Organizational Culture in Higher Education: Defining the Essentials

Abstract

Within the business community in the last ten years, organizational culture has emerged as a topic of central concern to those who study organizations. Books such as Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence [37], Ouchi's Theory Z [33], Deal and Kennedy's Corporate Cultures [20], and Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership [44] have emerged as major works in the study of managerial and organizational performance. However, growing popular interest and research activity in organizational culture comes as something of a mixed blessing. Heightened awareness has brought with it increasingly broad and divergent concepts of culture. Researchers and practitioners alike often view culture as a new management approach that will not only cure a variety of organizational ills but will serve to explain virtually every event that occurs within an organization. Moreover, widely varying definitions, research methods, and standards for understanding culture create confusion as often as they provide insight. The intent for this article is neither to suggest that an understanding of organizational culture is an antidote for all administrative folly, nor to imply that the surfeit of definitions of organizational culture makes its study meaningless for higher education administrators and researchers. Rather, the design of this article is to provide a working framework to diagnose culture in colleges and universities so that distinct problems can be overcome. The concepts for the framework