Corporate Culture Essay

Corporate culture is the idea that senior managers within an organisation must strive to develop a sense of belonging and purpose within the organisation. Barnard (1938) contrasted this on Durkheim’s anomie. Watson (2008 p. 46) in relation to corporate culture, suggests that a key weakness with Durkheim’s work is that it has a tendency to over-emphasise integration and consensus both within societies and within work organisations at the expense of attention to underlying conflicts.
Ethnomethodology studies how people make sense of their world and argue that there are no structures to which it can relate which contradicts traditional sociology. Watson (2008, p. 52) suggests that the dangers of turning conceptual abstractions like ‘society’, ‘class’ or ‘organisation’ into existing ‘things’ which have a life of their own outside peoples own minds. The next strand which will be examined is that of the Weber-interpretivist strand.
Essentially what this strand deals with is both the meaningful activity of the individual and the large scale questions of historical change and economic and political conflicts (Watson, 2008 p. 53). Weber attempted to find a balance between considerations of processes at a historical/societal level and processes of interpretation and action at the individual level (Hastings, 2011). Some critiques of his work would include the fact that some of his works are unfinished, ambiguous and the spelling and grammar is poor.

Weber’s early work inspired Goldthorpe to produce the Affluent Workers studies which gave rise to the concept of orientations of work. Watson (2008 p. 56) describes the orientations at work as the meaning attached by individuals to their work which predisposes them both to think and act in particular ways with regard to that work. Essentially what this strand is suggesting is that instead of concentrating on the needs of the worker which have been examined earlier in this paper and include the economic needs related to scientific management, the social and humanistic needs related to human relations and self actualisation.
Goldthorpe turned this on its head and instead suggested the importance of the meanings that workers take into the work situation in the first place (Watson 2008, p. 56). Thus one can argue that the point Goldthorpe was trying to make was that in different stages of a person’s live economic matters may take precedence resulting in them working less than attractive jobs for high money whereas if economic gain is not the priority then one could work for less money but still take something from the job like for example companionship.
Another important contribution from Weber gave rise to bureaucratised organisations seen in the institutional-level and the social construction of reality which as Watson (2008, p. 57) points out organisations take the shape they do not because of their efficiency or proven effectiveness but because people draw from the culture around them value based notions of how things should be organised. It can be argues that as human beings we will influence the organisations culture, it too, will influence us.
This is despite the organisation not being an entity we can touch, feel or smell. Watson (2008, p. 59) suggests that the Weber-interpretivist strand furthers an essentially sociological concern with how work behaviour and patterns fit into the wider political, social and cultural context. The next strand which shall be examined is the Marxian strand and it is one in which one can be argued provides the most coherent and important ideas of sociological thinking.
Hastings (2011) argues that Marxist theories provide a key analysis of the characteristics of capitalist societies and of the tendency of the class based nature and the contradictions of capitalism to bring about its eventual collapse. Marx suggests that it is through labour in which the human being meets its needs, which is a social process, and this is how the human world is created. Thus, if this how the human world is then created it can be exploited by the owner of capital to whom the seller of labour is in a working relationship.
This can mean that the worker can become alienated as the owner of capital will always have sufficient means of subsistence but the worker is dependent on the wages from work provided. This provides the basis for Marx’s materialism. Watson (2003, p 44) points out that the greatest impact of the ideas of Marx on modern industrial sociology has undoubtedly been through the use of his concept ‘the labour process’ to develop a perspective which combines interests in employees behaviour, employment relations and questions of work design and organisation.
Finally, the last strand which will be explored as part of this paper will be that of the poststructuralist and postmodernism. It can be see that these strands may be confusing or indeed misleading as Watson (2008, p 66) points out sometimes they are treated as the same thing and sometimes attempts are made to differentiate between the two expressions. This strand can prove to be controversial among sociologists in that the strands almost abandons the traditional thinking on the social world instead focusing on the texts and languages that people write.
Postmodernism flies in the face of the world being a social order in which we as humans attempt to build a system to make sense of and to extract our economic, actualisation and humanistic needs. Instead we, as humans, can go about inventing our own world through our own language and culture. Poststructuralist denies the existence of structures. We can no longer rely on religion or science to make sense of the world and its realities are situated within the text and language which are not predefined.
Indeed, it can be argued that it is the person who will give them meaning. Watson (2008, p. 67) describes discourses within this strand as a set of concepts, statements, terms and expressions which constitute ways of talking or writing about a particular aspects of life, thus framing the way people understand and act with respect to this areas of existence. Essentially poststructuralism has been a dominant factor in tying together the idea of multiple discourses to the centre of the sociology of work and organisations.
In conclusion one can see through the different strands how the sociologists have grounded the work in the area of sociology and that there are many that have links to another which have been examined throughout the course of this paper. One can also see the different views Durkheim and Marx displayed as completely opposite each other. Essentially, these strands form the basis for further exploration into sociology and provide the sound base for which to continue.