2. THE LEVELS OF CULTURE session 2
Course : J1653 – Organization Culture and Power
Year : July 2014
THE LEVELS OF CULTURE session 2

3. Learning Outcomes
After studying this chapter, the students should be able to :
Know that culture can be analyzed at several different levels
Identify cultures in organizations 3
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4. THE LEVELS OF CULTURE The major levels of cultural analysis
Visible organizational structures and processes (hard to decipher)
Strategies, goals, philosophies (espoused justifications)
Unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. (ultimate source of values and action)
Artifacts
Espoused beliefs and values
Underlying assumptions
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5. Artifacts
At the surface is the level of artifacts, which includes all the phenomena that one sees, hears, and feels when one encounters a new group with an unfamiliar culture.
Artifacts include the visible products of the group, such as the architecture of its physical environment; its language; its technology and products; its artistic creations; its style, as embodied in clothing, manners of address, emotional displays, and myths and stories told about the organization; its published lists of values; its observable rituals and ceremonies; and so on. 5
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6. Espoused Beliefs and Values
All group learning ultimately reflects someone’s original beliefs and values, their sense of what ought to be, as distinct from what is.
When a group is first created or when it faces a new task, issue, or problem, the first solution proposed to deal with it reflects some individual’s own assumptions about what is right or wrong, what will work or not work 6
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7. Basic Underlying Assumptions
Basic assumptions, in this sense, are different from what some anthropologists called “dominant value orientations” in that such dominant orientations reflect the preferred solution among several basic alternatives, but all the alternatives are still visible in the culture, and any given member of the culture could, from time to time, behave according to variant as well as dominant orientations. 7
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8. CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS
TWO CASE EXAMPLES :
The Digital Equipment Corp.
Ciba-Geigy 8
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9. The Digital Equipment Corp.
Artifacts: Encountering the Company
Espoused Beliefs and Values
Basic Assumptions: The DEC Paradigm 9
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10. Ciba-Geigy Artifacts—Encountering Ciba-Geigy
Espoused Beliefs and Values
Basic Assumptions — The Ciba-Geigy Company Paradigm
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