Organizational Culture and Its Counterculture

1. The authors Joanne Martin and Caren Siehl are focusing on organizational culture and its counterculture. The definition given by the authors for counterculture states that counterculture will most likely arise in a strongly centralized organization that has allowed a reasonable decentralization of authority to take place. The article assumes that cultural systems can emphasize as well as sustain the objectives of the firm’s top management. The main argument here is that in addition to serving integrative functions, culture can express disagreement and address needs for segregation among organizational elements. As a replacement for thinking culture is a huge phenomenon, they explore counterculture’s uneasy symbiotic relationship with the rest of an organization. Finally they tackle the connection between cultural development and managerial action by asking what a leader does, unintentionally or intentionally, that seems to impact the development of a counterculture. Given said that when a dominant culture and a counterculture takes place it creates an uneasy symbiosis between these two interdependent cultures. There were two books selected for this research, one was by Ed Cray and the other was by J.P Wright on General Motors. The three core values for dominant culture in GM were “respecting authority”, “fitting in” and “being loyal”. J.P Wright talks about how DeLorean’s division in GM has created an uneasy symbiosis relationship between the dominant culture and counterculture. DeLorean’s activities have been studied to see how he has created a counterculture in an organization with such a strong dominant culture. There are several ways to counter the dominant culture and DeLorean has done so by “questioning deference to authority”, “finding an alternative way to fit in” and “opposing demands for unquestioning loyalty”.

2. There are three types of subcultures; the first is enhancing, orthogonal and counterculture. This article’s main focus will be on