'Doing' Organizational Culture in the Saturn Corporation

Organization Studies, Jan, 2001 by Terry L. Mills, Craig A. Boylstein, Sandra Lorean

Sandra Lorean [*]

Abstract

As we break loose from an urban-industrial way of life and become engulfed in technological, information-based worlds, this dramatic shift in reality pushes many of us towards feelings of intense crisis. The fragmentation of the macro-cultural framework enables a multiplicity of thought-styles to emerge. This rise of social multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy leads to aggressive criticisms of traditional modern culture and politics. Yet while there is a break from the rationalized, homogeneous modern world, the 'postmodern' world remains ambiguous. Deeply rooted within this struggle for meaning lies language and knowing. Reality is 'made real' through language and thought. One way to remain organized is through the manipulation of thought through language. How is a meaningful, stable existence conveyed in a world in which the taken for granted meanings and stability that were 'there' in modern settings now appear to be shattered? Our analysis of the Saturn Corporation, USA, focuses on th e organizational function of creating and re-creating the roles of producer, consumer, and product in a way that taps into a need for community and affiliation that is acutely felt in this time of rational crisis. Through the mechanism of storytelling, the Saturn advertisements create a grand narrative, weaving a tale that makes the existence of a single, family-like symbolic community between the Saturn corporation and the consumers of its product seem real to those intimately involved in acting out the story.

Descriptors: organizational culture, storytelling, community, postmodernism, poststructuralism

Introduction

This study was designed to examine the Saturn Automobile Corporation's organizational culture and its relationship to media advertising campaigns. Such campaigns are integral to the creation, enactment and dissemination of Saturn's organizational culture. Storytelling is the central mechanism for understanding the relationship between these advertisements and how official organizational culture is institutionally crafted. It is argued here that storytelling and advertisements are used by Saturn to construct a common stock of knowledge (this terminology originated in the work of Alfred Shutz) and a sense of 'community' among its internal (employees) and external (customers, suppliers, etc.) team members. This mutually produced storytelling system creates a stage upon which story performances serve as keying mechanisms that assist in replacing individual worlds with an official, institutional reality.

Why Organizations Tell Stories

When organizational members use storytelling to construct their position vis-a-vis the organization, they pick up on both the story themes and on the storytelling mechanisms presented in the advertisements. Out of these advertisements, individual consumers construct meaning within the organizational milieu and make sense of organizational events. As can be seen, the construction and choice of a certain story guides the way individuals symbolically process what Saturn is and means. There is a discipline (see Foucault 1978) in stories, in that stories serve as scripts which define actors, sequence plots, and interpret past and future experience (Boje 1995). The voices of such marginal actors as former employees and/or unhappy customers are excluded. In this sense, organizational grand narratives are also oppressive. Storytelling may be seen as explanatory myth making or conceptual constructions that interpret and frame organizational situations. They may be seen as a medium of interpretive exchange among all pa rticipating actors, in which those involved continually communicate, experience, and live to 'get the story straight' (Boje 1995). Storytelling may be understood as a 'fable' that 'is no longer a ritual that manifests; it is a sign that serves as an obstacle' (Foucault 1978: 94).

It should be noted, however, that some have described storytelling as an instrument for understanding the dynamics of corporate relationships, and to develop cultural creativity (Hansen and Kahnweiler 1993; Feldman 1990). Kaye and Jacobson (1999) identified storytelling as an instrument for disseminating shared meanings within organizations; while Vendelo (1998) suggests that it is a mechanism for enhancing corporate reputation and gaining legitimacy. In a study by Covin et al. (1994), they found that storytelling is used by organizations for the diagnostic phase of planned changes. Furthermore, some scholars claim that storytelling has been used as a key tool for employee empowerment (e.g. Block 1987; Conger and Kanungo 1988; Spreitzer 1995, 1996; Breuer 1998). Others see storytelling as a vehicle for helping corporate customers to understand how products can help them succeed (Shaw et al. 1998).

Storytelling as Motivation, Discipline, or Coercion?

This leads into the main issues of the current analysis. Does storytelling communicate the shared culture, beliefs, and history of a group? Furthermore, is it a proven motivational tool that is being used in corporations large and small to educate employees and to consolidate corporate culture? (Durrance 1997). As Boje and Dennehy (1994) have suggested, 'empowerment implies that you have been disempowered. To be disem-powered is to be on the margins, to be peripheral to power, and even to have access to power denied' (1994: 204). The conclusion of Boje and Dennehy is that much of what other scholars claim to be empowerment is merely a token exercise -- an illusion. Storytelling can be seen as a disciplinary technique used by organizations to subtly coerce individuals into obedience. Such education expressed through storytelling is a sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle training exercise. It is a lesson in how to perform obedient, disciplined manoeuvres.