ABSTRACT
The culture metaphor has been adopted by scholars from many disciplines as a means of understanding organizational complexities, and the result has been a plethora of definitions of culture and great variance in methodologies for studying it. Communication scholars have been particularly interested in how symbols both create and reflect the culture. The Organizational Culture Survey contains 36 items; respondents use a Likert-type scale that ranges from to a very little extent to to a very great extent. Most studies to date have used ethnographic observation, content analysis of narratives, and interviews to understand the “culture” that is unique for each organization. In one sense, any characteristic one measures about an organization may be an aspect of culture. Therefore, having only six subscales may be limiting. However, the authors never intended for this to be exhaustive, noting that additional culture dimensions most likely will be forthcoming in research.
