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ration, then maintained through exercise of social influence. Culture represents the adaptation of a particular people to the external conditions of life, embodying traditional beliefs, interpretations, and rules of conduct that tend to endure in the face of changing objectives. In other words, culture is the foundational term through which the orderliness and patterning of much of life’s experiences are explained (Smircich, 1983).
In organizational research this anthropological definition of culture leads to a study of participants’ views about all aspects of the organization experience-work itself, the technology, the formal organization structure, and everyday language (myths, stories, special jargon). Culture exists in an organization, because of the need to attach meaning to one’s work. In essence, culture is a socially constructed reality. It expresses the values or social ideals and the beliefs that organization members come to share (Louis, 1980; Siehl and Martin, 1981).
In order to better understand the culture of an organization, it may be useful to distinguish different levels in which culture may be manifested. For example, Schein describes three levels of culture: observable artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions.
Artifacts, the most visible demonstration of culture, include physical structures and office arrangements, level of formality, amount of interaction among members, as well as written documents and various forms of archival information. Also included under this category are organizational stories, myths, and legends that are used to socialize new members and to provide a feeling of cohesion among group members. Observation is an effective means of studying culture at this level of analysis. While artifacts may provide helpful cues to an organization’s culture, they cannot tell the whole story. It is difficult to draw inferences about the true meaning of such symbols to insiders and how these symbols reflect the culture.
The second level at which culture may be expressed is through organizational values. Shared values are often expressed through behavioral norms, or common ways of reacting to one’s environment. A good way to reach this level of culture is by questioning members of the organization regarding why certain artifacts or observed behaviors exist. This may be accomplished through interviews, focus groups, or survey instruments. Values may also be expressed in the form of ideologies, which are often documented in a company’s mission statement or formally articulated as a philosophy for conducting business.
The deepest layer of culture, which is the most difficult to decipher, is the level of organizational assumptions. The reason culture is so hard to uncover at this level is because an organization’s ways of doing things have become taken-for-granted and are no longer in conscious awareness (Wilkins, 1983). Because members of the organization come to accept a similar perspective, their way of viewing the world goes unchallenged and unquestioned. Therefore, in order to reach the level of underlying assumptions, it is necessary to employ creative investigative approaches to the study of culture. This third stage of cultural examination is not simply a matter of asking employees to describe the culture in which they work. Broad samples of organizational members and a variety of data collection methods, including a combination of approaches such as focus groups, observation