Overview
What is organisational culture and how does it shape how we work? Why does the business world and organisations tend to misunderstand organisational culture? How can an ‘anthropological mindset’ give value to organisations? This webinar will set out to answer these three questions by blending a mixture of theoretical and practical approaches to understanding organisational culture; place and space, ritual, symbolism, impression management and conflict. I will show techniques on how to feedback ethnographic insights back to organizations through facilitation and how to empower organizations to understand the culture through multiple lenses through the SLAM cultural audit tool.
John Curran specializes in making organizations highly productive and people centric in order to achieve growth. He combines his expertise in anthropology, executive coaching, facilitation and service design to work with CEO’s, senior leaders and their teams to develop dynamic and collaborative organizational cultures that connect their values with those of their customers. John holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and have formal training in executive coaching (EMCC EQA), facilitation, organizational consultancy, qualitative market research, and group psychoanalysis. He is a guest lecturer at Cass Business School in marketing, a Visiting Scholar at the Royal College of Art in design anthropology, a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and a TEDx speaker.
References:
Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Daniel Beunza, Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of a Theory of Practice.”
Clifford Geertz, “The Interpretation of Cultures.”
Margert Heffernan, “Dare to Disagree.”
Henrietta Moore, Space, Text and Gender.
Sherry Orner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?“
Also of interest…
John Curran, “How Culture Is Messy and How That’s Good.” TEDxHull, June 5, 2017.
John Curran, “Big Data or Big Ethnographic Data: Positioning Big Data within the Ethnographic Space.” 2013 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings.
Decoding Culture with John Curran. “This Is HCD” podcast series.
Julia Katherine Haines, “The Ritual of Lean.” EPIC Perspectives, December 22, 2014.
Laura A. McNamara, “Organizational Culture as Lazy Sensemaking: What Ethnographers Can Do about Fundamental Attribution Error.” EPIC Perspectives, February 20, 2017.
Sam Ladner. “Bodywork and Productivity in Workplace Ethnography.” PechaKucha presented at EPIC2014, New York, New York.
