ABSTRACT
The recurring theme of this book is that cultural factors are of great importance in the successful organizational exploitation of networked information. This chapter will be devoted to a review of relevant literature on organizational culture and of methods of studying, assessing and changing it. It will particularly emphasize applications to the LIS environment and especially the electronic library. There are many hundreds of definitions of culture which are most helpful and illuminating within their appropriate context. For the layperson an acceptable definition might be ‘a set of common patterns of behaviour associated with particular group/s of people’. For ethnographers this is too loose and externalized and they would require ‘the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior’ (Spradley, 1979: 5). One important reason for the difference between these definitions is the level of description and analysis that would lie behind an understanding at that defined level: in the former, superficial; in the latter, in-depth. This distinction becomes important in selecting tools that help in understanding culture in organizations since, in practical terms, the returns are proportional to the investment of time, resource and effort. The concept of organizational culture is a metaphor from wider society and is itself the object of a multiplicity of definitions. Skyrme (1994) has counted 160! In the management context the metaphor is applied with varying emphases, but with an underlying consistency that makes it possible to devise an enumerative and ostensive definition derived from some of the principal writers on the subject which will serve as a working tool (Fletcher and Jones, 1992; Harrison, 1993; Shaughnessy, 1988; Skyrme, 1994; Wilkins, 1983).
