Strategy School 8: The Cultural School

8. The Cultural School (Strategy formation as a collective process)

This post is continuation of my previous posts on strategy, based on Mintzberg's book Strategy Safari.

Culture was "discovered" in management in the 1980s, thanks to the success of Japanese corporations. They seemed to do things differently than Americans. All fingers pointed to Japanese culture, and especially how that has been manifested in large Japanese corporations.

Bjorkman has pointed that radical changes in strategy have to be based on fundamental change in the culture. He described this as happening in the following 4 phases:

• Strategic drift
• Unfreezing of current belief systems
• Experimentation and re-formulation
• Stabilization

Premises of the cultural school:

• Strategy formation is a process of social interaction, based on the beliefs and understandings shared by the members of an organization
• An individual acquires these beliefs through a process of acculturation, or socialization, which is largely tacit and nonverbal.
• The members of an organization can only partially describe the beliefs that underpin their culture
• As a result, strategy takes the form of perspective above all, more than positions, rooted in collective intentions and reflected in patterns by which the deeply embedded resources, of the organization are protected and used for competitive advantage
• Culture do not encourage strategic change; at best, they tend to promote shifts in positions

Critique of the Cultural School

Cultural school should be faulted for conceptual vagueness. It can discourage necessary change. It favours the management of consistency, of staying on track.

Thank you very much,

RamP!