ACCOUNTING AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES 339
across occupational groups. Commercial managers may appreciate accounting
rather differently to engineers, for example.
It is useful to think of societal cultures as emergent, unfolding through time^5
(Geertz, 1973; Douglas, 1966), and similarly with organizational cultures (Petti-
grew, 1985; Feldman, 1986). That is not to say that given cultures do not survive
for long periods, or that changes may be proactively managed: organizational
cultures probably have inertial tendencies (cf. Miller & Friesen, 1984), perhaps
sometimes not even incorporating changes in wider patterns of social thought^6 (cf.
Burns & Stalker’s, 1961, pathological responses in mechanistic firms). Rather, the
implication is that culture is not programmed or static. The processes of cultural
change in organizations are poorly understood, however. Perhaps cultural change
is a political process: subcultures competing with one another for legitimacy and
dominance (Pettigrew, 1985). Perhaps cultural change is akin to the diffusion of
organizational forms, whole fields of organizations rapidly adopting knowledge
innovations in leading firms (cf. Fligstein, 1990). Perhaps in a Kuhnian sense, cul-
tural change is precipitated by crisis: the adoption of new cultural knowledge only
being possible when faith is undermined, for example by the failure of strategies
for subsistence. Maybe new cultures are autonomously crafted in organizations
(cf. ‘‘groping’’ towards ‘‘solutions-in-principle’’ and their subsequent elaboration:
Mintzberg, 1978; Jonsson & Lundin, 1977); or perhaps they are already there,
‘‘lying around’’ in counter-cultures, waiting to be discovered by others (cf. Cohen
et al., 1972); alternatively, cultures may be imported from the environment through
new actors (cf. Starbuck & Hedberg, 1977).
Clearly, there are multiple modes and possibilities for cultural change. However,
the point of importance for this paper is the conceptualization of cultural change
as the uncoupling of organizational action from one culture and its recoupling
to another (cf. Greenwood & Hinings, 1988; Hedberg, 1981). It is a process of
fundamental reinterpretation of organizational activities. Things cease to be what
they were and become what they were not: a new reality, if you will. In the railway,
for example, the sacred train could turn into cold steel, or the priest-like general
manager could become an anybody. Moreover, this process of uncoupling and
recoupling is unlikely to be sudden, but emergent: the gradual disintegration of
one coupling and the crystallization of another. This crystallization may be around
an idea not fully understood, a kind of ill-articulated new knowledge, perhaps
imported from the environment. In the railway, this idea was a new accounting.
Research method
Arm’s length analysis is clearly inappropriate for cultural analysis of the kind
described here. Instead, it calls for closer engagement in the research setting and
(^5) Douglas (1966, p. 5) states: ‘‘...we think of ourselves as passively receiving our native language,
and discount responsibility for shifts it undergoes in our life time. The anthropologist falls into
the same trap if he thinks of a culture he is studying as a long established pattern of values’’.
(^6) There is a link here to the cultural adaptation literature (Harris, 1979), but it is not developed in
this paper; cf. Lawrence & Lorsch ([1967] 1969), Aldrich (1979).