Applications of Boundary Theory to Organizational and Inter-Organizational Culture

Abstract

Culture and boundary are basic theoretical terms in the social sciences. Culture is more popular. To discover questions for future practice and theory-building, this analysis reframes organizational culture into the terms of boundary theory. Culture is understood according to elements of: (1) content, (2) process, (3) effect, (4) perspective, and (5) levels or types of culture. The diversity of the "interiors of collectives," typically registered as culture, is recast as the formation, maintenance, and change of boundaries. The need to do so is occasioned by globalization and the collapse of the Cold War. A case example -- the John C. Stennis Congressional Staff Fellows program -- is provided to illustrate how boundary theory and cultural theory can stimulate the design and delivery of a senior-level, intercultural leadership learning system. Conclusions and a research agenda are suggested to continue work linking the theory and practice of boundaries to organizational culture, especially through boundary spanning as intercultural leadership and learning.

Applications of Boundary Theory to Organizational and Inter-Organizational Culture

Culture is one of the basic theoretical terms in the social sciences. Since the 1980s, culture has been increasingly popular in the theory and practice of organization and management (e.g., Mintzberg, 1990; Adler & Jelenik, 1986). Culture entails a very high level of abstraction; it is not obvious until we have learned to recognize it; and it is not something we will ever encounter "on the ground" (Ingold, 1994; Shapiro, 1956). As such, the term is plagued both by charges that it is unnecessarily vague (e.g., Schneider, 1993), and by insistence that definitional wrangling is a waste of time and we really do know what we are talking about (e.g., Mintzberg, 1990).

What might constitute the next generation of thinking about culture, especially organizational culture? In context of the trends of globalization and collapse of Cold War ideologies, seemingly accepted concepts like culture are open to question, even to radical rethinking (e.g., Pucik, Tichy, & Barnett, 1993). The thesis of this article is that a recasting of organizational culture into the terms of boundary theory can provide a roadmap to craft a sharper language of description, and to discover questions for future practice and theory about the interior collectives (cultures) in and among organizations.

The discussion is organized in the following way. First, the concept of culture is located epistemologically (e.g., with respect to basic elements, perspectives, and types). This sets the origins for why it might be helpful to use boundary theory as a starting point for the concept of culture. Globalization is identified as a major force in making that linkage. The terms of boundary theory are introduced. Next, the recasting of culture into the terms of boundary theory is illustrated with a case describing an effort to create an inter-institutional staff culture at the boundaries between the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The article concludes with implications in the form of questions to guide future practice and theory building.

Epistemology of the Culture Concept
Basics

In the social science literatures, culture is defined as actor, action, and result or as content, process, and effects.

As content, the charter definition of culture is that of Tylor (1871) who said culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Weick (1995) and Schein (1985) would add that culture is shared experience. Kuper and Kuper (1996) suggest that culture in its most general sense, refers to the socially inherited body of learning characteristic of human societies: it takes much of its meaning from its position within a model of the world which depicts relations among society, culture, and the individual.

As process, culture has been defined as ways of learning and knowing or collective cognition (Mintzberg, 1990); and as a system to send, store, and process information (Elashmawi & Harris, 1993). Ingold (1994) suggests that people "live culturally" rather than "live in" cultures.

As effect, results of culture include the placing of a system of constraints and limits on individuals (Pfiffner & Sherwood, 1960); the provision of meaning and rules for social action (Outhwaite & Bottomore, 1993); the development of collective perspective (Mintzberg, 1990); the learned product of group experience (Schein, 1985; Nonaka, 1995); and the creation of differentiation and diversity of social forms produced by beings of the same or similar genetic type (Outhwaite & Bottomore, 1993).

Perspectives

Perspectives on the culture concept can be delineated according to discipline (e.g., anthropology, sociology, political science). We can also look to perspectives that transcend the individual disciplines to get a handle on different ways of "seeing culture" irrespective of discipline. The characterizations of Ingold (1994) and Wilber (1996) are illustrative.

According to Ingold, two basic perspectives on culture are the cognitivist view and the phenomenological view. Culture, in the cognitivist view, has a perceiving subject apprehending the world from a position outside of it so that the world is first configured in the mind prior to taking significant action. As such: (1) the body is a passive instrument in service of cultural reason, (2) stability of cultural form lies in intergenerational transmission of linguistically coded conceptual information, and (3) people's mental representations are the starting point to know what the world means for people living in it. By contrast, culture in the phenomenological view, according to Ingold, situates the perceiver from the start in active engagement with her or his surroundings so that perception is an achievement of the whole body-person rather than the mind. As such: (1) the body is active and intentional rather than instrumental, (2) stability of cultural form lies within the current of human relationships so that specific conditions of development are contributed from one generation to the next, and (3) bodily kinaethesis or performance is that starting point for analysis.

Another broad characterization of culture is Wilber's (1996) proposal that culture (interior-collective) is one of four different forms of knowledge, the other three being the social (exterior-collective), the behavioral (exterior-individual), and the intentional (interior-individual) (see Figure 1).

Wilber is attempting to describe basic features of "holons" or entities that are whole/parts (e.g., atoms are part of a whole molecule, whole molecules are part of a whole cell, whole cells are part of a whole organism). He says reality is composed of holons and he is looking to describe what all holons have in common to begin to see what evolution in all four domains of Figure 1 has in common. For present purposes, Figure 1 helps to show that:

. . . "cultural refers to all the interior meanings and values and identities that we share with those of similar communities, be they a tribal community, a national community, or a world community. By contrast, "social" refers to all the exterior, material, institutional forms of the community, from its techno-economic base to its architectural styles to its written codes to its population size. So in a very general sense, "cultural," refers to the shared collective worldview and "social" refers to the material base of that worldview. "Behavioral" is what individual holons look like from the outside in an objective and empirical manner (cells, limbic system, neocortex); "intentional" are the subjective or interior experiences, sensations, and emotions had inside the individual (holon). " (p. 75-78)

Figure 1
Culture as One of Four Ways of Knowing (Wilber, 1996, p. 71)

The left-hand column of Figure 1 is more non-material, more interpretive, and more concerned with consciousness (aspects that do not have simple location and require interpretation). The right-hand column is more material, more monological, more empirical and positivistic, and more concerned with form (objects or exteriors, surfaces that can be seen and require perception) (Pfiffner & Sherwood, 1960). The right side is concerned with "what does it do?" The left side is concerned with "what does it mean?" Or "surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted" (Wilber, p. 91). Thus, understanding cultural meanings is an interpretive affair to get at the interior meaning. Understanding the behavior of societies is a monological affair to get at exterior features like birthrates, amount of money in circulation, and so on, without ever having to talk to the cultural natives.

Taking a diagnostic stance, one question that surfaces with the Ingold and Wilber characterizations is that of "lag" or "congruence." That is, we can see that discrepancies could occur between exterior inventions (e.g., technology) and the interior meanings, values, and identities, individual and collective, attributed to those inventions. Discrepancies might also arise between the cognitive stance and the phenomenological stance. In practical terms, this so called "cultural lag" can lie behind much of the problem of organizing effectively -- e.g., the problem of organizing our defense forces effectively given technological innovations that change the character of future war and preservation of national security (Pfiffner & Sherwood, 1960; Shapiro, 1956).

Types and Levels of Culture

The third epistemological feature of the culture concept is that of types and levels of culture. Hofstede (1993) and Schein (1985) are illustrative.

Hofstede says that culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. The group or category of people may be a nation, an occupation, a type of business, or a corporation (p. 139). Hofstede uses socialization (the way in which a person is conditioned by environments) to distinguish types of culture and to associate their sources of socialization (see Figure 2).

Figure 2
Type of Culture and Place of Socialization (Hofstede, 1993)

The point of the Hofstede typology is first to see different levels or types of culture (i.e., we can talk about the interior meaning for different forms of collectives), and second to suggest that when a person starts participating in a formal work process, (s)he has been presocialized by a family environment and typically by one or more schools. When we enter a work environment, most of our values will be entrenched, and we will become socialized more to the practices of that work environment than to basic values.

Schein (1992) says that culture of any type manifests itself at three levels, from the deepest level of tacit assumptions, then up to espoused values (or what people say they wish to be), and then up to day-to-day behavior (or what people are actually doing). To get at the essence of culture, Schein says we have to surface the tacit assumptions, and look at the alignment or lack of alignment among these levels within a particular culture as well as across cultures. Schein (1996) also develops constructs of cultural type, most recently focusing on lack of alignment among three organizational subcultures -- executives (CEO and immediate subordinates), engineers (designers and technocrats who drive core technologies), and operators (line units)-- as a probable cause of failures of organizational learning.

The utility of the Hofstede and Schein articulations of "levels of a culture" and "types of culture" is to enable differentiation of the culture construct and to confront the implications of subcultural differences on other variables such as organizational performance, innovation, learning and unlearning.

Culture from the Starting Points of Boundary Theory

Culture is thus seen to be a fascinating piece of theorizing about the interior of collectives such as groups, organizations, occupations, and societies (nations). Culture calls attention to the fact that one of the most striking features of human life is the extraordinary diversity of ways of living it (Ingold, 1994). In anthropology, this diversity is registered as culture; in political science the diversity is registered as politics, parties, states and nations.

The diversity that is registered as culture can also be registered from another starting point: that of the human formation, maintenance, and change of boundaries. Globalization, the information society, technological innovation, the collapse of the Cold War and the end of public monopolies are forces that occasion contemporary attention to boundaries and to the differentiation, integration, and spanning of cultures set within extant boundaries. Cultural differences are inevitable consequences of geographical and linguistic boundaries (Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick & Kerr, 1995) as well as conceptual boundaries (e.g., Schein, 1995; Michael, 1995) to name a few of the boundary types. Boundary is here suggested as a term more fundamental than culture, and as a framework which can be used to recast or extend our understanding of culture.

Key Elements of Boundary Theory

Boundary is an important concept in many disciplines (Halley, 1995). It is well developed in the physical sciences and in the social and behavioral sciences, including business administration, but it is less well developed in public administration.

Boundary is a fundamental notion. A boundary creates an interior. A boundary is a line, a region, or a zone that divides, separates, distinguishes, sets limits, or is the limit itself. Boundaries are loci of highly charged contact where differences are seen and exchanges, sometimes violent, occur (e.g., friction, conflict, power, ritual, resource conversion). Cognitively, boundaries may be regarded as perceptual arrangements we use to separate or unite, differentiate or connect ourselves to the world (Michael, 1995). They help us establish and maintain habits, rules and expectations, provide defense, and define membership (who is in and out), and roles. Comparatively less emphasis has been given to the interlocking nature of activity within and among the areas or the diversity created by the many types of boundaries. The latter prompted Weinberg (1975) to recommend that the term "interface" ought to replace boundary, as interface was more expressive of the duality and exchange inherent in boundary as a place of separation and connection.

A recent survey examining how boundary has been developed (Halley, 1995) revealed a body of work that can be regarded as interdisciplinary boundary theory. Boundary theorists can be identified in economics, mathematics, law, philosophy, political geography, political science, public administration, psychology, social psychology, and futures studies to name a few. Their work encompasses boundary foundations (e.g., basic terminology, perspectives, values, methodology, and history of boundaries), and boundary dynamics (e.g., boundary making, boundary change, boundary conflict and power, boundary spanning, boundary learning, boundary management, boundary infrastructure, boundary leadership, and boundarylessness).

Interest in boundaries is especially strong during times of great boundary change. For example, shortly after the two world wars, attention riveted to the redefinition of nation-state boundaries. Today, it is not world war but the exponential increase in information and the forces of globalization (economic integration) that are challenging the dominant mythologies (cultures) which are maintained and expressed by boundaries -- whether physical, ideological, factual, procedural, organizational, programmatic, or personal. Thus Michael (1995:3) argues that the important boundaries today are "determined less by material circumstances such as geography and more by concepts, relationships, and flows of information in the form of money and other symbols."

The contemporary questioning of boundaries has given rise to two terms prominent in the business literature and emerging in the public administration literature: boundary spanning and boundarylessness. Boundary spanning makes a clear differentiation between an organization (or person) and environment. At the individual level, boundary spanning has been defined as persons who operate as exchange or linking agents between the organization and elements outside. At the organizational level, boundary spanning focuses more on organizational systems that filter, protect, buffer, and represent the organization to its environment. At the transorganization level, boundary spanning is the interaction processes within and among networks of organizations working to resolve macro problems which cannot be seen or solved by organizations acting on their own. It also includes cross-cultural learning (e.g., Tichy, 1993). Boundarylessness is regarded as a way of managing based on information such that distinctions (boundaries) do not get in the way (Devanna & Tichy, 1990). In boundarylessness, the idea is to bridge differences and blur turf distinctions and established territories or cultures (Halley, 1997).

Boundaries and Culture

Boundaries demarcate cultures and give rise to the dynamics of exchanges among them. Those demarcations have many descriptors (e.g., boundaries may be clear or fuzzy, weak or strong, qualitative or quantitative, artificial or natural, moral, subjective or objective, blurred, clear, ambiguous, institutional or organizational, ethnic or gender based). The terms of cultural theory, as found in the literature, often contain explicit or implicit reference to the terms of boundary theory (foundations and boundary dynamics). That this is so is illustrated in Table 1 below for different references in the literature of culture which also make reference to various elements of boundary theory.

Table 1
Illustrations of Cultural Theory in the Terms of Boundary Theory

Table 1 shows that the terms of boundary theory can be observed or inferred in the terms of cultural theory. Types and levels of culture (e.g., political, government and business, societal, organizational, bureaucratic) are illuminated by boundaries that differentiate patterns of identity, structure, values, norms (e.g.,trust, blaming), and meaning within and across those boundaries, which may be more or less clearly demarcated (e.g., where is the boundary between political versus non-political, or between business and government). How collective differences and commonalities are constructed is a question of boundaries is a question of culture. Culture means differentiation means fragmentation means boundary management to ensure entities (like societies or organizations or groups) cohere. Implicit in relating culture to boundary is also the idea of power: as Lamont and Fournier (1992) suggest, boundaries mark the social territory (the cultural area) of human relations to indicate who is admitted and who is excluded from various social arrangements.

In the world of human relations, then, we are continually in the process of defining, managing, and changing boundaries to "mark off" areas of shared practices, beliefs, values, norms, and institutions that create collective interior patterns called, by shorthand, "culture." The cultural pattens that ensue across boundaries may have high social capital (e.g., trust) or low social capital (e.g., blaming, distrust) (see Fukuyama, 1995 or Stupak, 1992). Thus, the initial or foundational problem is not to focus on culture per se; rather or in addition, it is to examine how, where, why, and with what effects boundaries are set and changed, and what dynamics of culture thus occur "at, around, and inside boundaries." In so doing, culture is revealed as a force maintaining existing boundaries and also as a force making relationships across those boundaries more or less problematic. Culture holds boundaries in place; cross-cultural dynamics determine the quality and effectiveness or cohesiveness among the numerous boundary demarcations.

Case Illustration: Creating A Boundary Spanning Leadership Culture

One implication of the above work relating culture to boundary theory, especially in the context of a global information society (e.g., Rosell, 1996) is that the place for major learning is at the edges, interstices, or undeveloped intersections of extant boundaries (e.g., public vs. private, Congress vs. executive, science vs. humanities). To make this concrete, this section briefly describes how culture theory related to boundary theory is a theoretical underpinning of a unique leadership development program for senior congressional staff at the boundary between the U. S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

The Stennis Congressional Staff Fellows Program

The Stennis Congressional Staff Fellows program recognizes and honors current senior level staff in each Congress, and encourages the development of a boundary spanning leadership role focused on quality congressional public service in a rapidly changing world. The program is conducted by the Stennis Center for Public Service, an independent agency of the legislative branch of the federal government. A class of 24 senior staff (committee staff directors, administrative assistants / chiefs of staff, and legislative directors) is competitively selected to balance the two chambers (House and Senate), as well as the parties (Republican and Democrat), and major staff roles (committee and personal). Once selected, each class sets and pursues its own learning agenda, looking ahead to a Congress ten years from now. Each class synthesizes its learning for implications to the congressional context, including the next class.

Boundary Theory , Culture, and the Stennis Congressional Fellows Program

When boundary and culture are the units of design, the Stennis Fellows program can be discussed theoretically at two levels -- overall and for particular program elements.

The Fellows program seeks the creation of a staff-to-staff boundary spanning culture of learning among senior staff of the House and Senate. The boundaries demarcating probable existing cultures can be seen in the composition of each class (each class has representation of obvious differences of party, chamber, and committee and personal office senior staff roles on Capitol Hill). The idea of the program is to respect such existing boundaries while also finding ways to work across them. The dominant value, with respect to boundaries, that the program seeks to reinforce is a strong commitment to an institutional (boundary spanning leadership) role for senior congressional staff -- a role that is larger than but highly respective of the roles occasioned by party, chamber, and office or committee structure (and of the ensuing paradoxes, e.g., Quinn et. al., 1996).

In the staff-to-staff culture the Fellows program creates, the focus is for participants to discover and more deeply develop cross boundary issues of leadership, governance, and congressional management that exceed the horizon of immediate planning and emerge at the boundary between the broad context of governing and the immediate and future contexts of Congress as an institution. Boundary is inherent in the issue agenda classes thus far have set and pursued. Examples are: how to improve public perception and confidence in Congress and U.S. government (boundary between Congress and the public); how to improve the relationship between Congress and the media; and how to improve a responsible role of political parties in the policy process. The staff-to-staff leadership and learning culture of the program is an emerging system and process to "create a memory of the future that is not one track" (de Geus, 1992) -- to send, store, and process institutional learning among senior congressional staff.

The program culture has mechanisms of feedback and synthesis of learning within each class to create a legacy across the classes as well as between the classes and the institution. Boundary spanning, culture-building processes built into the program are drawn from the public policy literature on agenda setting and foresight; the business literature on strategy, alliances, and hypercompetitive and turbulent environments; the psychological literature on self-directed learning; and institution-based studies on leadership.

The essence of the program is the creation of a concept and practice of boundary spanning leadership at the level of an interinstitutional, staff-to-staff group. The program is itself a process of leadership wherein diverse staff come together to engage in a leadership task of making new collective meaning (e.g., Drath & Palus, 1994). The idea of the Stennis Congressional Fellows program is to explore, in an inter-institutional learning culture "among traditional boundaries" what interlocking roles -- what new boundaries -- might emerge when senior staff examine the broad context of leadership, governance, and congressional management for implications to a 21st century Congress and to their present lives.

The Stennis Fellows program shows creation of content, process, and effects of a cross-cultural or cross-boundary leadership learning system. The content is cross-boundary issues at the institutional level (like relationships between Congress and the media, or Congress and the public), at the contextual level (governance and the information age), and at the personal level (so what leadership role is relevant to this group and to me as an individual?). The process is a cumulative learning process that is a prototype leadership process. And the effects are emerging, to include the delineation and experience of institutional and managerial boundary-spanning roles for senior congressional staff.

Context is profound and defining when it comes to prominence of the role and function of boundaries. One theme to come out of the Stennis case and the theoretical work underpinning it with respect to boundaries and culture, is recognition that the core problem we are experiencing today is extreme political and administrative complexity (lack of an overarching integrative culture) in overseeing so many conflicting and often highly contested boundaries. The Stennis case is, in microcosm, an example of an effort to create "a culture of learning at interstices." It emphasizes the need for an ongoing, ever changing "leadership as learning" process among senior congressional staff so that they have a means to continually construct and reconstruct shared interpretations of a rapidly changing context and apply that to immediate questions they face as public leaders on Capitol Hill.

Conclusions and Implications

Three general conclusions are warranted on the basis of the above discussion. (1) Boundary and culture are inextricably intertwined, yet very little work has been done to recast cultural theory into the terms of boundary theory. Culture is at heart a question of boundaries. Hence, boundaries are really the starting point of culture. (2) Boundary theory and cultural theory are presently terms more meaningful at the level of reflection or explanation rather than action or practice. The bulk of this article is at the level of explanatory theory, with the Stennis Congressional Fellows case included to connect the theoretical discussion to action or practice. (3) When the terms of culture are recast into the terms of boundary in a practical case such as the Stennis Congressional Fellows program, multiple perspectives and questions emerge that can bridge theory and practice.

Next steps are warranted to build on this work. The following illustrative theory-practice questions are posed to form the basis of a research agenda that links intercultural learning and boundary leadership as two focal themes that emerge from the foregoing analysis.

• Can old, sharply drawn, recognizable boundaries (such as those of party and chamber) really be maintained when higher-level boundaries are drawn that see commonalities and differences across familiar and closely held distinctions? Can individuals manage the cognitive dissonance between simultaneously maintaining boundary distinctions and norms of relationships at one level of culture (e.g., political party) and then transcending them with different norms and relationships at another, more cross-cultural level (e.g., Stennis Congressional Fellows program)?

• What new types of boundaries are created when existing institutional cultures (such as the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives) meet in cross-boundary or cross-cultural situations? For example, do people develop new roles, larger than or different from the roles they take on in the home base or institutional culture, and what new boundaries are thereby created with what effects?

• Culture is at once concerned with what we share and with how what we share makes us therefore different from others. Culture is both fragmenting (creating boundaries) and integrating (forming shared meaning within boundaries). To transcend the apparent dilemma, what interlocking leadership roles and styles are effective at the interstices among competing boundaries?

• Earlier, the epistemological outline of the concept of culture was identified to include culture as: content, process, effects, perspectives, types, and levels. Recast into the terms of boundary theory, that same epistemological outline sees culture more fundamentally as boundary foundations (e.g., types and levels of boundaries) and boundary dynamics (e.g., creation, management, and change of boundaries). So in the Stennis case, we can look fundamentally to what boundaries need to be included, what boundaries need to be crossed, what new boundaries (separations and relationships or cultures) might be created to form an interinstitutional culture of learning? What "new lines" can be drawn and in what new ways? The terms of boundary theory take us very quickly to the essence of the program (e.g., crossing boundaries of party, chamber, and role).

• Frequent pleas are heard for "more leadership." The Stennis case moves beyond that to argue that the traditional language of leadership is really inadequate to describe what is required to lead across boundaries that separate, for example, the House and Senate of the U.S. Congress, or that separate Congress from other entities such as the executive branch or the private sector. A new concept, such as boundary spanning leadership, or even "boundaryless" leadership, needs to be developed to provde a better understanding of how to create and manage inter-institutional cultures that preserve, yet span, constitutional and other boundaries. Additional research is needed to inform the question of what individual and organization-level knowledge and skills will enable effectively engaging in intercultural learning as an ongoing process of leadership?

A practical case such as the Stennis Congressional Fellows program thus is but one illustration to show how both boundary theory and cultural theory can underpin the design and delivery of a senior-level, intercultural leadership program. The case demonstrates a very preliminary effort to make this theory-practice connection, and thereby to transcend the apparent dichotomy between culture and boundary. Hopefully, if we can meaningfully link "culture and boundary," we will illuminate new theoretical questions and more effective practice. Self-conscious efforts are sorely needed that simultaneously address (in society and in organizations and groups) (1) the vast differentiation we have created with numerous boundaries and cultures and (2) the absence of coherence that existence of "culture across boundaries" ought to bring. Recasting organizational culture into the terms of boundary theory, and vice versa, sets an intellectual starting point to design intercultural leadership learning systems that can simultaneously maintain differentiation and appropriate integration or linkage among differences.

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