On Changing Organizational Cultures by Injecting New Ideologies: The Power of Stories

Recent corporate legal and ethical meltdowns suggest that avoiding such harms to companies and to society requires a significant culture change within the organization. This paper addresses the issue of what it takes to change a corporate culture. While conventional wisdom may suggest that a change...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Wines, William A. (Author) ; Hamilton, J. B. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer 2008
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2008, Volume: 89, Issue: 3, Pages: 433
Further subjects:B stories as DNA
B Ideologies
B new vocabularies
B Values
B new narratives
B mythic stories
B corporate culture changes
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:Recent corporate legal and ethical meltdowns suggest that avoiding such harms to companies and to society requires a significant culture change within the organization. This paper addresses the issue of what it takes to change a corporate culture. While conventional wisdom may suggest that a change requires only the institution of an ethics office with proper reporting paths and an ethics code, such an approach is only a beginning. Many large corporations, especially those in danger of legal and ethical catastrophes, need to undertake multiple initiatives to generate a new culture that manifests new values and new vocabularies. A cultural change accomplished by changing large numbers of personnel is expensive in financial and human terms. One component of a less costly approach is to tell new and different stories within the corporation because stories establish the cultural DNA that gives organizations, families, and individuals their identities. Such changes in individual firms, however, are influenced by the ideological assumptions within which and under which the industry and the society operates.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-008-0009-5