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Cultural Approach to Organiztions Ch 22 Study Guide

Terms in this set (30)

On the classic NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope frequently tells stories about the importance of her role in the parks department. This is most clearly an example of a:
A. Personal story.
The cultural approach belongs most clearly to which traditions of communication theory?
A. Socio-cultural and semiotic.
The cultural approach seeks to understand organizations as members experience them.
A. True
Members of an organization constitute and reveal their culture through cultural performance.
A. True
According to the cultural approach, who determines the nature of the organization's culture?
A. The manager. B. Low-level employees. C. Outside consultants. D. None of the above.
Ethnography often takes a long time.
A. True
A cultural performance is:
A. An ensemble of texts.
Geertz is most well-known for his interpretive analysis of:
A. A Balinese cockfight
Griffin, Ledbetter, and Sparks speculate that scholarly interest in the cultural approach could be renewed by:
D. A researcher who can write ethnographic interpretation in a compelling manner.
Which of the following is an example of a ritual at a college or university?
A. The annual commencement ceremony. B. Singing the fight song at each home football game. C. Eating lunch every day at the campus cafeteria. D. All of the above.
Which research method do cultural approach scholars use when trying to understand an organization's culture?
B. Ethnography.
A coworker is telling a ________ when she warns that Bill and Janet over in accounting really don't like each other.
D. collegial story
If students of a prestigious university refer to a nearby "party school" as "the zoo," they are describing that organization by use of a metaphor.
A. True
Collegial stories are always negative.
B. False
When cultural approach scholars write about stories, they often use language such as, "This story means..."
B. False
Emiko is an organizational communication scholar. She studies corporate use of e-mail by counting how many e-mails each employee sends per day. Why would Pacanowsky think this approach is insufficient?
D. Counting e-mails doesn't give insight to the meaning of e-mails or the act of e-mailing.
Geertz refers to ethnography as:
A. Thick description.
What is one way that cultural approach scholars have justified the expense of their work, given that they believe that changing corporate culture is impossible?
B. Emphasizing the utility of understanding culture for organizational recruitment.
How can ethnographers check the validity of their claims?
C. Ask their participants to verify their conclusions.
A metaphor clarifies what is unknown by equating it with something more familiar or vivid.
A. True
Geertz uses which term from the world of bugs to describe human cultures?
D. Webs.
Critical theorists fault the cultural approach because it:
D. Does not pass moral judgment on the practices of organizations.
For Pacanowsky, a good synonym for culture is climate.
B. False
According to Pacanowsky, culture is:
C. The puzzle itself.
Griffin, Ledbetter, and Sparks suggest that, in the late 20th century, Western interest in corporate culture was driven by fascination with the success of which Asian country?
D. Japan
The website of the Smith Power Tool Company has a page that describes the story of the company's founding. This is an example of a:
B. Corporate story.
Sarah has been doing an ethnography of a local computer store for the past six months. She's filled ten notebooks with her observations. What must Sarah add to convert this thin description into a thick description?
C. Her own interpretation of the store's practices.
Pacanowsky initially used Geertz's ethnographic approach to understand which organization?
C.) W. L. Gore & Associates.
According to Pacanowsky, culture is something that every organization has.
B. False
Most ethnographers in the cultural approach want to give managers tools to more strongly control their organization's culture.
B. False
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