From Emic to Etic: The Performativity of Organizational Culture in an Urban Charter School

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. The Organization of Education

Abstract

The production of knowledge often leads to changes in the way people understand and act in the world in ways that make that knowledge more or less true. While this relationship between knowledge, practice, and reality has largely been studied in financial markets, I argue it can be extended to organizations by showing how the concept of organizational culture is used to conscientiously construct an organizational culture. Specifically, I relate how an urban charter school uses the conception of organizational culture to build its own culture of discipline and order legitimated by the theory of broken windows. Historically, organizational culture emerged in the 1980s as a result of a long process of conceptual development from its use in describing the worldviews of people in the non-Western world, to its reflexive application to Western societies, and then to organizations and especially schools. Today, organizational culture is a basic concept taught to managers as a way to lead organizations. The results of a year-long ethnographic study of an urban charter school show how the school administration creates culture by defining the organization's beliefs, values, and expectations; structures them into the everyday routines of the school, and shapes the ways in which members interpret the school and find meaning in their work. This cultural performativity reveals the reactive relationship between the production and application of professional knowledge and its implications for social research and practice.

Author

• Jason Scott Radford, University of Chicago