Lina Anastassova and Kate Purcell
centralized organization. The managers to whom the letter is addressed do not make strategic decisions and it is clear, in reading the booklet further, that their empowerment is highly prescribed, scripted and limited within relatively narrow boundaries, within an organization which has clearly-specified rules and procedures and excellent communi- cation systems. On the face of it, it might seem that such a philosophy could be introduced relatively easily to a privatized hotel group emerging from the old State-owned companies in Bulgaria. However, as Legge (op. cit.) has pointed out, organizational culture is more usefully understood as a process which, although it may be seen by organizations themselves as deriving from a particular philosophy engendered from within, is adopted and interpreted by employees who have already been thoroughly socialized according to the wider cultural norms and values of their social environment; and the most successful examples of strategic 'organizational cultures' are those which build upon and reinforce prior cultural tendencies. In general, cultural change programmes tend to be more effective at management than operative level (Storey 1992: 215) and are particularly likely to be subverted by those in low-level jobs who have least to gain from identification with the company ideology (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 1990; Leidner op. cir.). In an interesting evaluation of the efficacy of TQM in the U.K. hospitality industry, Lashley (1994, 1995) comes to the obvious but often overlooked conclusion that different employment strate- gies are required for different employment situations and points out that
If empowerment can be differentiated from other employment initiatives, it engages with employees at an emotional level. It is individual and personal, it is about discretion, autonomy, power and control. Whatever the intentions of managers, the effectiveness of empowerment as an employment strategy will be determined by the perceptions, experiences and feelings of the 'empowered'. Fundamentally, these feelings will be rooted in a sense of personal worth and ability to effect outcomes; of having the 'power' to make a difference. (Lashley, 1994:2)
These senses are not well developed among the Bulgarians, for whom personal worth has latterly been evaluated in relation to conformity rather than individual initiative.
In considering a wide range of research on attempts to introduce new 'cultures' to organizations (such as Kelly [1991] on the introduction of 'enterprise culture' to the U.K. National Health Service), Legge (op. cir.: 426) concludes that organizations which have been managed in the past within a context of strong cultural norms are likely to experience most difficulty in coping with change in the short term, but
through disconfirmation and eventual ideological shift many may prove ultimately more adaptive to change, assuming the emergence of a new, strong yet appropriate culture. This may be at the cost of a transitional period when ability to generate commitment to any course of action, new or old, is minimal.
Bulgarian society generally, and the Bulgarian hospitality industry at all levels, are classic examples of such a transitional cultures, and the post-transitional direction is not yet clear: in particular, how far it will be possible or desirable to adopt human resource management techniques originally developed in very different cultural contexts.
Conclusions
This is the crux of the issue. Current employment practices in the Bulgarian hospitality industry emerge from the cultural residues of a centrally-planned economy and are