ALLEN W.

BATTEAU 1

Departments of Anthropology and Industrial Engineering Wayne State University Detroit, MI

Negations and Ambiguities in the Cultures of Organization

In this article I examine the difference between concepts of culture contained in organizational studies and those in anthropology. The twentieth-century emergence of rationalized organizations poses an unmet challenge to anthropological theory. The unique cultural consequences of the organizational form are found in the cultures of command and authority, adaptation and resistance, alienation and inclusion that are found in every organization. These separate cultures interrogate each other and draw on cultural resources outside the organization. In the final section I examine some of the mechanisms with which organizations manage the ambiguities of boundaries and differentiation. Drawing on theories of rites of passage, personhood, gift-exchange, and totemism, I describe the quotidian practices of staffing, sales, and accounting as symbolic processes for managing ambiguity, [organization, culture, theory]

ver the last twenty years, a widening divergence has marked management discussions of "organizational culture" and anthropological discussions of culture (Czarniawska-Joerges 1992 summarizes this discussion). Management theorists have successfully adopted anthropological insights into shared understandings and constructed meanings. However, anthropological theory has yet to digest the twentieth-century phenomenon of instrumental organizations. Any "science of humanity" that fails to comprehend these contemporary forms supplies but a partial view of human possibility. In this article I suggest that organizations create structures of meaning not found among anthropology's more familiar communities, those living outside regimes of instrumental rationality. These resources for sensemaking (Weick 1995:111 ff.) consist of cultures of rationality, of inclusion, of command and authority, and of adaptation and resistance that exist only in dialectical opposition to each other. This interplay and opposition creates an "organizational culture" that is continually emergent, continually negotiated, and continually in play, according to the strategic intent of the parties that contest it. Apprehending an "organizational culture" only begins with the collection of shreds and patches of shared meanings: at issue is how these are spun, woven, and stitched together in an evanescent bricolage to accommodate and advance the diverse interests that make up the organization.2 In the anthropological literature, there are abundant descriptions of subaltern groups (workers, clients), barely matched with descriptions of the regimes of rationality that enable the subordination and otherness of these groups. (For exceptions, see Marcus 1996 and Perin 1998.) To this

I add a description of the multiple cultural types engendered by organization (in the first section) and the dynamics of difference that maintain their separations (in the second section). In the management literature, there are abundant descriptions of "corporate culture," most typically as viewed from above. (For exceptions, see Rosen 1985 and Young 1989.) In this literature, culture is seen as a set of referential statements available for management manipulation, a separate (and "soft") affair from the ("hard") facts of technology, finance, and corporate control. To this I add first an understanding that organizational cultures are as much evocative as they are referential (in the third section), and second that the constraints of authority are constituted by an array of social relationships and choices that are negotiated and theatrically enacted (in the fourth section). Being evocative and dynamically related, the cultures of an organization can be navigated and negotiated but not controlled. Positions and relationships of command are culturally structured, and the lines of authority on an organizational chart are simply the truce demarcation from an earlier round of culture wars. Culture as viewed here is a framework of meaning, a system of reference that can generate both shared understandings and the working misunderstandings that enable social life to go on. These frameworks of meaning are cultivated, negotiated, and reproduced within behavioral enactments, even as certain of their representations have an atemporality that makes them independent of behavior. At times culture is mistakenly equated with behavior, with "the way we do things around here" (Schein's schema of artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions is an example of this; numerous organizational theorists,

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following Schein, include behavior in culture [Schein 1992:17]). The behavioral aspect of culture is better understood not as behavior per se but as those elements of behavior that are considered emblematic of identity.) Often this is but a careless usage. "Culture" is neither a descriptive generality of what some group does nor the extrasomatic systematicity of the social milieu; culture is that which is cultivated, the stories, myths, symbols, rituals, and stylized actions and interpretations the group uses to make sense of what they are doing, what they have done, and what they should do.3 (Giddens 1979 supplies an alternative to this methodological bracketing.) Cultures in organizations, like cultures elsewhere, embrace both semantic and poetic order (Burke 1973). Semantically they circumscribe order; poetically they imagine motivation. The entire rhetoric of management direction contains numerous poetic possibilities: a pep talk on teamwork resolves the antagonisms of individualism and group effort through a shared metaphor from the playing fields, and the response "You can count on us!" layers multiple meanings in each of its five syllables. Organized anthropology began at a time when numerous small-scale societies were scattered around the globe, linked by webs of trade, reciprocity, and border adjustments. Today fewer small-scale societies remain, nearly all are integrated into global networks of information, surplus appropriation, and commodity distribution, and all have their cultures "organized" to some degree. Native reserves, no less than tribal incorporation or a handcrafts business, represent organized culture, whether organized from without or within. Organizational theory may help organized anthropology better understand what organized culture is all about.

The Cultures of Organization

In this section I describe the intersecting and contradictory forms and rationalities of power and position that inevitably are found whenever a group decides to "get organized." "Getting organized" of necessity creates an array of contradictions among rationality, command and authority, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion. Finding one's way among these multiple contradictions is the common task of all members of an organization. In supplying a description and analysis of the cultures of organization, I will be drawing on seven years of experience as an engineer, salesman, and software developer in the corporate world, plus an additional three years as director of a congressional research institute. During those ten years I developed and sold products, managed budgets and facilities, created and implemented business strategies, hired and fired employees, and was myself once fired. I was able to amass considerable data on organizational behavior, performance, and sensemaking, and observe the

many faces of command, resistance, adaptation, inclusion, and alienation. Recent years in the business world as well have presented rich case material to challenge organizational orthodoxy. Upheavals in numerous industries, including automotive, airlines, and computers and electronics, have revealed previously hidden fault lines and have resulted in emergent organizational forms. For but one example we might consider the last twenty years of the commercial airline industry. As described by the journalist Thomas Petzinger Jr. in Hard Landing (Petzinger 1996), since the deregulation of passenger airlines in 1979, the industry has been a shifting kaleidoscope of alliance and rebellion, innovation, insurgency, and corporate collapse. It has seen a labor aristocracy (the pilots) perfecting strategies of resistance: the "sweet sixteen" (delaying an arrival time by 16 minutes to register on the FAA's logging of late arrivals), or entire approaches conducted with landing gear deployed in order to waste fuel. It has seen the creation of theatrics such as the "Fun culture" at Southwest, where employees, management, and even the CEO Herb Kelleher vie with each other to inject the most humor into operations. It has seen flight attendants at Braniff so devoted to their company that they chipped in from their wages to buy the company an airplane. It has seen executives such as Frank Lorenzo at Eastern so fixed in their determination to dominate that instead of compromising with the employees, they preferred to see the company die. It did. And it has seen an industry logic of rationalization and managerial rationality, Southwest excluded, so ferocious that its toll can be measured in suicides, both corporate and personal. All of these are tokens of cultures of resistance, inclusion, adaptation, command, and rationality that I describe in this section. To understand the cultures of organization, we must begin by defining organization. Organization is understood here as a social form defined by goal-oriented instrumental rationality. Examples of organization such as the Prussian Army have historically been carefully separated from the remainder of society. Instrumental rationality is found throughout human history but more typically has been embedded within kinship, familial, or domestic forms. Only in the twentieth century have large expanses of society become "organized," and the social form of organization has been emancipated from parochial forms (Boulding 1953). Organizational Science, the growing body of literature that confronts this historical development, both advances and interrogates organizational ideology. Organizational cultures around the world draw from both national and Western models, even as regimes of rationality add to and orchestrate new elements in the shifting kaleidoscope of affiliations and negotiated meanings (Sahlins 1993; but cf. Anderson [1983] or Gellner [1999] on the historicity of "national" cultures). Organization provides a more tightly

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coupled alternative to the loose regimes of local diversity and nuance and adjustment through which human societies historically have gotten along. The critical features of regimes of rationality, of emancipation from parochial forms and a positive accent on "getting organized," originated in but are not the exclusive franchise of the West. Discussions of organizational and corporate cultures often oscillate promiscuously between for-profit corporations, not-for-profits, and unincorporated groups such as block clubs. The question of whether or not the Western corporation typifies organizations around the world (which, from reading the management literature, one would guess it does) or is simply one unique variant on a more general pattern is also rarely addressed. In the United States, even not-for-profits, including universities, labor unions, and churches, are corporations under section 501 (c) of the Internal Revenue code and are subject to the strictures imposed by that code (itself a regime of rationality). It is an empirical question whether any given group should or should not be considered "an organization." If "getting organized" receives a positive accent within the group, then the group is or wants to be an organization: organization is a process, not a state. Specialized, organized groups such as secret societies and local cults are found in numerous non-Western, pre-industrial societies; within their social context these are typically exceptional and segregated rather than general and constitutive. A village or a segmentary lineage is rarely characterized as "an organization," unless it has imposed upon itself (or had imposed on it) organizational forms. Instrumental rationality is no longer just a means to an end but becomes an end in itself. Wherever "getting organized" is unquestionably a "good thing," there one has organization, as a matter of either fact or intention. Organization is an ongoing struggle to impose order, for strategic ends. Organizational life seldom lives up to the facade of order it projects. Unorganized order among local groups is a normal state in human affairs, which becomes disorganized only when contrasted to or placed in competition with an organizational ideal of rational order. Organizations are more successful in propagating the ideology of rationalized order than they are in sequestering and distributing the resources required for creating and maintaining order. Organizations more or less succeed in maintaining a facade of order. The experience of anyone inside an organization includes large measures of confusion, scrambling, chaos, and disorder. Only in the executive suites is disorder not readily visible, yet anyone familiar with boardrooms will understand that at this level the chaos and scrambling are only masked by smooth talk and polished manners, or delegated to the secretaries. Organization imposes a strategic boundary on some field of activity and creates a framework of authority within that boundary (Van Maanen and Barley 1984). Creating the boundary serves more a strategic than a technological

rationale. In the history of manufacturing, there was no technological reason why handweavers could not have worked as self-employed contractors in their own homes rather than as servants in a master's factory. In today's automotive industry, a manufacturer can outsource all its subassemblies and focus on final assembly and marketing. Although certain materials technologies require industrialscale coordination, for the main part, building or buying components, hiring labor or contracting out, retaining or staffing professional services, and even buying or renting capitalin sum, organizingserves a strategic function: what scheme of organizing (building and buying, inspiring and coercing, etc.) is going to create a competitive advantage? Even forming a recreational association has a strategic project, to confer legitimacy and social standing on what might otherwise seem an idle pastime. In so doing, however, organization imposes an ideal of order on relationships that in their natural state have their own order, with boundary adjustments resolved through shared misunderstandings (Batteau 1980). Functional differentiation within an organization carries with it a presupposition of rationality that is not assumed in the case of functional differentiation between organizations or between unorganized groups and individuals.4 Functional differentiation can be disorganized yet still ordered through multiple expedients that permit clarity of roles and standards. Onto such a milieu, organization imposes three new cultures and elicits a fourth. These are the cultures of rationality, of inclusion, of command and authority, and of adaptation and resistance, which I describe here. The first imposition is what Adams and Ingersoll (1990) call the "organizational ideal," the idea that instrumental rationality is a preferred method for coordinating activity. Although in fact this ideal is usually contaminated with personalistic or patrimonial forms (Jackall 1988), and within organizations its results are often irrational, this iron cage is part of organization. It is, in fact, this organizational ideal that permits us to construct locutions such as "organization imposes," when in fact the more accurate description would be "through organization a powerful group imposes." This shorthand, used here for convenience, expresses an ideology by attributing agency to what is in fact an instalment. The second new feature is a boundary. Organizations have an ideology of who is bound to the organization and who is not. This ideology identifies both relationships and the strength of the relationships, ranging from indentured servitude, through employment contracts, to the unstable alliances of organized anarchies. Organizational boundaries can be quite variable in their rigidity, their porosity, and their permanence. Free-floating coalitions and networks are not said to be organized until they impose some level of expectation on their affiliates.

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In forming a boundary, an organization will create or discover a culture of inclusion that unites its members and binds their loyalties. These are the so-called "corporate cultures" that consultants celebrated in the early 1980s (Deal and Kennedy 1982; Peters and Waterman 1982). The culture of inclusion may be based on a retrospective discovery of the founder's values or a dramatic event in the organization's history; it may be carefully attended to, or it may spontaneously grow. The culture of inclusion may be nothing more than an affirmation of symbols drawn from the surrounding national (or age, or gender, or status group) cultures. Even when this boundary creation is not deliberately pursued, there will still be at least a minimalist shared understanding that the boundary exists and that it is marked by various symbols: entries in personnel records, allocation of space and other resources, or deference to "the way we do things around here." The boundary may embrace ambiguities, such as the status of contract workers who daily negotiate and play-act the obligations and benefits of organizational affiliation.5 The third new feature is a framework of command and authority. This may be highly stratified, or it may be flat; it may be focused on a proprietor, or it may rotate among peers. It may even be invested in a meeting that all members attend. In any case, part of "being organized" is having a structure of authority. Descriptions of organizations lacking authority usually reveal enough hints of highly contextualized influence and deference to suggest that however subtle, structured authority is indeed present. The shared understandings of what constitutes power and authority may rest on symbols of professionalism, technical prowess, the prerogatives of ownership, or physical intimidation. They may receive deep legitimacy, or expedient obeisance. Like membership, these are also negotiated and play-acted, whether locally through status jockeying or nationally through legislation setting limits on the authority of supervisors. Part of this culture of command is shared expectations of the means and ends (though not necessarily legitimacy) of command. In prisons, extreme regimentation, physical force, and stripping away of privacy are considered normal, although the inmates may disagree.6 In the early years of industrialization, similar measures were used to "drive" employees to higher productivity (Zuboff 1988:35), viewing the "hands" as little more than intelligent draft animals. There is a reciprocal relationship between this culture of command and legitimation and the culture of inclusion previously described: the greater the degree of homogeneity and shared sentiments among members of the organization, the more subtle will be the mechanisms of command. In a highly homogenous workplace, a raised eyebrow may be sufficient to correct deviance, whereas the greater the distance between bosses and workers, the more coercive will be the management.7

In addition to imposing the cultures of rationality, inclusion, and command and legitimation, organization elicits some measure of resistance (a term that has been overplayed of late; Brown 1996). It is demonstrable that, containing command, organizations also contain resistance and adaptation. Earlier in this century, resistance took the extreme form of industrial warfare, with industrial armies shooting, bombing, dynamiting, and physically wrecking homes, factories, offices, and each other. On the capitalist periphery this continues even today. Closer to the center, industrial conflicts nowadays are less desperate and more stylized, whether a work-to-rule action (limiting production by following procedures exactly)8 or a "picket line" consisting of one man holding aloft a picket sign while sitting in a lawn chair. Resistance can also involve less extreme measures, whether an oral or written protest from a shop steward, a few sharp words to a supervisor, or acts of petty defiance. Resistance can be expressed in words or with the body: slow movement in complying with a directive is often intended as a silent "go to hell." Likewise, careful, deliberate compliance with a new program might be thoroughness, or it might be a "slow walk," delaying results until the political climate has been changed. Successful resistance strategies are carefully calibrated to keep management guessing about the subordinates' intentions. Among nonmanagerial employees there are clear understandings of the degree of autonomy and freedom an employee is entitled to, the acceptable limits of a boss's authority, the proper methods to signal these limits, and the corrective actions available when a boss oversteps the limits. These understandings are a culture of resistance, although if there is a strong sense of mutuality between managers and employees, this might better be called a culture of adaptation. Stylized adaptation and resistance are inevitable parts of organization. A culture of resistance is an assertion of dignity and autonomy within an environment that conspires to deny both. Associated most clearly with labor organizations, yet found among all groups that in some respect are closely involved with and dependent on the organization (potentially including customers, suppliers, middle managers, and even small communities), cultures of resistance place a premium on values such as autonomy, individuality, craftsmanship, hard work, family life, and religion. A culture of resistance can be expressed in something as ordinary as vacation pictures or comic strips on the walls of a cubicle, or an operative's favorite coffee mug at her assembly line station. In a context that is engineered to reduce her to an appendage of a machine, a coffee mug, or a union bumper sticker on the lunch bucket, becomes a way of saying "No!"y

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The Dynamics of Difference

The cunning maneuver of cultures of resistance is that they draw on assumptions outside the organization, shared by managers and workers alike, that contradict symbols of command and rationality inside the organization. When an office employee refuses to work overtime because she has to go home and take care of her children, she is drawing on some ideas of kinship and family responsibility that most managers (pathological cases excepted) would subscribe to. Whether or not she is truly needed at home, or just wants to escape the boss, is factually irrelevant to her strategic intent of playing the family card. Likewise, one notes the display at union meetings and on union badges of patriotic symbols, with their associations of dignity, freedom, and emancipation, or the playful exuberance in the decoration of cubicles, drawing on themes from popular culture. The other side of this interplay is seen in the consequences of managerial overreach. Managers sometimes allow themselves to be heard saying that productivity should be achieved at the expense of quality. If the messages are repeated enough, accompanied by not-so-subtle threats, after a while the line workers respond, "If you insist on poor quality, that's what we'll give you." A culture of anti-quality begins to grow, and months or years later management brings in some consultants to help them understand their cultural problem. This difference between the espoused values of the corporation and the practiced values (Argyris and Schon 1978) is expectable: values and other cultural productions represent compromises, border adjustments, and maneuvering for advantage by multiple groups. These adjustmentscollective sensemaking among management, workers, and the entire organization themselves become valorized as part of the organizational culture of inclusion. If an organization preaches quality while its practice is otherwise, such hypocrisy will come to be seen as "the way things are done around here" by workers and managers alike. The different cultures of the organization each interrogate the others and contain the seeds of each other, whether in the appeals to inclusion by resistance movements or the evaluation of management actions against a standard of rationality. When a union leader reminds management that "We're all in this together" (see Weekley and Wilber 1996, for example), he is appealing to symbols of common fate, even as he advances particular interests. Nor are inclusion and rationality the exclusive province of management, as demonstrated by the rationalization of the American coal industry by the United Mine Workers in the early 1950s (Caudill 1963). In some industries, countercultural symbols are available to management to motivate employees. The separate cultivations of rationality, inclusion, command and legitimation, and resistance and adaptation exist and evolve only in a dynamic relationship with, and using the resources of, each other.'"

Cultures of command and legitimation, and cultures of resistance and adaptation, are used alike by super- and subordinates in an attempt to make sense out of the arrogance, blockheadedness, and sheer stupidity of the other. Actions that from a labor perspective make perfect sense, such as asserting dignity and independence through departing on time, from a management point of view are nothing but stubborn alienation. Actions that make sense from a management point of view, such as insisting on time discipline at the expense of productivity, are seen as stupidity (and hence undermining management's legitimacy) from a labor point of view. Martin and Siehl (1983) describe the "uneasy symbiosis" of dominant and countercultures, although they seem to have groups (rather than frameworks of meaning) in mind. Rather than "symbiosis," implying functional adaptation, I characterize this relationship as dialectic, implying synthesis. It is this embrace and synthesis of rationality, inclusion, command and legitimation, and resistance and adaptation that gives the organizational form its uniquely integrating capability. Management and workers alike have but limited degrees of freedom to change any of the organizational cultures. An all-too-typical scenario is for management to attempt to solve attitudinal problems (absenteeism, drug use, sabotage) by colonizing the conscience of the hourly workers (Willmott 1993), without appreciating that what are perceived as attitudinal problems are part of a culture that is finely adjusted to the management culture and behavior. Neither can be changed without changing the other. It is this adjustment and interplay through action and the attribution of meanings, drawing on the multiple cultures of an organization, that makes organizational culture so elusive and difficult to change. At the same time, a referential, thematic view of culture allows a management discourse that assumes (in the face of experience) that cultures can be continually updated to match the contingencies of control. For example, a British firm was reported in 1998 to be laying off 20% of its head office management "in an effort to streamline decisionmaking and revitalize the group's corporate culture" (Cope 1998:15). Or, for another example, when Netscape merged with AOL in 1998, many industry observers predicted a culture clash between the barefoot, green-haired rebels of Netscape and the hard-edged business types of AOL. One former Netscape executive, though, suggested that there would be little problem, since Netscape "had already undergone at least two major culture shifts" (Roberts 1998:1). Despite the fact that Netscape was founded in April 1994, the concept of two (and an impending third) "culture shifts" in fewer than five years seemed entirely reasonable from this manager's point of view. In sum, organizations, by imposing boundaries, hierarchic order, and an ideology of rationality on differentiation, create a context that is inherently fragmentary and contradictory. Organizations embrace national and regional cultures.

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Organizations embrace differentiation, in forms as varied as national, regional, occupational, class, gender, or age differences. By necessity, however, organization engenders cultures of rationality, command and legitimation, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion, which vary in their strength and their content but not in their existence. These facts of differentiation and fragmentation have been long observed by organizational theorists (Gregory 1983; Martin and Meyerson 1988; Van Maanen and Barley 1984), although they are frequently explained as a regrettable declension from a more coherent ideal (Bartunek and Moch 1991; Gray et al. 1985) rather than an inevitable consequence of the organizational form. Anthropological theory has likewise had its own declension from an earlier, positivist understanding of cultures as coherent systems to the contemporary view of systems of meaning as negotiated among multiple, contending voices (Ortner 1984; Rosaldol989). This fragmented understanding of culture is contemporaneous with the growing importance of organizational forms in multiple areas of daily life. Instrumental rationality, considered as both an ideology and as a set of procedures for matching means to ends, is a dominant form in contemporary life (Habermas 1969; Horkheimer 1974; Marcuse 1968). Weber's discussion of instrumental rationality (zweckrationalitat) as the defining characteristic of bureaucracy has been advanced by the Frankfurt theorists as the defining characteristic of contemporary life. For Weber, the procedures of instrumental rationality were never ends in themselves; Habermas suggests that this is what has happened in late capitalist society. "Organizations," understood as distinctive social forms, are defined first and foremost by goal-oriented instrumental rationality (Adams and Ingersoll 1990; Morgan 1986). Yet these forms are no longer circumscribed by the religious, parochial, or status-based assumptions of society (Habermas 1969:114). All areas of lifework, play, consumption, civil discourse, sexare becoming more "organized," that is, subject to the dictates of regimes of instrumental rationality, whether originating from government, management, or craft standards. It is a measure of the pervasiveness of this ideology that it is difficult to describe in public discourse how "becoming more organized" can be anything other than a good thing or how the solvency and plasticity of cultural forms is a reflex of their regimentation. Yet one consequence of "becoming more organized" is a flattening of culture, an erasure of those deeper levels of meaning that make culture the source of human dignity and freedom. There is no place in organizational cultures for the awe of the sacred, except as a motivational tool; for an appreciation of nature, save as a resource for exploitation through logging or eco-tourism; or for a discourse on the mysteries of the immortal soul. Within the ideology of rationality, the meaning of freedom may not be questioned

because a rational answer is evident: freedom is the exercise of optimal choices to fulfill organizational goals, as defined by whatever group or coalition has the power to define them. Failure to make these optimal choices is a sign of individual inadequacy. The metonymic equivalence of command and rationality within an organization turns resistance into irrationality. Organization imposes a competitive structure, a drawing of lines of inclusion and opposition, upon the local nuances and adjustments of social life. As a strategic entity, an organization creates competition over the means and ends of its activity. More accurately, it raises the stakes of existing, local contestations over resources and meanings: local disputes become organized into intergroup conflicts. In the days before organized management, a millhand might tell a supervisor to go to hell, and get away with it; organized management created more coercive power over the hands, and organized labor attempts to even the balance. With both labor and management organized, relationships between the two are more regulated. The roles, identities, and cultures of labor, like those of management, are perpetually in play, and organized cultures become measured against the exigencies of opposition. Removed from the framework of symbolic interaction, and made into socially constructed "work" (Habermas 1969:93), most organizational cultures are tentative, contingent, and awkward in their display of motivating symbols. In that organizations exist to gain strategic advantage by regimenting differentiation and diversity, the shared understandings (of rationality, command, inclusion, and resistance) that make that possible are always going to be partial and emergent. At the level of individual sensemaking, organized culture requires nontrivial effort to adjust the multiple contradictions of rationality, command and legitimation, inclusion, and resistance and adaptation. Every member of the organization must grant, minimally, recognition to all of these, in some combination of authentic acceptance, slavish devotion, pragmatic recognition, hypocritical obeisance, or barely suppressed defiance. The adjustment of these contradictions requires an engagement that further binds the member to the organization with a construction of self that mirrors the complexity of the organization. Considering the structures of meaning and their enactment through interaction with other groups, the cultures of an organization represent an unstable synthesis of the multiple negations of rationality, command and legitimation, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion. In this section, I have shown that talking about a unitary "organizational culture" makes little sense. The various groups that make up organizations cultivate symbols, stories, experiences, justifications, values, and collective memories. In their routine interactions, these groups use these multiple cultivations to interrogate, to contradict, and to contest the others for autonomy or other values within

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the organization. These dynamics of difference within the framework of organization, however much they may be regretted by management and its theorists, are an inevitable consequence of a regime of rationality.

The Strategy of Ambiguity

In this section, I describe the deployment of cultures within an organizational context. Cultures are considered as structures of meaning whose representations are forever open to reinterpretation. A core part of organizational life can be seen in the strategic use of ambiguity, such as the vague directions that managers give to subordinates. Among the insecure, this promotes overconformity, although sometimes it must be reinforced by the encouragement of insecurity (such as threats of dismissal). Likewise, ambiguity is contained in obedience and resistance, as described in the previous section. By understanding their strategic intent, the ambiguities of organizational life become intelligible. Within the study of organizations, there are two sets of divergent streams in the understanding of culture. Some studies (e.g., those in Turner 1990 or Gagliardi 1990) focus on symbol systems and the meanings found in rituals and taboos. Other studies (e.g., Briody and Baba 1991; Fiske 1994) examine the adaptation of different groups within the corporation to each other and to their external environment. Although there is a rich literature on organizational symbolism (e.g., Alvesson 1993; Alvesson and Berg 1992; Boje 1991; Pondy et al. 1983), the dominant strain is the adaptation approach: how organizations and groups within organizations create patterned responses (in behavior, thought, and artifacts) to forces or influences in their environment, including the patterned behavior of other groups (see Sachs 1989 and Hamada 1994 for an overview of this literature). The adaptation view lends itself more readily to a positivist, instrumental approach to the world; the interpretivist view, by contrast, emerges from an academic counterculture that seeks meaning and insight rather than prediction and control (Geertz 1983; Rosen 1991). A second set of contrasts is between those who view culture as something shared throughout an organization and those who take a more nuanced perspective. Early authors (Deal and Kennedy 1982; Peters and Waterman 1982) saw culture as a source of cohesion (Schein 1992) and, hence, improved performance (Denison 1990; Ott 1989; Ouchi 1981); their efforts led to a body of research that looked for the unifying understandings within organizations (what I have called here the "culture of inclusion"). Subsequently a series of reappraisals (Siehl and Martin 1990) questioned whether culture could truly be correlated with performance. Parallel to these studies, which tended to focus on management concerns, a few studies (Applebaum 1981; Gamst 1980; Kunda 1992; Sacks 1988; Van Maanen 1991) began examining the cultures of nondomi-

nant groups including production workers, transportation workers, and hospital employees. These studies of occupational groups tended to focus on the groups and not their context within regimes of instrumental rationality." Other studies have described differentiation as the normal state of organizational life. Gregory (1983) sees such differentiation as normal, interpreting the multiple "nativeview paradigms" as explanatory of conflict within organizations. Martin and Siehl (1983) see organizations as generative of differentiation, focusing on the creation of "countercultures" in reaction to the dominant management culture. Following these early studies, a growing body of work has begun to see cultures as sources of fragmentation, confusion, and disorder (see Frost et al. [1991] for a good overview of this literature). Joanne Martin in Cultures in Organizations (1992) presents three different perspectives and resulting definitions of culture: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. In the integration perspective, culture consists of shared beliefs, values, patterns of meaning, expectations, basic assumptions, rules of social interaction, symbols, and meanings. The concept of basic or underlying assumptions, which is taken from Schein (1992), usually refers to conceptual or linguistic statements that take the form of propositional assertions: "time is linear," "time is cyclical," "human nature is intrinsically good," "social life is or should be cooperative." (In the previous section, I characterized this as a referential or thematic view of culture.) This thematic presentation is similar to numerous works describing and measuring organizational culture (Collins and Porras 1994; Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993; Hofstede 1984, 1991; Schein 1992). Differentiation views of culture are similar to the integration views in that they focus on shared, thematic meanings. Differentiation views use a more fine-grained unit of analysis, usually focusing on "subcultures" (equated to groups within the organization, Trice 1993, Trice and Morand 1991, Riley 1983, for example; Gregory 1983 makes the more careful usage of "subgroup"). Although differentiation focuses on the unequal distribution of competition for power among different groups within the organization, for the most part power and competition are seen to be boundary issues for the subgroups rather than intrinsic to their shared meanings. In Martin's fragmentation perspective, cultures are not a matter of consensus but, rather, contain a multiplicity of views whose manifestations are usually incoherent. Individuals are able to make sense of their situation and act on it only through a series of shifting alliances and ad hoc interpretations. Ambiguity, complexity, and lack of coherence are the touchstones of the fragmentation perspective. Such statements, however, are usually describing phenomena that are social or contextual rather than cultural: their focus is on the understanders and the understood, not the understandings.

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From a Fragmentation perspective . . . an organizational culture is a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely connected by their changing positions on a variety of issues. Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their individual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issues are activated at a given moment. [Martin 1992:153] "Culture" in Martin's usage thus seems to be a contingent assemblage of groups, actors, and context rather than a more durable framework for meaning. The point of view I present suggests that organizations do not so much generate as embrace differentiation, and by imposing ideals of rationality, command, and inclusion, engender fragmentation. The thematic view of culture used by Martin and most organizational theorists presupposes a universal scheme of measurement, such as the distinction between "individualistic" and "group-oriented" cultures (a coherent summation of this approach, under the heading of "comparative psychology," and its challenge to anthropology, is presented in an appendix to the psychologist Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations [1991:247 ff.]). An alternative, idiographic approach views culture as a thing-in-itself, understandable on its own terms, whose identity is based not on countable elements or scalable features but on relationships among these. According to this view, a culture's coherence is achieved not only through semantic ordering but through poetic condensation. In contrast to semantic meaning, poetic meanings cannot be disposed of on the tme-or-false basis. Rather they are related to one another like a set of concentric circles, of wider and wider scope. Those of wider diameter do not categorically eliminate those of narrower diameter. There is, rather, a progressive encompassment. To say that "man is a vegetable" contains much soundness. [Burke 1973:144] Semantically, "man is an animal" and "man is a vegetable" are contradictory, but poetically, anyone familiar with couch potatoes will admit some interest. Likewise, competing statements such as "Americans are individualists" and "Americans are conformists" are contradictory only as surface expressions of a coherent, underlying code. Some studies of organizational cultures do describe evocative rituals and symbols as "expressions" of deeper, underlying realities, often having to do with unequal allocation of power. For example, Rosen (1985) describes an annual ceremony at a law firm that reinforces the hierarchy of the firm even as it creates a feeling of shared purpose; Young (1989) describes in a British garment factory a small shrine to the royal family that reproduces the status divisions of the factory. In addition to displays such as these, there are other symbolic understandings that establish and legitimate these deeper understandings in the distribution of power. For example, the Western, archetypal symbols of professionalism are important for establishing and maintaining

the hierarchy of Rosen's law firm (Bledstein 1976); the "Ford-ist" model of production creates separations in Young's garment factory. Within organization theory, however, professionalism and Fordism are so natural that, like oxygen, they don't require comment. Martin (1992: 140 ff.) comments on the "silences" within cultures that are no less revealing of meaning than assertions; the cultural status of Fordism and professionalism and the historicity of the organizational form are probably the leading silences of organization theory (but cf. Barley and Kunda [1992] on management rhetoric). Archetypal symbols embrace diverse and seemingly contradictory referents. "Father" can refer to both sacred and profane figures. When taken out of context, this contains an ambiguity; in context, however, there is seldom confusion when one refers to a father. This embrace of the diverse and contradictory gives these "key symbols" their unifying power (Ortner 1973). To say that a company is "like a family" is a powerful statement precisely because "family" has numerous and contrasting referents. In short, the ambiguity is meaningful and unifying. By finding certain key symbols or root metaphors (Ortner 1973) that encompass numerous semantic domains (Dumont 1970), this approach better reveals the unity and coherence of a culture than does the assemblage of themes. This insight is achieved, however, by avoiding the question of the relationship between cultures, on the one hand, and the groups embracing and enacting them on the other. In fact, from this perspective, it makes less sense to talk about a culture than it does to talk about multiple cultural elements, strategically spun, woven, and stitched together in an evanescent bricolage. Since cultural elements are multivocal, an actor can manipulate the code to produce alternative justifications, or the actor can read different signals within a situation indicating different courses of action. Normative and contextual interpretation are, simply, figuring out what is proper and advantageous to do in a given situation. Further, in any given organizational context, there will always be more than one culture in play. When engineering negotiates a project schedule with marketing, whose view of the world will prevail? When a salesman is selling a complex product, does he interpret the product within his own frame of reference or within the purchaser's? If we look at culture only in terms of norms, propositional assertions, or situated behavior, and ignore the underlying codes, the multivocality, code-switching, and strategic ambiguity, what we call culture will always seem fragmentary, and we will lose sight of the processes of synthesis and resolution described in the next section. To understand the strategic use of ambiguity and working misunderstandings, consider the following: when a politician, in response to a constituent's request, vigorously shakes the petitioner's hand (perhaps with his left hand on

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the elbow), looks the petitioner straight in the eye, and says in a firm voice, "You can count on me," he is being intentionally ambiguous. The petitioner walks away confident that his request will be attended to, and the politician walks away knowing he has made no such promise. Although any seasoned politician has a stock of phrases for this situation ("We'll do the right thing," "I'll give it my fullest attention," "We'll take care of the situation," "We definitely must do something about that"), words alone cannot convey the construction: tone of voice, eye contact, posture, and physical contact all express the profoundest sincerity at a moment when the intention is just the opposite. Another politician, observing, would find nothing ambiguous in this situation at all. She would understand, with a slight smile, "Here is a dangerous situation: a constituent who has a request; our boy cannot afford to alienate the constituent, nor can he afford to grant the request. Better to send him away with a good feeling than to get yourself into a compromising position." This is an example of using stylized forms (linguistic constructions, bodily contact) to construct an artful resolution to a potentially dangerous situation. Each of these forms in isolation is ambiguous, but the forms' artful composition in this performance brings the danger under control and conveys a message that seems perfectly unambiguous. It is this essential ambiguity that permits words to mean their opposite and oppositions to cohere around shared meanings. To those who understand, "You can count on me" means "I didn't promise a thing," just like "Trust me" should be read as a warning. Meaning can be shared, and social discourse can be sustained, in the realms of semantic reference or poetic emotions or in the symbols that create and evoke them. A product launch exemplifies the synthesis of order out of confusion. If the product is in a fast-paced market or a rapidly evolving technology, then there is enormous managerial pressure to meet schedule commitments and beat the competition. Engineering, marketing, distribution, training, and human resources must all coordinate their efforts. Engineering wants to make some last-minute fixes, marketing wants to alter the image, distribution has to have its resources ready, HR (Human Resources) cannot find the new staffing needed, and each function sees every feature or image change as an arrogant usurpation by "those guys" who don't understand marketing (or logistics, or staffing, or technology, or whatever). There is no time to learn, no time to smooth ruffled feathers. Somehow or other the product usually gets launched, more or less on schedule, usually under the driving hand of the product manager. The consumers see the shiny new car, the innovative user interface, the handy appliance, with no understanding of the confusion and scrambling and screaming required to bring it to market.

Like the cacophony of an orchestra that resolves to an "A" when the first violinist stands up, and subsequently produces a symphony, a product launch is harmony preceded by chaos. For organizations, a symphonic voice is the stylized public performancethe new minivans in the showroom, the stack of shiny appliances in an industrial array on the department store shelves. A harmonious voice is not the normal course of events. The normal course of events is for different functionsthe strings, the woodwinds, engineering, HRto be playing their own tunes and maintaining separations, such as departmental boundaries, so that the discordance is kept private. Such private practicetrying new scores, experimenting with new phrasings, testing design alternatives, extending one's abilitiesis a prerequisite for the symphonic performance that the conductor elicits from the diverse musicians. In short, organizations embrace differentiation and engender fragmentation and confusion, which are ordered through stylized separations imposed from above. Middle managers, like musicians, try to harmonize, but it requires the peer authority of the first violinist to get them in tune and the tyranny of the conductor to keep them in rhythm and in balance. In this section, I have shown that differentiation and fragmentation should not be seen as a declension from an organizational ideal of harmony and integration but, rather, as its inevitable counterpoint. The cultural elements constituting this harmony should not be seen as themes or notes, partitionings of semantic or acoustic space, but as voices, like that of the oboe, which acquires its sweetness not from the purity of its pitch, but from the overtones and undertones that lend it color and depth.

Managing Ambiguity
A final question is how organizations manage ambiguity, and why. To understand this we do not need to examine the hagiography of corporate leadership. We should be able to find negation and synthesis in the most ordinary aspects of operations, in the recurrent or occasional activities where boundaries are defined and order is imposedin short, in the forms through which differentiation is organized. In this section, I examine and interrogate three areas of organizational life that are fairly standard in most corporations and many other organizations as well: staffing, selling, and bookkeeping. Even the least formal organizations, such as neighborhood block clubs, can make organized decisions or assumptions about who is in and who is out; the least formal organizations can engage in transaction-oriented persuasion (trading political loyalty for road repairs, for example), and the least formal organizations, if they control any assets, must keep a set of books. I generalize from the practices of corporations (including labor unions, churches, and eleemosynary institutions) and other groups

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where "getting organized" is held up as an ideal to show that standardized procedures and stylized routines are, in fact, devices for managing the multiple ambiguities that organizational life entails. A critical decision that any corporation makes concerns who is in, who is out, and who goes wherein short, staffing- Payroll or membership records are among the central documents of an organization. These identify who is considered a member or employee, and under what terms (part-time or full-time, temporary or permanent, exempt or nonexempt), and in what department. These categorizations are unambiguous, even if in practice they are violated: "part-time" employees are sometimes asked to work 40 hours in a week, and employees can be "seconded" or "vetted" from one department to another. Staffing actions can be stylized or proceduralized. A staffing action is a rite of passage that begins with a ritual of disaggregation (always stylized and calibrated: a call from a recruiter, a letter of inquiry, a watercooler conversation of the "Would you be interested . .." sort), proceeds through a liminal phase (during which the individual knows he or she is being evaluated and is on guarda time of high tension), and concludes with a ritual of reincorporation, whether a minimalist handshake or the elaborate "wedding ceremony" that Toyota uses to welcome new recruits into the Toyota "family." These separations and incorporations mark key transitions through the repetition of certain stylized behaviors, whether the round of introductions and the presentation of certain artifacts after an individual has been hired, or the removal of same following a termination. The normal aspect of personnel is the routine estimation and evaluation of those inside the organization (Jackal! 1988:17 ff.). Is Jeff a fast-tracker, or a drone? Does this new kid know anything useful, or is his head filled with textbook knowledge? Can Mary close a deal? Does Tom have the guts to fire someone? Does Fred have "the right stuff? Major effort is spent pondering questions of this sort; among production workers questions such as "Can I count on Al to cover for me?" or "Is Joe a fair supervisor, or do I have to watch out for him?" are frequent and critical. Questions of this sort are asking both what type of supervisor, salesman, manager, or engineer someone is and what does that mean? If James Whitworth III is understood to be a drone but, nonetheless, headed for the executive suite because he is the son of the owner, everyone understands that (the owner's) family values trump performance in this company. If Tom is seen to be nothing more than a hatchet man, then his movements are good signals of shifting corporate priorities. Deconstructing Fred tells new employees what the right stuff is, or isn't. In personnel actions and judgments, we see the embodiment of an organization's cultures, resolving the contradictions of command and inclusion. The individuals who

make up the organization are the signposts of its values, artifacts of this resolution. Although the cultural terrain predates and will outlast its signage, within the organization people learn how to navigate the terrain only by watching the navigation and missteps of others. Sales is a second arena where the organization defines itself and its relationships to the larger world. In many corporations, sales is the daily rhythm, the pulse of blood continuing to flow. Not-for-profit organizations such as charities and governments also find it necessary to "sell" their services, even when they consider it undignified to characterize the transaction as a "sale." Sales can be a grubby activity, where one of us (by definition, an elite) genuflects to the hoi polloi. It can be a nuisance, like a suitor's unwanted advances. It can work magic, transforming a shoeshine and a smile into jobs for thousands. It can be mock-heroic, mugging the national synthesis of unity from diversity (Shorrisl994). Selling creates and maintains bonds between an organization and its environment. I contrast selling to other mercantile transactions that have no personal content, whether in discount stores or mail order houses. Selling, and its companion, advertising, present a gift to the would-be customer: a firm handshake, the voice of conviction, an exciting image. If accepted, the gift is returned with that most valuable of corporate commodities, "customer loyalty." Ideally the customer comes to identify with the company and its products, whether by wearing the logo or by displaying tokens of loyalty, such as a placard or desk set. Through such gifts and returns and familiarity, the organizational world is integrated through a skein of reciprocal, if imbalanced, relationships. These relationships range from mutual predation to distributive coalitions (Olson 1982) whose form of reciprocity covaries with social distance (Sahlins 1965). In the vast literature on sales and negotiation technique, there is a common sense that the gift of the salesman or saleswoman is a gift of the person. Effective salespeople, whether selling new ideas to the boss, new products to customers, or themselves to would-be employers, must project a persona. They must show up, be there, present themselves. In fact, the presentation of self is no less important than the presentation of the idea or product. Reciprocal relationships contain an ambiguity, in that they transform mine into yours and yours into mine and independent predators into mutually dependent partners. This relationship is built and the ambiguity is resolved through a cycle of exchanges and counterexchanges, up to the closing of the deal. A customer tries to figure out "How can I get the best deal?" and it is the job of the salesperson to figure out "What can I give, and what do I need to receive in return?" In the subsequent internal sale (where the salesperson has to justify the deal), the salesperson must convince a flinty-eyed manager, "Here's how much profit

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we are making on this deal." Through negotiation, the salesperson constructs a certainty (the deal) out of these multiple ambiguities. A true salesperson is distinguished from a mere order-taker by these negotiating abilities, by his or her ability to combine the feeling of familiarity and inclusion (for the customer) with the promise of profitability and strategic advantage for the flinty-eyed manager. For a final example, let us consider and question the artifactuality of budgets and financial reports. These are the principal boundary mechanisms of an organization: they are the authoritative statements of the resources at its command and the disposition of those resources. Having "a set of books" defines an organization, and "the books" achieve a totemic status less from their representation of an organizational unit and more from their difference from "the books" of other organizations. In other words, it is at the level of budgets and financial statements and records that corporate identities are most clear-cut.12 Yet for anyone who has worked with "the books," their representational quality is potentially suspect. There are always ways to "cook the books." With modest legerdemain, income and expenditures can be transferred from one account to another, losses can be turned into profits, income can be deferred, and profits can be temporarily hidden from the tax authorities. To achieve clarity of presentation in "the books," drastic simplification is required: Unit B may have borrowed resources from Unit A, yet on "the books" the resource is still recorded as belonging to unit A. Unit C may have neglected to maintain an asset. Reputation, brand identification, social connections, and customer loyalty create a market value for companies that is greater than the "book value"; this incremental value is entered as "good will," a fudge factor for uncountable yet real assets. Only the integrity of the accounting profession, the cold eyes of the auditors (searching out overvalued assets and unrecorded commitments), and the standards promulgated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board stand between confidence in "the books" and complete chaos. In theory, "the books" are unambiguous, even if the underlying reality of unwritten commitments, borrowed resources, deferred income, and overvalued assets is far messier than "the books" admit. This, too, is a management of ambiguity, inasmuch as it is confidence in "the books" that permits investments to be made, relationships to be formed and maintained, and business to go forward. Identity is preserved (in the totemic "books"), and an icon of rational order ("Generally Accepted Accounting Principles") is enforced, despite the factual errancy of both. (Alvesson and Willmott [1996: 139 ff.] and Perin [1998] provide further interrogation of accounting, albeit from different perspectives.) Organization is a never-ending effort to impose order, and organized culture is an instrument and a consequence of this. Yet with every cultural productiona new slogan, a new image, a new buildingthe imperfection of the

existing order is revealed. Organized culture is always emergent, a response to the imperatives of rationality and the accidents of competition and strategy. Even the core symbols of rationality, the totemic "books" that define organizational uniqueness, are susceptible to the interventions of power. Organized cultures, like cultures elsewhere, are negotiated. Every watercooler conversation, about management's new policies, about what "the old man" is thinking, Fred's new project, or what Latonya did yesterday, is a negotiation of meaning. Negotiation acknowledges the advantages of power even as it creates spaces for social creativity: in negotiation, the outcome is always in play. These negotiations are not only of the form and content of meaning but of the very existence of meaning. Since organized cultures are always emergent and incomplete, the meaningfulness of actions and events is never taken for granted; if a person or event cannot be incorporated into an existing scheme of meaning, he or she or it becomes invisible and is passed over in silence. This is always more evident to the outside observer, who notes with puzzlement why the names of recently departed executives are quickly forgotten, why certain employees are seemingly invisible, and why certain management actions are acknowledged only with averted eyes and mumbled sentences. Negotiation creates the space for the exercise of agency and choice, a term usually elided (or denied: Willmott 1993) in organizational culture studies. Choice, the exercise of agency, implies the availability of alternatives, and the articulation of values is an articulation and weighing of alternatives. Like any negotiated order within organizations (Crozier 1971; Fine 1984), the conscience collective is politicalconsciousness is political, and conscience is political in that it is negotiated. Political conscience is the realization of alternatives: the choices that people perceive within their organizations constitute their political conscience. Must one obey the boss and work overtime? Dare one not? Are kickbacks to customers acceptable? Can we cook the books? Often changes in political conscience are attained by accident: an overreach by management can incite a spontaneous rebellion. Just as negotiation synthesizes order out of power imbalances and performance, so too political conscience, the realization of choices, incorporates semantic alternatives into the interpretation of contingent events. Political conscience reflects the construction of identity; the enactment of a shared sense of identity is a source of social cohesion. The sources of identity can include not only culturally supplied archetypes (the nation, gender, an occupational community), but also seemingly accidental, historical events: shared experiences, whether organizational or generational, are sources of cohesion and sensemaking (Weick 1995). Likewise, opposition movements often coalesce around unpredicted events, whether the Rouge River Bridge in the 1930s or Stonewall in the 1970s.

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By seeing culture not as given, but as historically emergent within the negotiation of values in social relationships and the creation of new forms of identity and political conscience, we move beyond the dualism that besets management theory. This is the dualism that distinguishes between the "hard" aspects of the organizationlines of authority, budgets, strategy, command and controlon the one hand, and the "soft" side of feelings, values, and moral sentiments on the other. Within regimes of instrumental rationality, the instruments of authoritybudgets, schedules, positions of commandare more "real" than the "soft" aspects of sentiments and values. Yet command in all its faces is constituted by an array of social relationships and choices that are negotiated and theatrically enacted; that is, relationships of command are culturally structured, and the lines on an organization chart, like a table of accounts, are simply the truce demarcation from an earlier round of culture wars. Organizational life presents a sustained imposing, negotiating, testing, displaying, and redefining of meanings and values of command, of inclusions, of rationality, and of resistance within these same relationships.

Conclusion
For nearly twenty years anthropologists and management theorists have been writing about organizational culture. From a matching of journal titles and citations, it is clear that they are talking about two different things, for two different purposes, to two different audiences, and as such making little contribution to each other's understanding of the subject at hand. It is time for a dialogue. In this article I have tried to show that portrayals of "organizational culture" in terms of thematic coherence or statistical distributions of behavior misapprehend both the nature of organizations and the dynamics that maintain cultural differences. Organizations embrace differentiation and engender fragmentation and confusion, yet they also impose cultures of rationality, command and authority, adaptation and resistance, and inclusion. Cultures are generative frameworks of meaning that enable those who make up an organization to figure out how to get on and get along. The dynamics of difference among these multiple cultures are based less on their positive, referential qualities and more on their evocative, strategic deployment. Within regimes of rationality, cultures, like words, are used with strategic intent. As an alternative to the upbeat positivism that pervades management literature (at least in its consulting subgenre), I suggest here that opposition and negation are necessary elements of the organizational landscape. Anthropology's understanding of otherness takes on a new coloration with this view that "othering" is a shared project within a common framework: an "agreement to argue" or a "distributed consensus" may well be more apt descriptions of organized culture than a "learned system of shared.. .,"etc.

The study of organizational culture is here to stay. Numerous articles and conferences each year make it clear that organizational culture is more than a passing management fad. An empirical question confronting both anthropology and organizational science concerns the worldwide diffusion or rejection of what began as a Western cultural form. The moral choice that the anthropological profession must make is whether culture will be represented by those socialized into the ethos of instrumental rationality, or whether instrumental rationality will be interrogated by outside, critical, creative voices. Over the near term, and increasingly on a global scale, larger segments of human life are going to be occupied by corporate, institutional, or organizational forms. Emergent states, transnational corporations, and political and religious movements all represent organizational forms producing their own gorgeous and prolific cultures of command and legitimation, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion and alienation (Barber 1996), embracing or rejecting but seldom ignoring Westem rationalism. Anthropology, if it is to have a future, must learn to address the moral and conceptual issues posed by this fact. A greater rigor of preparation, and a more thorough self-examination, will be required for organizational ethnographers if they are to approach the corporate and institutional worlds not as tourists or apologists but as interlocutors in a larger, shared drama of civilization.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to express my greatest appreciation to numerous colleagues whose comments over the career of this manuscript have done much to improve its quality. The comments of Bruce Mannheim were most valuable in framing the argument; likewise, Kevin Avruch, David Hakken, George Marcus, Constance Penn, Carolyn Psenka, and Andrea Sankar all supplied valuable guidance and insight. What slight merit this article may have owes much to these; its more certain defects remain the responsibility of its author. 1. Please address correspondence to: Allen W. Batteau, 2016 Shadford Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48104. 2. This phrase is actually a treble entendre: make up can mean "to fabricate," in the dual sense of assemble or dissemble; it can also mean to resolve one's differences. All three meanings are intended here. 3. Karl Weick, in Sensemaking in Organizations (1995), describes the vocabularies of society, organization, work, and coping, as well as the vocabularies of predecessors (tradition) and vocabularies of sequence and experience (storytelling), as the "substance ol sensemaking." 4. To be sure, there are many gradations here. When a manufacturer buys a component-maker, everyone understands that to some degree the component-maker will have to live with the policies and priorities of its newly acquired parent, in ways that it would not were the manufacturer just buying components. On the other hand, if the manufacturer has a long-term contract with the component-maker, even though the latter is nominally an independent entity, the manufacturer may nevertheless

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VOL. 102, No. 4 DECEMBER 2000 organized," that is, to acknowledge a structure of leadership, impose some rules, draw some distinctions of membership, and perhaps have some resources at its disposal. 12. Those who are familiar with it will, of course, recognize the parallel to Levi-Strauss's (1963) analysis of totemism. Nowhere is it asserted here that budgets and financial reports represent the most important values of an organization, any more than Levi-Strauss would assert that the Chippewa Eagle clan perforce values feathers and flight above all else. Instead the assertion is that while asset ownership (like clan membership) may as a matter of fact contain imprecisions and ambiguities (multiple loyalties, contested claims), at the level of totemic representation there is no ambiguity whatsoever.

expect various forms of fealty from its supplier, particularly if the manufacturer is the largest customer of the componentmaker. 5. Just as cubicles present today the frontlines of negotiations over personal space and privacy in corporations, contract workers are the frontlines of negotiations over inclusion. Initially, contract workers were an expedient to be retained for a few days or weeks of peak workload. As companies such as Microsoft found that they could add staff without the burden of employee benefits or long-term commitment, they began using contract workers for normal production. Although the IRS takes a dim view of the practice, in fact numerous businesses and not-for-profit organizations retain contract workers, provide them with space to work and tools for the job, set hours at which they must be at work, determine the methods they must use, and pay them at a fixed rate on a periodic basis, in short, treat them as employees in every regard except commitment and fringe benefits. 6. But see Foucault's description of the internalization of the culture of command (1979). 7. There is an extensive literature on the psychosocial reaction to and acceptance and internalization or rejection of authority (Mannoni 1964; Sennett 1980; Sennett and Cobb 1972), occasionally informed by insights into the differences among cultures. I can only note here that whether authority is received with fear or groveling or with a sense of security and integrity depends on both the cultural and the pragmatic context. 8. The dialectics that I am describing are wonderfully illustrated by these strategies, where the act of obeying the rules becomes a form of industrial disobedience. Noble (1984:277) provides a fine example of this. 9. "The coffee cup on the workbench is one of the great issues in industrial management," in the words of Charles Skinner, an instructor at Productivity, Inc., a consulting firm. Holusha (1992:D1) describes how assembly workers at an Asea Brown Boveri, Ltd. factory cooperated with effort to introduce greater workstation discipline but drew the line at removing certain personal objects, such as coffee mugs, from their workstations. 10. For those who still equate my usage of "cultures" with specific groups or statistical descriptions of behavior, let me make clear: cultures are resources for sensemaking that, while cultivated within groups, can be invoked or enacted by anyone. In numerous unionized industries, I have observed managerial employees adopt the attitudes of resistance that originated with the union; contrariwise, in very authoritarian organizations, line managers and rank-and-file alike strike similar poses of command. Cultures of command and authority and resistance and adaptation only fit best with the roles of those in positions of super- and subordination; they are the exclusive property of neither. 11. Within contemporary society any group can be subject to multiple and often conflicting regimes of instrumental rationality. Even a modestly organized group, such as the Baptist Church choir, may be subject to expectations from the church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the surrounding municipal government (in the form of zoning ordinances), and the IRS (if the choir ever charges money for a performance). The church choir may conclude that the only way to maintain its integrity in the face of these conflicting demands is to "get

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