The second screenside chat question or issue I want to address this week is actually one I didn't read in any particular post or any particular thread but in a variety of individual posts. And it was the fact that a lot of you are still hung up on culture, and you're wondering what kind of culture, because the notions of trust, the notions of finding the right network partners, etc., imply culture. And I think a lot of you are asking questions or mentioning culture in your posts this week again. And I wanted to kind of talk about that in relationship to organizational learning and in relationship to network forms of organizing, so that I think you see the kind of culture that this type of organizational theory implies. So the first one that I want to think about a little bit here, at least talk through, is when we think of networks within organizations, we typically think of more like an organizational learning kind of theory. And organizational learning had a particular kind of organizational culture in mind. It wasn't like a tech culture per se, about technologies and the kind of symbols associated with them, or this free-spirited kind of world where everybody has free food and the like. It was a culture that was reflexive on practice and its improvement. It was a culture about the process of improving work. So it's a very particular kind of culture. It wasn't stylistic in any way, like in terms of colors or themes or whatever. But the culture itself was focused on practices and rituals that concerned the core technology and reflection on improving it and remembering what worked and constantly assessing and discussing improvements on it. So that's a particular kind of culture and it entailed a particular kind of network. So we had a community of practice which was kind of a dense network of informal relations within the firm as well as a network of practice outside. So networks were there for sure, and a particular kind of culture, integrated perhaps on practice and the concern with improving practice. But beyond that it could be differentiated in terms of styles, whether you dress up or you dress down or what-have-you, okay? So it's kind of a focused feature of what the culture should be about. In network forms of organizing, here you have kind of an interorganizational culture that's implied. And often they're discussing in this theory an alliance or a family, or making sure everybody has shared values, right? So that kept coming up, but is it the same kind of culture as organizational learning? Not quite, but you notice that the kind of culture you need is, say, you're a management organization that coordinates all of these groups. And you're trying to create values that are shared between, say, the cafeteria workers, the janitors, the security people, the teachers, the counselors of a school or even a whole set of schools or a university or the like. And here you've subcontracted out each of these groups that are kind of paying and promoting these different sets of roles and individuals, right? So as a interorganizational network manager who's coordinating these groups, it's not so much that you have this integrated culture of sorts where everybody drinks the Kool-Aid and they talk about the Apple way or the Subway way, like a franchise. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, because quite a bit is subcontracted out. Nonetheless, you do need some kind of culture about integration, of openness about what everybody's doing, and sharing of their information, right, and the coordination of it and establishing complementaries and everybody doing their part kind of thing. So there's a culture about sustaining the network and the improvement of the network in kind of a learning way, but it's interorganizational. So it's intriguing to think about it, and it doesn't necessarily have to be as rich and dense and layered on like a cult. When we talked about organizational culture and organizational learning, it had that kind of feel. Here I don't think it's the same, but again there is something about culture going on. And I want to make sure that we kind of think about it. The culture is really one about concerning a process of network maintenance and care for alliance support. And there's clearly kind of efforts to ally, like you can imagine culture being different when you have multiple groups that are doing similar kinds of work, right? Because of the provision of services, maybe it's scale, you can't do it alone and in your organization that you need multiple providers, multiple neurology practices within this health partnership, right? And they may actually have more cultural mirroring and consistency across each other within that alliance. It makes sense that that could occur. But vertical differentiation, or vertical efforts at integration, or say across very distinct units, like say, the insurance companies and the actual partner health care provider, the physician groups. That those may be quite different in terms of their cultures within their units or within their firms, they can have an organizational culture that's about improving their practice. But within the network itself, the network form of organizing, there's also this kind of shared openness and a we-ness, this kind of sense of working together and affording a service that has more value to it because of being in that network. And there's even a shared notion of governance, right, that there's a sense of responsibility to sustain that network should any of the partners or any of those component organizations fall short of their obligations or should others arrive and the network feels could do a better job. As long as that collective norm is in place and perhaps being reinforced through some kind of interoganizational culture, whether you do that through company picnics, through meetings, through data sharing, through an integrated website and a variety of media technologies that you can use to facilitate that kind of communication between firms. It doesn't matter, that it just has this kind of, it has a learning feel to it. Like a culture between organizations, but it's not organizational learning culture, it's interorganizational network culture that would sustain it. And it's a little thinner, right, than the one that you see within an organization that's a cult. But both organizational learning and network forms of organizing seem to have a culture that's about a process of sustaining a network or improving practice, which is a more narrow-band notion of network, about a process, than about a style or about identities more generally that you would see, say, within a technology firm, or within, say, a pink-collar service provider firm or what-have-you. Those would afford even organizational culture to go even further than just the actual work process and its rituals and practices that reinforce that. So I just wanted to bring this up because organizational culture and notions of culture will keep coming back. And next week, in fact, we're going to talk about neo-institutional theory, which is about culture in the environment. And it's not a particular kind of culture about a process, like network forms of organizing might suggest, or what organization culture within, say, organizational learning might suggest. But it's probably going to be quite broader yet about beliefs in the environment. So let's keep an eye on that, but I think it's important to understand that these theories do speak to each other in certain ways, and I want to try to articulate that now and then. So thanks.
