organizationapplication
Cultural Approach to Organizations
By: Clifford Geertz & Michael Pacanowsky
THE APPLICATION!
By: Cari Porter
To apply Clifford Geertz and Michael Pacanowsky's Cultural Approach to Organization, I am going to discuss where my mother works. She is an in-school suspension teacher at J.A. Smith Middle School in Chillicothe, Ohio.
In the chapter the authors discuss the way that organizations or societies have subcultures and countercultures. In the school building where my mom works, there are many obvious subcultures. There are the subcultures formed by the grades the different teachers instruct, for instance the 6th grade teachers are on one floor, 7th on one floor and 8th on another floor. The teachers are forced to segregate themselves from the other grades, kind of like the example in class of the students mom who was best friends with a man she shared a cubicle with and then he was moved to another floor. They still maintain the relationship but are in different subcultures because of location.
For example, my mother's room was on the second floor for the past five years and this year it was moved to the first floor. The teachers that she associated with constantly changed and she told me that she is getting closer to the teachers on the floor where her room is this year, but she still gets to see her other friends at lunch and when she can go up to visit them.
There are also subcultures created by the subjects the teachers instruct. The teachers go to various workshops and meetings together on the weekends and when there are inservice days for them. The themes aresometimes for different subjects taught. For example, Math teachers would not be interested in going to the English workshop. So they travel together on weekends and even during the summer. My mother got to participate in a week long workshop in Boulder, Colorado last summer and she established a bond with the people she traveled there with.
There are also subcultures created by whether the teachers are smokers or not. The building has a non-smoking policy that was implemented two years ago and the teachers have to go outside go sit in there cars for their smoke break. Two teachers that I know of go to lunch together everyday so they can smoke on the way and on the way back to school. Subcultures also emerge if the teachers are parents and how old their children are. For instance, my mom is involved in a subculture with the other teachers who have children attending college.
The saying, "stick with your own kind" is relevant in this theory. People do tend to gravitate toward those who are similar to them. It creates a more comfortable situation for both parties if there are similarties to speak about, and that is a reason that subcultures are created so easily at the workplace.
There is another way to look at the school as a part of a culture as well as a culture within itself. The culture the school building is a part of is the Chillicothe City School System, which is made up of all the elementary schools, middle schools, and the high school in the city. Then of course, the city school system is a part of the culture of all the school systems in the state. To take it further, you could see that all the school systems in the United States are linked together by a culture.
It is the responsibility of management and the employees together to identify workplace communication needs and develop plans and strategies to improve workplace communication.
Geertz and Pacanowsky discuss that managers and chain of command can effect the way communication is passed. There is a pyramid form of communication where the information trickles down in a formal method with little to no horizontal passage at all. Then there is a lattice form of passing information where there are many lines both vertical and diagonal lines of communication in the company or culture, this is thought of as a more informal way of communicating.
When I asked my mom for an example of how communicating in the school worked effectively, she said that having monthly staff meetings and memos being circulated work. The staff feels that they are adequately informed and important as well. My mom also had an opinion about how they could improve communicatin in some areas too. The principal seems to avoid topics where conflict could arrise among the staff. When the school year ended the teachers schedule's were set, but during the summer some of the teachers went to the principal and had their's changed. Instead of notifying the entire staff, he posted it on a bulletin board in the staff lounge. Since it was in the summer, none of the teachers even came back to the building until a few weeks before school began for fall. When the rest of the staff noticed the posing, there were quite a few members upset because they felt their boss had hidden the information from them. In my opinion, being in the management position, he should be able to predict that conflict could arrise, and handle the problem as well. He could have easily sent a memo throught he mail as to follow normal procedure and also face the music for the decision he made to alter some and not all the schedules to personal preference.
Geertz mentions that the conversation at the watercooler in the office are vital to the study that ethnographers do. The information passed there, is what is really going on in the office. The stories are not neccessarily passed through management so they are the honest opinions of employees.
The "watercooler" at school, is the employee lounge. My mom says that all the gossip and stories are told and passed in there during their lunch breaks. So the stories that are told are only from those who have the same break, so the stories and rumors vary and change through the different lunch periods.
The chapter also discusses rituals that occur within an organization. Geertz and Pacanowsky discuss how that if any attempt to alter the ritual is met with stiff opposition. A ritual that I know my mom and three of her co-workers participate in every morning. My mom stops at the Dairy Mart and buys four coffees, to which she drinks one and gives the other three to her co-workers. They pay her for them and by the end of the week she has enough holes punched in her "frequent coffee card" that she can buy two free ones and they alternate who gets the two free ones. It throws a wrench in the works when one of them misses, but they deal with it by giving it to someone else and move on.
I think the cultures that are created by the teachers in the school are of great value to the students and the way they are taught. The way they relate with each other and relay the things they teach to each other from their subcultures are invaluable in the way they teach the children. Not only do they learn different techniques and information, but they also become friends and make the environment enjoyable. My mom loves her job, not just because of the way she gets to deal with kids, but because of the way she had made friends and enjoys spending time with her co-workers as well.
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This page was created by Cari Porter:)
This page was last updated 10/12/99