Organizational cultures - a metaphor in search for theories

Abstract

The theories on the organizations, as other theories on other social objects, generally lie upon metaphors. The organizations have been metaphorically considered either as machines (the first studies inside the paradigm of the scientific organization of labour), or organisms (the metaphor underlying the systematic theories on the organizations, or as brains (the theories of the decision and data processing applied to the organizations), etc. One of the emerging metaphors considers them as cultures. Based on an empirical study on the cultures of an enterprise of services, this text aims at contributing both theoretically and methodologically to the scientific debate within this field. So, the authors start discussing the concept of organizational culture from some aspects of its psycosociological appropriation. Then they show the empirical path leading order to the identification of the different organizational cultures shared by the staff of the enterprises, and to determine a set of organizational variables associated to the diagnosed cultures.