The Dynamic Societal Cultural Milieu of Organizations: Origins, Maintenance and Change

Abstract

Many international management scholars have expressed concern about whether societal culture changes so rapidly that research which attempts to represent it has little utility. We address this fundamental concern of international management by providing three theoretical lenses to examine the forces that produce and maintain a society's culture: functional theory, neo-institutional theory and complexity theory. We consider principles of progressive change and problems of social psychology from functional theory, the three pillars and conflicting institutional logics of neo-institutional theory and the ideas of stable equilibrium, oscillations and chaos of dynamic systems from complexity theory. Although these three theoretical lenses sometimes produce conflicting explanations of culture change, they often complement each other. Together, they provide a more realistic picture of the dynamics of the societal cultural milieu of organizations than do cultural representations that favour stability or those that completely discount the utility of any attempt at representing cultural continuity.

Citation

Kara, A. and Peterson, M.F. (2012), "The Dynamic Societal Cultural Milieu of Organizations: Origins, Maintenance and Change", Tihanyi, L., Devinney, T.M. and Pedersen, T. (Ed.) Institutional Theory in International Business and Management (Advances in International Management, Vol. 25), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 341-371. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1571-5027(2012)0000025020