INTERACTION NORMS AS CARRIERS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Too often, practitioners and theorists alike have tended to locate organizational culture in the mottoes and symbolic acts of top managers and to attribute to those leaders the ability to change and manage meaning from visible, yet distant, perches on the organizational chart. By contrast, I propose that the study of organizational culture focus on the networks of social interaction that constitute organizational life, and the rituals that support those interactions. This perspective is derived from an analysis of International Harvester's six-month-long UAW strike in 1979. In this case, management tried to redefine the established labor-relations culture by eliminating those managers who carried and reproduced that culture, but in doing so they also eliminated the company's knowledge of the subtle interaction rituals that had guided and supported labor negotiations. This, I argue, was a major factor contributing to the breakdown of negotiations at IH in 1979.