This article addresses the dual points of defining
culture and changing culture. Louis begins by defining what institutional
culture is: values, beliefs, and assumptions that institutional members share
to influence behavior. That definition tells me that institutional culture is
composed of three things.
First, the elements of culture are values, beliefs,
and assumptions; that is, values, beliefs, and assumptions constitute culture. Culture
is a kind of subjective knowledge—more accurately (as we’ll see below), an agreed
upon subjective knowledge—of what is
good and bad. Culture is not what is factually true or false, just as it’s not
action and behavior, but factual knowledge and action knowledge are implied by
the values of culture.
Second,
culture is shared in the interactions between people. Individual belief may be
a part of culture, but culture really comes alive when people share their
beliefs with each other. It’s in the relationships between people, and the
result interactions between them, that culture lives when consensual beliefs
form.
Third, culture
influences behavior. That means culture changes action. The rituals and
behaviors we often consider as “culture” (a food we eat, or a dance we perform,
or a style of clothing we wear) result from the culture but are not the culture
itself. The culture is in the values that lead to the action, but not the
action itself.
Louis
explains that changing a culture, such as shifting an institution’s way of
thinking and way of being, requires three elements: professional community,
organizational learning, and trust.
Professional
community, the first element, draws our attention away from individuals’ state
of being and toward institutional characteristics (including those that effect
both educators and students). Stressing community shifts the emphasis of making
institutional changes from policy implementation to changing the values of the
institution (i.e., “re-culturing”).
Organizational
learning, the second element, is adjunct to professional community in that it emphasizes
how organizations, institutions, and groups of people learn. Professional
development, on the other hand, often emphasizes how individual professionals
learn.
Additionally,
organizational learning emphasizes an evolutionary approach to continuous
improvement. Conventional reform efforts, on the other hand, may emphasize program
and policy implementation that adds bureaucracy to an already bureaucratic
institutional structure.
Furthermore,
organizational learning stresses the importance of developing lateral
communication networks in addition to hierarchical connections up and down.
Lateral communication tends to be more informal than traditional hierarchical
communication, resulting in a shift toward informal communication.
Trust, the
third element, is a characteristic of human relationships rather than of
institutional policy. As a result, professional relationship development should
be built into the very way in which committees, legislative bodies, and other
institutional groups function. Conventional models of program change that may
involve analyzing problems, identifying potential solutions, and implementing
the best possible solution, may not apply to building trust.
Overall, these
three components—professional community, organizational learning, and trust—must
combine to create institutional culture change. This change is hard to
accomplish because it takes a long time to do and because individuals and
institutions must be able to handle high amounts of complexity. Cultural change
is not about implementing new policies and procedures; rather, it's about
changing institutional identity.
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