CORPORATE POWER, POLITICS AND CULTURE

This module examines in depth both the conceptual and practical problems in political and cultural management. Explores ways in which corporate cultures both shape and are shaped by power and political activity within organisations, and their relationship with corporate effectiveness. Other areas covered include: the management of meaning; self-interest and its consequences; conflict management; impression management; gender and cross-cultural issues.
Studying this module, you will learn and understand:

• Organisations as political systems and cultural milieu. Forms of relationship between corporate culture, formal power, political management and organisational ideologies, and links with effective and ineffective organisational functioning.

• The nature, types and uses of power in organisations: visible and invisible power; actual and potential power (i.e. power as action vs power as the capacity for action); issue-control; the management of meaning (e.g. construction of profit and loss, construction of organisational causality); organisational rule - application and interpretation.

• Power and the management of conflict in organisations. Structural vs psychological conflict. Overt and covert conflict (e.g. autistic hostility, joking relationships and humour in organisational subcultures). Autonomy vs control in professional/bureaucratic conflict. The functions and dysfunctions of subcultural conflict.

• Organisational politics: interests, power, conflict and manipulation. Negotiated vs imposed outcomes, self-interest vs organisational interest. Types and strategies of organisational politicians (e.g. careerist, local/cosmopolitan, statesman/stateswoman). The role of subcultures - groups, cliques and coalitions - in organisational politics.

• Gender politics and corporate culture: power and types of powerlessness (e.g. women managers, secretaries), and the management of gender relations.  The role of gender in the shaping of formal and non-formal corporate power-relations. Political management in male and female dominated cultures (e.g. bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic forms of organisation; collective structures vs authority/hierarchy structures). Gender and marginalisation in professional cultures (e.g. law, health services, personnel management, Civil Service). Corporate culture and the management of inequality. Extra-organisational cultural influences on gender-roles in organisations.

• Political strategies and tactics. Political management skills (e.g. in decision-making/non decision-making, resource allocation, careers/management succession, budgets, coalition-formation). Political management and the perpetuation of power through obligation and dependence-creation (social exchange theory), and strengths and limitations of dependent subcultures as a power-base. Unobtrusive power as a political strategy.

Applied impression management as a political/career strategy (e.g. in organisational entry, performance appraisal, leadership, office design). Impression management as accountability.  Impression management strategies and the management of conflict. The role of gender and culture in applied impression management.

• The role of language in the formation, maintenance and change of corporate culture. Language as a medium of influence and as a reflection of organisational power-differences (e.g. in interviews, appraisals). Managing via talk: language as an instrument of organisational control. The analysis of organisational discourses in the construction of cultures and power-base (e.g. in relation to goals, training, corporate ideology). Narrative strategies in the presentation of management information. The discursive construction of gender.

• Cross-cultural comparisons of power, politics and conflict in organisations (e.g. Japan, USA, Europe - West and East). The role of national culture, work-attitudes and conscious/unconscious values in the management of e.g. inequality, gender, problem-solving, resistance to change.