Physical structure and culture : Symbolic conditioning
Think about how you instantly know by your physical surroundings whether you are at home or at work, in your own office, or in someone else's, and how this knowledge triggers various rituals and routines. Or consider the employee who works at home but finds it necessary to dress in a suit and say goodbye to family members before going to work in the next room, all in order to overcome the institutionalized meaning staying at home normally conveys and signal to family members that they are not to interrupt. These examples illustrate the power of built spaces to symbolically conditional expectations and behavior. Such responses can become so automatic that, in the case of practitioners of the Catholic faith, the mere sight of an altar provokes behaviors such as genuflection and making the sign of the cross, often ushering in memories of past religious experiences and the emotions associated with them. Because the stimulus to which such responses have been conditioned is a symbol (the suit and tie or the crucifix on the alter), this sort of conditioning has been called symbolic conditioning
Symbolic conditioning extends to all sorts of organizational behavior. For example, the counter of a McDonald's restaurant indicates that customers should queue up to receive service from employees also conditioned to stand behind the counter and wait on customers in the order in which they present themselves (see Figure 7.4) Other places to look for symbolically conditioned behavior include outside closed office doors, and in and around reception desks, libraries, and meeting rooms.
Symbolic conditioning depends on the formation of unconscious links between physical structure and the normal routines that make up much of daily life both in and out of organizations. For instance the habit of responding to others in an impersonal way is typical of many business cultures and can become symbolically conditioned to the physical surroundings of the workplace. As a result it is not uncommon to find people who want to interact with each other in more personal ways meeting outside their office settings.
Then again, so-called symbolic conditioning may not be purely symbolic, it can be physiological as well. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss discovered that the Bororo tribe in the Amazon built their village along both a north-south axis and an east-west axis that paralleled a river. The tribe used the axes to divide individuals into groups that were expected to follow rules governing such things as who could marry whom (e.g., marriage partners needed to be from different groups.) and where people could reside (e.g., the married couple were to live in the group of the male partner). When missionaries arrived they moved the villagers to another place where the houses were built in rows that did not conform to the axes of the former village. According to Levi-Strauss.
Disoriented with regard to the cardinal points, deprived of a disposition that gave meaning to their knowledge, the natives rapidly (lost) their sense of traditions as though their social and religious systems were too complex to function without the design made obvious by the disposition of the village.
In organizations that undergo merger or acquisition it is not uncommon for the expected economic benefits of the partnership to go unrealized. Many explain this unfortunate outcome as cultural incompatibility; however, the study of the Bororo suggests that spatial disorientation may be operating, too. Consider that, as companies merge, members of one or both organizations are likely to change their physical locations and surroundings as well as important self-identifying cues in their physical environment. Without familiar physiological and sociological cues to orient them, organizational cultures do not function as expected and, to the extent that this creates stress, it affects productive behavior in ways that can destroy economic value and create conditions ripe for cultural collapse.
Embodied organization theory : reuniting social and physical structure
That the physiological aspects of spatial orientation affect how and what we know is a central premise of embodiment theory, which explains how having a human body influences epistemology. Evidence for physio-spatial knowledge can be found in navigation habits that allow you to drive to work or school by the same route every day without any conscious awareness of your actions, and your ability to pour a cup of coffee without lifting your eyes from your newspaper. It also appears in language when, through metaphor (e.g., happy is up, depressed is down). Humans spatialize their physiological experiences.
Embodied organization theory proposes that, much as human bodies do, the physical structures of organizations embody human experiences as they wrap themselves around and organize activity in the shapes of office buildings and factories. But organization are also embodied in the sense of being formed from the bodies of employees and stakeholders. Consider, for example, how the Walt Disney Company uses the body types and appearances of its employees, not to mention the physiological responses of its customer, to construct the ride experiences that constitute the offer of Disneyland park. Those assigned to work as pirates in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction must have pirate-like physiques.
Organization embodiment theorists join critical postmodernists in seeking to reverse the effects of dichotomies hidden within disembodied modern theories, of which mind/body is but one. Other popular targets include thought/feeling (or cognition/emotion), action/reflection, authority/democracy, and object/subject. Sometimes all that is required is to note how a familiar theory already contains ideas about embodiment, as British organization theorists John Hassard Ruth Holliday, and Hugh willmott do when they point out: there can be no enactment without embodiment.
Researchers interested in organizational embodiment complain that organizational theory has become too focused on social influences to notice that physiological and spatial components affect organizations, which is what Homans claimed in reference to the Hawthorne Studies all those years ago. But rather than ignoring the social, Embodied organization theorists place physical structure-defined as the material embodiment of organizational practices and action-on and equal footing with social structure.Thus one intriguing implication of organizational embodiment theory is that, just as structuration theory reunites social structure with organizational action, suggesting an analogy: as agency is to action, so social structure is to physical structure.
Physical structure and culture : Symbolic conditioning
Think about how you instantly know by your physical surroundings whether you are at home or at work, in your own office, or in someone else's, and how this knowledge triggers various rituals and routines. Or consider the employee who works at home but finds it necessary to dress in a suit and say goodbye to family members before going to work in the next room, all in order to overcome the institutionalized meaning staying at home normally conveys and signal to family members that they are not to interrupt. These examples illustrate the power of built spaces to symbolically conditional expectations and behavior. Such responses can become so automatic that, in the case of practitioners of the Catholic faith, the mere sight of an altar provokes behaviors such as genuflection and making the sign of the cross, often ushering in memories of past religious experiences and the emotions associated with them. Because the stimulus to which such responses have been conditioned is a symbol (the suit and tie or the crucifix on the alter), this sort of conditioning has been called symbolic conditioning
Symbolic conditioning extends to all sorts of organizational behavior. For example, the counter of a McDonald's restaurant indicates that customers should queue up to receive service from employees also conditioned to stand behind the counter and wait on customers in the order in which they present themselves (see Figure 7.4) Other places to look for symbolically conditioned behavior include outside closed office doors, and in and around reception desks, libraries, and meeting rooms.
Symbolic conditioning depends on the formation of unconscious links between physical structure and the normal routines that make up much of daily life both in and out of organizations. For instance the habit of responding to others in an impersonal way is typical of many business cultures and can become symbolically conditioned to the physical surroundings of the workplace. As a result it is not uncommon to find people who want to interact with each other in more personal ways meeting outside their office settings.
Then again, so-called symbolic conditioning may not be purely symbolic, it can be physiological as well. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss discovered that the Bororo tribe in the Amazon built their village along both a north-south axis and an east-west axis that paralleled a river. The tribe used the axes to divide individuals into groups that were expected to follow rules governing such things as who could marry whom (e.g., marriage partners needed to be from different groups.) and where people could reside (e.g., the married couple were to live in the group of the male partner). When missionaries arrived they moved the villagers to another place where the houses were built in rows that did not conform to the axes of the former village. According to Levi-Strauss.
Disoriented with regard to the cardinal points, deprived of a disposition that gave meaning to their knowledge, the natives rapidly (lost) their sense of traditions as though their social and religious systems were too complex to function without the design made obvious by the disposition of the village.
In organizations that undergo merger or acquisition it is not uncommon for the expected economic benefits of the partnership to go unrealized. Many explain this unfortunate outcome as cultural incompatibility; however, the study of the Bororo suggests that spatial disorientation may be operating, too. Consider that, as companies merge, members of one or both organizations are likely to change their physical locations and surroundings as well as important self-identifying cues in their physical environment. Without familiar physiological and sociological cues to orient them, organizational cultures do not function as expected and, to the extent that this creates stress, it affects productive behavior in ways that can destroy economic value and create conditions ripe for cultural collapse.
Embodied organization theory : reuniting social and physical structure
That the physiological aspects of spatial orientation affect how and what we know is a central premise of embodiment theory, which explains how having a human body influences epistemology. Evidence for physio-spatial knowledge can be found in navigation habits that allow you to drive to work or school by the same route every day without any conscious awareness of your actions, and your ability to pour a cup of coffee without lifting your eyes from your newspaper. It also appears in language when, through metaphor (e.g., happy is up, depressed is down). Humans spatialize their physiological experiences.
Embodied organization theory proposes that, much as human bodies do, the physical structures of organizations embody human experiences as they wrap themselves around and organize activity in the shapes of office buildings and factories. But organization are also embodied in the sense of being formed from the bodies of employees and stakeholders. Consider, for example, how the Walt Disney Company uses the body types and appearances of its employees, not to mention the physiological responses of its customer, to construct the ride experiences that constitute the offer of Disneyland park. Those assigned to work as pirates in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction must have pirate-like physiques.
Organization embodiment theorists join critical postmodernists in seeking to reverse the effects of dichotomies hidden within disembodied modern theories, of which mind/body is but one. Other popular targets include thought/feeling (or cognition/emotion), action/reflection, authority/democracy, and object/subject. Sometimes all that is required is to note how a familiar theory already contains ideas about embodiment, as British organization theorists John Hassard Ruth Holliday, and Hugh willmott do when they point out: there can be no enactment without embodiment.
Researchers interested in organizational embodiment complain that organizational theory has become too focused on social influences to notice that physiological and spatial components affect organizations, which is what Homans claimed in reference to the Hawthorne Studies all those years ago. But rather than ignoring the social, Embodied organization theorists place physical structure-defined as the material embodiment of organizational practices and action-on and equal footing with social structure.Thus one intriguing implication of organizational embodiment theory is that, just as structuration theory reunites social structure with organizational action, suggesting an analogy: as agency is to action, so social structure is to physical structure.
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