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Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn. Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005, 242 pages, $40.00 softcover.
In the graduate course that I teach, I describe organizational culture as falling on a continuum somewhere between science and religion. Like a science, it often develops from experiences of what seems to predicate success; like a religion, it is also born of superstition, ritual, and a vague sense (faith?) that these patterns of conduct should certainly lead to payoff at some undefined future point in the journey. It turns out the analogy works surprisingly well in the applied side also: In cultural change efforts we often talk about whether someone has "gotten the religion;" if they have not we challenge them with scientific evidence that the old culture would not take us where we want to go.
Although culture may contain elements of private science and collective religion, the gulf between the two is wide enough that most authors end up allying themselves to one or the other side. Most choose religion: it is easier to articulate, harder to challenge, and at the end of the day pretty much any experience can be called a religious experience. A few authors do choose the path of science, placing themselves on firmer albeit more arid ground, which is easier to traverse but also to attack.
Cameron and Quinn's book is one of the few I am aware of that makes a real effort to bridge...