Culture change

About: Culture change is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1531 publications have been published within this topic receiving 41922 citations. The topic is also known as: cultural change & culture changes.

Reflexivity and Normative Change

Abstract: Normative change programs that is, programs that attempt to effect organisational change through altering employees’ beliefs, values, emotions and self-perceptions have been heralded by some as the royal road to corporate ‘excellence’. Academic literature on the phenomenon, however, is pervaded by a sense of unease. Critics claim that these programs invade employees’ subjectivity, and erode their autonomy and capacity for critical thought. In this paper, I employ concepts from the work of George Herbert Mead and Rom Harre to explore the reflexive processes of managers subjected to a normative change program that was carried out in an Australian steel plant during the 1990s. Taking two supporters of change as my prime examples, I show how reflexive processes are manifested in the way managers talk about themselves their private ‘real’ selves, their public personae and the relationship between these aspects of self. I conclude by examining how reflexivity is linked to autonomy and critical thinking, and argue that our academic unease about normative change may be explained by our own evaluations of the degree to which employees engage in the sorts of reflexive processes that we, as academics, value.

Culture loss and culture change among the Micmac of the Canadian Maritime Provinces 1912-1950

Abstract: Probably every young anthropologist at the end of his first field work, breaking reluctantly an identification, however illusory, with a people and a place he feels aro now in a sense his own, resolves to return in, say, twenty-five years and see how lifo has turned out at his particular jungle, desert, or coast. Twenty-five years seems to him agood span to pick; it approximates his current age, has the impressive sound of quarter-contury, and is the farthest durability that he can conceive for the capacity to function normally as scientist and as man.

Culture Change: Defining and Measuring Student-Centered Teaching.

Abstract: iii Acknowledgements iv

Safety Culture Maturity in Upstream: Oil and Gas Industry in Thailand

Abstract: The demand of energy in Thailand has significantly increased for the past 10 years. Volunteer company as one of the subsidiary company of Thailand National Oil and Gas Company, has responsible to respond to serve country’s energy demand in order to minimize import expense. Upstream Business Company like volunteer company is responsible to find the natural resources and energy to supply the country demand. Company is also in High-risk industry which one major accident may result operation disruption and impact to the country e.g. gas supply shortage to power plant and cause electricity shortage in Thailand. On the other hand, it may cause major reputation damage, multiple fatalities, environment contamination and financial loss to company and society. Hence, safety is one of the most important areas to make sure operation run smooth and prevent those from happening. The evolution and focus of safety have improved from 1980s, 2000s to early 2010s in Technology, System and Culture areas respectively. In Thailand, safety culture is very new and many companies fail to create the effective safety culture. Volunteer company has focused on safety culture (people) from the past 5 years due to root/underlying causes of the incident come from human factor. Volunteer company tailor made safety culture maturity model of 5 levels, Pathological, Reactive, Calculative, Proactive and Generative, from industry best practice along with strengthens safety management system in order to reduce incident and prevent Major accident in operation. Volunteer company launched safety culture questionnaire to identify company status to all employee in 2011 and result come with they are in level 3 (Calculative). Once the safety culture level has been clarify, it is easier to use proper tools and techniques to create a culture change, Volunteer company come up with 5 years roadmap to create a culture change from 2011 – 2015 with aspiration to achieve Generative level. As result of Volunteer company safety culture improvement shown indirectly from reduction in “Lost time injury frequency” (LTIF) and “Total recordable injury rate” (TRIR) from safety statistics, severity of the case has been reduced and operation run smoothly without any major accident.

Writing culture reliably : The analysis of high-concordance codes

Abstract: Although ethnography has traditionally been regarded as high in validity, the assessment of reliability in anthropological field research is very difficult. Fortunately, forms of systematic data collection exist that !end themselves both to reliability testing and replication. The analysis of culture in terms of the high-concordance codes that compose systemic culture patterns is a way to generate reliable data and replicable studies. (High-concordance codes, systemic culture patterns, cultural consensus analysis, culture theory, reliability) The viability of cross-cultural and intracultural comparative research rests on the degree to which the units of analysis are actually comparable. In turn, the comparability of units of analysis substantially depends on the degree to which measurements of them are reliable and valid. While ethnography is generally regarded as high in validity, the assessment of reliability in anthropological field research has typically been difficult. Moreover, in recent years the worth of reliability itself has been questioned. For interpretive or postmodern anthropologists who subscribe to the notion that ethnography is "a genre of storytelling" (Bruner 1986:139) where the task of the anthropologist is to "critique ethnographic stories" (Lett 1997:10), the techniques of literary criticism are more appropriate than those of science. But if the attention of interpretive anthropologists is directed at "the way social reality is to be presented" (Marcus and Fischer 1986:165) rather than at social reality itself, one can reasonably question the value of the entire enterprise (Lett 1997). Even the dean of interpretive anthropology, Clifford Geertz, has recognized that problems exist with the approach. In The Interpretation of Cultures, he (Geertz 1973) indicated that "the besetting sin of interpretive approaches ... is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment." Further, he claimed that "there is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be any less.., susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal" (Geertz 1973:24, quoted in Lett 1997:8). Reliability of measurement is one of the "explicit canons" of scientific appraisal, and the essence of reliability is consistency. The methods used to obtain information should provide the same results when administered under the same conditions. The problem is that the assessment of reliability in ethnography is far from simple. Participant-observation and interview studies simply do not lend themselves easily to reliability testing in the way that surveys do. The internal consistency of surveys can be assessed and they can be administered to the same informants a second time. They can be administered to other informants at other times and in other places. It is difficult or impossible to do any of these with participant-observation studies. In addition, ethnographic "targets" move; cultures change and thereby render efforts to test reliability moot. However, systematic ethnographic techniques exist that permit reliability testing, replication, and the assessment of culture change (see, e.g., Weller and Romney 1988). Moreover, some ways of conceptualizing culture, and cultural units of analysis, are more amenable to the use of such systematic techniques than others. Analysis of culture in terms of the high-concordance codes that compose systemic culture patterns lends itself both to reliability testing and replication. If, as Romney and Moore (1999) claim, systemic culture patterns are fundamental units for the evolution and transmission of culture, then they may also be ideal units of analysis for comparative research. SYSTEMIC CULTURE PATTERNS In his classic text, Anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber (1948:311) described four kinds of culture patterns. These include "the universal, the systemic, the societal or whole-culture, and the style type of patterns. …