The Social Construction of Corporate Culture

Using Sense-making to Create the Right Culture

Corporate culture as a value concept is not new. The empirical reality becomes “culture” to us because and insofar as we relate it to value ideas. It includes those segments and only those segments of reality that have become significant to us because of this value relevance. However, only a small portion of the existing concrete reality is colored by our value-conditioned interest and this alone is significant to us.

It is significant because it contains relationships that are important to us due to their connection with our values. Cultural patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.

An important concept in understanding culture is the idea of “social construction.” That is, there is no absolute version of the world — rather one makes interpretations according to his perception systems. This operates at both the individual and collective levels. The meanings that we attach to our interpretations are our “social constructions.”

Culture refers to the process of reality construction that allows people to see and understand particular events, actions, objects, or situations in distinctive ways. The concept of social construction leads to the notion of organisations being essentially socially constructed realities that rest as much in the hearts and minds of their members as they do in concrete symbols, artifacts, and sets of rules and relationships.

Shared meaning, shared understanding, and shared sense-making are all different ways of describing cultural formation.

“Sense-making” describes the meaning-sharing development process. Sense-making is the process of clarifying and appreciating the potential of relationships, in the evaluation of the external environment. These processes of sense-making are essentially learning processes.

Sense-making is an overall “meaning-giving” activity that is grounded in identity construction, retrospective, enactive, social, ongoing, focused in relation to extracted cues, and driven by plausibility, not by accuracy. This activity consists of the processes of enactment, selection, and retention, which are located on the aggregation level of the organization, not of the individual. In the end, sense-making in organizations creates a structure of shared meanings and understandings based on which concerted action can take place.

A network of shared meanings and interpretations provides the social order, temporal continuity, and contextual clarity for members to coordinate and relate their actions.

Sense-making is a never-ending attempt to reduce multiple meanings (equivocality) and handle complex informational data confronted by people in an organisation.

“Enactment” describes the way an organisation as a social organism adapts and adjusts to its environment by acting upon it to change it. Enactment involves defining the beginning of information management, followed by selection which is narrowing down the equivocality, and then deciding what to deal with and what to leave alone, ignore, or disregard. And finally, retention refers to the decision as to what information, and its meaning, employees will choose to retain.

Sense-making, when seen as a uniquely different organisational learning process, demands a more radical approach than normal individual learning which occurs when people give a different response to the same stimulus. Cultural organizational learning occurs only when groups of people give the same response to different stimuli.

Organisations are patterns of means-ends relations deliberately designed to make the same routine response to different stimuli, a pattern that is antithetical to learning in the traditional individual-focused sense. Organisational transformation involving cultural change must therefore aim at corporate cultural learning in order to obtain a sustainable and enduring change.

The various perspectives of corporate culture are provided by the following authors:

A social psychological transformation of organizational citizenship blossoms as the desired employee experience emerges through the sense-making activities to fuse meaning-sharing for a psychological contract that has empowering emotional and cognitive elements.

The end state is emotional and intellectual involvement, and commitment that leads people to do their best work, and exhibit behaviours associated with the radical employee engagement ideology, now culture, such as:

· employees consistently speak positively about their organisation to co-workers, potential employees, and customers;

· employees have an intense desire to be part of the organisation; and

· employees exert extra discretionary effort to actively contribute to the business success.

Within a corporate culture with high employee engagement, engaged employees internalise a sense of emotive attachment towards their organisation, which empowers investing themselves in both their work role and in the organisation as a whole. These employees use their talents to the fullest in support of the organisation’s vision and mission goals through dedication and commitment, voluntary discretionary efforts and advocacy.

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