Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education(a project in the ESRC Learning Society Programme,

award ref nos L123251071 & L123251074)

ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND INNOVATIONIN HIGHER EDUCATION

an annotated bibliography (mainly from the 1980s) of organisational culture and related concepts of

importance to investigating the place of innovation in higher education institutions

Harold Silver

December 1998

ISBN 1-84102-031-1

Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Plymouth, Douglas Avenue, Exmouth EX8 2ATTel: 01395 255463 Fax: 01395 264196 E-mail: s.english@plymouth.ac.uk

http://www.fae.plym.ac.uk/itlhe.html© 1998 by H Silver

Organisational culture and innovation in higher education

Drawing on an extensive literature of organisational behaviour, culture and change, the bibliography below contains relatively few items directly addressing higher education. The majority of the literature in these fields, much of it American, is either descriptive or analytical of industrial organisations. Some of it addresses theoretical issues against that background. Some of the literature consulted is also rooted in the analysis of school ‘climate’ or ‘culture’.

Nevertheless, there are aspects of this literature that can be usefully addressed in analysing the organisation and processes of higher education – including leadership, policy making and implementation, the formation and transmission of group understandings and values, and the interaction of individual and organisational learning. Some of the literature suggests important methodological considerations, particularly with regard to perceiving cultural homogeneity and differences within organisations, and tensions between abstraction, observed behaviour and opinion. There are occasionally valuable warnings concerning research pitfalls in these kinds of fields.

This bibliography has been selected and annotated with a view to interpreting the universities and organisations being analysed in this second year of a two-year study of ‘Innovations in teaching and learning in higher education’, the first year of which focused specifically on ‘The experiences of innovators’. Since the second year attempts to relate the findings of that study to institutional contexts and cultures in higher education institutions, penetrating appropriate literature is of considerable importance. It has therefore been essential in compiling this bibliography not simply to locate literature relevant to structures and procedures in higher education, but also to consider how it may relate to attempts to situate ‘the experiences of innovators’ in the varied and constantly changing environments of the recent past. Although the literature that does address, for example, university structures, leadership and policy making in British higher education is helpful in this respect, it has been imperative to extend the search for insights well beyond these confines.

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Allaire, Yvan and Firsirotu, Mihaela E. (1984) Theories of organizational culture, Organization Studies 5 (3), pp. 193-226.

This presents a typology of schools of thought in cultural anthropology, relationship to notions of organizational culture, existing assumptions and vocabularies (meanings, values, beliefs…). Kluckhohn (1952) identified 164 definitions of culture. Culture is discussed as meshed in to the social system or as a separate ideational system. Cultural and structural aspects of organisations have previously not been much discussed. The authors present ‘a conceptual framework for organizational culture as a particularist system of symbols shaped by ambient society and the organization’s history, leadership and contingencies, differentially shared, used and modified by actors in the course of acting and making sense out of organizational events… whatever else they may be, organizations are, unsurpassingly and at once, social creations and creators of social meanings’.

Argyris, Chris and Schon, Donald A. (1996) Organizational Learning II: theory, method, and practice, Addison-Wesley, Reading Mass.

The preface outlines the approach: an ‘overarching sense of organizational learning that refers broadly to an organization’s acquisition of understandings, know-how, techniques, and practices of any kind’; a concern with ‘productive’ organizational learning; the central importance of individual practitioners to organizational learning, and the complex interactions between individual and organizational learning. ‘Our focus is on organizational inquiry… in the Deweyan sense as a highly general characterization of the exercise of human intelligence… the intertwining of thought and action by which we move from doubt to the resolution of doubt. Organizational inquiry occurs when individuals in organizations inquire, in interaction with one another, in an effort to produce productive organizational learning outcomes’. The argument rests on a view of ‘single- and double-loop learning’: some kinds of learning take place within existing systems of values and the action frames in which values are embedded, while other kinds involve changes in values and frames and call for reflective inquiry that cuts across incongruent frames’. Ch. 1 concerns ‘What is an organization that it may learn?’, involving informational content (a learning product), a learning process, and a learner; organisations as collectivities; organisational action, knowledge and inquiry, with further emphasis on learning though collective interaction. It extends the discussion of differences between single-loop learning (as a result of which values and norms remain unchanged) and double-loop learning, which leads to change in the values of ‘organizational theory-in-use’. The structural and behavioural features of an organisational learning system create the conditions ‘under which individuals interact in organizational inquiry, making it more or less likely that crucial issues will be addressed or avoided’. Chs 8 and 9 describe and analyse some significant

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literature on learning organisations, and ‘an underlying conception of a central ideal’ is identified: ‘This ideal includes notions of organizational adaptability, flexibility, avoidance of stability traps, propensity to experiment, readiness to rethink means and ends, inquiry-orientation, realization of human potential for learning in the service of organizational purposes, and creation of organizational settings as contexts for human development’.

Becher, Tony (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories: intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, Buckingham, Open University Press.

A section on ‘reactions to innovative ideas’ outlines motives for resistance. ‘Among the paradoxes which abound in academia, one of the most curious is the apparent coexistence of radical chic with entrenched conservatism’. Resistance to new ideas ‘is inborn among academic communities, as can be clearly shown by the length of time it often takes for a major insight or discovery to gain general acceptance. Merton (1973) canonizes the phenomenon as “organised scepticism”’. Kuhn (1962) puts it down ‘to a concern to maintain an existing paradigm, even in the face of conflicting evidence’. Collins (1975) offers a different explanation in a field lacking ‘strong paradigms’; he sees resistance to change as a wish ‘to keep the organization decentralised and thus relatively egalitarian. The development of any theory that would change this situation… involves a power struggle of a particular sort’. The author’s own interviewees produced another motive: ‘in many fields it takes time and trouble to acquire the necessary expertise to make a significant research contribution. People who have spent some years…building up the vocabulary and conceptual structure demanded of a specialism…understandably see themselves as being committed to a sizeable intellectual investment’. In a contest between the ‘young Turks’ and the ‘old guard’ the former ‘have as yet made no major intellectual commitments (and) have little to lose by investing in potentially high-risk, high-profit commodities’. Traditionalists either banish the new by arguing it is inappropriate or invalid, or conciliate and incorporate the ‘avant-garde’ into the establishment.

Becher, Tony (1984) The cultural view, in Burton R. Clark (ed.) Perspectives on Higher Education: eight disciplinary and comparative views, Berkeley, University of California Press.

This conducts a ‘brief exploration of the concept of culture and its applicability to academic life. Three relevant fields of investigation – institutions, roles and functions, and intellectual arenas – are then examined’. A central feature is the discussion of academic disciplines but the author points out: ‘I found myself forced to abandon the academic discipline as the unit of analysis. When one begins to look closely into the epistemological structures of disciplines, it is apparent that most of them embrace a wide range of subspecialties… there is no single method of inquiry, no single verification procedure, no single set of values or purposes, which characterizes any one discipline. It is, in the end, more meaningful to talk about the identifiable and coherent properties of particular

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areas of inquiry within one discipline or another’. The ‘cultural approach’ to these fields has its limitations: ‘the exploration of disciplinary cultures and their associated epistemological subcultures is, of course, only one aspect of a much wider issue. It is clear from the existing literature that other profitable and relatively under-researched areas exist in the study of the distinctive way of life of teachers and learners, the ethnography of individual institutions, and the cultural characteristics of particular sectors in the system, or even of the system as a whole, in one or more national settings… The provenance of inquiries into academic cultures is by definition sectional and localized… They lack the obvious relevance, the broad and authoritative sweep, of organizational, political, or policy-centered research’.

Becher, Tony and Kogan, Maurice (1980), Process and Structure in Higher Education, London, Heinemann

This ‘model for higher education’ contains a central level (systemic authorities); individual institutions; basic units (the nature of which varies between institutions; the individuals. The book explores the nature and responsibilities of each of these levels, and ch. 8 considers ‘initiating and adapting to change’, how changes affect different units, strategies for and barriers to innovation, with change emanating from within and outside the institutions. It argues that ‘the conservatism of British higher education is somewhat exaggerated by its critics. We have argued it to stem mainly from contextual rather than from personal factors… The main constraints on change are social, not psychological: they depend more on the way the system operates than on the particular stand that its individual members choose to take’. The book analyses throughout the distinction between normative and operational characteristics of the different levels of the system.

Beckhard, Richard and Pritchard, Wendy (1992) Changing the Essence: the art of creating and leading fundamental change in organizations, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

There are unprecedented demands and dilemmas facing business and public organisations. The authors address a combination of leadership, cultural impact and management of change, focusing on the organisational learning process (unfreezing beliefs, knowledge and attitudes and encouraging new ones), in order to move from result orientation to a learning mode. They discuss Argyris and Schon’s ‘single loop’ and ‘double loop’ learning (q.v.), the former responding to change and maintaining the status quo, the latter correcting errors and modifying norms and practices. They discuss the meaning of a ‘learning organisation’ and ‘culture’(distinctive values and assumptions, plus norms and artifacts that guide action) and emphasise the importance for change effort to be vision driven.

Burnes, Bernard (1992) Managing Change: a strategic approach to organisational development and renewal, London, Pitman.

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The chapter on ‘developments in organisation theory’ traces the work of key theorists and movements. The chapter on ‘change management’ examines the work of different schools developing approaches and techniques, and discusses strategies for bringing about change (e.g. behaviourist and group dynamics approaches).

Burns, Tom and Stalker, G.M. (1961; edn of 1994) The Management of Innovation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Theories of bureaucracy (Weber and critiques). ‘…the notion that people spend their working lives ruled by those set above them by virtue of the inherent rationality, as well as the law-like authority, vested in the hierarchic command structure of bureaucratic organization proved to be just as challangeable as the rational control of working behaviour imposed by scientific management’. The study, based on research into industrial firms in Scotland, analyses management dissension, competition and conflict over organisational goals.

Burton, Leon and Haines, Chris (1997) Innovation in teaching and assessing mathematics at university level, Teaching in Higher Education 2 (3), pp. 273-93)

This describes the ‘cultural context’ within which university mathematics teaching is located, including competing demands, a resource-driven approach and an emphasis on research: ‘some senior academics questioned the rationale and potential effectiveness of this project’ – reflecting the devaluing of teaching internationally. Most learning ‘is sited in a learning culture dominated by dependency on the tutor, the lecture and/or the text’. Experiment and innovation in teaching are not rewarded. Concern about students’ mathematical knowledge reflects their experience in schools and ultimately ‘how change is viewed and managed within University departments’. Against a background of traditional teaching and examining the project explored effective teaching, learning and assessing practices. The project addressed concerns relating to assessment using innovative practices, and to the management of change: ‘promoting and managing change is a necessary component of managing a department…rather than considering how the teaching and learning environment for mathematics could change, perhaps one should ask why mathematics departments are so resistant to change’. Departmental managers do not seem ‘to understand or implement’ a process of meeting the challenge to manage change’, and it is time for those concerned with change in mathematics to address how to enable traditional mathematics departments to ‘adapt to a learning paradigm more appropriate to social and personal needs’.

Chaffee, Ellen Earle and Tierney, William G. (1988) Collegiate Culture and Leadership Strategies, New York, Macmillan.

‘On each campus we observe a cultural drama in process, one that is unique to that institution’, but also a common desire ‘to understand the dynamics of culture

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and its influence on institutional performance. The authors have learned the need to respect the integrity and uniqueness of each institution’. Similar institutions may differ as a result of their identities being communicated differently to internal and external groups, which have different perceptions. Institutions are shaped by external and internal forces. As resources, decision making and other problems intensify leaders need to understand institutions as cultural entities: ‘to implement decisions, leaders must have a full, nuanced understanding of the organization’s culture. Only then can they articulate decisions in a way that will speak to the needs of various constituencies and marshall their support’. A cultural paradigm views an organisation ‘as a social construction where participants constantly interpret and create organizational reality’. This paradigm shift is widely present in the social sciences and humanities, where researchers and practitioners are looking for ‘more appropriate ways to study social behavior and events’. All of this points to the need for case studies, resulting from ‘intimate contact with daily institutional life at a number of campuses’. The authors emphasise their use of longitudinal analysis (‘avoiding a onetime snapshot’).

Clark, Burton R. (1987) The Academic Life: Small worlds, different worlds, Princeton NJ, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

‘Academic institutions are unusual forms of collective action whose nature is well highlighted by the metaphor of organized anarchy [cf. Cohen & March]. Ch. 6 explores the bases of academic authority and problems of its division: ‘Professional authority in academia begins with the simple fact that academic subjects serve not only as areas of work and sources of dignity and faith, but also as bases of control. Discipline-based authority that favors the faculty stands over against enterprise-based authority, which is largely allocated in the American system to trustees and administrators’. The result is a tension between departments and the central administration, with problems for the individual focusing on ‘how to balance the personal and the collegial’. Institutions and subjects provide different ‘authority environments’. Near the end of the 20 th

century ‘it is difficult…to grasp how the control of academic services operates. No one is in charge… Control is localized in autonomy-seeking, and often competitive, subsets… Among the fractured components, various fields exhibit somewhat different combinations of personal, collegial, and managerial controls. There are different measures of influence by ‘peers, bureaucrats, and clients… What we find in academic authority in America depends on where we look in the institutional hierarchy’.

Clark, Burton R. (1984) The organizational conception, in Burton R. Clark (ed.) Perspectives on Higher Education: eight disciplinary and comparative views, Berkeley, University of California Press.

‘An organizational perspective on higher education commonly takes analysts inside the system… With a little imagination it allows observers to see the system

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from the bottom up, looking out from the positions and perspectives of faculty, students, and local administrators, as well as from the top down’. Such a focus makes it possible to ‘establish which internal characteristics are important…as a “demand” flows into the system, who supports it, who resists it, and how is it organizationally implemented and thereby shaped?’ At the ‘floor’ of the institution are ‘clusters of professionals tending various bundles of knowledge… the concentration on knowledge is what academics have most in common. But what they have least in common is common knowledge’. The organisation of the system around subjects means a highly structured division of labour, and personnel are divided along different horizontal and vertical dimensions: ‘sectors, hierarchies, sections, and tiers’. Academic life has a sysmbolic side ‘a “culture” as well as a social structure’ (a feature of the disciplines is their ‘quiet fanaticism’). Organisation is also authority, ‘a way of concentrating and diffusing legitimate power’. The chair, the department and the interdisciplinary programme are ‘the three primary ways of organizing at the operating level’. The article discusses what it calls ‘the master matrix’, the criss-crossing of the two primary modes of organisation – the institution and the discipline (though it often scatters members of the latter across different locations). ‘A national system of higher education may be and often is as much a set of disciplines and professions as it is a set of universities and colleges’(a situation prompted more by research than by teaching’) and universities and colleges ‘are something other than unitary organizations’. An underlying problem is the subdivision of disciplines and the emergence of new institutions, leading to ‘exponential expansion in the structures of work, belief, and authority which support the tasks and technologies of higher education’. Such organisational analysis ‘must track disciplines as well as enterprises’, and it is at the ‘intersects’ in this criss-crossing matrix that ‘the work gets done’.

Cohen, Michael D. and March, James G. (1974, edn of 1986) Leadership and Ambiguity: the American college president, Boston Mass, Harvard Business School Press.

The key discussion is of ‘metaphors of leadership’, relatively distinct ways of looking at the governance of universities, includes the competitive market, administrative, collective bargaining, democratic, consensus, anarchy, independent judiciary and plebiscitary autocracy metaphors (the administrative, collective bargaining and democratic ones being overused). The importance of this discussion lies in the fact that the model chosen ‘dictates a presidential style’. Ch. 9 focuses on ‘leadership in an organized anarchy’, which seems to portray the realities of modern universities. It stresses the ambiguities faced by the American college president: ambiguity of purpose (justifying action and identifying goals); ambiguity of power (how powerful is the president?); ambiguity of experience (what is to be learned from events of the presidency?); ambiguity of success (when is a president successful?). The chapter discusses each in turn. In terms of purpose, for example, ‘almost any educated person can deliver a lecture entitled “The Goals of the University.” Almost no one will listen to the lecture voluntarily. For the most part, such lectures and their companion essays are well-

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intentioned exercises in social rhetoric, with little operational content’. Ambiguities ‘describe the life of any formal leader of any organized anarchy. The metaphors of leadership and our traditions of personalizing history… confuse the issues of leadership by ignoring the basic ambiguity of leadership life. We require a plausible basic perspective for the leader of a loosely coupled, ambiguous organization’. An important thrust of the argument is that ‘the tactics of administrative action in an organized anarchy are somewhat different from the tactics of action in a situation characterized by clearer goals, better specified technology, and more persistent participation. Nevertheless, we can examine how a leader with a purpose can operate within an organization that is without one’.

Deal, Terrence E. and Kennedy, Allen A. (1982, edn of 1988) Corporate Cultures: the rites and rituals of corporate life, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Ch. 1 on ‘strong cultures’ itemises the elements of business culture, including the myths, rituals and other components common to discussions of culture. It suggests that companies that have ‘cultivated their individual identities by shaping values, making heroes, spelling out rites and rituals, and acknowledging the cultural network have an edge. These corporations have values and beliefs to pass along – not just products. They have stories to tell – not just profits to make’. It emphasises that ‘a strong culture is a system of informal rules that spells out how people are to behave most of the time’, and that a strong culture ‘enables people to feel better about what they do, so they are more likely to work harder’. Following chapters discuss ‘values: the core of the culture’, ‘heroes: the corporate right stuff’ and symbolic managers – those who take the lead ‘in supporting and shaping the culture’ and think seriously about ‘the values, heroes, and rituals of the culture’. They see their primary job as managing value conflicts that arise, and place a high level of trust in their fellow employees. ‘In the dispersed, helter-skelter world of the radically decentralized atomized organization, some glue is absolutely essential to hold independent work units together. The role that culture plays will be even more critical than it is in today’s corporate world… In sum, the future holds promise for strong culture companies. Strong cultures are not only able to respond to an environment, but they also adapt to diverse and changing circumstances'’

de Woot, Philippe (1996) Managing change at university, CRE-action, 109, pp. 19-28.

This short paper addresses the theme of the failure of ‘organizational capacity’ to adapt to rapid change. The concept of planning is ‘outmoded… Planning gives way to strategic development. The main element of this approach is the willingness to develop the necessary resources to become capable of implementing a bold strategy’. In universities resource development is not just a question of finance, but one of innovation and quality. Organizational leaders need vision in order not simply to wait ‘until the crisis is deep enough to threaten the survival of the university as a major actor’. On the other hand ‘a vision that

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limits itself to a mere declaration of intent would have no impact whatsoever on the organization. To be implemented it has to be translated into concrete actions that set the whole organization on the move… Change in our universities is slow and difficult because of our culture’. Good management, that is concerned with administering resources, is not enough. Leadership, which is concerned with governing people, is required at every level ‘to motivate and energize the actors of the system’.

Dill, David D. (1982) The management of academic culture: notes on the management of meaning and social integration, Higher Education, 11 (3) pp. 303-20.

‘We are members of academic communities, but we manage academic organizations… We assume a common academic culture; we do not manage it’. The strength of academic culture becomes particularly important in a situation of declining resources, and ‘the social fabric of the community is under great strain’. Academic institutions have distinctive cultures, which emphasise the core values of the institution, and there is therefore an important process of ‘the management of meaning’, the techniques of which are the ‘undiscussed skills of academic management’. In a competitive market there has been a tendency for academic institutions to adopt the managerial techniques of the market, while the tools adopted are being questioned by the business community. He cites Burton Clark as suggesting that the culture of an academic organisation is more complex than that of other organisations, and ideologies or systems of belief permeate academic institutions at three levels: ‘the culture of the enterprise, the culture of the academic profession at large, and the culture of academic discipline’. The decline of Western academic institutions is partly due to the loss of a ‘unifying system of belief’. A feature of American academic life, more than in other countries with centralised traditions as to what constitutes a discipline, has been the proliferation of disciplines and fields since World War II, eliminating ‘shared traditions’. Culture consists of myth, symbol and ritual. ‘If a chancellor, dean, or department head were to think seriously about the creation of meaning, or more responsibly, the nurturing of existing academic culture, what myths or symbols should be emphasized? … corporate and industrial examples offer little insight… One difficulty with academic symbols and their supporting rituals is that they are often abstract’. There is need for more attention than is normally received in discussion of academic management to ‘the maintenance of the expressive aspects of academic community… To begin, we must first discuss the management of academic culture not as anthropologists, sociologists, educators, theologians, or journalists, but seriously’.

Drummond, Ian, Nixon, Iain and Wiltshire, John (1997) Personal transferable skills in higher education: the problems of implementing good practice (Hull and Newcastle, unpublished typescript).

The paper analyses pressures to develop personal transferable skills and approaches to developing them. It considers the variable levels of success in

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skills development and the factors involved, and the barriers commonly encountered. At an institutional level these include ‘institutional inertia’ and ‘the systematic prioritisation of research’. At the department or school level they include traditional systems of department management, which ‘make sustaining long term development initiatives difficult in some institutions’, and ‘reluctance to adopt innovative approaches to teaching and particularly to assessment’. At the individual level barriers include academics’ ‘lack of expertise, experience and confidence to adopt new approaches to teaching’, failure to understand that students need to be motivated, the research focus of many academics’ career path, and ‘high levels of commitment to the academic discipline concerned and the belief that PTS necessarily involves at least an element of trade-off of purely academic goals and achievement’. The paper suggests that whilst many institutions claim to have reward systems ‘which recognise and support a culture of innovation in teaching, these frequently lack any real credibility’. It supports the need for institutions to establish a ‘credible and durable body with responsibility for teaching and learning… To date, very little attention has been paid to how changes in teaching and learning practices in HE can be most effectively managed’.

Fullan, Michael G. (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change, London, Cassell (2nd edn of The Meaning of Educational Change, 1982)

The book discusses the sources and meanings of educational change, its implementation and continuation, and the range of actors in the process – the teacher, principal, student and others. Ch. 8 on the principal suggests ‘it is time to go beyond the empty phrase “the principal is the gatekeeper of change”’. The principal is caught between great pressures to bring about major transformations and to maintain stability, and the role is overloaded and fragmented. There are forces ‘stalling improvement’ but effective principals can overcome problems. They face ‘a classical organizational dilemma. Rapport with teachers is critical… The endless supply of new policies, programs, and procedures ensures that the dilemma remains active… the principal’s change agent role has come front and center… We have begun to make the transition from the principal’s role in influencing the implementation of specific innovations to the principal’s role in leading changes in the school as an organization’. This ‘larger role’ is one of transforming the culture of the school and the principal as ‘collaborative leader’. In the North American context ‘schools and districts cannot now manage innovation, and never will be able to without radically redesigning their approach to learning and sustained improvement… schools cannot redesign themselves. The role of the district is crucial’. Ch. 16 (‘The future of educational change’) contains a section on ‘From innovations to institutional development’. Insights into implementing single innovations are important, but ‘thinking in terms of single innovations is inherently limiting, because we are in reality faced with attempting to cope with multiple innovations simultaneously… institutional development – changes that increase schools’ and district’s capacity and performance for continuous improvements – is the generic solution needed.

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Taking on one innovation at a time is fire fighting and faddism… The greatest problem faced by school systems is not resistance to innovation but taking on too many changes indiscriminately. Selectivity and synergy replace ad hoc-ism in institutionally developed organizations’.

Gosling, David (1996) What do UK educational development units do?, International Journal for Academic Development 1 (1), pp. 75-83.

Educational development units (EDUs) designed to improve the quality of teaching or provide a support service have spread since the 1970s. Staff development officers and others have teaching quality responsibilities, but this survey focused on units ‘which have been given a strategic role within their institutions to address the issues of improving learning, teaching and assessment within the context of resource pressures and increasing student numbers’. EDUs were in some cases created in the context of Enterprise in Higher Education. They have a role in bringing about change, report directly to a pro-vice-chancellor or equivalent (or report to and advise a committee), but are viewed ‘variously’ by teaching staff: ‘given the traditionally closed and autonomous nature of university departments, being a central unit also presents particular problems in initiating and embedding change… most respondents indicated that they believed that the obstacles to change included the attitudes of staff, external pressures, culture of the disciplines and resource pressures’. The survey suggests that EDUs and similar departments ‘appear to be having a significant influence within their institutions in promoting change and supporting staff in a difficult resource environment’.

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Graves, Desmond (1986) Corporate Culture – Diagnosis and Change: auditing and changing the culture of organizations, London, Frances Pinter.

The books includes chapters on ‘what are we talking about?’, diagnosing the culture, the leader and culture and changing the culture. An introduction outlines the growth of attempts to study organisational climate and its relationship to managerial behaviour, including the variables within organisational culture. It quotes from a series of papers edited by Tagiuri and Litwin (1968) which reviewed definitions of organisational climate and offered: ‘Organisational climate is a relatively enduring quality of the internal environment of an organisation that (a) is experienced by its members, (b) influences their behaviour, and (c) can be described in terms of the values of a particular set of characteristics (or attributes) of the organisation’. The author comments that this definition ‘begs more questions than it eliminates, for instance: ‘what is the length of the relatively enduring quality? And how can we distinguish climate from other influences upon behaviour? And what is the value of a particular set of attributes?…’ The book also explores approaches to the concept of culture, suggesting limited value to most of the ways of ‘segmenting’ the nature of corporate culture.

Handy, Charles B. (1976, 3rd edn) Understanding Organizations, New York, Facts on File.

Ch. 7 explores the nature and meanings of ‘the cultures of organizations’. The word ‘cultures’ is preferred to ‘organizational ideologies’, as conveying ‘more of the feeling of a pervasive way of life, or set of norms. In organizations there are deep-set beliefs about the way work should be organized, the way authority should be exercised, people rewarded, people controlled. What are the degrees of formalization required? How much planning and how far ahead? What combination of obedience and initiative is looked for in subordinates? Do work hours matter, or dress, or personal eccentricities?… Do committees control, or individuals?… These are all parts of the culture of an organization’. Following Roger Harrison, he elaborates four main types of culture. (1) ‘The power culture’, which depends on a central power source, with rays of power and influence spreading out from that central figure. Size is a problem for power cultures, which put their faith in individuals, not committees, and may suffer from low morale and high turnover. (2) ‘The role culture’, which is often stereotyped as bureaucracy, works by logic and rationality and ‘rests its strength in its pillars, its functions or specialities’. The role is often more important than whoever fills it. Role cultures offer security and predictability to the individual, but can be slow to see the need for change. (3) ‘The task culture’, which is job or project oriented. It is a matrix structure bringing together the right people and resources in a team culture, offering flexibility and sensitivity to the environment. (4) ‘The person culture’, where any structure exists only to serve individuals within it (e.g. barristers’ chambers, architects’ partnerships, some small

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consultancy firms…). Control mechanisms and management hierarchies are possible in such cases only by mutual consent. The author pursues a range of what he calls ‘the influencing factors’ (history and ownership, size, technology, goals and objectives, the environment, the people). Other chapters address, for example, the politics and management of differences, and how the concepts he elaborates work ‘in application’.

Hargreaves, David H. (1995) School culture, school effectiveness and school improvement, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 6 (1), pp. 23-46.

This article discusses the relevance of the concept of culture to school effectiveness and improvement. Typologies of school culture, ‘ideal type’ cultures (traditional and collegial) and varieties of structures, and their linkages, are explored. The discussion is against the background of ‘cultures in transition’, under the impact of rapid educational reform. It addresses the issue of ‘which type of culture most helps schools to cope with change, in what ways and under what conditions?’

Jelinek, Mariann (1979) Institutionalizing Innovation: a study of organizational learning systems, New York, Praeger.

The Introduction argues the need for new theory to explain ‘how organizations learn’, since their learning has a ‘something more’ than that of the aggregate of the individuals taking part – organisations ‘have a life of their own’. Organisational learning and change are without a map ‘for exploring these phenomena… the central focus of this study is the large, successful firm which devotes substantial effort to long-range planning… Clearly organizations do differ in their ability to influence adaptation to change… If a firm or organization is to continue to grow, it will ultimately surpass the ability of even the extraordinary individual to coordinate and direct it, to innovate extensively enough to maintain it’. A qualitative shift transforms ‘I know’ to an ‘organizationally shared “we know”’. Since learning takes place over time and is demonstrable ‘only in the sequential application of generalized insights or approaches’, this study focuses on the means by which such applications take place (how an organisation replicates ‘procedure, approach and insight… particularly with regard to innovation’) and takes a narrative, longitudinal view. Ch. 6 (‘Learning in organizations’) contains a central discussion of ‘hierarchies of learning’. At the lowest levels are activities such as recording the specifics of basic task and routinising new tasks. The higher levels include the evolution of training programmes to teach new approaches, changing the organisation’s mission, and developing strategies for repeated paradigm change. From the point of innovation it is these higher levels that are important: ‘they are the stuff of policy decisions, concerning… questions of long-range proactiveness, institutional identity and change’. These are critical in a period of technological and social change. Much of what an organisation ‘knows’ is not codified or formalised, but is ‘part of the culture, part of what is “understood”’ but can

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become available and generalised. Organisations learn, in fact, by codifying individual insights, and the hierarchy of learning makes it possible to distinguish between routine repetition and higher-level procedures: the form of the organisation itself becomes ‘process’. To discuss organisational learning it is not necessary to abandon systems thinking, the importance of the individual, or administrative mechanisms which preserve knowledge and ‘make feasible the general application, refinement, and extension of such knowledge’.

Johnson, H. Russell (1976) A new conceptualization of source of organizational climate, Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 (1), pp. 95-103.

This explores differences in ‘the perceived quality of the relationship between the individual and the organization as a function of longevity’. It interprets climate as a joint function of ‘situational and personality variables… it is neither exclusively’.

Kerr, Clark (1964, edn of 1966) The Uses of the University, New York, Harper & Row.

The most relevant section is entitled ‘Conservative institutions – dynamic environment’. It argues for the university’s need to create a stable, continuous, equitable environment for its members, and ‘inventiveness should be left to the individual faculty member with the protection and solidity of the surrounding institutional structure’. Quoting Frederick Rudolph he emphasises that the history of American colleges and universities has, with rare exceptions, been one of ‘drift, reluctant accommodation, belated recognition that while no one was looking, change had in fact taken place’. Few innovations had taken place and movements for reform had been met by the ‘collective faculty who usually seem to be dragging their feet’. He portrays the individual faculty member as torn between ‘guild’ and ‘socialist’ views of the university. The former stands for ‘self-determination, and for resistance against the administration and the trustees; the socialist view, for service to society which the administration and the trustees often represent. The guild view is elitist toward the external environment, conservative toward internal change, conformist in relation to the opinion of colleagues. The socialist view is democratic toward society, radical toward change, and nonconformist… Few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others’. ‘The truly major changs in university life have been initiated from the outside, by such forces as Napoleon in France, ministers of education in Germany, royal commissions and the University Grants Committee in Great Britain, the Communist Party in Russia, the emperor at the time of the Restoration in Japan’ (and governing boards, Congress and foundations in the United States).

Kimberly, John R.(1981) Managerial innovation, in Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (eds) Handbook of Organizational Design, vol. 1, Adapting Organizations to their Environment, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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The discussion of managerial innovation revolves around a Mao Tse-tung metaphor: ‘in a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken’. Imposing managerial innovation in the absence of internal receptivity is like heating the stone. A discussion of the meaning of innovation is followed by the questions: Why do some organizations adopt particular innovations whereas others do not? Why does a given organization adopt some innovations and not others? What kinds of factors facilitate or impede adoption of innovations? Research on adoption behaviour normally focuses on individuals, but managerial innovations are adopted by organizations - which complicates assumptions from the former research. The discussion takes in the characteristics of administrators, size and organizational structures. The utilisation and ultimate fate of managerial innovations are discussed. There is a lack of research on such questions as: where ideas for managerial innovation come from, and how they are developed?’ The discussion is predominantly market-oriented.

King, Nigel and Anderson, Neil (1995) Innovation and Change in Organizations, London, Routledge.

Search in the past has been for factors helping or hindering organisations attempting to innovate. There is a need to look at people (including leadership, change agents, idea champions), structure, climate and culture, and environment, and types of organisational structure (away from the individual). Discussion covers structural and interpretative approaches to culture, including Handy’s four types of the former: role, power, task and person cultures. These ‘view culture in terms of the symbols, rituals and myths pervading the organization. Managing change therefore involves the manipulation of these symbolic elements of culture’. A ‘timeless’ approach to culture involves correlations between various attitudinal and behavioural variables’, an alternative being to construct ‘innovation histories’. ‘If, as seems likely, innovations rarely progress in a clear and predictable sequence of developmental stages, and if the process looks different for different types of innovation, questions must be raised about how “manageable” the innovation process (and organizational change more generally) is’.

Kremer-Hayon, Lya and Avi-Itzhak, Tamar E. (1986) Roles of academic department chairpersons at the university level: perceptions and satisfaction, Higher Education 15, pp.105-12.

Such roles have been neglected in the past, and the focus has been on students and instructors only. The conclusion from interviews emphasises chairpersons’ lack of preparation and the conflict arising from dual loyalty to external groups (larger community of the institution) and internal groups. The result is often dissatisfaction and ambiguity. Chairs do not and do not need to encourage research, as this is embedded already in the system.

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Louis, Meryl Reis (1990) Acculturation in the workplace; newcomers as lay ethnographers, in Benjamin Schneider (ed.) Organizational Climate and Culture, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

The paper focuses on the process by which ‘new members come to appreciate cultures and climates indigenous to work settings and organizations’. It describes competence as a member of a social group as ‘based on being conversant in the set of meanings shared by group members… Culture knowledge is tacit, contextual, informal, unofficial, shared, emergent. Together these characteristics make teaching or otherwise transmitting local cultures to newcomers problematic’. It analyses the roles of peers, mentors, supervisors and the newcomers themselves, as well as the environments in which they operate.

Louis, Meryl Reis (1985) An investigator’s guide to workplace culture, in Peter J. Frost et al. (eds), Organizational Culture, Beverly Hills, Sage.

Using some definitions of cultural patterns, differences, understandings… the author isolates three basic components of culture: the content (‘the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns… a set of common understandings’), the group, and a relationship between the content and the group (content characteristic of the group). Anthropologists have long differed over the content: ‘in fact more than thirty years ago Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) identified 164 meanings of the term “culture” that had been used in anthropology. Most of the meanings deal with nuances of the content component’. The author rejects the common assumption that ‘an organization is possessed of a single culture, one that is pervasive throughout the organization’. If one assumes that an organisation has a culture ‘then it should not matter where one looks to find it or who one chooses as informants’. The culture at the top of an organisation may be a ‘for-our-eyes-only’ culture or a ‘for-public-consumption’ culture. The researcher needs to discover the extent of ‘penetration’ by a particular culture. Without a framework for subdividing the topic, it ‘assumes the burden of comprehensiveness – an awesome burden in the case of workplace culture’. ‘It is generally agreed that workplace cultures encompass tacit understandings, difficult-to-detect negotiations, and other intermittent and intersubjective processes, as well as more accessible physical and linguistic symbols… The challenge for the investigator trying to uncover a culture, then, is to look for and/or provoke conditions under which tacit understandings and processes are accessible.

McNay, Ian (1995) From the collegial academy to corporate enterprise: the changing cultures of universities, in Tom Schuller (ed.) The Changing University?, Buckingham, Open University Press.

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This briefly discusses four types of institutional culture: collegium (‘the key word is “freedom”); bureaucracy (‘regulation becomes important’); corporation (‘the executive exerts authority’); enterprise (‘key word would be client’). All four co-exist in different balances in most universities.

March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P. (eds) (1979, 4th printing 1994) Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, Oslo, Scandinavian University Press.

The contributions discuss American and Scandinavian examples of choice in institutional decision-making, with an underlying commitment to the Cohen and March concept of ‘organized anarchy’. Olsen addresses their emphasis on ambiguity: ‘An organization is not simply a vehicle for solving given problems or for resolving conflict through bargaining. It is also a collection of choices looking for problems; issues and feelings looking for decisions-in-process through which they can be mediated… It is also a set of procedures by which participants arrive at an interpretation of what they (and others) are doing, and who they are. This view of an organization as a mixture of issues, activities, feelings, and choices, each generated in part from extraneous factors, makes every choice opportunity an ambiguity stimulus’. Some of the theory in the book is closely related to the analysis of often minor events in the decision-making process. The general theme is summarised by March and Romelaer as a rejection of the view that ‘great consequences must have great causes, that decisions were necessary events, and that the explanation of organizational choice lies within the choice. Much of this book is devoted to an alternative view. We have argued in a number of ways that decisions are streams rather than events, that choices are contextual, and that understanding alternative pasts is as significant as understanding alternative futures’. Christensen also portrays the nature of decision and choice: ‘The idea of decision is a theory. It assumes a connection between activities called the decision process, pronouncements called decisions, and actions called decision implementations. The decision process brings together people, problems, and solutions and produces a decision. The process may involve problem-solving; it may involve bargaining, it may involve some system of power. Whatever the mechanism, the process generates an outcome. That decision, in turn, is converted into specific actions through some variation of a bureaucratic system’.

Masland,Andrew T. (1985) Organizational culture in the study of higher education, Review of Higher Education, 8 (2), pp. 157-68).

Organisational culture is presented as a ‘useful perspective on higher education’. It outlines previous literature (interest in Japanese industry, academic disciplines, academic profession, institutions and national systems). The difficulty of studying culture is that it ‘is implicit, and we are all embedded in our own cultures. In order to observe organizational culture, the researcher must find visible and explicit manifestations’. It addresses saga, heroes, symbols and rituals

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as ‘windows on organizational culture’. The methodology includes interviews (seen as most important), observation and documentary analysis.

Meek, V. Lynn (1988) Organizational culture: origins and weaknesses, Organization Studies, 9 (4), pp. 453-73.

‘The study of organizational culture – the proposition that organizations create myths and legends, engage in rites and rituals, and are governed through shared symbols and customs – is much in vogue’. Much emphasis is being placed on cultural problems at a time when institutional structures are under strain. In organisational research not enough attention has been paid to which sociological and anthropological models have been borrowed (mostly from the ‘structural-functional’ theoretical paradigm). Studies have been unduly linked ‘to the interest of management’ and have promulgated the idea that ‘“culture” is the collective consciousness of the organization, “owned” by management…’ The structure of power and conflict have been underestimated: ‘the theories of culture used by the contributors [to Kilmann et al. (eds) Gaining Control of the Corporate Culture, 1985] rest on the premise that the norms, values and beliefs of organizational members are factors that create consensus, predict behaviour and create unity…Any theory that assumes that culture is the internalization of dominant norms and values, must also assume that all members must hold to the dominant value system or else be “outside culture”’. ‘Most anthropologists would find the idea that leaders create culture preposterous’. Individuals create and reproduce culture, but not in a vacuum (e.g. ‘no one person creates language’). ‘Cultural conflict is most obvious in professional organizations – large teaching hospitals, research laboratories, tertiary education institutions…while organizations may be regarded as forums for conflict and dispute, they also wield power in modern society through what Galbraith (1983) terms their ability to condition their own members and the public at large’. Shared norms and symbols in an organization do not necessarily mean consensus and cohesion. The author emphasises the view that organisation culture is what ‘an organisation is’. Culture and structure are abstractions and the task for the researcher is ‘not to observe culture or structure, but to observe the concrete behaviour of individual actors’. Multiple theoretical models are needed to do justice to ‘the variety, complexity, and richness of human culture’.

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Meyerson, Debra and Martin, Joanne (1987) Cultural change: an integration of three different views, Journal of Management Studies 24 (6), pp. 623-47.

The authors treat culture as ‘a metaphor of organization, not just as a discrete variable… We view organizations, then, as patterns of meaning, values and behaviour’. ‘Organizations are cultures’. They discuss three paradigms of culture and their implications for cultural change. Paradigm 1 sees culture as shared and an integrating mechanism, giving an impression of consistency, often focusing on the leader as ‘a primary source of cultural content’, and denying ambiguity. Superficial and more deeply rooted perspectives view cultural change ‘in terms of a monolithic process, as an organization-wide phenomenon’. Paradigm 2 emphasises differentiation and diversity, seeing organisations as ‘not simply a single, monolithic culture. Instead, a culture is composed of a collection of values and manifestations, some of which may be contradictory’, revealing different types of subcultures, and giving more prominence to ‘diffuse and unintentional sources of change’. Paradigm 3 differs from 1 and 2 in stressing ambiguity, ‘thought of as the way things are, as the “truth”, not as a temporary state awaiting the discovery of the “truth”…cultural manifestations are not clearly consistent or inconsistent with each other’. This paradigm does not portray culture as generally harmonious or full of conflict. Instead, individuals share some viewpoints, disagree about some, and are ignorant of or indifferent to others’. It emphasises ‘individual adjustment to environmental fluctuations’. The conclusion is that ‘an awareness of all three paradigms simultaneously would avoid the usual blind spots associated with any single perspective’.

Middlehurst, Robin (1993) Leading Academics, Buckingham, Open University Press.

Chapter 3, ‘Organizational images’, discusses different perspectives on the university. The collegial image, influential in the past, is now in major respects ‘more symbolic than real’. Universities as ‘professional organizations’ involves a focus on ‘the characteristics of the staff’. Neither of these two provides an entirely satisfactory description of the modern university, and ‘the political image’ focuses on difference and competition within the university, ‘in contrast to the emphasis on homogeneity and cooperation within collegial and professional images’. Following Weber, there is a view of universities as bureaucracies, also limited as an explanation of universities. More recent images involve seeing the university as ‘an adaptive system, the entrepreneurial image’, or the ‘cybernetic image’, which sees the university as a brain, capable of being ‘flexible, resilient and inventive in response to new situations’. The overall discussion of the characteristics of leadership includes (ch. 7) ‘leading departments’.

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Mills, Daniel Quill and Friesen, Bruce (1992) The learning organization, European Management Journal 10 (2), pp. 146-56.

‘We conceive of a learning organization as one able to sustain consistent internal innovation or “learning”, with the immediate goals of improving quality, enhancing customer or supplier relationships, or more effectively executing business strategy, and the ultimate objective of sustaining profitability…they need to…utilize the outputs of innovation in their operations’. Organisations learn through individuals, ‘the systematization of knowledge into practices, processes and procedures’ and by absorbing other institutions. Equipping an organisation to learn means a commitment to knowledge, the developing of learning internally (including by research), a mechanism for renewal, and an openness to the outside world. ‘A traditionally structured organization can also be a learning organization… (but) steep hierarchies tend to preserve the knowledge of a formative period in the firm’s life’. To become a learning organisation a firm ‘must teach its employees how to learn, and it must reward them for success in learning’

Mintzberg, Henry (1979) The Structuring of Organizations: a synthesis of research,, Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-Hall.

The book is mainly concerned with ‘the essence of structure’, the basic elements of organisations and its ‘system of flows’. The structure of an organisation ‘can be defined simply as the sum total of the ways in which it divides its labor into distinct tasks and then achieves coordination among them’. It is concerned with coordinating mechanisms as organizations grow and diversify, and with their means of serving their mission and ‘the needs of those people who control or otherwise have power over the organization (such as owners, government agencies, unions of the employees, pressure groups)’.

Moses, Ingrid (1985) The role of head of department in the pursuit of excellence, Higher Education 14 (4), pp. 337-54.

An Australian study of the role of leadership of research and teaching. Staff see the head of department as department advocate and planner and getting people involved, not just as executive officer. Departments are favourable to research but provide little or no encouragement for teaching, for which there is little feedback or reward: ‘departmental preoccupation is with getting the teaching done, not with doing it well. The more junior staff sometimes discussed teaching strategies and problems among themselves, and their own interest in teaching prompted them to seek opportunities to improve their teaching’.

Newton, Colin and Tarrant, Tony (1990) Educational Management and Administration, 18 (3), pp. 61-6.

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Two educational psychologists discuss the application of psychology normally concerned with children’s learning and behaviour difficulties to changing schools. They underline a need to combine short-time objectives with long-term vision.

Nias, Jennifer, Southworth, Geoff and Yeomans, Robin (1989) Staff Relationships in the Primary School: a study of organizational cultures, London, Cassell

The analysis is based on the study of five schools and the longer the researchers spent in them the more they made sense ‘of events whose meaning had been obscure’, and the commonality of significant factors even though the schools were unique: ‘the school’s buildings and organizational arrangements; the people who worked there, their histories and that of the school. Each of these affected the school’s culture, first, by determining the nature and extent of interaction between staff members, and second, by helping to decide who among them had authority and influence’. Ch. 3 is about these ‘individual school cultures’. It addresses the buildings, their ‘natural meeting places and “critical pathways”’; the organisational arrangements, where teachers ‘generally lead working lives characterized by isolation from other adults’, but where it is possible for staff to be brought together and interaction to take place; individual ‘inclination’, or choice to communicate and collaborate or not; the power of history; norms and shared meanings, which were particularly the product of interaction, ‘through the symbols, rituals and ceremonies which reflected the underlying values, attitudes and beliefs of the culture’. Further chapters discuss the way the culture (e.g. ‘the culture of collaboration’) is established and maintained. One emphasis is on the role of head teachers ‘as founders of their schools’ cultures’. Heads have to have a sense of mission which they can articulate and defend. They therefore need to be able to persuade others to share that sense of mission. This involves securing the commitment of other staff (and parents and governors) to the beliefs and values that the individual head believes to be most important for his/her school’. The schools studied were not inert or self-satisfied, and contained a variety of pedagogical and curricular developments. As organisations they were ‘densely populated, actively constructed, finely balanced and continuously changing. At the same time they were stable, subject to the authority of the head and the influence of the peer group, controlled by allegiance to shared beliefs and values. The key to this apparent contradiction is the notion of organizational culture… primary schools have the capacity to become the kinds of organizations that the adults who work in them choose that they will’.

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Ott, J. Steven (1989) The Organizational Culture Perspective, Pacific Grove, Cal., Brooks/Cole.

Ch. 1 discusses ‘the organizational culture perspective’. Such a culture exists in an organisation in the form of such things as shared values, beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, norms, artifacts, and patterns of behavior… (it) is a way of looking at and thinking about behavior of and in organizations, a perspective for understanding what is occurring’. It is an approach in opposition to structural perspectives, challenging, e.g. how organizations make decisions, and rejecting the assumptions of structural and systems schools. Behaviour is not conditioned by rules, authority and rational norms, but by cultural norms, values, beliefs and assumptions. Knowledge of structure, planning processes etc. gives unreliable clues about an organisation’s culture: ‘an organization’s behavior cannot be understood or predicted by studying its structural or systems elements. An organizational culture perspective also has limitations – it is only one way of looking at an organisation, and it is still a ‘youthful’ approach, emerging in the 1950s but only becoming a ‘hot topic’ from the end of the 1970s. Ch. 3 looks at concepts, definitions and a typology, including a detailed classification of the elements of organisational culture.

Powell, Walter W., Koput, Kenneth W. and Smith-Doerr, Laurel (1996) Interorganizational collaboration and the locus of innovation: networks of learning in biotechnology, Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (1), pp. 116-45.

‘We argue in this paper that when the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms’. The discussion explores in detail the nature of and reasons for ‘interfirm alliances’, and focuses on ‘forms of collaboration undertaken by dedicated biotechnology forms’ and the contribution of ‘cooperative ventures to organizational learning’ – extensive connections in an emerging industry that ‘typify the field’. Reasons offered by investigators include the strategic use of pooled resources, knowledge creation within a fluid and evolving community, and the returns provided by exploitation rather than exploration. Collaborations in high-tech industries ‘typically reflect more than just a formal contractual exchange… Beneath most formal ties, then, lies a sea of informal relations’.

Pugh, Derek S. and Hickson, David J. (1964, edn of 1996) Writers on Organizations, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

This summarises the work of writers on organisations under six headings: the structure of organizations, the organization and its environment, the management of organizations, decision-making in organizations, people in organizations, and organizational change and learning. Authors covered include Max Weber, Henry

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Mintzberg, Charles Handy and, in the last section, Chris Argyris, Peter Senge and Gareth Morgan.

Reichers, Arnon. E. and Schneider, Benjamin (1990) Climate and culture: an evolution of constructs, in Benjamin Schneider (ed.) Organizational Climate and Culture, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

This paper contains two detailed tables of the development of ‘the climate concept’ (1939-) and of ‘the culture concept’ (1979-). It explores the longer history of the former in the fields of industrial and organizational psychology and organizational behaviour, with its ‘reconceptualizations and empirical breakthroughs, not yet characteristic of the latter. Early empirical studies considered climate as a correlate of work motivation and productivity. One difference between climate and culture development ‘concerns the ways of science in applied psychology compared to anthropology. Research from a climate perspective comes almost linearly from Kurt Lewin’s influence, and Lewin believed there was nothing so practical as a good theory’. His followers focused on aspects of effectiveness, which is not an important concept in anthropology, where ‘description is the issue’. Culture reseachers ‘make a distinction in the definition of culture between culture as something an organization is versus culture as something an organization has’. The former tends to be exploratory and descriptive, the latter promotes ‘an examination of organizational cultures as systems of shared meanings, assumptions, and underlying values… We agree with Schein (1985) that climate can most accurately be understood as a manifestation of culture. Culture is probably a deeper, less consciously held set of meanings… at a general level, there is substantial overlap between the two concepts’.

Rutherford, Desmond, Fleming, William and Mathias, Haydn (1985) Strategies for change in higher education: three political models, Higher Education 14, pp. 433-45.

This is mainly a discussion of Becher and Kogan, Process and Structure in Higher Education (1980) (‘a structural model’); Lindquist, Strategies for Change (1978) and Berg and Ostergren, Innovations and Innovation Processes in Higher Education and ‘Innovation processes in higher education’ (1977; 1979) (‘a social model’); and Argyris and Schon, Theory in Practice and Argyris, Reasoning, Learning and Action (1974; 1982) (‘a personal model’). It broadly accepts Cohen and March’s description of universities as ‘organised anarchies’ and explores how the three models provide ‘insight into the factors that promote and inhibit innovation and change in institutions of higher education’. It rejects a view of change as a ‘rational model’ involving identifiable stages. Across the three models it perceives ‘some recurrent themes’, which have to do with: conflicting goals and priorities; the need for radical approaches to solve major problems; the espousal of values by groups which do not necessarily use them to inform their action; the prior problem of changing values in order to achieve radical change; the role of leadership and power in institutionalising change. The

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conclusion is that ‘if institutions of higher education are to respond effectively to the continuing challenges on their traditional autonomy and practices then radical changes in current values and behaviours are needed’, and the three complementary perspectives can help to serve this purpose. The paper uses the rapid expansion of continuing education in a traditional university as a case study.

Schein, Edgar H. (1996) Culture: the missing concept in organization studies, Administrative Science Quarterly, 41 (2), pp. 229-40.

Researchers have underestimated the importance of culture (‘shared norms, values, and assumptions’) in how organisations function. The concept is valuable only when it derives from observation of real behaviour. Understanding of the concept is moving from individualistic psychology to greater integration of psychology, sociology and anthropology. The individualistic bias stemmed from the 1960s-70s. Argyris and others showed how organisations have infantilised their employees, and how organisations have trained people to have negative views of human nature. A research bias towards bottom-up norms ignored the cultural values of other groups, producing abstractions untenable in practice. There are three cultures of management: ‘the engineers’ and ‘executives’ who operate within international professional frameworks, and ‘operators’ who do not. Some analysts expect groups other than the last one to give up their culture. ‘Organization studies will not mature as a field until we spend much more time in observing and absorbing these other cultures, learning to see them from the insider’s perspective, even discovering in that process other occupational cultures that affect how organizations work… My own insights have only come after I have spent hours and hours immersed in a given phenomenon, after I have identified and dealt with all my own prior expectations and stereotypes, and have gradually come to see what is really out there’.

Schein, Edgar H. (1985) Organizational Culture and Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

The crucial message of this book is introduced in the Preface: ‘I got into the topic of organizational culture, the more I realized that culture was the result of entrepreneurial activities by company founders, leaders of movements, institutional builders, and social architects. As I began to think through the issues of how culture changes, I again realized the centrality of leadership – the ability to see a need for change and the ability to make it happen’. Chapters include ‘Defining organizational culture’ (again stressing that ‘organizational cultures are created by leaders’, whose only important role is to ‘create and manage culture’); ‘Why culture must be better understood’; ‘Functions of culture in organizations’; ‘Content and levels of culture’; ‘Analyzing the change process’; ‘Leadership as managed culture change’. ‘Culture’ is reserved for the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs’ shared by members of an organisation and define in a ‘taken-for-granted’ fashion an organisation’s view of itself. It is ‘a learned product of group experience and is, therefore, to be found only where there is a

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definable group with a significant history’. It is important to develop theoretically sound answers to such questions as: What does culture do? What functions does it serve? How does it originate, evolve, and change? Why is it so difficult to change culture?. How is that the individual intentions of founders and leaders come to be ‘a shared, consensually validated set of definitions that are passed on to new members?’ People function comfortably because of a high degree of consensus. The book concludes: ‘Once an organization has evolved a mature culture because it has had a long and rich history, that culture creates the patterns of perception, thought and feeling of every new generation in the organization and, therefore , also “causes” the organization to be predisposed to certain kinds of leadership… the mature group, through its culture, also creates its own leaders. As scholars we must understand this paradox: Leaders create cultures, but cultures, in turn, create their next generation of leaders’.

Schuller, Tom (1992) The exploding community? The university idea and the smashing of the academic atom, in Ian McNay (ed.) Visions of Post-compulsory

Education, Buckingham, Open University Press.

This paper explores the idea of ‘the university as a community…and…the extent to which centrifugal pressures make this notion increasingly inaccurate as an account of current practice’. It discusses the differentiation of academic labour, the erosion of common salary scales (a shared reward system), the decline of the department as an intellectually coherent unit (which was perhaps exaggerated historically) under the impact of specialisation. Academics are faced with an increasing strain on loyalty. Is this ‘to her or his students? To the department? To the institution? To the “academic community”? To a sponsor? Or to him – or herself?’ They are reluctant to attend meetings not directly relevant to their own field, resist supervising students from other departments or contributing to courses run by colleagues. The university may be losing its claim to be a community ‘with an internal cohesion and inherent bonding force’.

Sporn, Barbara (1996) Managing university culture: an analysis of the relationship between institutional culture and management approaches, Higher Education, 32, pp. 41-61.

How does university culture function ? – a vital question in a situation of mass education and financial decline. Goals are ambivalent and attainment problematic. These are ‘people oriented’. Professionals want autonomy but are vulnerable to their environment. Problems are similar in business companies. Values and beliefs are developed in historical processes and transmitted by language and symbols. A strong culture supports strategic management, and strategic implementation depends on the underlying culture (the discussion includes diagrammatic representation of university structure, culture, mission,

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goals, management). A strong culture means congruence amongst members, hierarchical integration and strategies. ‘Assessing the culture and integrating the results in management processes enhances the possibilities of cultural changes. A university with very strong subcultures can – once realized – be developed into a more unified institution by initiatives that trigger a higher degree of identification’. This was an empirical study based on a review of previous research reports on the institution (Wirtschaftuniversitat Wien) and its flow of internal mail.

Strivens, Janet (1985) School climate: a review of a problematic concept, in David Reynolds (ed.) Studying School Effectiveness, London, Falmer.

Most people working in or visiting schools ‘seem happy to accept the idea that a particular institution has its own “atmosphere”…There are, however, a number of problems with this assumption that worry the educational researcher…there is no guarantee that this initial evaluation would command a high degree of consensus’. However one describes and classifies environments ‘we may be fairly certain that they are not created overnight. Institutions have histories, but these are rarely available with any degree of completeness to the researcher’. Early work in this area was inspired by ‘classical’ organisation theory, particularly studies of leadership and group behaviour. Schools were not seen as different from other kinds of organisation. Scales measuring organisational climate or quality of school life were developed. Other measures of climate were also developed. Schools, however, were seen as a type of organisation that implied ‘the existence of rationally conceived and defined goals, and an equally rationally developed and adopted “technology” for achieving them’. The assumption tended to be that a well-designed questionnaire would reveal weaknesses that could be rectified. The problematic nature of goals in the organisational structure of schools was not recognised. Nor was the ambiguous nature of pupils as members of the organisation. ‘Climate’ has been used as an aspect of culture, ‘encompassing attitudes, behaviour and organizational structures influencing school effectiveness’. The substitution of ‘culture’ for ‘climate’ may not help, but it does suggest the need ‘for the skills of the ethnographer in exploring the elusive nature of a school’s “atmosphere”’.

Taylor, Peter G. (1998) Institutional change in uncertain times: lone ranging is not enough, Studies in Higher Education, 23 (3), pp. 269-79.

The paper focuses on the increasing centrality of communication and information technology (CIT) in innovation, in a period of uncertainty (with potential for both progress and for deterioration). It argues that the ‘energising’ role of the individual ‘lone ranger’ innovator has been important but is no longer sufficient: ‘the lone ranger approach emphasises the importance of investing creative energy, but has done little to articulate that investment with the broader institutional context… lone ranging will continue to fail to lead to fundamental rethinking of every aspect of the way in which universities provide their services – to

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reinventing university cultures’. Lone rangers are not team players, do not welcome systematic, institutional policy frameworks. Cost-centre structures have placed such centres under pressure to develop survival strategies. Reinventing cultures, given the need for collaboration by individuals with complementary expertise, is now the challenge, and traditions will not be moved ‘in any profound way by this romantic, even heroic, approach’. Extending involvement ‘“towards the centre” requires the engagement of a “critical mass” of staff in the pedagogical use of CITs. The paper distinguishes between ‘innovation’ and ‘appropriation’ (the informed adoption of the work of lone rangers), emphasises the importance of the latter and develops a five-stage process for its implementation: ‘few institutions take the time to institutionalise the innovations, or to transform the learning of individual innovators into organisational learning’.

Tierney, William G. (1988) Organizational culture in higher education, Journal of Higher Education, 59 (1), pp. 2-21.

This discusses organizational culture as a useful concept ‘for understanding management and performance in higher education’, grounded in ‘the shared assumptions of individuals participating in the organization. Often taken for granted by the actors themselves, these assumptions can be identified through stories, special language, norms, institutional ideology, and attitudes that emerge from individual and organizational behavior’. Earlier studies had concentrated, e.g., on student culture, leadership and distinctive colleges. The paper offers a six-item ‘framework of organizational culture’: environment, mission, socialization, information, strategy and leadership, and exemplifies them in a study of ‘Family State College’.

Trowler, Paul R. (1998) Academics Responding to Change. New Higher Education Frameworks and Academic Cultures, Buckingham, Open University Press

This discusses ‘organizational culture at NewU’. It considers four existing ways of conceptualising it: the nomothetic; the functionalist; the inductively derived categorising; and the phenomenological approaches. These approaches ‘generally fail to take into account the different “stages” of articulation of organizational culture’. It argues for greater theoretical elaboration of organizational culture, positing that ‘any large organization is characterized by a unique multiple cultural configuration – not a unitary whole but a set of cultures of different levels and kinds, manifested in different ways… The vision of cultures within organizations is also a dynamic one in the twin sense that it is itself in constant movement and shows how cultural characteristics may be configured in ways which will impede or facilitate change. This is in marked contrast to the static nature of the models of organizational culture reviewed earlier’.

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Van Maanen, John and Barley, Stephen R. (1985) Cultural organization: fragments of a theory, in Peter J. Frost et al. (eds) Organizational Culture, Beverly Hills, Sage.

The authors identify four ‘domains of analysis’ in accounting for the genesis, maintenance and transmission of culture: the ecological context in which a group is embedded; ‘differential interaction’ – patterns of interaction within the context between persons ‘who may or may not be members of the group to which one wishes to attribute a culture; collective understandings – ‘any social world consists of a collection of signs that are essentially devoid of meaning until they are noticed and interpreted by members of the collective; the reproductive and adaptive capacity (which) centers on the individual members’. The focus here is on the subgroup, in which members interact and ‘address problems cooperatively, collective understandings form to support concerted action’. The theory suggests that organisations ‘harbor subcultures’, but this does not preclude the possibility of a homogeneous organisational culture. The paper pursues ‘the seeds of organizational subcultures’, exploring for example the origins of organisational ‘segmentation’, the impact of technological innovation, ideological differentiation (‘schisms in academic departments and research institutes frequently begin when members start to distinguish themselves on the basis of differing paradigms’) and ‘contracultural movements’ (which draw support from many subgroups in opposition to subcultures which ‘treat their members dismally or subscribe to wrongheaded ideas’). The paper therefore offers a theoretical rationale ‘for the presence and proliferation of subcultures in organizations’, with their potential for conflict. It concludes that ‘there are sound theoretical reasons to expect multiple subcultures within organizations… if we wish to discover where the cultural action lies in organizational life, we will probably have to discard some of our tacit (and not so tacit) presumptions about organizational (high) culture and move to the group level of analysis. It is here where the people discover, create, and use culture, and it is against this background that they judge the organization of which they are a part’.

Van Vught, Frans A. (1989) Creating innovations in higher education, European Journal of Education, 24 (3), pp. 249-70.

The article ‘focuses upon the relationship between government strategies designed to encourage innovation in higher education and the innovative behaviour of higher education institutions. Policy-making has included both increased government planning and control and a strategy of self-regulation. Government ‘sets the innovation priorities… The institutions are supposed to be able to initiate innovations themselves, while government merely facilitates these innovations’. Research on organisational behaviour has sought to identify variables influencing the take-up of innovations (degree of decentralisation, formalisation, specialisation and complexity). Theories of government likelihood to intervene have been developed: ‘only very recently in the literature on higher education has attention been paid to matching governmental instruments to the higher education context’. In higher education institutions

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themselves it is the ‘knowledge areas’ that form the basic ‘foci of attention. Areas of knowledge are the “building blocks” without which higher education as an organisation cannot exist… Fragmentation is abundant’. The article reviews the literature that discusses organisational variables related to success of innovations, resistance to innovations and keeping them alive (‘diffusion will be difficult and will mainly take place through communication between colleagues’). The ideology of the academic profession ‘incorporates a basic resistance to comprehensive changes, especially when launched “from above”… This argument leads to the conclusion that government-initiated reforms in higher education systems, generally speaking, are not likely to succeed’. [This last argument does not take account of financial inducements by governments and their agencies.] Disciplines and fields are social communities with their own history, language, values and norms, and ‘judge the acceptability of innovations from their social perspectives, these judgements are influenced by the circumstances and conditions in their disciplines and fields’. The article discusses the characteristics that determine the fate of an innovation, taking account of the compatibility of a new idea, its relative advantage, its complexity, ‘triability’ and observability by others. [Although in 1989 this was analysing realities already becoming fast out of date, it points in directions for developing theories of the interconnection between government, institutions and ‘knowledge areas’.]

Wallis, W. Allen (1964) Centripetal and centrifugal forces in university organization, Daedalus, 93 (4), pp. 1071-82.

[Central messages of this paper are similar to Clark Kerr’s in The Uses of the University, also 1964.] It looks at organisations as systems of communication and information: ‘From the combination of these two kinds of information, about institutional goals and individual capacities, the people and resources of the institution are organized to carry out the three functions: deciding what to do, arranging for it to be done, and distributing the results’. It distinguishes between centralised organisations (authoritarian and hierarchical) and decentralised ones (individualistic and lassez-faire). The former are predictable and reliable, can be controlled and directed. The advantage of the latter is their adaptability. Centralisation occurs because faculty are here today gone tomorrow, but centrifugal tendencies arise from increasing diffusion of authority to outsiders. ‘Whereas once the advance of knowledge in most fields depended on universities and universities alone, now teaching is the only university activity that depends wholly on universities’. [This latter statement is interesting, but no longer applies in Britain].

Weick, Karl E. (1976) Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems, Administrative Science Quarterly, 21 (1), pp. 1-19.

Rationalised procedures are rare in ‘nature’. This paper is intended to help make sense of organisational life. ‘Loose coupling’ appeared in the literature in

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1973/5, and is a ‘sensitizing device’. ‘People who are steeped in the conventional literature of organizations may regard loose coupling as a sin or something to be apologized for. This paper takes a neutral, if not mildly affectionate, stance toward the concept’. Its virtue is that it allows portions of organisations to persist, with their localised adaptation etc. It provides a methodology for analysis of the unpredictable and its contexts. J.G. March has argued that ‘loose coupling can be spotted and examined only if one uses methodology that highlights and preserves rich detail about context’. ‘More time should be spent examining the possibility that educational organizations are most usefully viewed as loosely coupled systems. (This) can have a substantial effect on existing perspectives about organizations’.

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