OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Symbolic Frame Worksheet

Noelle Marietta

OGL 481

Professor Willmott

Arizona State University

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the symbolic frame
2. Apply the symbolic frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

I helped plan my friend’s wedding, a small, simple, inexpensive, event. I’m going to
zone in on one specific situation, which is the reception or lack thereof. The bride and
groom wanted not necessarily a reception, but rather cake and drinks after the wedding.
Their goal was to take off for their honeymoon, as soon as possible after the wedding.
They only had three days as the bride was in the military and had to go to training for a
week after that three-day stretch. The groom’s mother was adamant that they must have a
meal after the wedding, this brought up the issue of extra cost, and lost time for the bride
and groom. The groom’s mother wanted to hire a caterer and split the costs with the
bride’s parents. This was causing stress as the mother of the bride struggled with the idea
of this added cost, the bride and groom were frustrated by the mother of the groom. The
mother of the bride is very non-confrontational and didn’t know how to just say no. In the
end, finger food prepared by the bride’s aunt was the compromise, and I avoided
throwing down with the mother of the groom. The biggest issue in all of this was the
mother of the groom’s inability to understand and respect the couple’s wishes.

2) Describe how the symbols of the organization influenced the situation.

For this situation I would say that the ceremony symbol is what we see at play here. The
wedding is literally a ceremony and it is tradition for a reception to follow with certain
aspects that we could say are ceremony, such as the cutting of the wedding cake. There is

1
 also the first dance, mother and groom, and bride and father dance, throwing of the
bouquet, etc. The reception is where family and friends get to celebrate the unification of
two people, it is a new beginning (Bolman and Deal, 2017). The reception is also where
the guests get to socialize, and talk to the other guests and the bride and groom. Taking
all of this into account I can see more clearly why the mother of the groom was so
adamant about having a meal after, if not a full blown reception. By not having the time
after the wedding, we were breaking tradition and possibly something she had been
looking forward to for a long time.

3) Recommend how you would use organizational symbols for an alternative course of
action regarding your case.

I don’t think we can change that the symbol is ceremony, but I do think it may have given
those in the situation, (including myself) a better perspective on why this was such a big
issue to the mother of the groom. We know that being able to see things from the other
person’s perspective can help in coming to a solution and reading this situation from the
perspective of this symbol has given me a new way to look at it.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

I would have used what I know now, to come to a solution more easily, and a better
fitting one possibly. I would have treated the mother of the groom as if she were a
customer and found out the parts of the reception that she found to be important. Then
using her criteria, worked to then still give the bride and groom what they wanted while
appeasing the mother and making her feel heard. At the heart of it, one might argue that
she simply wanted that time afterward to celebrate with her family her son getting
married.

Reference or References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and
leadership(6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass