Rethinking Culture

David G. White, Jr., Ph.D. is a cognitive anthropologist who has spent his career working in large organizations as well as entrepreneurial start ups. He is a co-founder of and principal in ONTOS Global, a boutique consulting firm in the alignment of business strategy, change and organizational culture.

"David G. White, Jr. maps out a provocative journey into the multidisciplinary possibility of holding an integral understanding that finds new meanings in useful theories. Supported by an extremely thought-provoking framework, White insists on a more up-to-date and unified approach to culture and change. This exciting and well-researched book steps beyond the thought boundaries within which organizational culture and cognition are usually confined. He is not willing to accept today’s challenges and conflicts as intractable. And he doesn’t want us to accept them either."—Brenda B Jones, Co-editor, NTL Handbook for Organization Development and Change; recipient of the OD Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award"Imagine an anthropologist studied your culture through the eyes of your employees and asked them to describe the purpose and workings of your organization. David J. White Jr. did just that, and he shows how those descriptions reveal that many "cultures" exist in every organization, and they may not be as "manageable" as you think. His scholarly argument suggests evidence that culture emerges from the logic models or "schemas" that help people make sense of the organization and their place in it. For example, is your organization a "machine" or an "organism?" Is something "true" only when experienced, or can truth emerge from extrapolation? This perspective on culture has profound implications for whether and how culture can be shaped and directed, and takes you beyond the hype that culture can be everything and anything."—Dr. John W. Boudreau, Professor and Research Director,Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California"David G. White, Jr. charges into the crowded morass of organizational culture with a keen eye and a sharp machete in hand. This thorough and provocative book offers no easy answers or quick fixes. Rather it challenges the reader to explore the terrain of cognition, practice and language, which are the most perceivable and visible instantiations of true (not espoused) organizational culture. Like Gideon Kunda, White seeks out the deeper structures of culture and thus presents a very innovative and compelling perspective on this most impactful dimension of organizational life."—Eric Rait, Principal, Honeycomb Development"David G. White Jr.’s thoughtful, hard-working and intelligent treatise sounds a cautionary note to current thinking about ‘organizational culture,’ and opens up a fresh, provocative perspective on this popular topic."—Robert Kegan, Meehan Research Professor of Adult Learning,Harvard University Graduate School of Education,and Co-author, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

• Part 1: Functionally Embodied Culture1. What’s Wrong with Organizational Culture?2. The Nature of Grounding: Embodied Cognition, Schemas and Analogical Transfer3. Motivated Meaning: Cultural Schemas and Hierarchies4.Functionally Embodied Culture: The Professional and Strategic Grounding of Organizational Culture Part 2: Cultural Schemas in a Diversified Industrial Manufacturer5. Investigating Schemas: Contexts, Methods and Challenges6. Seeing Schemas: Research at IMCO7. Where Culture Comes From: Functional Grounding and its Affordances8. Functionally Embodied Culture: Possible Limits, or Limitless Possibilities?