Issues in the cultural analysis of organisations.

The focus of the research is a cultural analysis of continuity and change at a heavy engineering plant of a multinational manufacturing corporation from the mid 1960's to the early 1990's. Substantively, the dissertation offers some views on the diffusion and institutionalisation of models of organisation, of managing, and of progress by exploring the genesis and impact of a particular model of organisation-making and cultural change (that of total quality) in the case-study plant. The fate of this managerial reform is explained with the help of historical and ethnographic data and by constructing an institutional model of the plant's symbolic environment. It is argued that a more complex mapping of culture and cultural change is required than is currently portrayed in the literature so that the relationship between cultural and organisational boundaries becomes part of the research problem rather than an (often implicit) input to the research design. Concerns about how to model and represent the plant and about which data and voices are to be considered valid constitute the main methodological debates. The dissertation aims to offer some methodological contribution to cultural analysis by providing accounts of three cycles of research activity. It is proposed that movement between these perspectives and their multi-method research practices is a way of juxtaposing micro and macro interpretations of organisation life and acknowledging issues of structure and agency.