Book essay on “leadership & cultural webs in organizations: Weaver's tales”

Changing organizational culture is a top priority for new senior managers but several obvious and hidden cultural elements interconnect to hinder and even entrap them. McLean (2013) draws from social anthropology with strong tribute to Clifford Geertz for defining organizational culture as sets of webs. Managers as weavers of organizational cultural webs attempt to understand threads made up of semiotics, semantics, structure and people — and to change them. Researchers as weavers become deeply immersed ethnographically within an organization to develop an overall storyline or fabric (meta-conversation) on examples of leadership seeking to effect change in organization culture. McLean encourages leaders to apply a cognitive rather than mechanistic approach to understanding and attempting to change organization culture. His approach is based on managers driving and researchers exploring thinking (framing), estrangement, rethinking (reframing), enactment and exemplification. Managers seek to stimulate organization cultural change collectively through being a weaver among weavers.