CONCERNS REGARDING CULTURE (part 2)

This posting picks up on what the last one started, a report on a set of concerns and related questions one can ask about an organization and its culture when devising a plan to institute meaningful change.  That previous posting looked at three concerns, the first three of six concerns, offered by Lawrence E. Harrison.[1] 

His effort is aimed at addressing national cultures and their function in determining whether lesser developed countries are successful or not in modernizing their political and economic efforts.  The posting took those ideas and applied them to the challenge of instituting organizational change.  In so doing, the posting identified three aspects of an organization that are deemed as useful in planning change.

The three aspects are:  the typology of existing values and attitudes among the participants of an organization, understanding of how cultural values and attitudes affect stated goals, and how the held values and attitudes relate to the institutions of an organization.  If the reader missed that posting, he/she is encouraged to look it up.  For this posting, its time to move on to the last three concerns.

The fourth concern is how the organization transmits its values and attitudes.  This is a socialization concern.  It is important when considering change since a meaningful change will call on participants to favorably align their values and attitudes with what the change promotes in terms of behaviors and other organizational aspects.  In the main, what is important is whether the socialization processes are effective. 

Chances are there are deficiencies in how an organization meets this function.  When that is the case, the change agent needs to ask:  what can be done to improve the socializing processes?  These agents, to varying degrees, must depend on the organization’s established modes of training and socializing not only new recruits, but its veteran participants as well. 

In addition, change agents should gain an understanding of what organizational assets exist that assist in transmission efforts.  Once identified, how does one improve them or bolster them?  If there is a general deficiency in this area, how does one change these elements or “fix” them so they are, in effect, true assets relative to this concern?  Of course, if this is the case, it augments what needs to be changed making the challenge even more daunting.

The next concern is over how an organization measures values and attitudes.  This shifts one’s view to a more quantitative issue, although there are qualitative ways to measure values and attitudes.  What is usually done to conduct this introspection, is for the human relations people to administer a survey instrument asking people how they feel about different aspects of the organization. 

Surely the reader at one time another has taken one of these.  Oftentimes, the questions ask the respondent to characterize a statement – a description or a sentiment – in which they indicate how much they agree with it or disagree with it.  The options usually range from strongly agree – agree – don’t care – disagree – strongly disagree. 

The respondent usually indicates their feeling by choosing a number that corresponds to the various levels (like 1 to 5).  This lends itself to statistical analysis and assumes that if one person indicates a 4, for example, that roughly equates to someone else indicating a 4.

There are also instruments that ask for open ended answers.  Here there might be a statistical method to gauge what the respondents are indicating in their written responses, but more often answers are qualitatively analyzed.  Some organizational official reads the answers and interprets them as to what the respondents feel about what is being asked.

This writer is not an expert on this type of concern, but generally feels that for the most part these different ways of tapping and measuring participant opinions and feelings are legitimate ways.  To the degree they are, they provide a change agent useful information.  A lot of thought should be used in designing and implementing these instruments.  The object is to get accurate – as opposed to favorable – sentiments held by those who are the subjects of a change effort.

The last of the six concerns is assessing how well ongoing change efforts, within the organization, are doing in terms of values and attitudes.  And this leads one to ask:  how unsettled is this organization?  And one does not need to be upset with any level of dysfunction.  A word of warning is in order.

When one writes about change, as this blog has done from time to time, a reader might assume the writer is prone to favor change.  In the case of this blog, that is not true.  This writer favors and sees value in a stable environment.  Change, given its challenge and its disruptive quality, should only be sought when the need for it is deeply believed and felt. 

That is, it is determined that some aspect of an organization is seriously undermining the purpose of the organization – of why it exists.  Short of that, the organization should just be about what it does through the normal avenues it has established or has been granted.

Take the school system’s effort in civics education.  This blog has promoted a serious change to that curriculum.  This is not offered off-handedly.  This blog has dedicated a lot space in making the claim that the current status quo is seriously undermining what this writer believes civics education should be doing.  Here is not the place to re-state that argument, but to just cite it as an example of when a change effort is legitimate.

The other aspect of this concern is whether those change efforts are effective or not.  This calls on evaluation and any change effort needs to have, as part of its processes, an evaluation component.  Organizational evaluation is a prominent issue of concern among organizational scholars.

That component should be sophisticated enough to include steps like identifying the change’s objectives, its intermediate accomplishments (often called milestones), the steps that are designed to accomplish those intermediate accomplishments, and all this needs to identify qualitative levels of success or failure.  This in turn points to both terminal evaluation (did the process succeed or not?) and formative evaluation (is the effort getting there?).

And with that, Harrison’s suggested concerns over culture, be it national or organizational, is done.  Future postings will look at other elements of culture and how it indeed matters.

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[1] Lawrence E. Harrison, “Introduction:  Why Culture Matters,” in Culture Matters:  How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2000), xvii-xxxiv. 

CONCERNS REGARDING CULTURE (part 1)

Culture is a collective idea in that it encompasses a lot of various elements of one’s daily life.  More generally, it is often analyzed against other factors to explain why a society – or segments of a society – acts as it does.  Yet, certain theoretical approaches, among them critical theory, give this factor, culture, short shrift.  Other factors, like economic class divisions or geographic conditions, are more likely highlighted by those theorists or researchers. 

But as the title, Culture Matters,[1] of his edited book infers, Lawrence E. Harrison makes the case that not only does it matter, but it needs to be accounted for when considering change or development.  He describes how when trying to understand the lack of development in certain areas of the world, cultural conditions need to be studied and included in the mix of factors an analyst considers.

This writer wants to extend that notion a bit.  Not only are societies so affected by culture, but so are its businesses, neighborhood organizations, social clubs, non-profit organizations, and, of particular concern to this blog, schools.  All a society’s organizations, albeit to a less inclusive degree, have their own respective cultures.  These, in turn, reflect the societal culture, but have their own distinguishing elements.

The reader is reminded that one of the topics this blog has addressed is change.  While societal culture is more encompassing and helps one understand why a people behaves as it does, an organizational culture does the same thing within its more limited extent. 

If an organization wants to institute change of any significance, its culture surely needs to be considered.  And any question one would ask of a societal culture, with some revision, one can ask of an organizational culture.  By so asking, the implementation of change is made possible.

Harrison offers six concerns and accompanying questions that can guide social scientists to investigate why certain nations are able to advance – by modern standards – and some are not.  This posting shares some of these concerns, leaving the rest for the next posting.

The first concern Harrison entitles typology.  That is, he is looking at those sentiments – in the form of values and attitudes – that either assist or detract from the development of democratic institutions and economic practices that lead nations to develop modern economies.  Are there, at the organizational level, similar, fundamental values and attitudes that allow for organizational change?

This writer believes that there is.  If he is right, what are those questions?  The first question is:  what are the prevailing, relevant values and attitudes held by the subjects of an organization that can be judged to affect a change effort?  Once identified, a second question is asked:  are the sentiments helpful or counterproductive? 

Here, a change agent uses reasonable standards to determine on which side of that divide a given sentiment falls.  But the concern is then further extended to determine:  how strongly are these sentiments held?  These questions – all three of them – are asked early in a change effort.  The concern, therefore, is to identify and gauge these sentiments, but a bit more is suggested here. 

Once identified, to gauge them, a change agent needs to develop an empathetic understanding of how these sentiments affect the people being subjected to the change effort and the resulting changes.  Therefore, his/her concern is not merely a matter of asking these questions, but to develop an empathy or a compassion for what is being revealed. 

Why?  Often, these values and attitudes and, more likely, their strength, is not consciously known by the subject.  These sentiments at times – when they’re engaged – pop up and can readily determine subsequent behavior.[2]  This condition, in other contexts, has been amply covered in this blog.  As in those previous references, the point is that this factor makes change very difficult.  Beyond that, for a change agent to be successful, he/she needs to deal with it in a humane way.

This situation calls on change agents to devise honest but subtle ways to solicit the information.  They call on a level of trust that is not necessarily shared in any given social grouping.  This must be worked upon by establishing a history of honest exchanges.  It takes time and sincerity.

The second concern Harrison addresses is developing an understanding of how cultural values and attitudes affect stated goals and this is a more nuanced concern.  It is beyond the question of what are the sentiments people hold or of how strong they are.  The concern here is the qualitative aspect of how they influence people’s perceptions and dispositions.  This takes on more of a narrative quality.

For example, this writer in his maturing years – and up to this day – was affected by the relationship between his mother and father.  It was a bit rocky, to say the least.  But if someone were to have engaged the writer and tried to have steered him in one direction or another, that change agent would have probably had to feel how that relationship affected him at critical times. 

For example, how it made him look at authority or how secured he would feel given a proposed change and his role in that change.  This is not shared as a complaint or a “woe is me” account, it is what many people might share to explain their behavior – assuming they are conscious of the effects such earlier experiences have. 

Here, to get at such insight, a bit of story-telling would probably be necessary.  Those are elicited to acquire a qualitative understanding from where the subject is coming.  And to add to the challenge, many times such past experiences and their related feelings are not shared readily.

Harrison’s next concern, and the last one treated in this posting, is how the held values and attitudes relate to the institutions that exist within a society or an organization.  Here the focus shifts from the individual subject to the society or, in terms of what is being highlighted here, the organization.  In other words, the question becomes:  how are things done here – the organization – and how does this proposed change affect that? 

Are the existing ways well-established?  Are they supported, relied upon, cherished?  Or, are they disliked, detested, or are people just indifferent toward them?  Again, these can be feelings held – or their strength are held – at a subconscious or unconscious level.  Inquiry into these concerns can be the subject of conversations, surveys, experimental experiences, or “what if” questioning.

This concern should be part of a formative evaluation regimen as the change effort progresses by asking:  how are the institutions holding up?  Are necessary practices and modes of behavior changing – especially at times when no one is taking note?  Are the roles within the institutional arrangements changing; are status arrangements changing; and so on?

This posting will end here.  Harrison’s concerns might seem a bit obvious, to some, but what might be obvious to an interested party is always enhanced by a reputable source seeing it the same way.  Harrison is such a source.  The next posting will complete Harrison’s six areas of concern.

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[1] Lawrence E. Harrison, “Introduction:  Why Culture Matters,” in Culture Matters:  How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2000), xvii-xxxiv. 

[2] For example, Timothy D. Wilson, “The Social Psychology Narrative – Or – What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?” in    Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, ed. John Brockman (New York, NY:  Harper Perennial, 2013), 99-114.