Studying symbolism in organizational settings

Sierk Ybema, Merlijn van Hulst, and Dvora Yanow

Prepared as Chapitre 2.5 « Les symboles et les objets symboliques dans les organisations: quand l’outil devient une médaille… », for La Theorie des Organisations: Les Tendances Actuelles, reds. François-Xavier de Vaujany, Anthony Hussenot et Jean-François Chanlat. Paris: Economica.

Organizational scientists analyse patterns and processes in organizational life through such concepts as power, culture, identity, institutions, and so forth, notions that are not directly observable. What organizational researchers directly engage in their analyses of these concepts are the sayings, doings, and things that organizational actors generate and use. Much of what organizational science offers is thus based on analyses of language, acts, and objects that are in some way meaningful to those actors – such organizational artefacts as a friendly greeting in the corridor, a story about ‘the good old days’, gossip about a manager’s alleged fraud in his previous job, an organizational chart. In this chapter we engage the processes through which language, acts, and objects come to be treated as symbolic in everyday organizational life. How do organizational actors make (or unmake) meaning through talk, acts, and things? And how do social scientists make meaning of such meaning-making efforts? 

Organizations are filled with human artefacts that work symbolically in representing and thereby communicating collective organizational meanings. Attention to the symbolic dimensions of organizational life began to develop in the late 1970s, as scholars became increasingly aware of the limitations of the technical-rational character of theorizing in organizational studies and began searching for alternatives. Importantly, this search coincided with intellectual ferment across the social sciences in general as theorists turned from structural-functionalism and took on board the challenges for empirical research posed by hermeneutics, phenomenology, and related philosophies: the so-called “interpretive turn.” The turn to interpretive philosophies and methodological presuppositions included “taking language seriously” (White 1992), treating it not as a transparent referent to what it designated, but as representative, potentially, of a wide range of meanings. This representative character is, as we shall see, what makes something “symbolic”; that is, as carrying or conveying some meaning other than its “literal” meaning. In empirical social scientific studies, including organizational studies, the analysis of symbolism has focused not only on language, but also on acts and objects.

Organizational symbolism became popular in organizational studies in roughly the same era as other meaning-focused concepts entered the field, primarily the idea of “organizational culture” (Smircich 1983, Frost et al. 1985). From the beginning, organizational culture studies identified symbols as the ways in which cultural meanings were created, manifested, communicated, and even, according to certain academic writings, controlled (Wilkins 1983; for a critique of the latter, see Kunda 1992). Although occupying a central position within the broader field of organizational culture studies, organizational symbolism also took on something of a life of its own, with its own edited collections (e.g., Pondy et al. 1983, Gagliardi 1990, Turner 1990, Rafaeli and Pratt 2006) and journal special issues (Administrative Science Quarterly 1983). Many of its topical areas of study – humour, metaphor, built spaces, stories and storytelling, for example – have developed into research fields in their own right. In what follows, we discuss three broad categories of human artefacts: language, acts, and objects. Although we treat them, for heuristic purposes, as separate, elements from two or more of these categories often work together in the communication, representationally, of human meaning, as the case example in section 5 illustrates.

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1. Symbols and symbolism: a bit of definition

A symbol is something that stands for, or represents, something else, where the “symbol” is typically more concrete and what it stands for is typically more abstract. In many cultures, for instance, the dove is a symbol of peace. Although individuals may develop their own repertoire of symbolic artefacts and their meanings for them personally – something that interests psychotherapists, for example – in organizations and other collectives, symbols and their meanings are social conventions (Yanow 1996: 9), and organizational studies researchers are likely to be more interested in these collectively shared meanings and their representations. This understanding of representational or embedded meaning follows from a hermeneutic philosophy. Initially, “hermeneutics” referred to the study of Biblical texts and the rules for their interpretation, including the understanding that different interpretive communities made sense of those texts in different, and often conflicting, ways. The use of the term expanded beyond Biblical texts to other written texts (e.g., Gadamer 2004); eventually, it was extended to the study of physical objects (such as film, architectural design), spoken language, and acts (which social scientists interpret by rendering them as texts, leading Charles Taylor [1971] to term them ‘text analogues’).

The hermeneutic idea is that every time we create an artefact, we embed within it what is meaningful to us – what we value, the beliefs we hold, the sentiments we attach to that artefact. Herein is the symbolic relationship: the artefact represents those meanings. Moreover, every time we use that same artefact, we recreate or re-instantiate those meanings. At the same time, in that use the opportunity for change arises, and prior meanings may be reinterpreted and revised over time as consensus over the new meaning forms and takes hold.

The idea that different interpretive (or epistemic) communities do not always agree on the meaning of a text means that there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between artefacts and meanings: that dove may represent something different for different groups, or for different individuals within a single group. Prior knowledge, deriving from education, training, familial and other backgrounds, and other experiences, continues to accompany individuals as they join in organizational life, and we do not necessarily abandon the symbols and their attendant meanings that accompany those experiences. Still, their potential for embodying multiple possible meanings at the same time is one of the things that give symbols their power. Engaging in various interactions, groups and their representatives may assume that they are all talking about the same thing, when in fact they are using the same word or other artefact to represent different, and perhaps even conflicting meanings, even as they are not aware of these differences (e.g., Young 1989). In other words, researchers need to be careful not to treat the organization being studied monolithically, being sensitive instead to various possible subgroups (teams, divisions, departments), each with its own understanding of what specific artefacts represent. Moreover, artefacts are not always symbolic. In certain circumstances, under certain conditions, that dove might be someone’s dinner – or just a dirty white bird.

How might these three broad categories of artefacts – language, acts, and objects – be manifest in organizational settings? We explore them first as concepts and then, in the next section, provide more extended examples of each.

Language: Written, spoken, and nonverbalLanguage in organizations, as in general life, can be written or spoken, but it can also be nonverbal. It ranges from formal speech in written documents and meetings with stakeholders and clients to such informal language – which Goffman, in his day, considered “back region” – as “reciprocal first-naming, ... profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, ... use of dialect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and ‘kidding,’ [and] humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching, and

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flatulence”’ (Goffman 1959: 128). Members’ talk is often populated with abbreviations and colloquial sayings, including those expressions and categories that are particular to specific occupations or organizations. Dutch police officers, for instance, talk about ‘acquaintances’ when referring to people widely known among colleagues because they have been in frequent contact with them (van Hulst 2013). In California police departments, such persons are colloquially known in police talk as ‘frequent flyers’.

As the quote from Goffman, above, shows, it is not always easy to separate out non-verbal from verbal forms of language. The former manifest themselves in hand and facial gestures (kinesics) and other visual or aural displays, including paralanguage (the sound of the voice, vocal punctuations), proxemics (the use of space, such as norms for proper distance between people; see Hall 1966), tactile ‘behavior’ (e.g., the ‘rules’ for touching), ‘décor’ (e.g., dress, hair, and other aspects of personal style), and physical characteristics (e.g., posture or bearing, physiognomy, height). Their symbolic dimensions may link these to displays of status, power, and/or emotions. Here, ‘language’ starts to overlap with the categories ‘acts’ and ‘objects’.

Acts: Rites, rituals, ceremonies, dramas, everyday ‘doings’A symbolic approach also explores the meanings of organizational actors’ actions and interactions, including attending to their ritual, ceremonial or dramaturgical dimensions. We may, for instance, describe socialization processes as ‘initiation rituals’. Similarly, the holding of regular meetings might be interpreted as ritualistic behaviour working to enhance managerial authority and rationalize formal-hierarchical structures in an organization (for examples, see Ingersoll and Adams 1986; Linstead et al. 1996; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Floden and Weiner, 1978). Rites, rituals, ceremonies and dramas are examples of distinctive kinds of organizational acts that are set off from ‘ordinary’, everyday life and which carry strong meanings. Rites, for instance, can be seen as ‘relatively elaborate, dramatic, planned sets of activities that consolidate various forms of cultural expression into one event …, usually for the benefit of an audience’ (Trice and Beyer, 1984: 655). The symbolic analysis of acts need not be restricted to rites, rituals, ceremonies or dramas. We may explore the symbolic dimensions of everyday acts, as they, too, can represent meaning. Daily events, like taking a break from work, can provide co-workers with activities that give meaning to their shared organizational lives (Roy 1959). The act of implementing, locally, a national government policy can communicate to local residents that ‘government’ has heard their cries for help and is responsive to these (Yanow 1996). Bringing out the symbolic dimensions of actions and interactions has the advantage of rendering strange what may look normal and self-evident, thereby making visible what might otherwise be easily overlooked (Ybema and Kamsteeg 2009). As with all artefacts, not all (inter)actions have a symbolic dimension. The symbolism of action may be strongest in those acts that are explicitly and intentionally crafted to help organizational members give meaning to the work they do, the identities they claim, and the interests they pursue.

Objects: Built spaces and their design and furnishings, dress, trophies, and other material artefactsThe realm of the material world is a locus classicus for the study of symbolic meaning, even though it has largely been overlooked within organizational studies until fairly recently. The interpretation of material artefacts has loomed large in psychological studies, in particular in the context of individuals’ dream worlds (as in the work of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell). Within organizational culture studies in particular, attention to the symbolic character of physical artefacts has explored trophies used in ceremonies and

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rituals (e.g., the gold watch that used to be presented at retirement gatherings; see Kunda 1992), uniforms and other forms of dress (e.g., Rafaeli, Dutton, Harquail, et  Mackie-Lewis 1997), the foodstuffs at annual holiday parties (Rosen 1988), and other elements of the material world. A significant subset of analytic attention has focused on organizational spaces, from the design of corporate headquarters (Berg and Kreiner 1990) to the influence of the traditional diwan design on organizational practices in the Middle East (Weir 2010) to the ways in which a World War II defense headquarters shapes a business school’s present configurations (de Vaujany and Vaast 2014). Similar attention has been applied to the allocation of designated parking spaces to people at different hierarchical levels of an organization and to the ways in which office spaces have been furnished and the allocation of furnishings, including desks and paintings, by size correlated with rank and status (e.g., Steele 1973, Hatch 1990). Consider a classroom, for instance. A typical lecture hall positions students in chairs on a rising pitch, their attention physically focused by the design of the room, lighting, and furniture on the lecturer at the “head” of the room, near the writing boards and electronic equipment. This arrangement embodies a “theory” of pedagogy, with its attendant values and beliefs: it is the lecturer, only, who possesses knowledge, which is to be transmitted to the students; students are cast in the role of passive absorbers of what the lecturer has to say. Quite a different theory of teaching and learning is embedded in the design of a seminar room: all participants, including the instructor, sit around the table at the same eye level, and students are not restricted to a view of the back of their classmates’ heads—meaning that all present have something to contribute, potentially, to the discussion and the learning. Every time participants populate these classrooms, their designs reinforce—recreate, maintain—the respective pedagogical theory they embody (although in such recurrent usage is where the possibility of changing those relationships resides). In other words, the material aspects of the classroom represent, symbolically, a set of authority relations and beliefs in its utility for conveying knowledge. Analyses of other physical artefacts would also take up their meanings for various interpretive communities within the organization being studied, but also explore potentially conflicting interpretations, as with other artefact types. The extent to which their meanings might be tied to authority, power, status, and other issues would also be analyzed.

We find this tripartite categorization useful for heuristic purposes, although it is not the only one that could be used. The study of symbols might be approached through a taxonomy based on the senses, for instance, dividing symbols according to their visual, aural, sensate, and other dimensions. It is also important to note that although for analytic purposes, any set of categories can be usefully distinct, in practice they are commonly intertwined (Yanow 1996: 14). To use the taxonomy we adopt here, graduation ceremonies, for example, involve speeches (language) and diplomas (physical objects that contain written words) awarded to people who march across a stage and are greeted with a handshake (acts and more objects and spoken and nonverbal language; see, e.g., Dandridge et al. 1980; Jones 1996; Yanow 1996, 2000).

After discussing issues in interpreting symbols and the research tradition that emerged from focusing on the symbolic character of organizational artefacts, we will return to this taxonomy and present examples of each category, treating them separately for analytical purposes.

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2. Interpreting Organizational Symbols

We all learn to interpret the world(s) we inhabit from an early age. This occurs as we become socialized as members of different (sub)cultures. We discover what it means to be a part of a particular group or community. When we join an organization, we are also socialized or acculturated in a process that turns us into members of that organization (Van Maanen and Schein 1979; Louis 1980). By a certain point in time newcomers have learned to interpret the meanings that organizational artefacts carry, as symbols representing particular values, beliefs, and feelings or sentiments, whether in their particular work group organization or for the organization as a whole. To be seen and accepted as a competent member of an organization or part of one typically means that one is able to interpret (read, decipher, decode…) ‘the symbolic sounds that characterize this [organizational] world’ (Schatzman and Strauss 1973).

Interpreting the meaning(s) of symbolic language, acts and objects involves seeing or sensing other than what is readily observable and plain to the eye or the ear. What such interpretation entails is well illustrated by Gilbert Ryle’s classic example, which became well-known through Clifford Geertz’ (1973: 6-7) introduction to The Interpretation of Cultures:

Consider, he [Ryle] says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle points out, the winker has … done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and—voilà!—a gesture.

That, however, is just the beginning. Suppose, he continues, there is a third boy, who, “to give malicious amusement to his cronies,” parodies the first boy’s wink, as amateurish, clumsy, obvious, and so on. He, of course, does this in the same way the second boy winked and the first twitched: by contracting his right eyelids. Only this boy is neither winking nor twitching, he is parodying someone else’s, as he takes it, laughable, attempt at winking. Here, too, a socially established code exists (he will “wink” laboriously, overobviously, perhaps adding a grimace—the usual artifices of the clown); and so also does a message. Only now it is not conspiracy but ridicule that is in the air. … One can go further: uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the would-be satirist may practice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching, winking, or parodying, but rehearsing; though so far as what a camera, a radical behaviorist, or a believer in protocol sentences would record: he is just rapidly contracting his right eyelids like all the others. Complexities are possible, if not practically without end, at least logically so.

Organizations are filled with rapidly-moving-eyelids to be interpreted. Telling a story about a client or a boss, for instance, involves more than factual reporting on the events or interactions that took place. It entails adding sufficient detail and nuance as to distinguish the ‘twitches’ of what the client did or what the boss said from the ‘winks’, which may well bring the storyteller’s own values, beliefs, and/or feelings into play. For the researcher hearing the

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story, analysis can also mean assessing the role or position the storyteller sees for herself, as well as what these situations mean to her. The telling of a story often invites the listener to share her own experience in return. A culturally competent colleague knows how to respond, even if the colleague might not be able to make this knowledge explicit (Polanyi 1966). Knowing an artefact’s meaning allows members to act, and sharing a ‘web of meanings’ (Geertz 1973) helps members to ‘forge common grounds for action’ (Smircich 1992: 526).

There is, however, not necessarily one single, ‘correct’ interpretation of any artefact, as Geertz (1973) pointed out, whether by an organizational member or by a researcher. Interpretation reaches no rock bottom, because meaning does not belong to anyone in particular and cannot be fixed. Interpretations might vary among departments, groups and even individuals in the same organization (Riley 1983; Parker 2000). Over time, meanings in organizations may also shift (Weick 1995). In fact, artefacts and meanings are part of a dynamic process in which ‘all language, objects, and acts are potential carriers of meaning’, and at the same time they are ‘tools for the recreation of meanings and for the creation of new meanings’ (Yanow 1996: 10). Moreover, meanings may be fought over. They can be sources of power (Smircich and Morgan 1982). And, ‘for those who produce an artifact with a symbolic purpose in mind meaning may be clear and direct, but once others adopt the artifact and thus make it their symbol, they will express their own meaning with it’ (Hatch and Cunliffe 2006: 194). The long-established meanings of existing symbols can be challenged and new ones negotiated; new symbols might be developed.

A case study by Smith and Eisenberg (1987) illustrates these several points. They describe a conflict between management and employees at Disneyland in the US, in which shared symbols from the past were used strategically by both parties. Employees cherished the friendly, tight-knit family image of the organization. They remembered the founder of the company, Walt Disney, as a caring employer. The family image was supposed to be typical of his vision. Disneyland managers had a different interpretation of Disney’s ‘philosophy’. Confronted with financial problems due to the economic recession in the 1980’s, they stressed the ‘business of show business’. ‘“Walt” knew how to make a buck’: he was a shrewd businessman who was selling a highly calculated fantasy world. In these ways, the image of the organizational hero, the putative symbol of the organization-wide values and beliefs, was interpreted differently by the two parties, which eventually led to an employee strike (Smith and Eisenberg 1987: 367-80).

Like organizational members, researchers, too, interpret organizational symbols. One might consider researchers as visitors who aspire to become knowledgeable in the organization’s ways of life. A researcher who has been hanging around the organization or its subpart long enough to have become less of a stranger and more of ‘a familiar’ has also acquired a degree of cultural competence, including knowing how to make sense of what members relate and how to respond to those tellings. Much like organizational members, a researcher’s ability to understand the organization being studied in large part depends on that interpretive capacity. Researchers’ interpretations are often interpretations of organizational members’ interpretations (Geertz 1973), as the former (co-) generate data through interviews, (participating) observations, and/or reading research-relevant documents. In keeping with the understanding that symbolic meanings are not necessarily uniform or universal within an organization, students of symbols and symbolism may attend not only to the interpretations of dominant organizational members, but also to those of less dominant, and perhaps even oppositional, organizational members whose authority and power are more limited than that of management, including those whose voices are more hidden, silent or silenced (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2009).

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3. Establishing a research tradition

Before organizational symbolism came into its own as a school of thought, several disparate articles appeared which addressed symbolism in a way that anticipated many later research efforts and publications. Anthropologist Harrison Trice, later working together with his colleague Janice Beyer (e.g., 1984), was among these forerunners. He had started thinking about such things long before the establishment of organizational symbolism as a research field, such as in his co-authored article exploring the ways in which ceremonial aspects of personnel administrators’ roles can contribute to organizational goal achievement (Trice, Belasco, and Alutto 1969). Together, he and Beyer published a stream of work focusing on organizational rites, rituals, and ceremonies, later joining this line of inquiry with the field of organizational culture in their textbook (Trice and Beyer 1992).

Higher education scholarship also spawned a number of studies that explored organizational symbolism, looking at the cultures of schools, colleges, and universities (e.g., Meyer, Scott and Deal 1983; Bolman and Deal 1991). Forerunners include Burton Clark’s (1972) treatment of organizational sagas, focusing on collective understandings of organizations’ histories and the ways in which these ‘sagas’ can foster bonds of loyalty among organizational members. Moving beyond school settings, Ian Mitroff and Ralph Kilmann’s ‘Stories managers tell’ (1975) extended this kind of approach to exploring the ways in which ‘epic myths’ facilitate a sense of the organization’s unique identity. Early organizational symbolism writings also pointed out how the apparently rational outlook of modern organizations was in fact a product of myth-creation and that behind or in such rationalism one might encounter symbolism. John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977), for instance, looked at the relationship between organizational structures and the myths of the surrounding institutional environment, arguing that the more these overlapped, the more ‘a logic of confidence and good faith’ could be drawn on as a control mechanism, in lieu of more formal, hierarchical methods of control. Martha Feldman and James March (1981), to give a second example, argued that information is not just gathered to make decisions that are better informed, but that information gathering is a symbolic act as well. As they saw it, acts of “using information, asking for information, and justifying decisions in terms of information” had become “significant ways in which we symbolize that the process is legitimate, that we are good decision makers, and that our organizations are well managed” (1981: 178; for a similar argument, showing how different aspects treated by management studies – strategy, human resources, communication, change – rest on symbolic elements, see Alvesson and Berg 1992). In a later article also entitled ‘Stories managers tell’, Ralph Hummel (1991) advanced the methodological argument that stories could be, and should be seen as, a scientifically valid source of evidence. This orientation anticipated a rich lode of studies of narratives, stories, and storytelling, as well as research into how organizational actors narrated their organizations’ histories (e.g., Boje 1991, Czarniawska 2004, Gabriel 2000).

In suggesting that the study of symbolism could serve as a useful addition to the organizational analysis toolkit, two articles, one by Thomas Dandridge, Ian Mitroff, and William Joyce (1980), the other by Meryl Reis Louis (1980), were foundational. Louis, also writing on organizational culture (e.g., Louis 1985), pointed out that organizational meanings were passed on to newcomers through socialization processes that commonly employed symbolic means, a topic explored much less explicitly by theorists of organizational socialization (e.g., Van Maanen 1978, Van Maanen and Schein 1979). Subsequently, other publications built on those two founding articles, further advancing theories about the role of symbolism in organizations. Among these were Barry Turner’s 1986 essay, which staked out the ground for a symbolic approach. Also central to the development of organizational symbolism as a field of study were the European Group on Organizational Studies’ Standing

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Committee on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS) conferences, and in particular the Third International Conference on Organizational Symbolism and Corporate Culture, held June 24-26, 1987 in Milan, which led to the publication of a set of its papers under the title Symbols and Artifacts (Gagliardi 1990). This conference and the book were key to bringing the world of physical artefacts to the organizational studies table, which up until then (and to some extent since) had focused more on language and acts. In his introduction to the book, editor Pasquale Gagliardi asked why so little attention had been paid in the organizational studies literature to physical objects, such as office and other built spaces and their design and furnishings. His answer – that social science has typically engaged the intellect (ethos) rather than mythos and, especially, pathos – remains an important argument still today (cf. the chapters in Rafaeli and Pratt 2006; Yanow 2010).

4. Empirical examples of studying language, acts, and objects

The types of artefacts treated in the organizational symbolism literature are wide-ranging. To illustrate the sort of analysis that might be undertaken, we will discuss a single extended example of each of the three artefact categories, making use of a few classical and recent contributions in the field. In the subsequent section, we present a single case that intertwines a range of different symbolic artefacts.

4.1 Symbolic language: Stories as an example Stories exemplify the symbolic richness of organizational language. They not only can contain the categories, abbreviations, slang and other elements of a particular organization’s language; they also commonly describe and interpret what is going on in the organization’s life, giving meaning to work and providing identities to members and others (Gabriel 2000; Czarniawska 2004). In a classic contribution to the literature, David Boje (1991) coined the phrase ‘storytelling organization’ to capture how members of an office-supply firm told each other stories on a daily basis. Recently, one of us (van Hulst 2013) looked at a storytelling organization par excellence, the police. Police officers exchange stories regularly. They do so to inform their colleagues about recent events in their district, but also to blow off steam, to make sense of things that have happened, and to entertain. To get a sense of what a storytelling lens in research entails, we provide some ethnographic detail on police officers’ storytelling:

The topic of stories was mostly calls that had been attended to by officers on theteam in the previous hours, days or weeks. The stories normally started with the callas it came in and then dealt with what happened when the police arrived on the scene.Often, the events that were talked about had not come to a definitive end. Somebodymight have been arrested and brought to the station, but what was going to happennext was still unclear. People who were known to the officers because they had beenin contact with the police on a frequent basis were a popular topic. The introductionto such stories took the form of a question like: ‘You know who we ran into yesterday?’

Exciting sets of events attracted more attention and more listeners. A car chase and an officer shooting a suspect in July 2010 both led to elaborate storytelling sessions. But such events were rare. If officers came back from a call that included some kind of violence or something else that had cause for excitement, officers sitting at a desk would come to the pantry to hear the story. As news travelled fast through the team, team members often asked other team members about events that they had heard mentioned. One day, for instance, a team member asked another, ‘So, how did it

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work out with that baby?’, to which the other responded tersely, ‘It [the baby] started to work again’ (van Hulst 2013: 633-634).

To share the goings-on of the police beat, a group of team members transform their day-to-day experiences into an ever-expanding series of tales of everyday life at the police station. The officers’ interpretations of their work, their fellow officers and the citizens they interact with are reflected in these stories.

4.2 Symbolic acts: Rituals and ceremonies as an example Rituals and ceremonies are often treated together, and they are definitionally distinguished only with difficulty. A common distinction would be to note that ceremonies are rarer, often being tied to specific times in an organization’s calendar, such as welcoming ceremonies and graduation ceremonies in the life of educational organizations. By contrast, although rituals may be part of ceremonial activities, ritualized activity need not be tied to specific times in the calendar or year and may indeed be seen in everyday activities that have a particularly repetitive character.

As an example of organizational ceremonies, we turn to Michael Rosen’s (1988) description of the organizational ‘performances’ that characterized the Christmas parties of the organization he studied. Consider the article’s opening:

It was already dark outside by the time the members of Shoenman and Associates finished work for the day. People put on their winterwear – overcoats, overshoes, gloves, hats, and scarves – and left the office in small groups, walking the five or six city blocks to the club. Although it was only about 5.30 p.m. on a Friday, the downtown streets were unusually deserted, giving these co-workers the opportunity to walk down the sidewalks four or five abreast.

As they arrived at the club, people left their winterwear in the cloakroom and entered the main bar and dance room, also on the ground floor. This was designed to appear as a hunting lodge. Rough-sawn pine walls and only slightly finished wood moulding gave it a log cabin look. The Christmas decorations – the lights, tree, tinsel, mistletoe, etc. – only added to the intended cosiness of the lodge motif.

By 6.15 p.m. approximately 100 people had gathered in the lounge. They were clustered in small groups, some sitting around tables, others standing around the room. Drinks were free, and the bar was crowded.

Before the night is over these people will have talked and drunk alcoholic beverages together, eaten dinner, scandalized their bosses and numerous other organization members in skits, drunk more, danced with each other, and otherwise socialized into the early hours of Saturday. All this is part of the annual Shoenman and Associates Christmas party, always held on the Friday evening before the holiday (Rosen 1988: 463).

In ‘reading’ the dress, the decorations, the drinking, and later, the food and the speeches as artefacts representing organizational meanings, Rosen sought to understand how hierarchy, status, and power within the organization – rather abstract analytical concepts – could be seen in the play of the ‘act’ that is a ceremony (although we note that the acts that comprise the Christmas party ‘ceremony’ – drinking, eating, dancing, play-acting, and so on – also entail language and objects; but treating these together as a ceremony brings additional analytic purchase to the fore).

4.3 Symbolic objects: Built space as an example Although scholars of human or social geography, urban planning, architectural design, marketing, and other design-engaged fields had long been cognizant of the ways in which built spaces communicated meaning(s), Per Olof Berg and Kristian Kreiner (1990) were

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among the first to note the role that corporate architecture plays in matters of organizational identity. They observed that the acquisition of a building and its particular design can be used, symbolically, as totems, as packaging, and/or to signal status, potency, and even good taste. More recently, David Weir (2010) has focused on the way that the design of the traditional diwan shapes decision-making practices in many Middle Eastern organizations:

[The] diwan [is] a rectangular room, with little or no furniture other than cushions, chairs or benches around the walls. … Within the diwan space the movements of people tend to describe characteristic patterns, because diwan signifies a process as well as a location. It is common in a public diwan for the swirl of mobility to form a counter-clockwise pattern as people approach the leading person – the shaykh – or persons, who are typically to be found seated on the far side of the entrance, and engage them in discussion before moving on. An implicit hierarchy is inscribed on the space and underpins the spatially-located activity. While the more important people may initially be seated, they will move to greet, welcome and involve newcomers in the swirl of the diwan. A diwan in action is a scene of mobility rather than stasis (Weir 2010: 123-24).

As with readings of other kinds of artefacts, Weir focuses not on the ‘literal’ design of the diwan, but on the meanings embedded in that design, meanings that relate to hierarchical relations and their associated powers of influence, prestige, status, and honor. Once again, the focus is on one class of artefacts – here, objects, in the form of spatial arrangements and furnishings – but those are linked to patterns of activity (who sits where, and movement from one seat to another) which also entail language (greetings, business discussions, decisions).

5. An extended case

In order to illustrate what a symbolic perspective on organizational analysis might look like, we turn to a case study of office life in Efteling, one of the oldest and largest amusement parks in Europe, with an annual attendance of around 4.2 million a year, in the south of the Netherlands. Since its opening in 1952, Efteling has evolved from a nature park with a playground and a Fairy Tale Forest into a theme park which offers fairy-tale amusement to both children and adults (This case draws on Ybema 1996, 1997, 2004, where additional discussion of it along with the ethnographic fieldwork used to produce the case and the theoretical interpretations of it may be found.)

5.1 Spatially situated symbolic actsObservations of the ways Efteling staff members acted in different office spaces showed a rather curious combination of open doors and confidential conversations, a jovial attitude and repressed tensions, shared pride and hidden conflicts. The informal and often friendly manner of managers and staff working in the public spaces in the office made a first impression on newcomers (including the fieldworker) of openness and informality. They often left their doors open: people could drop in at any time. However, when the researcher once entered an office, his interlocutor closed the door and informal conversation turned confidential: “This must remain between us....” Staff members considered such conversations to be ‘illegal’; they adopted a conspiratorial tone and called it ‘gossiping’. On the one hand, the underground communications had considerable entertainment value: it made a break in everyday routines. Still, people’s private lives were not the only topic of discussion; business also got done. ‘Gossipers’ considered new ideas, formed coalitions, set out policies, and prepared actions. This informal communication circuit obscured decision-making processes. Staff members had to go by what their informants confided to them. Due to limited information, they often felt there were things going on behind their backs which they had no grip on or knowledge of, finding out only later that decisions had been made, sabotaged or overridden. So, observing

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spatially situated symbolic acts, the researcher gained an image of collaborative staff practices that were at once consensual and conflict-ridden. The researcher entered the ‘gossiping’ circuit to learn more about these conflicts.

5.2 Talk of change: Antagonistic discourses In confidential conversations, Efteling staff expressed disagreements about the organization’s current plans and policies. Roughly speaking, two contending discourses could be distinguished. An old guard in particular – those who had worked for the company for several years, some for decades – complained about changes, often cloaking critique in romantic stories about the glorious past of the company. Showing a distinct pride in the organization’s history and its founder, a highly respected Dutch popular artist, their nostalgia presented the amusement park’s hard-working attitude, warm-hearted atmosphere and high quality standards as typical of its past. In the 1990s, the organization’s success and the rapid growth into the second largest amusement park in Europe (after Euro Disney) had launched a process of professionalization and commercialization which, in the eyes of the old guard, undermined those traditional virtues, for which they held the new management team responsible. In gos-sips about a manager’s alleged past fraudulent behaviour as a businessman, they caricatured the management team’s money-making abilities as dubious. In their eyes, the original ideology of offering visitors fairy-tale amusement had been turned into a commercial formula to sell fun to as many people as possible.

A competing discourse advocated managerial values like cost consciousness, financial health, ‘professional’ standards, and further growth of the company, ‘in order to be able to compete with Euro Disney’. These ‘postalgic’ values and beliefs (Ybema 2004) were voiced in particular by a newer generation of well-educated professionals and middle managers (in finance, commerce, HR) hired from outside and often ‘from above the rivers’ (i.e., from the ‘arrogant north’) to introduce a more pragmatic way of thinking within the company. The new board of directors or ‘management team’, in particular, appointed a few years prior to and during the research, were identified with this commercialism, especially after they did away with the traditional (and expensive) personnel retreat day. In keeping with their managerial concerns, this new generation of professionals and managers was less proud of Efteling’s glorious past than they were of that year's record-breaking visitor count and healthy financial prospects. For them Efteling was not a fairy tale. It was leisure industry. For the researcher, listening to these different types of change talk, including in confidential conversations, and analysing its symbolic meanings enabled the discovery of conflicting ideas and values among staff members.

5.3 The organizational chart as a symbolic objectThe friction between the old guard and the new management team was not only a conflict between contradictory values and ideas. It was also a clash of interests. A series of informal conversations about one artefact – the newly introduced organizational chart – helped to make the power struggle clear. The chart delineated line and staff departments, the formal hierarchy, and the division of labour in customary fashion. The researcher carried a copy of it with him, bringing it out whenever a conversational moment seemed right and asking: “Can you point out where you are in the chart?” This proved to be a particularly difficult question for some members of the old guard, who often could not tell where they were located. They would then draw the previous version of the organizational chart for the researcher, which, they assured him, was ‘much simpler’. In the old chart, the then-general manager directly supervised eleven departments, and he had a personal connection with each head of depart-ment, often a member of the old guard. Some of the latter thus used to have a central position in top-level consultations within the company. They explained that, under the pretence that

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the old structure was “unworkable” and out of synch with modern management principles, the new management had restructured the organization, creating four staff departments and four line departments, and bringing in new professional managers to supervise the latter. A new executive level was inserted between the general manager and the former heads of depart-ment, who now were called staff or middle managers. Examining the old and new charts with senior staff members enabled the researcher to see the profound change in the old guard’s position in the formal hierarchy, losing considerable influence in the process.

Finding these senior members stashed away in the margins of the formal chart surprised the researcher because the ‘old-timers’ had sat in on top-level meetings where company policy and cooperation problems were discussed, giving him the impression they were central players in the organization. As the researcher started discussing the chart with some of the new generation of managers and professionals, he heard that they were not able to get around the old guard. The board of directors was dependent on the old guard’s coopera-tion and had to take their opinions into account. They were frequently consulted because of their technical skill and know-how, enjoying a high position in the informal hierarchy, comparable to the status of honorary members of a club. Moreover, while new managers were generally excluded from the gossip circuit, these old-timers were central players in the informal communication networks. Ironically, despite the formal authority their strategic position in the official hierarchy gave the directors, it did not give them the right to speak in the informal ‘club structure’ where status was weighted by tenure and technical experience. Managers indicated they often felt misunderstood, unappreciated and powerless, as reactions to their new ideas and plans, particularly from the old guard, were often rather reserved. In a way, they felt treated as peripheral candidates for club membership whose ideas didn’t need to be taken too seriously.

The symbolism of the simple artefact of the organizational chart opened a window upon a variety of different meanings, as it lay down the formal chain of command while hiding the informal hierarchy. Discussing its ambiguity of meanings takes us right into the organization’s power struggles and the clash between formal and informal authority.

6. Future directions

A symbolic perspective can intersect with some of the more recent “turns” in organizational theorizing, such as those exploring sociomateriality, work practices, and the processual character of organizing. Clearly, studies of organizational symbolism set the stage for the growing presence in organizational studies of object-focused studies, drawing on science studies (science and technology studies, or the sociology of scientific knowledge), actor-network theory, and other ways of knowing that accord the material world a central place in theorizing (e.g., Jarzabkowski and Pinch 2014, Orlikowsi 2007). Similarly, contemporary empirical studies of work practices might engage the objects with which practitioners do what they do (see, e.g., Nicolini 2013), analyzing their meanings in ways that have been central to a symbolic perspective. With respect to the analytic purchase of a symbolic perspective for the ‘process turn’, adopting a research strategy focused on material, verbal and ‘action’ symbols may enable bringing organizational processes into view, in particular when researchers set out to follow actors, interactions, and artefacts as they ‘travel’ across social and symbolic boundaries (Yanow, Ybema, and van Hulst 2012). In these several ways, a symbolic perspective may be joined with different strands of current thought in organizational studies. In bringing together the linguistic, the (inter)actional, and the material, focusing on the symbolic nature of discourses and practices, text and context, objects and meaning-making, it is well-equipped to address some of the challenges in current theorizing in organization studies.

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