11 - The Control of Organizational Diversity

Summary

In the previous two chapters, we showed the relevance of social networks for the understanding of turnover and crises in organizations. But what enables organizations to promote coordination and collectivity? How do people with diverse backgrounds, goals, and values successfully coordinate their activities in organizations? The usual answer to these questions is that organizational culture provides the glue that keeps the organization together. But the organizational culture literature has neglected the importance of social connections in producing shared systems of meaning. In this chapter, we begin the process of remedying this oversight through an emphasis on how people who are tied to each other create locally shared cognitive understandings. First, we provide an in-depth analysis of how the diversity of cultural interpretations within one organization is controlled through the friendship network. Second, we extend the discussion to include how network embeddedness affects agreement concerning the structuring of networks across three different organizations.

Previous organizational culture research has tended to treat the culture of an organization as an independent variable that can be manipulated to control deviant behavior (e.g., Ouchi, 1980). From this culture-as-amanagerial-tool perspective, an effective organization is like a clan, in that it relies on mechanical solidarity – a religious adherence to common beliefs and practices – to ensure cooperation (Durkheim, 1933: 175–8). The clan cannot tolerate any divergence from the “totality of belief and sentiments common to all members of the group” (Durkheim, 1933: 129).