Reconstructing organizational culture or welcome to ...

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Reconstructing organizational culture or welcome to valhalla! a

Mary Jo Hatch & Majken Schultz

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Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Version of record first published: 21 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Mary Jo Hatch & Majken Schultz (1995): Reconstructing organizational culture or welcome to valhalla!, Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 1:1, 1-8 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10245289508523442

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Reconstructing Organizational Culture or Welcome to Valhalla! Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz Downloaded by [Copenhagen Business School] at 02:18 17 December 2012

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

On the evening of June 26, 1991, just under 200 people from 17 different nations gathered in Copenhagen for the eighth international meeting of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS), an event that came to be known as the "Valhalla Conference". As we assembled at the Admiral Hotel for the opening reception, almost everyone agreed that the papers submitted were the best ever seen at a SCOS conference. This special issue of the new jounal, Studies in Cultures, Organizations, and Societies, can only represent a small segment of the work presented at the conference, but in its own way it is a culmination of the entire Valhalla experience and thus an important artifact of the Valhalla Conference. In addition to introducing the papers that are included in this special issue, we intend in the following pages to give you a small taste of Valhalla, SCOS and its members. From the beginning, SCOS conferences have not only been about research concerning organizational culture and symbolism, they have also been about establishing and maintaining practices and traditions involving symbolic organizational behaviour. Thus SCOS conferences are more than academic meetings, they are occasions for raising consciousness of the ways in which we are complicitous in the symbolic worlds we study. In an effort to pass on some of the SCOS culture, we offer two stories from Valhalla. The first tells a confessional tale of the events leading up to the conference, while the second is an impressionist tale of a symbolic event that took place at one of the Valhalla pre-conference workshops. Following these stories, we will introduce the papers for this special issue and share our views about the contributions they make to our field of study.

Celebrating Valhalla: A Confessional Tale At Copenhagen Business School, around 1986-1988, a large group of scholars were dedicated to culture studies. Some were actively involved in SCOS, while others attended the annual conferences only occasionally. But for everyone, the organizing of the SCOS conference in Copenhagen in 1991 presented a tremendous challenge and a great opportunity. The group throughout the process consisted of Seren Christensen,

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2 Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz

Kristian Kreiner, Jan Molin, Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen, Marianne Risberg, Ann Westenholz and Majken Schultz. Mary Jo Hatch joined the organizers a bit later. Looking back, two different streams of thinking were motivating our attempt to do something different with a SCOS conference in the context of which we introduced the Valhalla Initiative. O n e strong influence was the still new and provocative postmodernism. We had all been involved in a study group, reading the new, cool French philosophers. Our meeting table was covered in pink and silver to remind us that postmodernism pinpoints the theatrical and aesthetic side of life. For us, postmodernism questioned the ethnographic "tribal" notion of culture and its focus on essence and stability. Postmodernism took you on a trip into hyperreal postindustrial times, where culture enables rather than constrains organizational behaviour. The second influence was our concern over the lack of empirical research carried out in organizational settings. At the time, most people still referred to the existence of culture by studying orchestrated rituals, stories about unusual incidents and myths of the founding fathers - and occasionally mothers. It often seemed as if so-called research had been transformed into tabloid journalism. We wanted to bring the culture concept back to a focus on everyday life in organizations - to find the extraordinary within the ordinary. However, we also wanted to acknowledge that organizations are no longer what they used to be. In postindustrial time and space, organizations become loosely coupled and fragmented contexts. Our aim was to bring the attention of SCOS researchers to bear on the issues of everyday life within these settings and thereby to work toward reconstructing the concept of organizational culture on a foundation of empirical research. By naming our invitation to join Valhalla a "Call for Research", we wanted to emphasize this devotion to the field. In order to bring SCOS researchers together for this venture, we felt that we needed to establish our identity as a group. Within SCOS, symbolism has a distinct role in relation to conferences: for instance, the local cultural context of conference locations typically penetrates conference themes. Thus, we wanted the conference to benefit from our Danish heritage. In the global village, traditional Nordic mythology was one of the few characteristics left that was unique to Scandinavians. At first, we considered naming our initiative after the God of Odin, who, as the oldest and most wise God, master of disguise, reigns over the others. We also considered Odin's two messenger birds, Hugin and Munin, who fly out, to look over the field and return to Odin with the latest news about the ongoing battles between various tribes among the Gods. W e even considered the big snake-like Dragon known as Midgaardsormen in our search for a Scandinavian dragon.' However, we could not associate ourselves with the frightful and demonic features of this enormous creature. Finally, we fell in love with Valhalla. Valhalla is the mythical resting place of the Nordic warriors who have lost their lives in battle. After a night in Valhalla the warriors regain their strength and are ready to return to the battlefield. It is an enormous and spectacular place, where 800 giants are able to enter at once at each of the 540 entrances. Within Valhalla, the ceilings are covered with golden shields and the walls are made of spears. The brave warriors all meet in Valhalla, hosted by Odin, for recovery, renewed strength and hedonistic pleasure.

' The dragon is the official symbol of SCOS and appears in some form at every conference.

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For us, Valhalla stressed the collective character of the mission and the idea of providing a retreat from the battlefield, where culture researchers were often fighting. The 540 entrances to Valhalla represented the multiplicity of approaches to studies of organizational culture and symbolism. In spite of the sometimes rough atmosphere of heated intellectual debate, the wamors experienced Valhalla's powers of renewal and, from the reports we received afterwards, even had a little fun. During the first workshop we stated: In Valhalla those warriors gathered who had died honourably on the battlefield. They had been on an adventurous and risky mission and are now retreating from the field to recover with drink, talk and good company by the side of the wise God of Odin. After a night in Valhalla they will be ready for the battlefield again. W e think of ourselves as warriors on an adventurous and challenging mission hunting our images of culture, whether we find the culture out there in the field or in here in our minds. It's a mission of honour and excitement, wherever it will bring us. We hope the workshops will be the place. where we all retreat from our respective battlefield to talk, drink and gain inspiration for the next stay in the field (introduction talk to the first Valhalla workshop).

As it turned out, we received a lot of heat for having chosen Valhalla as our guiding metaphor. Our fellow "warriors" accused us of: male-chauvinism, reducing women to figures in breast plates; aggressiveness and hostility; war-fetishism; beer-odour and hedonism, etc. However, the metaphor did survive until 1991 and hopefully the logo chosen for the conference, showing a meeting between two peaceful Viking merchant ships, evoked an image of Valhalla as a joint feast rather than a chauvinist battle. Certainly, we recall the workshops as unique experiences in academia, where heated debate and friendly inspiration were mixed with great talk and spectacular events, creating a rare blend of scholarly community and human friendship. In the "Call for Research", which in 1988 served as an invitation to join the Valhalla Initiative we invited: Researchers and groups of researchers working in the field of organizational culture and symbolism to participate in an international research initiative named "the Valhalla project". The aim of Valhalla is to stimulate and facilitate empirical research on culture and symbolism as it applies to various forms of formally organized contexts. In the best of Valhalla traditions the research we encourage is a daring, adventurous one, emphasizing new theoretical perspectives and unorthodox methodologies. Valhalla will consist of a number of independent empirical studies and the 1991 conference will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of these studies. However, to reap the synergetic benefits some loose couplings will b e established. By means of communication networks and a series of workshops, the possibilities for establishing some common ground will be explored (Call for Research flyer).

In the invitation to join the Valhalla Initiative, some basic concerns with the existing traditions of culture research were stated. In spite of the ongoing debate between those who saw culture as a variable and those who considered it a root metaphor, we argued in our "Call for Research that these two positions were strikingly similar in two ways:

( 1 ) They both rely on the assumption that culture is "real" ( 2 ) They both rely on the assumption that culture has "real" behavioral relevance.

4 Man; Jo Hatch and Maiken Schultz


Thus, the Valhalla Initiative was an invitation to challenge these hidden assumptions in culture research and to move towards a new understanding of organizational culture. Here, reification of proclaimed cultural profundity was to be avoided, and the confusing and fragmented pictures of everyday life in organizational contexts would be studied by the development of new and innovative methods. We proposed that such methods should differ from both conventional, positivist frames of reference and classic anthropological stays in the field. The Valhalla Initiative was organized as a sequence of three different workshops to be developed in the order in which we imagined the research process would unfold: at first theory, then methods and finally analysis, according to the time-line illustrated below:

Workshop 1: Theoretical Perspectives: Project ideas CopenhagenIMm May 1989 Workshop 2: Methods: Enacting qualitative methods Copenhagen/M@nNovember 1989 Workshop 3: Data: Interpreting findings Belgirate, September 1990

VALHALLA CONFERENCE, COPENHAGEN 1991 Special Issue 1995 Studies in Culture, Organizations and Societies The idea of the workshops was that the participants' research projects would be travelling along this developmental path and that our meetings would allow us to inform and inspire one another at critical points in the research process leading up to the SCOS conference. Although new ideas and participants were added along the way, this joint research effort did seem to work out in the sense that a large number of the papers presented at the Valhalla conference benefitted from inspiration, critique and discussion that took place during the workshops. More importantly, the high spirit of the workshops had opened new conversations between the people of SCOS. The Valhalla activities enjoyed substantial funding and support by the Copenhagen Business School and a generous invitation by ISTUD.

Feast of Symbols: An Impressionist Tale The second of our three intensive Valhalla workshops, like the first, was held on an island a couple of hours southwest of Copenhagen. There we shared an entire evening of

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s y m b o l i s m that started w i t h o u r b e i n g a s k e d t o w e a r o u r finest attire a n d t o t a k e a mysterious b u s ride. N o t m a n y of us had brought m u c h finery t o the tiny rural island of M m , but w e did o u r best i n good-natured anticipation. . . We gather in the hotel lobby and obediently file onto the special bus that comes to drive us into the local village. It is cold and dark as we sit in anticipation aboard the bus that winds down the narrow streets of the village of Stege. The driver deposits us just outside a fairly nondescript but nonetheless charming old building. We climb a few stairs, go through the entrance and from there into a room where we confront a small stage facing several rows of seats. Opposite us, close to the stage, stand Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen and Majken Schultz holding trays lined with drinks. Jesper wears a tuxedo and Majken an evening gown. Both are looking elegant, guilty and pleased as they mischievously offer everyone champagne. There we stand, sipping, chatting and wondering what will happen next. By now it is around seven o'clock and we are beginning to get hungry. And worried. No food appears to be available anywhere close by. Finally, Jesper suggests that we all sit down. W e choose seats, with our stomachs rumbling and our heads spinning a little from the drink. The room darkens and a film begins to play on the small screen which appears as the stage curtain is drawn aside. We watch enthralled as Babette's Feast, a Danish film with English subtitles based on a novel by Karen Blixen, begins to roll across the screen. Well, it turns out to be a bit of a dirty trick. The film is about food. It is about other things as well, but when you are as hungry as we are, it is particularly about food. Wonderful French food. In the film a French refugee (Babette) attempts to repay her puritanical Danish benefactresses for taking her into their sparse but loving home in her time of need. After a great deal of history and not a little mystery concerning Babette, the two sisters and their situation, Babette wins the French lottery and invests her winnings in a feast of a sort unknown to the little fishing village she has made her home for the past 15 years. She sends to France for the ingredients and when they arrive by boat weeks later, Babette begins her ordeal of preparation. When the day of the feast arrives, the table is set and a boy comes to help with the serving as Babette slaves in the kitchen. W e watch the guests arrive, knowing what Babette does not, that the recipients of this wonderful gift have agreed in advance not to allow themselves to enjoy it - they have a pact with their (now deceased) spiritual leader who is also the father of the two sisters, whose memory Babette innocently intends the feast to honor. They have vowed not to be tempted by worldly pleasures and have agreed to remind themselves of this by not tasting any of the meal which begins with Amontillado. As each course is served, only one guest allows himaelf any pleasure. He is a Swedish colonel to whom one of the sisters had given her heart as a young girl only to see him ride off alone after she rejected him to please her father. Of course, we too (by now nearly starving) are taking in each delicious, vicarious morsel. All the way through, course after course, wine glass by wine glass, only the Swede seems to know how to enjoy food and drink and he comments eloquently upon the magnificence of each leg of the culinary journey. Toward the end of the affair, the Swedish colonel recognizes the meal as one he has eaten before, in Paris, at a restaurant known as the Cafi Anglais. But I will not spoil Babette's story with further telling, in case you do not know it. The movie ends and we are herded back onto the bus for the drive home. Still no explanation. But never mind, our hearts are full even if our stomachs are empty. Back at the hotel, our dinner is apparently delayed. We are getting desperate. We go to the bar to pass the time with a little discussion of the movie and more drink. Finally, the doors to the banquet room open and we are invited to the tables. They are, of course, lovely. We file in to find our places. As we are organizing ourselves, Seren Christensen stands, raising a small glass in his hand. We look down and find glasses filled with a thick orange-brown liquid which we raise in a toast as Soren, obviously pleased with himself, states emphatically, "This is not the Cafi Anglais, but this is Amontillado!" He sits. We drink. Amazing flavor, rich with symbolism. But again we wonder, what can this mean? The first course looks familiar, but we are too hungry to ask questions. Then

6 Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz


comes the second. We can no longer overlook what is going on before our incredulous eyes and in our even more incredulous mouths. The very food we watched Babette's boy serving in the movie is appearing, course by delicious course, in front of us at our tables! To top it off, it is being served by boys! It turns out that the chef who prepared the meal for the movie has been consulted by the hotel staff and a replica - a simulacra - has been prepared just for us. We are breathless. It is both easy and hard to take in. Later, literally satiated with food, drink and symbols, we go to bed warm and happy. Well, we may eat and drink together, but you are always hungover alone. It is cold and dark when I get up the next morning, but by the time I collect myself for breakfast, dawn is breaking. I open my curtain and look outside. Sunlight dances on the cold ground. After three days of grey skies and rain I want to look at it shining on the dark brown, newly turned earth. As I gaze out at the confident rows a farmer ploughed just outside my window, I jot these few lines of poetry: What could be so important that the sun would shine, in November, in Denmark. . . What indeed. The breakfast crowd is pretty thin when I arrive. I see Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges and go to sit with her at a table by the window. Someone approaches us with the news, delivered in quiet words: the Berlin Wall fell during the night. "Oh, but that is fantastic news," Barbara whispers hoarsely. She, too, is expressionless and I understand "fantastic" not so much in the sense of being good news, which it certainly is, but in the sense of fantasy, the purely imagined, the unbelievable. Unable to take it in, we sit in stunned silence. Then I realize that the news is travelling, always quietly, from table to table. No one gets excited. No one says much of anything at all. We just sit there, each transported to a private space. Then it hits me. A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth as I remember our innocent revelry the night before. We have already celebrated this event with another - our marvellous, now doubly symbolic, feast from Babette.

The Gates of Valhalla W e have chosen from the Valhalla conference a number of papers that w e feel offer significant conceptual andlor methodological contributions that will inspire continuous reconstructing of the organizational culture c o n c e p t - t h e t h e m e of t h e V a l h a l l a Conference. Silvia Gherardi presents a detailed, context sensitive-analysis of a ritual developed and performed within an occupational community of blue-collar workers. Gherardi uses her analysis to fully describe the method she followed in producing and analyzing her data, a method that combines projective techniques, cognitive mapping and participant observation. B u t G h e r a r d i ' s contribution d o e s not e n d with h e r description a n d d i s c u s s i o n of m e t h o d . H e r c a s e s t u d y b e a r s o n a t o p i c o f g r o w i n g i n t e r e s t t o organizational researchers - ambiguity a n d its symbolic and interpretive uses b y organizational members. In placing her study within a decision-making frame, Gherardi not only provides methodological inspiration to the study of ambiguity, she makes a theoretical contribution as well by locating three types of ambiguity in the decision processes of her subjects: the ambiguity of interpretations (who interprets and when) the ambiguity of implications (the possibilities for multiple meaning) and the ambiguity of implementation (deciding who will act and how).


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David Knights and Hugh Willmott provide a thick description of an organizational and cultural change process in an insurance company. In their paper they show how new symbols of "professionalism", "team-working" and "corporate planning" are displayed within the existing culture. These symbols reflect a new orientation adopted by numerous companies and illustrate how the liberal philosophy of the New Right has been implemented and enacted in a British organization. Knights and Willmott paint a picture of the complexity of symbolic universes involved, which in its richness is very rarely found in the literature on cultural change. Furthermore, Knights and Willmott demonstrate how new symbols of change are enacted by various organizational actors in a ritualized change context. They carefully document how the implications of the lack of cultural insight from top management have devastating implications for the attempt to change management control. Here, Knights and Willmott provide a keen insight into middle management's reactions to changes in management control, which contains an important contribution to the discussion of the role of middle management in organizational change. Heather Hopfl presents a metaphorical analysis of the customer service role in organizations via comparison with the role of a dramatic actor. Her development of three aspects of actor behavior - the counterfeit, the conceit and the corpse - extends the now familiar dramatistic metaphor for organization in intriguing new directions. The result is a compelling critique of current corporate training practices in the area of customer service, and some provocative suggestions about the implications of these practices for customer relations in particular and society in general. Hopfl's contribution is methodological as well as theoretical, offering a fine example of the technique of extended metaphor analysis. Kristian Kreiner and Majken Schultz present a study of a high-tech cross-national collaborative venture within Europe. Their study focuses on how sense-making occurs and develops within loosely, structured, temporary project organizations, and asks whether culture is possible in such a context. Kreiner and Schultz argue that work under these conditions demands an understanding of organizations as soft culture. They propose an innovative twist to the culture concept that suggests why shifting and fragmented glimpses of meaning co-exist within a shared frame of reference. Kreiner and Schultz illustrate how symbols provide meaning and legitimacy within soft cultures through acts of categorising and labelling project activities, magnetizing actors and attracting them to networks, and licensing the exploration of opportunities via the intersection of projects and networks. Antonio Strati offers an inside view of an established and well-developed network art photography. He labels the experiences that are the focus of his study "organization without walls". Strati, who is himself a recognized art photographer, describes in his own words, and those of others involved in art photography, the aesthetic urge that intertwines individual and collective. He also describes important ritual encounters through which art photography is constructed and reconstructed, explaining their function through metaphorical comparison with the evocative image of the colosseum. The implicit suggestion that aesthetics may be an important dimension constituting other networks and communities beyond those of art photography is, in our view, an inspiring and provocative aspect of Strati's contribution. Hugo Letiche takes you on an evocati~eand provoking travel into organizational life in postmodern times. Instead of providing a general discussion of modernism and


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postmodernism, Letiche has chosen a set of key concepts developed by Baudrillard and examines organizations with these concepts. Hereby, Letiche shows how postmodernism offers a new language as it tears down modernist illusions. Furthermore, Letiche moves postmodernism further in the direction of offering a new practice in the social sciences. This leaves the reader with the ability to move beyond ongoing rhetorics and performance in organizations and begin to recognize themselves in the midst of hyperreal events. An unusual case in the postmodern debate, Letiche offers ethnographic descriptions from organizational events within a high-tech project team and a theoretical exploration of how the strategies of implosion and fatality, suggested by Baudrillard, apply to the mourning "I" from the project team. In the strategy of implosion the subjects give in to hyperreality and any sense of meaning collapses into undifferentiated, empty forms. Only seduction by means of communication is left. Alternatively, the strategy of fatality or self-transcendence is offered. Here, the subject reverses the assumed symbolic order between meaning and event and is left with the "facts" of circumstance. Anne Loft provokes her reader to consider a time before time was a taken-for-granted organizing principle of modern life and the time clock a central mechanism for its discipline in organizations. Her collage and accompanying text narrate a story of the metaphorical connection between time and money and its links to control practices. Her novel contribution traces a critical part of the process by which time became such a commonplace organizing principle by focusing on advertisements for time clocks and time discipline that reflect the extent to which the idea of "time management" had to be "sold" to managers, and that paved the way for modern uses of time in organizations which are nearly invisible today. Apart from the fascinating insights into time and organization, Loft's collage also represents a novel approach to the study of cultures, organizations and societies. In their richness and variety the contributions in this special issue map the subthemes of the Valhalla conference: concepts, methods and data. Gherardi demonstrates an innovative combination of various research methods and draws theoretical implications to the concepts of ambiguity. Knights and Willmott offer substantial insights into the dynamic processes of organizational culture and relate it to the New Right movement in Britain. Hopfl extends the use of the dramatistic metaphor to a critique of service concepts in organizations. Kreiner and Schultz advance the concept of soft culture and add new roles to the theory of symbol use in organizations. Strati introduces the concept of organizations without walls as he explores the aesthetic dimension in culture studies. Letiche offers an evocative elaboration of the postmodern theorist Baudrillard and applies his distinct vocabulary to organizational analysis. Loft presents an intriguing collection of cultural artifacts that displays historical notions of time still found in contemporary cultural assumptions. We hope you will enjoy your visit to Valhalla through reading these papers. We cannot offer food, drink and hedonistic pleasure as found in Valhalla, but we offer insight and outlook as promised by the wise God of Odin.