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What happened is prologue: creative divergence and corporate culture fabrication

What happened is prologue: creative divergence and corporate culture fabrication Culture is an overarching phenomenon that helps individuals make sense of their world. However, culture is not an unchanging “given.” Members of a society actively create culture and, through their activities and interactions, sustain or change this culture. In an organizational setting, culture gives meaning to each person’s membership in the social stage that is the workplace. In the process of cultural creation and sustenance, the past is often used as a harbinger of things to come. How an organization effectively uses the past to shape its present culture is a major focus of this study. This article is an ethnographic study of how culture is fabricated, sustained, and renewed in a small advertising firm. The authors propose three interpretive themes – nightmare avoidance, “Richardism,” and dream building – and develop these into a framework using Drucker’s three entrepreneurial strategies. A fourth strategy, creative divergence, emerges from our in‐depth analysis of EMC. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Management Decision Emerald Publishing

What happened is prologue: creative divergence and corporate culture fabrication

Carolan McLarney; Edward Chung
Management Decision , Volume 38 (6): 10 – Aug 1, 2000
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Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 MCB UP Ltd. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0025-1747
DOI
10.1108/00251740010373098
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Culture is an overarching phenomenon that helps individuals make sense of their world. However, culture is not an unchanging “given.” Members of a society actively create culture and, through their activities and interactions, sustain or change this culture. In an organizational setting, culture gives meaning to each person’s membership in the social stage that is the workplace. In the process of cultural creation and sustenance, the past is often used as a harbinger of things to come. How an organization effectively uses the past to shape its present culture is a major focus of this study. This article is an ethnographic study of how culture is fabricated, sustained, and renewed in a small advertising firm. The authors propose three interpretive themes – nightmare avoidance, “Richardism,” and dream building – and develop these into a framework using Drucker’s three entrepreneurial strategies. A fourth strategy, creative divergence, emerges from our in‐depth analysis of EMC.

Journal

Management Decision – Emerald Publishing

Published: Aug 1, 2000

Keywords: Decision making; Corporate culture; USA

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