Exam 5: Communication, Culture, and Organizing

The management at the restaurant where Robin works has long used the phrase "team" in order to describe how everyone at the restaurant needed to pull his or her weight for a collective success. Instead of "shift managers," there were "shift coaches," and instead of "good employees," there were "team players." Recently, a new manager came in to the restaurant and is referring herself as the "director" and all of the staff as "cast members." After two weeks, tensions between staff and management reached a boiling point. How might we best describe what is going on?

Organizational life is made up of a set of ongoing practices that members must engage in to accomplish organizing.

In order to be good anthropologists, cultural scholars of organizations must be sure to find exotic and strange cultures to study.

Purist and pragmatist approaches to organizational culture give us a theory of power to understand difference and control.

Cultural studies of organizations offered managers exciting ways to motivate employees and to reinvigorate ______.

At Danielle's undergraduate university, there was a gazebo on campus where, the story went, if a couple kissed, they would become engaged before they graduated from college. Danielle was secretly delighted when she and her partner kissed in the gazebo one afternoon; they became engaged right before graduation. To Danielle's surprise, when they moved across the country to pursue graduate work, the university that they attended had a similar story - except the "kissing" spot was on the seal of the university. Which of the following might describe this "strange" occurrence?

Professor Kimble thinks that her students lack enthusiasm and dedication to the class that she is teaching, so she decides to create a more competitive atmosphere so that students will engage and work harder. She decides to institute a classroom talent show, holds a class t-shirt design contest, and gives rewards for perfect attendance. In her attempts to manage her classroom's culture, we might say that Professor Kimble has a ______ understanding of organizational culture.

Studying culture is an experimental science.

Mark Zuckerberg's apology for Facebook's data breach scandals is best described as a rite of ______.

Joie's room overlooks a city park where local guys gather every evening to play pick-up basketball. Most afternoons, he watches the guys negotiate who gets to play, the rules of the game, and their rituals of picking team members, celebrating wins, and the occasional fight. Eventually, Joie starts to play with the guys. Now, he is able to pick out who the "new" guys are because they don't seem to know the rules or rituals, "how things work." Over time, the new guys learn the rules and bring new things to the court. Which of the following best describes how Joie has come to understand this culture?

______ metaphors provide powerful frames for organizational life.

Luis is fascinated by the ways in which pick-up basketball games are organized in the city park that his room overlooks - soon, he starts to play pickup basketball with the guys in his neighborhood. According to cultural anthropologists, Luis could simultaneously be studying this culture even while playing basketball.

Kelly and her 30-something friends occasionally use the phrase, "That's so college." Typically, they use this phrase to refer to something that only occurred during their four years at university: partying late into the evening, cramming all night for exams, stressing about grade point averages, and painting their faces and screaming obnoxiously at every home football game. Which of the following symbolic forms best refers to their sense that these things are "so college" and not a regular part of the culture of their post-college adult lives?

The cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s stayed outside of organization; young people were willing to adapt to the "old ways" or organization life at their workplaces.

Professor Snow has assigned a research project that asks you to study an organizational culture (from a purist point of view). Which of these projects do you imagine would best fulfill her expectations?

The existence of "culture boot camps" or intensive "cultural training" programs at workplaces attempt to ensure that a workplace has a single, unitary culture. Which form(s) of control are we most likely to see in this approach to organizing?

The relationship Donald Roy (1953) had to his co-workers in his famous ethnography of a manufacturing company can be described as ______.

White-collar work can be just as dehumanizing as ______ work.

The "metaphor" for organizational culture is the organism.

From a ______ perspective of organizational culture, organizations only exist insofar as organization members engage in communication activities.