During the Human Relations era (1930s-1960s), the formal organization (rules, procedures, performance evaluations, pay system, disciplinary system, etc.) was contrasted to the informal organization (groups norms, informal work methods, the grapevine, informal rewards, etc.). These two were viewed as natural and symbiotically intertwined. Crackdowns were sometimes conducted by management to stop what was informally going on, only to see things go back to "normal" soon after. Greater bottom-up input was sometimes recommended by human relations researchers to lessen the gap between the two.
More recently (1990s-date), differences between the official culture (the overt and explicit), and the operating culture (tacit and implicit) have been described. To lessen the gap, consultants have told managers they might employ better initial training, provide better supporting documentation, improve communication processes and undertake team building exercises.
Are these two analyses talking about different things, or are people simply using different jargon to talk about much the same things?
Formal and Informal Organization Citations
Barnard, C. I. (1938). The Functions of the Executive. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Roethlisberger, F. J. and W. J. Dickson 1939. Management and the Worker. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Dalton, M. 1959. Men Who Manage. Wiley: New York.
Official and Operating Culture Citations
Ingersoll, V. H. and Adams, G. B. (1992). The tacit organization. Greenwich, CA: Wadsworth.
Gibson, J. C. Ivancevich, J. M. and Donnelly, J. N. (2000). Organization: Behavior, Structure, Processes. Boston: Irwin, McGraw-Hill.
Franklin, A. L., and Pagan, J. F. (2006), “Organization Culture as an Explanation for Employee Discipline Practices,” Review of Public Personnel Administration, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 52–73.
Dear Prof. Bruce, your question is highly relevant and praiseworthy. The explanation which you have given has probably in-built answer of the question. The prominent one i.e. Human Relations era is still in use though could be through different names. In a bureaucratic structure organization which you have called official culture is more prominent in government/public sector whereas the operating culture applicability is more frequent in private sector. However basic philosophy remains the same that role of human beings and human relations in organizational setting can never be undermined whether directly or indirectly.
I think I understand what you are looking for, I have some general and specific journals below....interesting study:
Schneider, B., Brief, A. P., & Guzzo, R. A. (1996). Creating a climate and culture for sustainable organizational change. Organizational dynamics, 24(4), 7-19.
Buchanan, D., Fitzgerald, L., Ketley, D., Gollop, R., Jones, J. L., Lamont, S. S., ... & Whitby, E. (2005). No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(3), 189-205.
Hardy, C. (1996). Understanding power: bringing about strategic change. British Journal of Management, 7(s1), S3-S16.
Burns, J. (2000). The dynamics of accounting change inter-play between new practices, routines, institutions, power and politics. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 13(5), 566-596.
Great question. I do believe that the two variables, culture and formality, are related but not continuously. I just tried a 2X2 table with formal/informal as one set of marginals and official/operating culture as the other and found that I could think of real world examples of all four possibilities - especially intriguing (to me) is the informal/official culture setting where behind-the-scenes attacks on suspected non-believers occur.
I think revisiting Weber's work on the development of organisations and bureaucratic structures is important. Please also read Alvin Gouldner's seminal writings which form the bedrock of our understanding of how unofficial organisations and subjectivity works in framing informal organisations.
I agree totally with Punia and Paulson. Both have given a best answer for your question.
Hallo Prof Bruce Your question is deep rooted. This has invoked a thought provoking debate. Both the concepts are nearly the same but lens to see through the perspective is different. Relationship of Humans and informal or formal Organizations is a conceptual reality and gap between the two is a practical reality. The strategic existentiality of the organizations lies in its faith in humans. The French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre has argued that individuals act in ‘bad faith” when forced by outside societal forces.
Organizations are collective existences which have life, will and choice of their own. They face turbulent social, economic, ecological and technological conditions in which they make choice which reflect their authentic being or a false positioning in the environment. Like individuals, organizations also experience “bad faith” and behave falsely in the wake of realities which require authentic and free choices from them. The collective identity, existence and behavior of the organizations trapped in “bad faith” condition is shaped by this “for-itself” false consciousness. This false consciousness borne out of a collective state of bad faith erodes the vitality, creativity and growth of the organizations. The persistence of this organizational state of bad faith leads to decline, inefficiency and ultimate demise of organizations.
World is an organization in which events occur in good or bad faith. Human society is erected around the idea of good or bad faith, within that it has socio and cultural norms, standards and roles which people have to adopt to develop a harmonious environment based on mutual trust and confidence.
I think organisational culture is too complex an issue to limit to two dimensions or divisions. As a starting point, Edgar Schein's model of culture has three levels - artifacts, values and beliefs - none of which would directly map on to the formal/informal organisation or the official/operating culture dimensions. An approximation would be the official culture is observable through the artifacts and values but the operating culture would be found by investigating the work attitudes and beliefs of the people employed.
As Muhammad Maqsood Khalid has stated above "Organizations are collective existences" and there will be an interaction between the formal and informal organisation and the official and operating culture which would result in the overall culture of the organisation.
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I was quite familiar with the references to formal and informal organization from Human Relations. I first ran into the reference to the official and operating cultures in Franklin and Pagan (2006), which is an article dealing with discipline in the public sector. This article did not mention the older formal and informal organization. The Library at my school did not have copies of the other two references that I thought were the original source of this official and operating culture from the way Franklin and Pagan used these references. I did obtain copies of these books via a inter-library loan program. Ingersoll and Adams (1992) wrote about a public sector case where the state of Washington bought a Ferry system and placed it under the control of the Department of Transportation (DOT), which was highway oriented. The marine and highway cultures both were present for some time. The highway culture tried to exert control and for quite some time the marine culture resisted. Ingersoll and Adams (1992) stress Mega-patterns and Mega-myth. This did not strike me as quite the same thing as the official culture and the operating culture. If one thought about the marine area, I could see how the official highway culture was quite different from the marine operating culture. The authors, though, did not use these terms. The other book, Gibson, Ivancevich and Donnelly (2000), is a Organization Theory text book. There are many editions. I did not realize this until the book that showed up was not printed in the same year as the cited text, because Franklin and Pagan did not list an edition. In any case, I once again could not find any usage of the official culture and the operating culture. I now believe this terminology was created by Franklin and Pagan (2006) and they may have been inspired to some degree by earlier works, such as Ingersoll and Adams (1992).
I spoke to Steve Paulson about his 2X2 idea. It took him some time to recall the examples that he mentioned jotting down. In the end, he was thinking about a particular organization fitting more in one cell than another. When I initially read his idea, I interpreted it differently. I was thinking if I could list examples from different cases that I had gathered in the past fifteen years with pieces falling in each of his proposed cells. It took me some time to do this, but I think I have done so.
I could comment at some length on some of the other contributions. For example, I am familiar with Schein (1985). Many people largely ignored his chapter dealing with the content and levels of culture (cultural dimensions) (pages 85-111). What Schein descibed in this chapter was actually based on the earlier work of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961). I am one of the few people who has applied these sorts of cultural dimensions in a number of different articles. I have used cultural dimensions to contrast several different organization models (Fortado, 1992), compare four different approaches to organization culture (Fortado and Fadil, 2012), and in a case study of a bank, to show the conflicting aspects of the former service culture with the new sales culture (Fortado and Fadil, 2014). Anyone who is interested in such things can download these articles from my page. Thank all of you for helping me puzzle my way through the issues mentioned above. Bruce
Your question may find some answers in the Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman's work. The model of "semiosphere" proposed by Lotman describes the relationship between a "center" standardized, official, believed to have legitimate authority but still threatened to become ossified, and a "periphery": creative, dynamic, but not normalized according the criteria of the "center". See :
Youri Lotman, La Sémiosphère, Presses universitaires de Limoges, 1999 and L'Explosion de la culture, Presses universitaires de Limoges, 2004.
"On the semiosphere" , in Sign Systems Studies, 33(1) 2005, p. 205–229, and
Culture and Explosion. ("Semiotics, Communication and Cognition" 1.) De Gruyter Mouton, 2009..
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