Essays on Culture and Coordination
Culture is both mechanism and outcome of coordinated social action. First, culture enables people to come together and act in a collective fashion—enabling coordination both within and across teams in organizational settings. Second, coordinated action produces, shifts, and reinforces culture over t...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155910 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5827-9652 |
| Summary: | Culture is both mechanism and outcome of coordinated social action. First, culture enables people to come together and act in a collective fashion—enabling coordination both within and across teams in organizational settings. Second, coordinated action produces, shifts, and reinforces culture over time. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between culture and coordination through three studies. In Chapter 1, I examine how employees from different areas of functional expertise can work together to create a shared culture enabling further coordination. Leveraging ethnographic data from an academic research setting, I find that safety professionals enacted a shared culture of safe and sustainable research by teaching researchers how to integrate safety and sustainability into their research, rather than handling compliance tasks for them. In Chapter 2, co-authored with Ray Reagans, we examine how managers and firms can foster cultures that enable individuals from various underrepresented groups to succeed. Organizations face a tradeoff in managing diversity: individuals from different stigmatized groups prefer different diversity cultures because they are represented at different levels within organizations. We find that organizations can align individuals from different groups to perform better under the same culture by focusing on a general sense of individuation, allowing them to move beyond the tradeoff grounded in representation. Specifically, we find that organizations can do this by creating a culture that frames each person as an individual rather than a member of a group and in turn valuing equality of all individuals regardless of background. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine how individuals online allocate their attention to various cultural tastes. I find that, in the online world, freedom of exploration allowing individuals to participate across multiple communities enables connections to form between generic and specialty communities, which would otherwise rely on separate audiences in the offline world. While the internet may not shift the overall distribution of attention away from generic communities toward a greater variety of specialty communities, it enables cross-cutting discussion and engagement across these communities, increasing exposure to diverse tastes. |
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