Organizational Structure & Culture

All talk about organizations relies on abstract conceptions, using words and their meanings, to make sense systematically of our experience and observations of people doing things together. A great deal of organizational life can be described and, more importantly, sometimes even understood, predicted, and influenced, with abstract ideas about structure and culture.

While there is no universal agreement or consistency in definitions of structural and cultural aspects of community organizations, grassroots organizers have some common usage and understandings.

Structural features of organization are formal, inflexible (except under special conditions and procedures), created and maintained by documentation, and contingency-centered: they set responsibilities, formal rights, and rewards or punishments on which individual behavior or group action is contingent. The structure is adopted “officially,” by explicit decision, on the basis of known rules and procedures. It determines how the organization is supposed to operate and for what purposes.

Usually we mean by organizational culture those features that are informal, flexible (but often long-lived), created and maintained by word-of-mouth, and ideology-centered: they define good and bad, winning and losing, friends and enemies, etc. The cultural definitions of people, circumstances, events, objects, facts, processes, information, and so on, are essential for organizational decisions and movement.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE & STRUCTURE

Structural Features                                                                 Cultural Features

Contingency-centred                                                                      Ideology-centered

Formal                                                                                          Informal

Fixed                                                                                            Flexible 

Documented                                                                                 Word-of-mouth

In practice, of course, it isn’t possible to separate structure and culture. So while we create organizational structure that spells out the positions to be filled by members of an organization, it’s mostly culture that defines the roles that go with those positions and the kinds of people who will fill them.

Structure

The basic “artifact” of organizational structure is written documentation—constitutions and bylaws. Usually these documents begin with the broad goals and purposes of the or-ganization, reflecting the core values and interests of the membership, constituency, or clientele.

Structural documentation may also spell out the organization’s main resource base. For instance, many organizations ordinarily define their “classes” of membership in their constitutions or bylaws, sometimes even specifying the amount of annual dues for each. Similarly, the documentation defines formal offices or positions in the organization. But this isn’t the same as labor division, that is, as specifying who does what actual work. The documentation may also limit tax-exemption alternatives.

Culture

Cultural aspects of organizations are generally thought of as those that evolve in conver-sation and are in flux, constantly changing. In most instances organizational culture de-fines what things mean, whether they’re valued as good or bad, right or wrong, and how things are to be done when answers can’t be fixed by formal structure, policy, or proce-dure.

Within larger structural goals, it’s the culture that carries organizational objec-tives. While the broad purposes of grassroots organizing are to bring together low- and moderate-income families for their political, economic, and social interests, goals that are laid out in basic documents, it’s our more specific and immediate objectives for organiz-ing membership drives, campaigns on issues, and program development that bring those goals to life. The objectives themselves are mostly within the culture of the organization.

The culture also promotes “operational ideologies,” the meanings for contingen-cies in the organization’s daily action life. In contrast to basic values, it’s the transient operational ideology—formed, shaped, and transmitted in the course of common experi-ence and discussion about that experience—that defines a double-talking city hall bu-reaucrat or a corporate flack-catcher as “no friend of the neighborhood.”

Community Organizing Practice

One way to get a better practical understanding of structure and culture in community organizations is to look at grassroots organizing committees, the forerunners of many neighborhood associations and congregational organizations. Organizing committees are the keystones in new organizations. The O.C. isn’t just the chronological mainspring of events that lead to an organization; it also shapes and often permanently sets the incipient organization’s structure and culture. In fact, the failure of novice organizers and develop-ers to recognize the impact of structure and culture—some rely almost exclusively on personal relationships and exhortation—accounts for a long list of organizational problems