ALLEN W. BATTEAU1

Departments of Anthropology and Industrial EngineeringWayne State UniversityDetroit, MI

Negations and Ambiguities in the Cultures of Organization

In this article I examine the difference between concepts of culture contained in organizational studies and those in anthro-pology. The twentieth-century emergence of rationalized organizations poses an unmet challenge to anthropological the-ory. The unique cultural consequences of the organizational form are found in the cultures of command and authority,adaptation and resistance, alienation and inclusion that are found in every organization. These separate cultures interrogateeach other and draw on cultural resources outside the organization. In the final section I examine some of the mechanismswith which organizations manage the ambiguities of boundaries and differentiation. Drawing on theories of rites of pas-sage, personhood, gift-exchange, and totemism, I describe the quotidian practices of staffing, sales, and accounting as sym-bolic processes for managing ambiguity, [organization, culture, theory]

Over the last twenty years, a widening divergencehas marked management discussions of "organ-izational culture" and anthropological discussions

of culture (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992 summarizes thisdiscussion). Management theorists have successfullyadopted anthropological insights into shared under-standings and constructed meanings. However, anthropo-logical theory has yet to digest the twentieth-century phe-nomenon of instrumental organizations. Any "science ofhumanity" that fails to comprehend these contemporaryforms supplies but a partial view of human possibility.

In this article I suggest that organizations create struc-tures of meaning not found among anthropology's morefamiliar communities, those living outside regimes of in-strumental rationality. These resources for sensemaking(Weick 1995:111 ff.) consist of cultures of rationality, ofinclusion, of command and authority, and of adaptationand resistance that exist only in dialectical opposition toeach other. This interplay and opposition creates an "or-ganizational culture" that is continually emergent, continu-ally negotiated, and continually in play, according to thestrategic intent of the parties that contest it. Apprehendingan "organizational culture" only begins with the collectionof shreds and patches of shared meanings: at issue is howthese are spun, woven, and stitched together in an evanes-cent bricolage to accommodate and advance the diverse in-terests that make up the organization.2

In the anthropological literature, there are abundant de-scriptions of subaltern groups (workers, clients), barelymatched with descriptions of the regimes of rationality thatenable the subordination and otherness of these groups.(For exceptions, see Marcus 1996 and Perin 1998.) To this

I add a description of the multiple cultural types engen-dered by organization (in the first section) and the dynam-ics of difference that maintain their separations (in the sec-ond section). In the management literature, there areabundant descriptions of "corporate culture," most typi-cally as viewed from above. (For exceptions, see Rosen1985 and Young 1989.) In this literature, culture is seen asa set of referential statements available for managementmanipulation, a separate (and "soft") affair from the("hard") facts of technology, finance, and corporate con-trol. To this I add first an understanding that organizationalcultures are as much evocative as they are referential (inthe third section), and second that the constraints of author-ity are constituted by an array of social relationships andchoices that are negotiated and theatrically enacted (in thefourth section). Being evocative and dynamically related,the cultures of an organization can be navigated and nego-tiated but not controlled. Positions and relationships ofcommand are culturally structured, and the lines of author-ity on an organizational chart are simply the truce demar-cation from an earlier round of culture wars.

Culture as viewed here is a framework of meaning, asystem of reference that can generate both shared under-standings and the working misunderstandings that enablesocial life to go on. These frameworks of meaning are cul-tivated, negotiated, and reproduced within behavioral en-actments, even as certain of their representations have anatemporality that makes them independent of behavior. Attimes culture is mistakenly equated with behavior, with"the way we do things around here" (Schein's schema ofartifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptionsis an example of this; numerous organizational theorists,

American Anthropologist 102(4):726-740. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological Association

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following Schein, include behavior in culture [Schein1992:17]). The behavioral aspect of culture is better un-derstood not as behavior per se but as those elements of be-havior that are considered emblematic of identity.) Oftenthis is but a careless usage. "Culture" is neither a descrip-tive generality of what some group does nor the extraso-matic systematicity of the social milieu; culture is thatwhich is cultivated, the stories, myths, symbols, rituals,and stylized actions and interpretations the group uses tomake sense of what they are doing, what they have done,and what they should do.3 (Giddens 1979 supplies an alter-native to this methodological bracketing.)

Cultures in organizations, like cultures elsewhere, em-brace both semantic and poetic order (Burke 1973). Se-mantically they circumscribe order; poetically they imag-ine motivation. The entire rhetoric of managementdirection contains numerous poetic possibilities: a pep talkon teamwork resolves the antagonisms of individualismand group effort through a shared metaphor from the play-ing fields, and the response "You can count on us!" layersmultiple meanings in each of its five syllables.

Organized anthropology began at a time when numer-ous small-scale societies were scattered around the globe,linked by webs of trade, reciprocity, and border adjust-ments. Today fewer small-scale societies remain, nearly allare integrated into global networks of information, surplusappropriation, and commodity distribution, and all havetheir cultures "organized" to some degree. Native reserves,no less than tribal incorporation or a handcrafts business,represent organized culture, whether organized from with-out or within. Organizational theory may help organizedanthropology better understand what organized culture isall about.

The Cultures of Organization

In this section I describe the intersecting and contradic-tory forms and rationalities of power and position that in-evitably are found whenever a group decides to "get organ-ized." "Getting organized" of necessity creates an array ofcontradictions among rationality, command and authority,resistance and adaptation, and inclusion. Finding one'sway among these multiple contradictions is the commontask of all members of an organization.

In supplying a description and analysis of the cultures oforganization, I will be drawing on seven years of experi-ence as an engineer, salesman, and software developer inthe corporate world, plus an additional three years as direc-tor of a congressional research institute. During those tenyears I developed and sold products, managed budgets andfacilities, created and implemented business strategies,hired and fired employees, and was myself once fired. Iwas able to amass considerable data on organizational be-havior, performance, and sensemaking, and observe the

many faces of command, resistance, adaptation, inclusion,and alienation.

Recent years in the business world as well have pre-sented rich case material to challenge organizational ortho-doxy. Upheavals in numerous industries, including auto-motive, airlines, and computers and electronics, haverevealed previously hidden fault lines and have resulted inemergent organizational forms. For but one example wemight consider the last twenty years of the commercial air-line industry. As described by the journalist Thomas Petz-inger Jr. in Hard Landing (Petzinger 1996), since the de-regulation of passenger airlines in 1979, the industry hasbeen a shifting kaleidoscope of alliance and rebellion, in-novation, insurgency, and corporate collapse. It has seen alabor aristocracy (the pilots) perfecting strategies of resis-tance: the "sweet sixteen" (delaying an arrival time by 16minutes to register on the FAA's logging of late arrivals),or entire approaches conducted with landing gear deployedin order to waste fuel. It has seen the creation of theatricssuch as the "Fun culture" at Southwest, where employees,management, and even the CEO Herb Kelleher vie witheach other to inject the most humor into operations. It hasseen flight attendants at Braniff so devoted to their com-pany that they chipped in from their wages to buy the com-pany an airplane. It has seen executives such as FrankLorenzo at Eastern so fixed in their determination to domi-nate that instead of compromising with the employees,they preferred to see the company die. It did. And it hasseen an industry logic of rationalization and managerial ra-tionality, Southwest excluded, so ferocious that its toll canbe measured in suicides, both corporate and personal. Allof these are tokens of cultures of resistance, inclusion, ad-aptation, command, and rationality that I describe in thissection.

To understand the cultures of organization, we must be-gin by defining organization. Organization is understoodhere as a social form defined by goal-oriented instrumentalrationality. Examples of organization such as the PrussianArmy have historically been carefully separated from theremainder of society. Instrumental rationality is foundthroughout human history but more typically has been em-bedded within kinship, familial, or domestic forms. Onlyin the twentieth century have large expanses of society be-come "organized," and the social form of organization hasbeen emancipated from parochial forms (Boulding 1953).Organizational Science, the growing body of literature thatconfronts this historical development, both advances andinterrogates organizational ideology. Organizational cul-tures around the world draw from both national and West-ern models, even as regimes of rationality add to and or-chestrate new elements in the shifting kaleidoscope ofaffiliations and negotiated meanings (Sahlins 1993; but cf.Anderson [1983] or Gellner [1999] on the historicity of"national" cultures). Organization provides a more tightly

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coupled alternative to the loose regimes of local diversityand nuance and adjustment through which human societieshistorically have gotten along. The critical features of re-gimes of rationality, of emancipation from parochial formsand a positive accent on "getting organized," originated inbut are not the exclusive franchise of the West.

Discussions of organizational and corporate culturesoften oscillate promiscuously between for-profit corpora-tions, not-for-profits, and unincorporated groups such asblock clubs. The question of whether or not the Westerncorporation typifies organizations around the world(which, from reading the management literature, onewould guess it does) or is simply one unique variant on amore general pattern is also rarely addressed. In the UnitedStates, even not-for-profits, including universities, laborunions, and churches, are corporations under section501 (c) of the Internal Revenue code and are subject to thestrictures imposed by that code (itself a regime of rational-ity). It is an empirical question whether any given groupshould or should not be considered "an organization." If"getting organized" receives a positive accent within thegroup, then the group is or wants to be an organization: or-ganization is a process, not a state.

Specialized, organized groups such as secret societiesand local cults are found in numerous non-Western, pre-in-dustrial societies; within their social context these are typi-cally exceptional and segregated rather than general andconstitutive. A village or a segmentary lineage is rarelycharacterized as "an organization," unless it has imposedupon itself (or had imposed on it) organizational forms. In-strumental rationality is no longer just a means to an endbut becomes an end in itself. Wherever "getting organized"is unquestionably a "good thing," there one has organiza-tion, as a matter of either fact or intention.

Organization is an ongoing struggle to impose order, forstrategic ends. Organizational life seldom lives up to thefacade of order it projects. Unorganized order among localgroups is a normal state in human affairs, which becomesdisorganized only when contrasted to or placed in competi-tion with an organizational ideal of rational order. Organi-zations are more successful in propagating the ideology ofrationalized order than they are in sequestering and distrib-uting the resources required for creating and maintainingorder. Organizations more or less succeed in maintaining afacade of order. The experience of anyone inside an or-ganization includes large measures of confusion, scram-bling, chaos, and disorder. Only in the executive suites isdisorder not readily visible, yet anyone familiar withboardrooms will understand that at this level the chaos andscrambling are only masked by smooth talk and polishedmanners, or delegated to the secretaries.

Organization imposes a strategic boundary on somefield of activity and creates a framework of authoritywithin that boundary (Van Maanen and Barley 1984). Creat-ing the boundary serves more a strategic than a technological

rationale. In the history of manufacturing, there was notechnological reason why handweavers could not haveworked as self-employed contractors in their own homesrather than as servants in a master's factory. In today'sautomotive industry, a manufacturer can outsource all itssubassemblies and focus on final assembly and marketing.Although certain materials technologies require industrial-scale coordination, for the main part, building or buyingcomponents, hiring labor or contracting out, retaining orstaffing professional services, and even buying or rentingcapital—in sum, organizing—serves a strategic function:what scheme of organizing (building and buying, inspiringand coercing, etc.) is going to create a competitive advan-tage? Even forming a recreational association has a strate-gic project, to confer legitimacy and social standing onwhat might otherwise seem an idle pastime.

In so doing, however, organization imposes an ideal oforder on relationships that in their natural state have theirown order, with boundary adjustments resolved throughshared misunderstandings (Batteau 1980). Functional dif-ferentiation within an organization carries with it a presup-position of rationality that is not assumed in the case offunctional differentiation between organizations or be-tween unorganized groups and individuals.4 Functionaldifferentiation can be disorganized yet still orderedthrough multiple expedients that permit clarity of roles andstandards.

Onto such a milieu, organization imposes three new cul-tures and elicits a fourth. These are the cultures of rational-ity, of inclusion, of command and authority, and of adapta-tion and resistance, which I describe here.

The first imposition is what Adams and Ingersoll (1990)call the "organizational ideal," the idea that instrumentalrationality is a preferred method for coordinating activity.Although in fact this ideal is usually contaminated withpersonalistic or patrimonial forms (Jackall 1988), andwithin organizations its results are often irrational, this ironcage is part of organization. It is, in fact, this organizationalideal that permits us to construct locutions such as "organi-zation imposes," when in fact the more accurate descrip-tion would be "through organization a powerful group im-poses." This shorthand, used here for convenience,expresses an ideology by attributing agency to what is infact an instalment.

The second new feature is a boundary. Organizationshave an ideology of who is bound to the organization andwho is not. This ideology identifies both relationships andthe strength of the relationships, ranging from indenturedservitude, through employment contracts, to the unstablealliances of organized anarchies. Organizational bounda-ries can be quite variable in their rigidity, their porosity,and their permanence. Free-floating coalitions and net-works are not said to be organized until they impose somelevel of expectation on their affiliates.

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In forming a boundary, an organization will create ordiscover a culture of inclusion that unites its members andbinds their loyalties. These are the so-called "corporatecultures" that consultants celebrated in the early 1980s(Deal and Kennedy 1982; Peters and Waterman 1982).The culture of inclusion may be based on a retrospectivediscovery of the founder's values or a dramatic event in theorganization's history; it may be carefully attended to, or itmay spontaneously grow. The culture of inclusion may benothing more than an affirmation of symbols drawn fromthe surrounding national (or age, or gender, or statusgroup) cultures. Even when this boundary creation is notdeliberately pursued, there will still be at least a minimalistshared understanding that the boundary exists and that it ismarked by various symbols: entries in personnel records,allocation of space and other resources, or deference to"the way we do things around here." The boundary mayembrace ambiguities, such as the status of contract workerswho daily negotiate and play-act the obligations and bene-fits of organizational affiliation.5

The third new feature is a framework of command andauthority. This may be highly stratified, or it may be flat; itmay be focused on a proprietor, or it may rotate amongpeers. It may even be invested in a meeting that all mem-bers attend. In any case, part of "being organized" is hav-ing a structure of authority. Descriptions of organizationslacking authority usually reveal enough hints of highlycontextualized influence and deference to suggest thathowever subtle, structured authority is indeed present. Theshared understandings of what constitutes power andauthority may rest on symbols of professionalism, techni-cal prowess, the prerogatives of ownership, or physical in-timidation. They may receive deep legitimacy, or expedi-ent obeisance. Like membership, these are also negotiatedand play-acted, whether locally through status jockeying ornationally through legislation setting limits on the author-ity of supervisors.

Part of this culture of command is shared expectations ofthe means and ends (though not necessarily legitimacy) ofcommand. In prisons, extreme regimentation, physicalforce, and stripping away of privacy are considered nor-mal, although the inmates may disagree.6 In the early yearsof industrialization, similar measures were used to "drive"employees to higher productivity (Zuboff 1988:35), view-ing the "hands" as little more than intelligent draft animals.

There is a reciprocal relationship between this culture ofcommand and legitimation and the culture of inclusionpreviously described: the greater the degree of homogene-ity and shared sentiments among members of the organiza-tion, the more subtle will be the mechanisms of command.In a highly homogenous workplace, a raised eyebrow maybe sufficient to correct deviance, whereas the greater thedistance between bosses and workers, the more coercivewill be the management.7

In addition to imposing the cultures of rationality, inclu-sion, and command and legitimation, organization elicitssome measure of resistance (a term that has been over-played of late; Brown 1996). It is demonstrable that, con-taining command, organizations also contain resistanceand adaptation. Earlier in this century, resistance took theextreme form of industrial warfare, with industrial armiesshooting, bombing, dynamiting, and physically wreckinghomes, factories, offices, and each other. On the capitalistperiphery this continues even today. Closer to the center,industrial conflicts nowadays are less desperate and morestylized, whether a work-to-rule action (limiting produc-tion by following procedures exactly)8 or a "picket line"consisting of one man holding aloft a picket sign while sit-ting in a lawn chair.

Resistance can also involve less extreme measures,whether an oral or written protest from a shop steward, afew sharp words to a supervisor, or acts of petty defiance.Resistance can be expressed in words or with the body:slow movement in complying with a directive is often in-tended as a silent "go to hell." Likewise, careful, deliberatecompliance with a new program might be thoroughness, orit might be a "slow walk," delaying results until the politi-cal climate has been changed. Successful resistance strate-gies are carefully calibrated to keep management guessingabout the subordinates' intentions.

Among nonmanagerial employees there are clear under-standings of the degree of autonomy and freedom an em-ployee is entitled to, the acceptable limits of a boss'sauthority, the proper methods to signal these limits, and thecorrective actions available when a boss oversteps the lim-its. These understandings are a culture of resistance, al-though if there is a strong sense of mutuality between man-agers and employees, this might better be called a cultureof adaptation. Stylized adaptation and resistance are inevi-table parts of organization.

A culture of resistance is an assertion of dignity andautonomy within an environment that conspires to denyboth. Associated most clearly with labor organizations, yetfound among all groups that in some respect are closely in-volved with and dependent on the organization (potentiallyincluding customers, suppliers, middle managers, and evensmall communities), cultures of resistance place a pre-mium on values such as autonomy, individuality, crafts-manship, hard work, family life, and religion. A culture ofresistance can be expressed in something as ordinary as va-cation pictures or comic strips on the walls of a cubicle, oran operative's favorite coffee mug at her assembly line sta-tion. In a context that is engineered to reduce her to an ap-pendage of a machine, a coffee mug, or a union bumpersticker on the lunch bucket, becomes a way of saying"No!"y

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The Dynamics of Difference

The cunning maneuver of cultures of resistance is thatthey draw on assumptions outside the organization, sharedby managers and workers alike, that contradict symbols ofcommand and rationality inside the organization. When anoffice employee refuses to work overtime because she hasto go home and take care of her children, she is drawing onsome ideas of kinship and family responsibility that mostmanagers (pathological cases excepted) would subscribeto. Whether or not she is truly needed at home, or justwants to escape the boss, is factually irrelevant to her stra-tegic intent of playing the family card. Likewise, one notesthe display at union meetings and on union badges of patri-otic symbols, with their associations of dignity, freedom,and emancipation, or the playful exuberance in the decora-tion of cubicles, drawing on themes from popular culture.

The other side of this interplay is seen in the conse-quences of managerial overreach. Managers sometimes al-low themselves to be heard saying that productivity shouldbe achieved at the expense of quality. If the messages arerepeated enough, accompanied by not-so-subtle threats, af-ter a while the line workers respond, "If you insist on poorquality, that's what we'll give you." A culture of anti-qual-ity begins to grow, and months or years later managementbrings in some consultants to help them understand theircultural problem. This difference between the espousedvalues of the corporation and the practiced values (Argyrisand Schon 1978) is expectable: values and other culturalproductions represent compromises, border adjustments,and maneuvering for advantage by multiple groups. Theseadjustments—collective sensemaking— among manage-ment, workers, and the entire organization themselves be-come valorized as part of the organizational culture of in-clusion. If an organization preaches quality while itspractice is otherwise, such hypocrisy will come to be seenas "the way things are done around here" by workers andmanagers alike.

The different cultures of the organization each interro-gate the others and contain the seeds of each other, whetherin the appeals to inclusion by resistance movements or theevaluation of management actions against a standard of ra-tionality. When a union leader reminds management that"We're all in this together" (see Weekley and Wilber 1996,for example), he is appealing to symbols of common fate,even as he advances particular interests. Nor are inclusionand rationality the exclusive province of management, asdemonstrated by the rationalization of the American coalindustry by the United Mine Workers in the early 1950s(Caudill 1963). In some industries, countercultural sym-bols are available to management to motivate employees.The separate cultivations of rationality, inclusion, com-mand and legitimation, and resistance and adaptation existand evolve only in a dynamic relationship with, and usingthe resources of, each other.'"

Cultures of command and legitimation, and cultures ofresistance and adaptation, are used alike by super- and sub-ordinates in an attempt to make sense out of the arrogance,blockheadedness, and sheer stupidity of the other. Actionsthat from a labor perspective make perfect sense, such asasserting dignity and independence through departing ontime, from a management point of view are nothing butstubborn alienation. Actions that make sense from a man-agement point of view, such as insisting on time disciplineat the expense of productivity, are seen as stupidity (andhence undermining management's legitimacy) from a la-bor point of view. Martin and Siehl (1983) describe the"uneasy symbiosis" of dominant and countercultures, al-though they seem to have groups (rather than frameworksof meaning) in mind. Rather than "symbiosis," implyingfunctional adaptation, I characterize this relationship asdialectic, implying synthesis. It is this embrace and synthe-sis of rationality, inclusion, command and legitimation,and resistance and adaptation that gives the organizationalform its uniquely integrating capability.

Management and workers alike have but limited degreesof freedom to change any of the organizational cultures.An all-too-typical scenario is for management to attempt tosolve attitudinal problems (absenteeism, drug use, sabo-tage) by colonizing the conscience of the hourly workers(Willmott 1993), without appreciating that what are per-ceived as attitudinal problems are part of a culture that isfinely adjusted to the management culture and behavior.Neither can be changed without changing the other. It isthis adjustment and interplay through action and the attri-bution of meanings, drawing on the multiple cultures of anorganization, that makes organizational culture so elusiveand difficult to change.

At the same time, a referential, thematic view of cultureallows a management discourse that assumes (in the faceof experience) that cultures can be continually updated tomatch the contingencies of control. For example, a Britishfirm was reported in 1998 to be laying off 20% of its headoffice management "in an effort to streamline decision-making and revitalize the group's corporate culture" (Cope1998:15). Or, for another example, when Netscape mergedwith AOL in 1998, many industry observers predicted aculture clash between the barefoot, green-haired rebels ofNetscape and the hard-edged business types of AOL. Oneformer Netscape executive, though, suggested that therewould be little problem, since Netscape "had already un-dergone at least two major culture shifts" (Roberts 1998:1).Despite the fact that Netscape was founded in April 1994,the concept of two (and an impending third) "cultureshifts" in fewer than five years seemed entirely reasonablefrom this manager's point of view.

In sum, organizations, by imposing boundaries, hierarchicorder, and an ideology of rationality on differentiation, createa context that is inherently fragmentary and contradictory.Organizations embrace national and regional cultures.

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Organizations embrace differentiation, in forms as variedas national, regional, occupational, class, gender, or agedifferences. By necessity, however, organization engen-ders cultures of rationality, command and legitimation, re-sistance and adaptation, and inclusion, which vary in theirstrength and their content but not in their existence.

These facts of differentiation and fragmentation havebeen long observed by organizational theorists (Gregory1983; Martin and Meyerson 1988; Van Maanen and Bar-ley 1984), although they are frequently explained as a re-grettable declension from a more coherent ideal (Bartunekand Moch 1991; Gray et al. 1985) rather than an inevitableconsequence of the organizational form. Anthropologicaltheory has likewise had its own declension from an earlier,positivist understanding of cultures as coherent systems tothe contemporary view of systems of meaning as negoti-ated among multiple, contending voices (Ortner 1984;Rosaldol989).

This fragmented understanding of culture is contempo-raneous with the growing importance of organizationalforms in multiple areas of daily life. Instrumental rational-ity, considered as both an ideology and as a set of proce-dures for matching means to ends, is a dominant form incontemporary life (Habermas 1969; Horkheimer 1974;Marcuse 1968). Weber's discussion of instrumental ration-ality (zweckrationalitat) as the defining characteristic ofbureaucracy has been advanced by the Frankfurt theoristsas the defining characteristic of contemporary life. ForWeber, the procedures of instrumental rationality werenever ends in themselves; Habermas suggests that this iswhat has happened in late capitalist society. "Organiza-tions," understood as distinctive social forms, are definedfirst and foremost by goal-oriented instrumental rationality(Adams and Ingersoll 1990; Morgan 1986). Yet theseforms are no longer circumscribed by the religious, paro-chial, or status-based assumptions of society (Habermas1969:114). All areas of life—work, play, consumption,civil discourse, sex—are becoming more "organized," thatis, subject to the dictates of regimes of instrumental ration-ality, whether originating from government, management,or craft standards. It is a measure of the pervasiveness ofthis ideology that it is difficult to describe in public dis-course how "becoming more organized" can be anythingother than a good thing or how the solvency and plasticityof cultural forms is a reflex of their regimentation.

Yet one consequence of "becoming more organized" isa flattening of culture, an erasure of those deeper levels ofmeaning that make culture the source of human dignity andfreedom. There is no place in organizational cultures forthe awe of the sacred, except as a motivational tool; for anappreciation of nature, save as a resource for exploitationthrough logging or eco-tourism; or for a discourse on themysteries of the immortal soul. Within the ideology of ra-tionality, the meaning of freedom may not be questioned

because a rational answer is evident: freedom is the exer-cise of optimal choices to fulfill organizational goals, asdefined by whatever group or coalition has the power todefine them. Failure to make these optimal choices is asign of individual inadequacy. The metonymic equiva-lence of command and rationality within an organizationturns resistance into irrationality.

Organization imposes a competitive structure, a drawingof lines of inclusion and opposition, upon the local nuancesand adjustments of social life. As a strategic entity, an or-ganization creates competition over the means and ends ofits activity. More accurately, it raises the stakes of existing,local contestations over resources and meanings: local dis-putes become organized into intergroup conflicts. In thedays before organized management, a millhand might tell asupervisor to go to hell, and get away with it; organizedmanagement created more coercive power over the hands,and organized labor attempts to even the balance. Withboth labor and management organized, relationships be-tween the two are more regulated. The roles, identities, andcultures of labor, like those of management, are perpetu-ally in play, and organized cultures become measuredagainst the exigencies of opposition.

Removed from the framework of symbolic interaction,and made into socially constructed "work" (Habermas1969:93), most organizational cultures are tentative, con-tingent, and awkward in their display of motivating sym-bols. In that organizations exist to gain strategic advantageby regimenting differentiation and diversity, the shared un-derstandings (of rationality, command, inclusion, and re-sistance) that make that possible are always going to bepartial and emergent. At the level of individual sensemak-ing, organized culture requires nontrivial effort to adjustthe multiple contradictions of rationality, command and le-gitimation, inclusion, and resistance and adaptation. Everymember of the organization must grant, minimally, recog-nition to all of these, in some combination of authentic ac-ceptance, slavish devotion, pragmatic recognition, hypo-critical obeisance, or barely suppressed defiance. Theadjustment of these contradictions requires an engagementthat further binds the member to the organization with aconstruction of self that mirrors the complexity of the or-ganization. Considering the structures of meaning and theirenactment through interaction with other groups, the cul-tures of an organization represent an unstable synthesis ofthe multiple negations of rationality, command and legiti-mation, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion.

In this section, I have shown that talking about a unitary"organizational culture" makes little sense. The variousgroups that make up organizations cultivate symbols, sto-ries, experiences, justifications, values, and collectivememories. In their routine interactions, these groups usethese multiple cultivations to interrogate, to contradict, andto contest the others for autonomy or other values within

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the organization. These dynamics of difference within theframework of organization, however much they may be re-gretted by management and its theorists, are an inevitableconsequence of a regime of rationality.

The Strategy of Ambiguity

In this section, I describe the deployment of cultureswithin an organizational context. Cultures are consideredas structures of meaning whose representations are foreveropen to reinterpretation. A core part of organizational lifecan be seen in the strategic use of ambiguity, such as thevague directions that managers give to subordinates.Among the insecure, this promotes overconformity, al-though sometimes it must be reinforced by the encourage-ment of insecurity (such as threats of dismissal). Likewise,ambiguity is contained in obedience and resistance, as de-scribed in the previous section. By understanding theirstrategic intent, the ambiguities of organizational life be-come intelligible.

Within the study of organizations, there are two sets ofdivergent streams in the understanding of culture. Somestudies (e.g., those in Turner 1990 or Gagliardi 1990) focuson symbol systems and the meanings found in rituals andtaboos. Other studies (e.g., Briody and Baba 1991; Fiske1994) examine the adaptation of different groups withinthe corporation to each other and to their external environ-ment. Although there is a rich literature on organizationalsymbolism (e.g., Alvesson 1993; Alvesson and Berg 1992;Boje 1991; Pondy et al. 1983), the dominant strain is theadaptation approach: how organizations and groups withinorganizations create patterned responses (in behavior,thought, and artifacts) to forces or influences in their envi-ronment, including the patterned behavior of other groups(see Sachs 1989 and Hamada 1994 for an overview of thisliterature). The adaptation view lends itself more readily toa positivist, instrumental approach to the world; the inter-pretivist view, by contrast, emerges from an academiccounterculture that seeks meaning and insight rather thanprediction and control (Geertz 1983; Rosen 1991).

A second set of contrasts is between those who viewculture as something shared throughout an organizationand those who take a more nuanced perspective. Earlyauthors (Deal and Kennedy 1982; Peters and Waterman1982) saw culture as a source of cohesion (Schein 1992)and, hence, improved performance (Denison 1990; Ott1989; Ouchi 1981); their efforts led to a body of researchthat looked for the unifying understandings within organi-zations (what I have called here the "culture of inclusion").Subsequently a series of reappraisals (Siehl and Martin1990) questioned whether culture could truly be correlatedwith performance. Parallel to these studies, which tendedto focus on management concerns, a few studies (Apple-baum 1981; Gamst 1980; Kunda 1992; Sacks 1988; VanMaanen 1991) began examining the cultures of nondomi-

nant groups including production workers, transportationworkers, and hospital employees. These studies of occupa-tional groups tended to focus on the groups and not theircontext within regimes of instrumental rationality."

Other studies have described differentiation as the nor-mal state of organizational life. Gregory (1983) sees suchdifferentiation as normal, interpreting the multiple "native-view paradigms" as explanatory of conflict within organi-zations. Martin and Siehl (1983) see organizations asgenerative of differentiation, focusing on the creation of"countercultures" in reaction to the dominant managementculture. Following these early studies, a growing body ofwork has begun to see cultures as sources of fragmentation,confusion, and disorder (see Frost et al. [1991] for a goodoverview of this literature).

Joanne Martin in Cultures in Organizations (1992) pre-sents three different perspectives and resulting definitionsof culture: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation.In the integration perspective, culture consists of sharedbeliefs, values, patterns of meaning, expectations, basic as-sumptions, rules of social interaction, symbols, and mean-ings. The concept of basic or underlying assumptions,which is taken from Schein (1992), usually refers to con-ceptual or linguistic statements that take the form of propo-sitional assertions: "time is linear," "time is cyclical," "hu-man nature is intrinsically good," "social life is or shouldbe cooperative." (In the previous section, I characterizedthis as a referential or thematic view of culture.) This the-matic presentation is similar to numerous works describingand measuring organizational culture (Collins and Porras1994; Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993; Hofstede1984, 1991; Schein 1992).

Differentiation views of culture are similar to the inte-gration views in that they focus on shared, thematic mean-ings. Differentiation views use a more fine-grained unit ofanalysis, usually focusing on "subcultures" (equated togroups within the organization, Trice 1993, Trice and Mo-rand 1991, Riley 1983, for example; Gregory 1983 makesthe more careful usage of "subgroup"). Although differen-tiation focuses on the unequal distribution of competitionfor power among different groups within the organization,for the most part power and competition are seen to beboundary issues for the subgroups rather than intrinsic totheir shared meanings.

In Martin's fragmentation perspective, cultures are not amatter of consensus but, rather, contain a multiplicity ofviews whose manifestations are usually incoherent. Indi-viduals are able to make sense of their situation and act onit only through a series of shifting alliances and ad hoc in-terpretations. Ambiguity, complexity, and lack of coher-ence are the touchstones of the fragmentation perspective.Such statements, however, are usually describing phenom-ena that are social or contextual rather than cultural: theirfocus is on the understanders and the understood, not theunderstandings.

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From a Fragmentation perspective . . . an organizational cul-ture is a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely con-nected by their changing positions on a variety of issues.Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their indi-vidual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issuesare activated at a given moment. [Martin 1992:153]

"Culture" in Martin's usage thus seems to be a contingentassemblage of groups, actors, and context rather than amore durable framework for meaning. The point of view Ipresent suggests that organizations do not so much gener-ate as embrace differentiation, and by imposing ideals ofrationality, command, and inclusion, engender fragmenta-tion.

The thematic view of culture used by Martin and mostorganizational theorists presupposes a universal scheme ofmeasurement, such as the distinction between "individual-istic" and "group-oriented" cultures (a coherent summa-tion of this approach, under the heading of "comparativepsychology," and its challenge to anthropology, is pre-sented in an appendix to the psychologist Hofstede's Cul-tures and Organizations [1991:247 ff.]). An alternative,idiographic approach views culture as a thing-in-itself, un-derstandable on its own terms, whose identity is based noton countable elements or scalable features but on relation-ships among these. According to this view, a culture's co-herence is achieved not only through semantic ordering butthrough poetic condensation. In contrast to semantic mean-ing, poetic meanings

cannot be disposed of on the tme-or-false basis. Rather theyare related to one another like a set of concentric circles, ofwider and wider scope. Those of wider diameter do not cate-gorically eliminate those of narrower diameter. There is,rather, a progressive encompassment. To say that "man is avegetable" contains much soundness. [Burke 1973:144]

Semantically, "man is an animal" and "man is a vegetable"are contradictory, but poetically, anyone familiar withcouch potatoes will admit some interest. Likewise, com-peting statements such as "Americans are individualists"and "Americans are conformists" are contradictory only assurface expressions of a coherent, underlying code.

Some studies of organizational cultures do describeevocative rituals and symbols as "expressions" of deeper,underlying realities, often having to do with unequal allo-cation of power. For example, Rosen (1985) describes anannual ceremony at a law firm that reinforces the hierarchyof the firm even as it creates a feeling of shared purpose;Young (1989) describes in a British garment factory asmall shrine to the royal family that reproduces the statusdivisions of the factory.

In addition to displays such as these, there are othersymbolic understandings that establish and legitimatethese deeper understandings in the distribution of power.For example, the Western, archetypal symbols of profes-sionalism are important for establishing and maintaining

the hierarchy of Rosen's law firm (Bledstein 1976); the"Ford-ist" model of production creates separations inYoung's garment factory. Within organization theory,however, professionalism and Fordism are so natural that,like oxygen, they don't require comment. Martin (1992:140 ff.) comments on the "silences" within cultures thatare no less revealing of meaning than assertions; the cul-tural status of Fordism and professionalism and the histo-ricity of the organizational form are probably the leadingsilences of organization theory (but cf. Barley and Kunda[1992] on management rhetoric).

Archetypal symbols embrace diverse and seeminglycontradictory referents. "Father" can refer to both sacredand profane figures. When taken out of context, this con-tains an ambiguity; in context, however, there is seldomconfusion when one refers to a father. This embrace of thediverse and contradictory gives these "key symbols" theirunifying power (Ortner 1973). To say that a company is"like a family" is a powerful statement precisely because"family" has numerous and contrasting referents. In short,the ambiguity is meaningful and unifying. By finding cer-tain key symbols or root metaphors (Ortner 1973) that en-compass numerous semantic domains (Dumont 1970), thisapproach better reveals the unity and coherence of a culturethan does the assemblage of themes.

This insight is achieved, however, by avoiding the ques-tion of the relationship between cultures, on the one hand,and the groups embracing and enacting them on the other.In fact, from this perspective, it makes less sense to talkabout a culture than it does to talk about multiple culturalelements, strategically spun, woven, and stitched togetherin an evanescent bricolage. Since cultural elements aremultivocal, an actor can manipulate the code to produce al-ternative justifications, or the actor can read different sig-nals within a situation indicating different courses of ac-tion. Normative and contextual interpretation are, simply,figuring out what is proper and advantageous to do in agiven situation.

Further, in any given organizational context, there willalways be more than one culture in play. When engineer-ing negotiates a project schedule with marketing, whoseview of the world will prevail? When a salesman is sellinga complex product, does he interpret the product within hisown frame of reference or within the purchaser's? If welook at culture only in terms of norms, propositional asser-tions, or situated behavior, and ignore the underlyingcodes, the multivocality, code-switching, and strategic am-biguity, what we call culture will always seem fragmen-tary, and we will lose sight of the processes of synthesisand resolution described in the next section.

To understand the strategic use of ambiguity and work-ing misunderstandings, consider the following: when apolitician, in response to a constituent's request, vigorouslyshakes the petitioner's hand (perhaps with his left hand on

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the elbow), looks the petitioner straight in the eye, and saysin a firm voice, "You can count on me," he is being inten-tionally ambiguous. The petitioner walks away confidentthat his request will be attended to, and the politician walksaway knowing he has made no such promise. Althoughany seasoned politician has a stock of phrases for this situ-ation ("We'll do the right thing," "I'll give it my fullest at-tention," "We'll take care of the situation," "We definitelymust do something about that"), words alone cannot con-vey the construction: tone of voice, eye contact, posture,and physical contact all express the profoundest sincerityat a moment when the intention is just the opposite. An-other politician, observing, would find nothing ambiguousin this situation at all. She would understand, with a slightsmile, "Here is a dangerous situation: a constituent whohas a request; our boy cannot afford to alienate the con-stituent, nor can he afford to grant the request. Better tosend him away with a good feeling than to get yourself intoa compromising position."

This is an example of using stylized forms (linguisticconstructions, bodily contact) to construct an artful resolu-tion to a potentially dangerous situation. Each of theseforms in isolation is ambiguous, but the forms' artful com-position in this performance brings the danger under con-trol and conveys a message that seems perfectly unambi-guous.

It is this essential ambiguity that permits words to meantheir opposite and oppositions to cohere around sharedmeanings. To those who understand, "You can count onme" means "I didn't promise a thing," just like "Trust me"should be read as a warning. Meaning can be shared, andsocial discourse can be sustained, in the realms of semanticreference or poetic emotions or in the symbols that createand evoke them.

A product launch exemplifies the synthesis of order outof confusion. If the product is in a fast-paced market or arapidly evolving technology, then there is enormous mana-gerial pressure to meet schedule commitments and beat thecompetition. Engineering, marketing, distribution, train-ing, and human resources must all coordinate their efforts.Engineering wants to make some last-minute fixes, mar-keting wants to alter the image, distribution has to have itsresources ready, HR (Human Resources) cannot find thenew staffing needed, and each function sees every featureor image change as an arrogant usurpation by "those guys"who don't understand marketing (or logistics, or staffing,or technology, or whatever). There is no time to learn, notime to smooth ruffled feathers. Somehow or other theproduct usually gets launched, more or less on schedule,usually under the driving hand of the product manager. Theconsumers see the shiny new car, the innovative user inter-face, the handy appliance, with no understanding of theconfusion and scrambling and screaming required to bringit to market.

Like the cacophony of an orchestra that resolves to an"A" when the first violinist stands up, and subsequentlyproduces a symphony, a product launch is harmony pre-ceded by chaos. For organizations, a symphonic voice isthe stylized public performance—the new minivans in theshowroom, the stack of shiny appliances in an industrial ar-ray on the department store shelves. A harmonious voice isnot the normal course of events. The normal course ofevents is for different functions—the strings, the wood-winds, engineering, HR—to be playing their own tunesand maintaining separations, such as departmental bounda-ries, so that the discordance is kept private. Such privatepractice—trying new scores, experimenting with newphrasings, testing design alternatives, extending one'sabilities—is a prerequisite for the symphonic performancethat the conductor elicits from the diverse musicians.

In short, organizations embrace differentiation and en-gender fragmentation and confusion, which are orderedthrough stylized separations imposed from above. Middlemanagers, like musicians, try to harmonize, but it requiresthe peer authority of the first violinist to get them in tuneand the tyranny of the conductor to keep them in rhythmand in balance.

In this section, I have shown that differentiation andfragmentation should not be seen as a declension from anorganizational ideal of harmony and integration but, rather,as its inevitable counterpoint. The cultural elements consti-tuting this harmony should not be seen as themes or notes,partitionings of semantic or acoustic space, but as voices,like that of the oboe, which acquires its sweetness not fromthe purity of its pitch, but from the overtones and under-tones that lend it color and depth.

Managing Ambiguity

A final question is how organizations manage ambigu-ity, and why. To understand this we do not need to examinethe hagiography of corporate leadership. We should beable to find negation and synthesis in the most ordinary as-pects of operations, in the recurrent or occasional activitieswhere boundaries are defined and order is imposed—inshort, in the forms through which differentiation is organ-ized.

In this section, I examine and interrogate three areas oforganizational life that are fairly standard in most corpora-tions and many other organizations as well: staffing, sell-ing, and bookkeeping. Even the least formal organizations,such as neighborhood block clubs, can make organized de-cisions or assumptions about who is in and who is out; theleast formal organizations can engage in transaction-ori-ented persuasion (trading political loyalty for road repairs,for example), and the least formal organizations, if theycontrol any assets, must keep a set of books. I generalizefrom the practices of corporations (including labor unions,churches, and eleemosynary institutions) and other groups

BATTEAU / NEGATIONS AND AMBIGUITIES IN THE CULTURES OF ORGANIZATION 735

where "getting organized" is held up as an ideal to showthat standardized procedures and stylized routines are, infact, devices for managing the multiple ambiguities that or-ganizational life entails.

A critical decision that any corporation makes concernswho is in, who is out, and who goes where—in short, staff-ing- Payroll or membership records are among the centraldocuments of an organization. These identify who is con-sidered a member or employee, and under what terms(part-time or full-time, temporary or permanent, exempt ornonexempt), and in what department. These categoriza-tions are unambiguous, even if in practice they are vio-lated: "part-time" employees are sometimes asked to work40 hours in a week, and employees can be "seconded" or"vetted" from one department to another.

Staffing actions can be stylized or proceduralized. Astaffing action is a rite of passage that begins with a ritualof disaggregation (always stylized and calibrated: a callfrom a recruiter, a letter of inquiry, a watercooler conversa-tion of the "Would you be interested . . ." sort), proceedsthrough a liminal phase (during which the individualknows he or she is being evaluated and is on guard—a timeof high tension), and concludes with a ritual of reincorpo-ration, whether a minimalist handshake or the elaborate"wedding ceremony" that Toyota uses to welcome new re-cruits into the Toyota "family." These separations and in-corporations mark key transitions through the repetition ofcertain stylized behaviors, whether the round of introduc-tions and the presentation of certain artifacts after an indi-vidual has been hired, or the removal of same following atermination.

The normal aspect of personnel is the routine estimationand evaluation of those inside the organization (Jackal!1988:17 ff.). Is Jeff a fast-tracker, or a drone? Does this newkid know anything useful, or is his head filled with text-book knowledge? Can Mary close a deal? Does Tom havethe guts to fire someone? Does Fred have "the right stuff?Major effort is spent pondering questions of this sort;among production workers questions such as "Can I counton Al to cover for me?" or "Is Joe a fair supervisor, or do Ihave to watch out for him?" are frequent and critical.

Questions of this sort are asking both what type of super-visor, salesman, manager, or engineer someone is and whatdoes that mean? If James Whitworth III is understood to bea drone but, nonetheless, headed for the executive suite be-cause he is the son of the owner, everyone understands that(the owner's) family values trump performance in thiscompany. If Tom is seen to be nothing more than a hatchetman, then his movements are good signals of shifting cor-porate priorities. Deconstructing Fred tells new employeeswhat the right stuff is, or isn't.

In personnel actions and judgments, we see the embodi-ment of an organization's cultures, resolving the contradic-tions of command and inclusion. The individuals who

make up the organization are the signposts of its values,artifacts of this resolution. Although the cultural terrainpredates and will outlast its signage, within the organiza-tion people learn how to navigate the terrain only bywatching the navigation and missteps of others.

Sales is a second arena where the organization definesitself and its relationships to the larger world. In many cor-porations, sales is the daily rhythm, the pulse of blood con-tinuing to flow. Not-for-profit organizations such as chari-ties and governments also find it necessary to "sell" theirservices, even when they consider it undignified to charac-terize the transaction as a "sale." Sales can be a grubby ac-tivity, where one of us (by definition, an elite) genuflects tothe hoi polloi. It can be a nuisance, like a suitor's unwantedadvances. It can work magic, transforming a shoeshine anda smile into jobs for thousands. It can be mock-heroic,mugging the national synthesis of unity from diversity(Shorrisl994).

Selling creates and maintains bonds between an organi-zation and its environment. I contrast selling to other mer-cantile transactions that have no personal content, whetherin discount stores or mail order houses. Selling, and itscompanion, advertising, present a gift to the would-be cus-tomer: a firm handshake, the voice of conviction, an excit-ing image. If accepted, the gift is returned with that mostvaluable of corporate commodities, "customer loyalty."Ideally the customer comes to identify with the companyand its products, whether by wearing the logo or by dis-playing tokens of loyalty, such as a placard or desk set.Through such gifts and returns and familiarity, the organ-izational world is integrated through a skein of reciprocal,if imbalanced, relationships. These relationships rangefrom mutual predation to distributive coalitions (Olson1982) whose form of reciprocity covaries with social dis-tance (Sahlins 1965).

In the vast literature on sales and negotiation technique,there is a common sense that the gift of the salesman orsaleswoman is a gift of the person. Effective salespeople,whether selling new ideas to the boss, new products to cus-tomers, or themselves to would-be employers, must projecta persona. They must show up, be there, present them-selves. In fact, the presentation of self is no less importantthan the presentation of the idea or product.

Reciprocal relationships contain an ambiguity, in thatthey transform mine into yours and yours into mine and in-dependent predators into mutually dependent partners.This relationship is built and the ambiguity is resolvedthrough a cycle of exchanges and counterexchanges, up tothe closing of the deal. A customer tries to figure out "Howcan I get the best deal?" and it is the job of the salespersonto figure out "What can I give, and what do I need to re-ceive in return?" In the subsequent internal sale (where thesalesperson has to justify the deal), the salesperson mustconvince a flinty-eyed manager, "Here's how much profit

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we are making on this deal." Through negotiation, thesalesperson constructs a certainty (the deal) out of thesemultiple ambiguities. A true salesperson is distinguishedfrom a mere order-taker by these negotiating abilities, byhis or her ability to combine the feeling of familiarity andinclusion (for the customer) with the promise of profitabil-ity and strategic advantage for the flinty-eyed manager.

For a final example, let us consider and question the arti-factuality of budgets and financial reports. These are theprincipal boundary mechanisms of an organization: theyare the authoritative statements of the resources at its com-mand and the disposition of those resources. Having "a setof books" defines an organization, and "the books" achievea totemic status less from their representation of an organ-izational unit and more from their difference from "thebooks" of other organizations. In other words, it is at thelevel of budgets and financial statements and records thatcorporate identities are most clear-cut.12

Yet for anyone who has worked with "the books," theirrepresentational quality is potentially suspect. There are al-ways ways to "cook the books." With modest legerdemain,income and expenditures can be transferred from one ac-count to another, losses can be turned into profits, incomecan be deferred, and profits can be temporarily hiddenfrom the tax authorities. To achieve clarity of presentationin "the books," drastic simplification is required: Unit Bmay have borrowed resources from Unit A, yet on "thebooks" the resource is still recorded as belonging to unit A.Unit C may have neglected to maintain an asset. Reputa-tion, brand identification, social connections, and customerloyalty create a market value for companies that is greaterthan the "book value"; this incremental value is entered as"good will," a fudge factor for uncountable yet real assets.Only the integrity of the accounting profession, the coldeyes of the auditors (searching out overvalued assets andunrecorded commitments), and the standards promulgatedby the Financial Accounting Standards Board stand be-tween confidence in "the books" and complete chaos. Intheory, "the books" are unambiguous, even if the underly-ing reality of unwritten commitments, borrowed resources,deferred income, and overvalued assets is far messier than"the books" admit.

This, too, is a management of ambiguity, inasmuch as itis confidence in "the books" that permits investments to bemade, relationships to be formed and maintained, and busi-ness to go forward. Identity is preserved (in the totemic"books"), and an icon of rational order ("GenerallyAccepted Accounting Principles") is enforced, despitethe factual errancy of both. (Alvesson and Willmott [1996:139 ff.] and Perin [1998] provide further interrogation ofaccounting, albeit from different perspectives.)

Organization is a never-ending effort to impose order,and organized culture is an instrument and a consequenceof this. Yet with every cultural production—a new slogan,a new image, a new building—the imperfection of the

existing order is revealed. Organized culture is alwaysemergent, a response to the imperatives of rationality andthe accidents of competition and strategy. Even the coresymbols of rationality, the totemic "books" that define or-ganizational uniqueness, are susceptible to the interven-tions of power.

Organized cultures, like cultures elsewhere, are negoti-ated. Every watercooler conversation, about manage-ment's new policies, about what "the old man" is thinking,Fred's new project, or what Latonya did yesterday, is a ne-gotiation of meaning. Negotiation acknowledges the ad-vantages of power even as it creates spaces for social crea-tivity: in negotiation, the outcome is always in play. Thesenegotiations are not only of the form and content of mean-ing but of the very existence of meaning. Since organizedcultures are always emergent and incomplete, the mean-ingfulness of actions and events is never taken for granted;if a person or event cannot be incorporated into an existingscheme of meaning, he or she or it becomes invisible and ispassed over in silence. This is always more evident to theoutside observer, who notes with puzzlement why thenames of recently departed executives are quickly forgot-ten, why certain employees are seemingly invisible, andwhy certain management actions are acknowledged onlywith averted eyes and mumbled sentences.

Negotiation creates the space for the exercise of agencyand choice, a term usually elided (or denied: Willmott1993) in organizational culture studies. Choice, the exer-cise of agency, implies the availability of alternatives, andthe articulation of values is an articulation and weighing ofalternatives. Like any negotiated order within organiza-tions (Crozier 1971; Fine 1984), the conscience collectiveis political—consciousness is political, and conscience ispolitical in that it is negotiated. Political conscience is therealization of alternatives: the choices that people perceivewithin their organizations constitute their political con-science. Must one obey the boss and work overtime? Dareone not? Are kickbacks to customers acceptable? Can wecook the books? Often changes in political conscience areattained by accident: an overreach by management can in-cite a spontaneous rebellion. Just as negotiation synthe-sizes order out of power imbalances and performance, sotoo political conscience, the realization of choices, incor-porates semantic alternatives into the interpretation of con-tingent events.

Political conscience reflects the construction of identity;the enactment of a shared sense of identity is a source ofsocial cohesion. The sources of identity can include notonly culturally supplied archetypes (the nation, gender, anoccupational community), but also seemingly accidental,historical events: shared experiences, whether organiza-tional or generational, are sources of cohesion and sense-making (Weick 1995). Likewise, opposition movementsoften coalesce around unpredicted events, whether theRouge River Bridge in the 1930s or Stonewall in the 1970s.

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By seeing culture not as given, but as historically emer-gent within the negotiation of values in social relationshipsand the creation of new forms of identity and political con-science, we move beyond the dualism that besets manage-ment theory. This is the dualism that distinguishes betweenthe "hard" aspects of the organization—lines of authority,budgets, strategy, command and control—on the one hand,and the "soft" side of feelings, values, and moral senti-ments on the other. Within regimes of instrumental ration-ality, the instruments of authority—budgets, schedules, po-sitions of command—are more "real" than the "soft"aspects of sentiments and values. Yet command in all itsfaces is constituted by an array of social relationships andchoices that are negotiated and theatrically enacted; that is,relationships of command are culturally structured, and thelines on an organization chart, like a table of accounts, aresimply the truce demarcation from an earlier round of cul-ture wars. Organizational life presents a sustained impos-ing, negotiating, testing, displaying, and redefining ofmeanings and values of command, of inclusions, of ration-ality, and of resistance within these same relationships.

Conclusion

For nearly twenty years anthropologists and manage-ment theorists have been writing about organizational cul-ture. From a matching of journal titles and citations, it isclear that they are talking about two different things, fortwo different purposes, to two different audiences, and assuch making little contribution to each other's under-standing of the subject at hand. It is time for a dialogue.

In this article I have tried to show that portrayals of "or-ganizational culture" in terms of thematic coherence or sta-tistical distributions of behavior misapprehend both the na-ture of organizations and the dynamics that maintaincultural differences. Organizations embrace differentiationand engender fragmentation and confusion, yet they alsoimpose cultures of rationality, command and authority, ad-aptation and resistance, and inclusion. Cultures are genera-tive frameworks of meaning that enable those who makeup an organization to figure out how to get on and getalong. The dynamics of difference among these multiplecultures are based less on their positive, referential quali-ties and more on their evocative, strategic deployment.Within regimes of rationality, cultures, like words, are usedwith strategic intent. As an alternative to the upbeat posi-tivism that pervades management literature (at least in itsconsulting subgenre), I suggest here that opposition andnegation are necessary elements of the organizational land-scape. Anthropology's understanding of otherness takes ona new coloration with this view that "othering" is a sharedproject within a common framework: an "agreement to ar-gue" or a "distributed consensus" may well be more aptdescriptions of organized culture than a "learned system ofshared.. .,"etc.

The study of organizational culture is here to stay. Nu-merous articles and conferences each year make it clearthat organizational culture is more than a passing manage-ment fad. An empirical question confronting both anthro-pology and organizational science concerns the worldwidediffusion or rejection of what began as a Western culturalform. The moral choice that the anthropological professionmust make is whether culture will be represented by thosesocialized into the ethos of instrumental rationality, orwhether instrumental rationality will be interrogated byoutside, critical, creative voices. Over the near term, andincreasingly on a global scale, larger segments of humanlife are going to be occupied by corporate, institutional, ororganizational forms. Emergent states, transnational cor-porations, and political and religious movements all repre-sent organizational forms producing their own gorgeousand prolific cultures of command and legitimation, resis-tance and adaptation, and inclusion and alienation (Barber1996), embracing or rejecting but seldom ignoring West-em rationalism. Anthropology, if it is to have a future, mustlearn to address the moral and conceptual issues posed bythis fact. A greater rigor of preparation, and a more thor-ough self-examination, will be required for organizationalethnographers if they are to approach the corporate and in-stitutional worlds not as tourists or apologists but as inter-locutors in a larger, shared drama of civilization.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to express my greatest ap-preciation to numerous colleagues whose comments over thecareer of this manuscript have done much to improve its qual-ity. The comments of Bruce Mannheim were most valuable inframing the argument; likewise, Kevin Avruch, David Hak-ken, George Marcus, Constance Penn, Carolyn Psenka, andAndrea Sankar all supplied valuable guidance and insight.What slight merit this article may have owes much to these; itsmore certain defects remain the responsibility of its author.

1. Please address correspondence to: Allen W. Batteau,2016 Shadford Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

2. This phrase is actually a treble entendre: make up canmean "to fabricate," in the dual sense of assemble or dissem-ble; it can also mean to resolve one's differences. All threemeanings are intended here.

3. Karl Weick, in Sensemaking in Organizations (1995),describes the vocabularies of society, organization, work, andcoping, as well as the vocabularies of predecessors (tradition)and vocabularies of sequence and experience (storytelling), asthe "substance ol sensemaking."

4. To be sure, there are many gradations here. When a man-ufacturer buys a component-maker, everyone understands thatto some degree the component-maker will have to live withthe policies and priorities of its newly acquired parent, in waysthat it would not were the manufacturer just buying components.On the other hand, if the manufacturer has a long-term contractwith the component-maker, even though the latter is nominal-ly an independent entity, the manufacturer may nevertheless

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expect various forms of fealty from its supplier, particularly ifthe manufacturer is the largest customer of the component-maker.

5. Just as cubicles present today the frontlines of negotia-tions over personal space and privacy in corporations, contractworkers are the frontlines of negotiations over inclusion. In-itially, contract workers were an expedient to be retained for afew days or weeks of peak workload. As companies such asMicrosoft found that they could add staff without the burdenof employee benefits or long-term commitment, they beganusing contract workers for normal production. Although theIRS takes a dim view of the practice, in fact numerous busi-nesses and not-for-profit organizations retain contract work-ers, provide them with space to work and tools for the job, sethours at which they must be at work, determine the methodsthey must use, and pay them at a fixed rate on a periodic basis,in short, treat them as employees in every regard except com-mitment and fringe benefits.

6. But see Foucault's description of the internalization ofthe culture of command (1979).

7. There is an extensive literature on the psychosocial reac-tion to and acceptance and internalization or rejection of author-ity (Mannoni 1964; Sennett 1980; Sennett and Cobb 1972), oc-casionally informed by insights into the differences amongcultures. I can only note here that whether authority is receivedwith fear or groveling or with a sense of security and integritydepends on both the cultural and the pragmatic context.

8. The dialectics that I am describing are wonderfully illus-trated by these strategies, where the act of obeying the rulesbecomes a form of industrial disobedience. Noble (1984:277)provides a fine example of this.

9. "The coffee cup on the workbench is one of the great is-sues in industrial management," in the words of Charles Skin-ner, an instructor at Productivity, Inc., a consulting firm.Holusha (1992:D1) describes how assembly workers at anAsea Brown Boveri, Ltd. factory cooperated with effort to in-troduce greater workstation discipline but drew the line at re-moving certain personal objects, such as coffee mugs, fromtheir workstations.

10. For those who still equate my usage of "cultures" withspecific groups or statistical descriptions of behavior, let memake clear: cultures are resources for sensemaking that, whilecultivated within groups, can be invoked or enacted by any-one. In numerous unionized industries, I have observed mana-gerial employees adopt the attitudes of resistance that origi-nated with the union; contrariwise, in very authoritarianorganizations, line managers and rank-and-file alike strikesimilar poses of command. Cultures of command and author-ity and resistance and adaptation only fit best with the roles ofthose in positions of super- and subordination; they are the ex-clusive property of neither.

11. Within contemporary society any group can be subjectto multiple and often conflicting regimes of instrumental ra-tionality. Even a modestly organized group, such as the Bap-tist Church choir, may be subject to expectations from thechurch, the Southern Baptist Convention, the surroundingmunicipal government (in the form of zoning ordinances), andthe IRS (if the choir ever charges money for a performance).The church choir may conclude that the only way to maintainits integrity in the face of these conflicting demands is to "get

organized," that is, to acknowledge a structure of leadership,impose some rules, draw some distinctions of membership,and perhaps have some resources at its disposal.

12. Those who are familiar with it will, of course, recog-nize the parallel to Levi-Strauss's (1963) analysis of totemism.Nowhere is it asserted here that budgets and financial reportsrepresent the most important values of an organization, anymore than Levi-Strauss would assert that the Chippewa Eagleclan perforce values feathers and flight above all else. Insteadthe assertion is that while asset ownership (like clan member-ship) may as a matter of fact contain imprecisions and ambi-guities (multiple loyalties, contested claims), at the level of to-temic representation there is no ambiguity whatsoever.

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