The cultural school focuses on the way collective processes lead to strategy.
Like power, culture is always present. However, strategy schools are hesitant to address it. Not the cultural school, however. The cultural school focuses on all those social connections which create culture, in the hope of fostering efficiency and innovation.The cultural school involves all the different departments within a company, and recognizes their contributions to the overall strategy. It formulates strategy using everyone’s input while adhering to their culture, social behavior, values and preferences.The larger a company gets, the greater its culture’s influence becomes. This can make changes to company culture difficult to implement. For example, when companies merge during an acquisition, the employees that are used to the informal working processes from their old company may have difficulty adjusting to the new, highly formalized processes of the acquiring company.We can see culture’s role in strategy formation throughout history. The automobile, for example, was invented in Europe, where it was part of a culture of craftsmanship for special products, and was designed for the upper class. The United States had no such tradition, so car manufacturers reinvented the automobile as a mass product.In other words, the American automobile strategy had to diverge from the historical precedent in order to succeed in a different culture.One major problem with the cultural school is that it focuses so much energy on something nebulous and abstract. Focusing on something as vague as culture can lead to vague strategies.It can also be difficult to implement cultural strategies. People don’t like changes, especially when it comes to their culture, and are likely to resist them.
"A Corporation doesn't have a culture. A Corporation is a culture. That is why they (the cultures) are so hard to change