intellectual, part surgeon, and part stand-up comedian."
Cliff Oswick, Chair in Organization Theory, City University London, UK
