RESEARCHING ORGANISATIONAL

CULTURE – A CASE FROM SLOVENIA

Dr. Justina Erčulj

National School for Leadership in Education, Slovenia

University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper, Slovenia

The researcher

• 30 years in education• Teacher, deputy head teacher, head teacher,

lecturer, co-ordinator of international projects…

• Mother of two adult children

The structure of my presentation

• Why such a research was done?• Two aspects of organisational culture• Two aspects – two research paradigms• Challenges for qualitative research in

Slovenia• Steps in the research• Researcher’s dilemmas • Key findings

3

Why the research was done?

• The feeling of culture – me as a teacher, a deputy head teacher, a parent…

• Culture as a vague concept – me as a small-scale researcher

• Culture ‘in situ’ – me as a lecturer in schools

• Culture and the claim for recipes – me as a head teachers’ trainer

Two aspects of organisational culture

• Culture as something an organisation HAS – managerial view

• Culture as something an organisation IS – anthropological view

Managerial aspect

• Shared assumptions, systems, values• Behavioural regularities• Common set of rules• ‘Strong’ and ‘weak’ cultures• Typologies

Anthropological aspect

• Uniqueness of an organisation• Emerging from collective interaction• Dynamic relationships• Organisations as multiple identities

Two aspects – two paradigms

• Managerial aspect – “the pressure for certainty” (Simons 1996): questionnaires, diagnostic tools, existing : preferred, ranking, figures - quantitative

• Anthropological aspect – “narrative analysis” (Hammersley and Gromm 2000): observations, interviews, interpretation - qualitative

Challenges for qualitative research in Slovenia

• Scientific knowledge understood in Popperian sense: “the world of objective theories, objective problems, and objective arguments” (Popper 1979: 108)

• In 1982 first qualitative (action) research published in Slovenia followed by some other action research studies (“randomly qualitative”)

Challenges for qualitative research in Slovenia

• Attributes related to qualitative studies in Slovenia: ‘alternative methodological principles’ (Toš 1999), ‘pseudoscience’ (Kirn 1996), ‘private matter that allows [researchers] an individual opinion’ (Ule 2000)

• Qualitative and quantitative paradigms as complementary – but: “Hypotheses that have been developed during research process in an inductive way should be tested in a theoretical way with the help of ‘external’ theory in a deductive way” (Sagadin 2001)

Case study as the selected research method

• It “recognises the complexity and ‘embeddedness’ of social truths” (Adelman 1980) and is related to “emphasis on interpretation” (Stake 1995).

• 2 schools: E (effective), S (silent)

‘Structure’ of the research

E and S schoolhead teacher

teachers artefacts

My challenges

• Stuggling with my own understanding of ‘reality’

• The ‘laden-I’ (Peshkin 1988)• Validity of my research in a quantitatively-

oriented research community• Ethical concerns – S school

Data collection

• Documentary analysis (school brochures, schools’ annual plans)

• Observation (final ceremony, the first school day)

• Interviews

The problem of validity

• Uniqueness of the case study – little (no?) capacity for generalisation

• The issue of the relationship between the researcher, the researched and the reader

• Internal validity: triangulation of data, reflexivity on my bias

Schools in public documents

• tables and figures• ‘language of quantification’• ‘universalism’• ‘bureaucratic nature of the school’

Schools in public events

• perfect organisation• projection of unified beliefs• “less about what [schools] are like than

about what they should be like” (Parker, 2000)

Schools in teachers’ stories

• diversity of patterns• “issue-specific coalitions” (Martin, 1992)• stories influenced by teachers’ personal and

professional experiences – local stories

Schools in head teachers’ stories

• E School: control, external accountability, ‘economy of performance’

• S School: powerlessness, metaphors

BUT• Cultural gatekeepers • Little consideration of teachers’ voices

Two cultures of schools

PRIVATE CULTURE

PUBLIC CULTURE

symbols

publ

icat

ion

rituals

rules

build

ing

meanings

Questions for discussion

• What are current challenges for research in your country?

• How would you approach studying organisational culture?