ABSTRACT
CONTEXT
Culture influences the dynamics and outcomes of organizations in profound ways, including individual-level outcomes (like the quality of work products) and collective impacts (such as reputation or influence). As such, understanding organizational culture is a crucial element of understanding performance; from an anthropological perspective, ‘performance’ is not an outcome of culture, it is a part of culture. A key challenge in understanding organizational culture, especially in complex academic organizations, is the lack of a flexible, scalable approach for data collection and analysis.
PURPOSE OR GOAL
In this study, we report on our development of a survey-based cultural characterization tool that leverages both lightweight data collection from stakeholders in the organization and public information about that organization. We also integrate perspectives from prior literature about faculty, students, and staff in academic departments. Taken together, the resulting survey covers key elements of culture and allows for scalable data collection across settings via customizations and embedded logic in the survey itself. The outcome of this work is a design process for a new and promising tool for scalable cultural characterization, and we have deployed this tool across two institutions.
APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS
We leverage prior research, our own preliminary data collection, and our experience with this approach in a different setting to develop a cultural characterization survey suitable for delivery to multiple engineering department stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students). We start with a modest number of interviews, stratified by these three groups and achieving saturation of responses, to understand their views on their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, and their perceptions of how it ‘works’. We merge this information with public data (for instance, departmental vision or mission statements, which convey a sense of priorities or values) as well as prior literature about higher education culture. We also draw upon our experience in another setting as well as pilot testing data, and the result is a carefully-constructed set of dichotomous items that are offered to department stakeholders in survey form using an electronic survey platform. We also collect background and demographic information in the survey. The resulting data are analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to extract meaningful information about the departmental culture from the perspectives of the stakeholder groups.
ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES
The resulting survey consists of two parts, each with sub-components. The two top level survey parts contain: (i) items common to all respondents in all settings (i.e. all institutions in this study), and (ii) a set of institution-specific items. Within those sections, the framing of the items is calibrated for the stakeholder groups so that items make sense to them within the context of their experience. The survey has been administered, and the data are being analyzed and interpreted presently. We expect the results to capture the specific elements of local culture within these institutions, as well as differences in perspectives and experience among the three primary stakeholder groups.
CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY
This study demonstrates a scalable approach to survey development for the purposes of cultural characterization, and its use across settings and with multiple stakeholder groups. This work enables a very nuanced view of culture within a department, and these results can be used within academic departments to enable discussion about change, priorities, performance, and the work environment.
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The Cultural Impacts of Social Movements
The most important impacts of social movements are often cultural, but the sheer variety of potential cultural impacts—from shifts in public opinion to new portrayals of a group on television to the metrics guiding funding in a federal agency—presents unique challenges to scholars. Rather than treating culture as a social sphere separate from politics and the economy, we conceptualize it as the ideas, values, and assumptions underpinning policies and practices in all spheres. We review recent research on movements’ impacts on public opinion and everyday behavior; the media and popular culture; nonpolitical institutions such as science, medicine, and education; and politics. We focus on cultural impacts that have mattered for movements’ constituencies and address why movements have had those impacts. We conclude with an agenda for future research, seeking greater connection between the literatures on movements and the literatures on the institutions that matter to movements.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657872
- PAR ID:
- 10293069
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Review of Sociology
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0360-0572
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 279 to 299
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073018-022342
