Please join us for our AOM Showcase Symposium on "Cultural Mixing and Match-Making: Examining the Interplay of Organizations and Audiences," sponsored by the OMT and MOC divisions. Our symposium aims to consider the mechanisms by which organizations foster cultural resonance and impact external stakeholders' behavior by examining whether and how audiences dynamically affect the cultural strategies or approaches organizations develop and deploy.
The symposium will take place on Tuesday morning, August 11, from 9:45AM to 11:15AM at the Vancouver Convention Center, Room 001, during this year's Academy of Management Meeting. The details of the symposium are included below. We hope to see you there!
Cultural Mixing and Match-Making: Examining the Interplay of Organizations and Audiences
Presenter:
Mary Ann Glynn, Boston College
Presenter:
Hayagreeva Rao, Stanford U.
Presenter:
Majken Schultz, Copenhagen Business School
Presenter:
Roy R Suddaby, U. of Victoria/ Newcastle U.
Organizer and Chair:
Christi Lockwood, Boston College
Organizer:
Isabelle Yi Ren, Boston College
Notions of culture as a toolkit (Swidler, 1986, 2001) and institutions as enablers of sensemaking and identity construction (e.g., Glynn, 2008; Weber & Glynn, 2006; Weick, 1995) have shifted researchers away from seeing culture as a constraint. Instead, scholars now tend to view culture as a symbolic resource deployed by individual and organizational actors to foster shared modes of behavior and outlook (Swidler, 2001). However, scholars have seldom considered how audiences dynamically affect the cultural strategies that organizations construct, deploy, and adjust over time. As a result, the management literature speaks little to "the mechanisms by which organizations achieve cultural resonance and affect behaviors of external stakeholders" (Giorgi, Lockwood & Glynn, 2015: 36). In this symposium, we bring together scholars whose work broadly explores how organizations use culture effectively in order to advance the conversation in this direction. We draw from research in multiple areas to examine: 1) how organizations may use culture to appeal to disparate audiences, 2) how audiences assess such strategies via both taken-for-granted assumptions and active sensemaking and interpretation, and 3) whether and how organizations and audiences may interact to co-create cultural meanings and practices over time. We aim to generate novel insights and identify promising avenues for research, with the objective of enlivening conversations about culture and audience in organizational life.
Christi Lockwood
PhD Candidate
Boston College, Carroll School of Management
Management and Organization Department