Decoding Culture: Tools for Behavioral Strategists

Özgecan Koçak () and Phanish Puranam ()
Additional contact information
Özgecan Koçak: Goizueta Business School, Organization & Management Area, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Phanish Puranam: Strategy, INSEAD, Singapore 138676, Singapore

Strategy Science, 2024, vol. 9, issue 1, 18-37

Abstract: It is uncontroversial for strategy scholars that culture matters for both strategy formulation and execution. Yet, the diversity of approaches and concepts for thinking about culture can prove daunting for operationalizing this insight. We introduce the concept of a “code”—a fuzzy mapping between two distinct sets of cognitive constructs—as a fundamental construct to study culture. The concept of a code, and the distinction between using a code versus expectations about the code others use, can be applied to study many different elements of culture both in terms of theorizing about them with precision and for empirical applications. Furthermore, we argue that a code-based perspective on culture is particularly useful from the normative, design-oriented stance that is characteristic of strategy. Using an example of creating stakeholder alignment around the problem of sustainability, a first-order challenge for business and society today, we show that the perspectives of culture as shared values and culture as a toolkit point to different interventions that are each likely to work under different conditions.

Keywords: managerial and organizational cognition; organization design; organizational learning; strategy formulation; strategy implementation; behavioral theory of the firm; organizational culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2022.0008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orstsc:v:9:y:2024:i:1:p:18-37

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Strategy Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().