Introduction

This document is part of larger project to bring the reality and theory of culture together. At its core it the website www.culturalcompetence.eu. The model used has the size of groups as its starting point, ranging from very large groups through larger and smaller groups to the individual.

The three major larger groups are business, government and civil society, each with their own basic motivation (private interest, public interest and idealistically respectively) with major consequences on organisational cultures (e.g. why government can only draw lessons from business to a limited degree). The link with culture started with companies, in particular in international trade. The idea was simple: the more you understand your partner, the better deal you can make. This orientation widened abroad to investment (daughter company, joint venture and so on) and at home to organisational culture and dealing with multicultural society. In the latter case the idea is that better internal co-operation enhances effectiveness and efficiency with higher motivation and satisfaction and decreasing absence. It has an impact on stakeholders and a link with strategy, structure and control.

Yet, progress in research and applications is slow, due to conceptual differences and reliable instruments. Furthermore, each possible instrument is only a starting point for understanding and working with a specific organisational culture. The quest for understanding organisational culture is a maze of disciplines, inductive–deductive, theories, methods, empirical testing, concepts, perspectives, axes, typologies, divergence and diversity, colours, observations, descriptions, interviews, questionnaires, aspects, games, change, functions and use, enculturation, relation with climate, strong and weak cultures, industry cultures, occupational cultures, project cultures and more. Not surprisingly, this maze results in insufficient exchanges between researchers, countries and disciplines.

Just one aspect of this discussion is the question (s) whether organisational culture is about values (and their consequences) or rather practices (how things are actually done); different starting point! The difficulty of researching values is discussed in Culture 6; practices differ from one company to another and are less easy to compare.

Companies need culture for doing business abroad, for dealing with multicultural society and for better understanding how things are done.