... the industry's root metaphor: work is perceived, metaphorically, to be a religion that may be described as a singular devotion to the transformative value of educational travel. Unearthing the root metaphor was critical to the study, because "this 'dominant myth' is the fundamental generator" (Mohan, 1993, 55) of a group's assumptions, and thereby of its characteristic behaviors, policies, and practices. Indeed, the notion of work-as-religion seemed to "generate" or at least contextualize most of the other assumptions that emerged. For example, membership in the industry is "legitimized" by member entities' symbolic allegiance to the industry's mission. Metaphorically, member entities are thus part of the "family of believers" (albeit distant relatives, at times!); alternatively, some competitors are perceived to have "crossed the line" into heretical behavior.
... throughout the data, the root metaphor was performed both explicitly and implicitly, suggesting that this "dominant myth" exerts a gravitational-like force upon industry's assumption set and thereby upon its "way of doing things." In fact, one informant actually described the industry as "motion around the sun of learning, or more accurately, [around] the romance of learning" (Y, 2-15). Likewise, the notion of "industry gravity" not only emerged during interpretive analysis, but was also explicitly acknowledged by several informants. Although little more than heuristic in this regard, this study nonetheless implies that the "force" of "cultural gravity" within an industry may be formidable.
Another finding concerns the "creation" or "source" of the industry's culture. Extant cultural assumptions, and in fact the earliest manifestations of the root metaphor, are primarily traceable to ALSG, to its founder, Dr. Gilbert Markle, and/or to his co-founder, Dr. Theodore Voelkel. Some informants may not agree with this conclusion, and indeed may be offended by it, particularly those who think that the "paradigms have shifted," (A, 1-15) that the ALSG/Markle culture is at best no longer relevant or that it represents sheer apostasy, at worst. Here, however, one must remember that the bedrock of culture, its proverbial "ground zero," resides within that most abstract level of taken-for-granted reality (Schein 1985), i.e, within the "group's basic assumptions . . . tacit beliefs members hold about themselves, their relationships to others, and the nature of the organization" (Mohan, 1983, 15) — or to use the interpretivist's language, within the root metaphor or the dominant myth. That being the case, evidence accrued from informants' stories, jargon, vocabulary, and constructs is irrefutable: Assumptions generated within the ALSG/Markle culture are, at the most abstract level of taken-for-granted reality, widely shared across the industry today, whether or not informants consciously perceive that to be the case, and/or whether they reject the ALSG/Markle culture as being in any way relevant to the present time.
This finding suggests that the "founder phenomenon" is as relevant to industry culture as it is to individual organizations, and even more so. As well, this study suggests that the "integration" perspective — wherein the founder's "personality, his dreams, his flaws, and his talents" are largely responsible for what occurs (Kimberly, 1979, emphasis added) — may be most descriptive of the founder's role in shaping industry culture. Data also suggest that the cultural founder(s) of an industry may not be synonymous with its actual founder(s). In other words, the "spider" or the "webmaster" (here used in an organic sense) may not be the person who actually establishes the enterprise; instead, it is the cultural founder(s) who set the stage (as it were), who "create the mindset" (Z, 1-19), who spin the web of significance.
Yet another finding suggests that common cultural assumptions seem to have evolved "organically" in this industry's genetically related companies. That is to say, cultural assumptions were "carried" to newly forming companies by their founders and other elites who had previously been exposed to (and likely employed by) the ALSG/Markle culture. In fact, one informant described the industry's history as
More specifically, this informant claims:
Thus, a "genetic" model of cultural evolution seems to account for cultural assumptions held in common across genetically related companies in the industry. However, this explanation does not account for the existence of analogous assumptions that emerged from non-genetically related entities' data. Although at least one of this industry's non-genetic entities (EF) may have "adopted" assumptions engendered within the ALSG/Markle culture (by virtue of hiring an erstwhile ALSG executive to guide the newer entity's formative stage), this study found no evidence to suggest that former ALSG personnel were involved in forming other non-genetic entities. This finding is curious. For one thing, it may focus attention upon the "cultural performances" of corporate documents as potential conduits of cultural assumptions. After all, what better way for a newly forming entity to "adopt" a special "way of doing things" and/or a special way of talking about what is done, than to use as models the documents that come out of existing, accepted members of the industry? In any case, this study's support for an identifiable industry culture that includes both genetically and non-genetically related companies is perhaps best described as an "ancestral" model of culture, rather than as a "genetic" one. This "ancestral" model is pictured in Appendix F.
Taken together, the foregoing conclusions lead to a compelling question: In the preoccupation with industry culture, whatever happened to corporate culture — that is, to the idea that successful, effective companies not only have singular, identifiable cultures, but "strong" ones, at that? Posing an answer reveals what may be the instant study's most provocative finding: the concept of entity orientation.
It will be remembered that when the actual language of each performance was examined, the concept of entity orientation emerged. In this study, entity orientation has been defined as an individual company's "spin" of, its peculiar emphasis upon, or its affinity for one (or more) of the industry's commonly held assumptions. For example, Company A's "rebel orientation" may be explained as its distinctive "spin" or emphasis upon assumptions about the origins of truth. Likewise, Company B's "value orientation" and Company C's "romantic orientation" may be explained as two distinctive "spins" or emphases upon common assumptions regarding the purpose of work. Moreover, this study implies that culture may be what an industry is whereas orientation may be what an individual entity has — further insinuating that culture may be comparatively static, enduring, descriptive of the industry as a whole, and influenced most profoundly by founding individuals and/or organizations whereas an entity's orientation to that culture may be more dynamic, "manageable," and thereby more susceptible to administrative and environmental influences.
In review, this study's conclusions may be summarized as follows: