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Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain by

Joanne, Martin

Article  in  Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis Research and Practice · January 2002

DOI: 10.1023/A:1015468409408

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 Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 4: 217-221, 2002
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands.

Book Reviews
Martin, Joanne. (2002). Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002.

WARREN THORNGATE
Carleton University, Psychology Department, 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada

We who attempt to compare policies or the processes by which they are made
occasionally yearn for new concepts, methods, metrics, or other tools of com-
parison. Most of our current comparative tools are borrowed from economics
and political science, a few from psychology, history, business, or elsewhere.
Most have been dulled by years of use. The old tools often fail to deliver the
emotional rewards of understanding that they did in our youth. The excitement
of using freshly learned tools for our first policy comparison often gives way to
the boredom of using the same old concepts in the same old ways. Questions
the old tools answer well lead to others they answer poorly or not at all, and
lead us into the temptation of new tools, new perspectives.
One congeries of new perspectives can be found between cultural anthropol-
ogy and organizational studies, a collection agglutinated around the concept of
organizational culture. Studies of organizational culture attempt to address or-
ganizational behavior by examining cultural features of the organizations them-
selves. There is no paucity of writing about organizational culture. The Internet
retailer www.amazon.com lists 343 books with the term in the title, and the
term coughs up over 600,000 hits from the search engine www.google.com.
Analyzing the culture of one's organization has become something of a man-
agerial fad, one reminiscent of analyzing one's managerial style, personality, or
IQ. Many business schools, eager to exploit new concepts for MBA marketing
advantage, offer courses on the topic, often paired with leadership courses.
Folderol aside, the concept of organizational culture is sufficiently respectable
and rich to tempt many policy researchers yearning for new analytical tools, cu-
rious to discover what understanding can be squeezed from organizational cul-
ture comparisons of policymaking among bureaucracies within nation states.
Such researchers can benefit no end from a read of Joanne Martin's lucid ac-
count of assorted perspectives and debates among the subcultures of those
who study organizational culture. Now Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organiza-
tional Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, Martin
is well qualified to outline the field. With a background in social psychology,
she has written extensively on organizational behavior and culture from several
perspectives. Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain is her third book in
the area.
218 THORNGATE

Martin states that her primary goal of writing the book is "... to open readers'
minds about new ways to think about and study cultures so that culture can
be understood in different and deeper ways [hoping to] improve the range and
quality of cultural research that is done by organizational scholars" (p. 19). In
pursuit of this goal, Martin organizes the first of three sections of her book
around several dilemmas, paradoxes, and points of debate that characterize
the study of culture and its application to organizations. Many of these points
begin with differences in the definition of culture and reach as far as the politics
of publication. For example, functionalists who define culture as a collection of
variables, such as individualist-collectivist or hierarchical-egalitarian, pursue
quite different questions about organizational culture in quite different ways
than do interpreters who define culture as a pool of metaphors and symbols
in need of interpretation. Other differences include emic (insider) versus etic
(outsider) explanatory preferences and interests in broad generalization across
many organizations versus deep understanding of a few. These cleavages, and
the rancorous debate that they often stimulate (Martin's term is "culture wars"),
are reminiscent of those dividing a sister discipline a century ago. Should psy-
chology be the study of behavior or the study of experience? The answer had
implications not only for content but also for methods, epistemologies, and
curricula. Historical accidents and academic politics split psychology into a
North American, behavioral tradition and a European, experiential tradition, still
noticeable and not yet reconciled.
Martin attempts to organize an analogous division of organizational culture
research not by continent but by perspective or point of view. In her words,
"The integration perspective focuses on those manifestations of a culture that
have mutually consistent interpretations.... The differentiation perspective fo-
cuses on cultural manifestations that have inconsistent interpretations.... The
fragmentation perspective conceptualizes the relationship among cultural man-
ifestations as neither clearly consistent nor clearly inconsistent" (p. 94, italics
hers). She clarifies the three categories with examples that nicely review re-
cent organizational culture literature, including some addressing the issues of
power and research values. She then argues for her belief that all three must
be represented for a good understanding of the culture of an organization.
Martin's ecumenical argument reminds me of one well made long ago in the
much different discipline of population biology. Richard Levins (1966) argued
that population changes were governed by phenomena so complex and so
intricately connected that no single perspective could capture the whole. As
a result, Levins suggested that we waste our time debating the superiority of
one perspective over another and waste our talent adopting only one as our
own. Understanding complex phenomena, he suggests, does not come from
peeling away falsehood to reveal a single true point of view, but from articulat-
ing as many points of view as are required to make sense of the complexities
observed—rather like walking around a sculpture to see all sides. Because cul-
tures, including organizational cultures, show every sign of being at least as
BOOK REVIEWS 219

complex as populations, Martin's variation of Levins' argument seems sensible

indeed.
Ecumenical arguments are seductive until research must be done. How does
one conduct research from several perspectives? How does one report it?
Partial answers come from the second and third sections of Martin's book:
"doing culture research" (Chapters 7-9), and "exploring the edges of cultural
theory" (Chapters 10 and 11). Included are good discussions of the strengths
and limitations of research done with numbers or words, the advantages and
difficulties of longitudinal studies, and the importance of clear writing.
Policymaking researchers seeking a collection of organizational culture vari-
ables to cut and paste in an upcoming questionnaire will find none here. Martin
provides neither a cookbook of cultural research recipes nor a training manual.
She instead provides a fine tour and consumer guide to the range of often com-
plementary, sometimes competing, concepts from the organizational culture
research traditions. Because policymaking research is inherently multidisci-
plinary, it advances in part by skillful use of concepts from several disciplines.
The book offers a readable and well-balanced account of the strengths, weak-
nesses, and assumptions necessary to make skillful use of tools of those who
study organizational culture.

Reference

Levins, R. (1966). 'The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology." American Scientist 54,
421-431.

Budge, Ian, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and

Eric Tanenbaum. (2001). Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for
Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. Laver, Michael (ed). (2001). Estimating the Policy Positions of
Political Actors. London: Routledge.

PAUL V. WARWICK
Simon Fraser University, Professor of Political Science, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

These two volumes address one particular measurement issue that has plagued
students of democratic regimes for some time: how to measure the policy po-
sitions of political parties and the governments they form. The resolution of this
issue is essential for assessing the degree to which parties represent and im-
plement the preferences of their voters. It is also critical for the more specialized
task of developing and testing theories capable of predicting which coalitions
are likely to take office in legislatures that have no majority party (which is the
norm in West European systems) and how long they are likely to survive in
power.
220 WARWICK

Both volumes take the approach that the way forward in measuring party
positions is to content-analyze the published manifestos or platforms of politi-
cal parties. Mapping Policy Preferences represents the accumulated efforts of
the Manifesto Research Group (MRG), a collection of mainly European scholars
that has coded the electoral manifestos of parties in 25 developed democracies
since the end of World War II. The group has also undertaken a more limited
effort to code the government declarations of coalition governments for a sub-
set of these countries and elections, thus allowing a comparison between what
coalition governments say they will do and what their member parties want
them to do. Both data sets are included on a CD-ROM that accompanies the
volume; the articles are mainly concerned with explaining how the coding was
done and showing that it gives accurate results—at least in terms of measuring
party positions on a left-right dimension.
The issue of accuracy is not simply one of assessing whether the MRG inter-
prets and codes manifestos reliably; there is a larger issue of validity at stake.
The MRG approach is based on a "saliency" interpretation of political com-
petition, which sees individual parties as "owning" various issues. Under this
interpretation, parties do not take opposite sides on contentious issues but
rather seek to identify themselves with certain issues that they stress in their
declarations, avoiding mention of issues identified with other parties. If this is
so, then a party's relative position can be identified by counting the amount of
attention it devotes to various issues in its manifesto. The MRG has identified
56 issues with cross-national relevance and codes the proportion of sentences
in each manifesto devoted to each of these issues.
Not everyone accepts the saliency interpretation, however. The MRG has ad-
dressed this concern by including among its 56 categories a substantial number
that represent opposite sides of the same issue (e.g., "traditional morality: pos-
itive" and "traditional morality: negative"). To its critics, this compromise under-
cuts the theoretical integrity of the enterprise; as Budge shows (p. 83), however,
it is usually the case that one side of these bipolar items is usually mentioned
far more than the other side, consistent with the saliency interpretation.
Notwithstanding Budge's efforts to defend the MRG coding scheme, which
appears in both volumes, much of the volume edited by Laver is devoted to
exploring alternative computer-based coding schemes. Computerization holds
the promise of greatly speeding up the coding process, especially if the raw data
can be entered simply by scanning in published documents. But computer cod-
ing may not be more accurate: while computers can count flawlessly, they are
much less adept at grasping context. The.consequence is that computer coding
schemes are generally based on counting words rather than sentences or quasi-
sentences (as the MRG does), with an inevitable loss of meaning. Even this
simplification does not eliminate the problem, since the meaning of individual
words often depends on context. As Ray (p. 152) observes, the character string
"lead" might refer to the "act of giving direction or impulsion" or to "a heavy
ductile metal". This may be the reason why the attempts to use computerized
BOOK REVIEWS 221

codings of manifestos to develop left-right party positions for several European

countries, as reported in the Laver volume, do not yet demonstrate a clear
superiority over the efforts of the MRG.
A potentially more fruitful strategy, discussed in the Laver volume in chapters
by Ray and by Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, would be to use a probabilistic
computerized coding. This involves the coding (by humans) of the sentences
in a "seed" set of manifestos into a number of policy categories and then the
calculation of the frequency with which various key words appear in each cat-
egory. This creates a "probability dictionary" that indicates each key word's
likelihood of belonging to each of the defined policy categories. Whenever a
key word is encountered in a new text, the computer can then assign it to the
various categories based on these probabilities. For instance, if the coding of
seed manifestos revealed that the word "restraint" was used 70% of the time
in the context of government spending and 30% of the time in the context of
social morality, each use of the word in a new document could be attributed
with a weight of 0.7 to the government spending category and 0.3 to the social
morality category.
The quality of the results of any computerized content analysis will clearly
depend on the quality of the initial human coding: the basic idea is that humans
interpret context and meaning in a set of seed documents so that computers can
apply that contextual understanding to other documents. Given the level of en-
thusiasm for computerized coding evident in the Laver volume, we may expect
new data sets based on these strategies to appear in the near future. Whether
they will prove to be superior to the MRG's efforts remains to be demonstrated;
in the meantime, we have the MRG data available to all in a very usable format.
The two volumes together demonstrate that a lot of serious and creative
effort is being devoted to the issue of measuring policy positions from mani-
festos. One clear advantage that manifesto-based measurement has over as-
sessments based on surveys of experts, the most commonly used alternative,
is that it makes it possible to track changes in party positions over time. How-
ever, we should also note that almost all the assessment of accuracy is based
on the ability to reproduce (well-known) left-right positions; it has yet to be
shown that manifestos can yield good estimates of positions on other relevant
policy dimensions. In addition, much less effort has been put into assessing
the declared policy positions of governments; the MRG's coding (the only one
now available) covers just 12 countries and extends only to the mid-1980s.
The correspondence between the positions of coalition governments and the
positions of the parties that compose them remains relatively underexplored
as a result. And, of course, the issue that is likely to be of paramount interest
to policy analysts—what policies do governments actually implement?—is not
addressed at all in these data collection efforts.

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