In the 1980s 'culture' operated as a kind of 'open sesame' concept in management theory. Subsequently it has been heavily criticized. Despite the critics, the concept of culture continues to be widely used by managers and consultants. It signifies processes of importance in organizations that other concepts do not capture so well. A project of 'managing culture' was devised in the year 2000 in collaboration with the Scandinavian engineering consultant company SEC. 

Cultural merging 

SEC was in a heavy growth period, after mergers and acquisitions of a number of firms. The reasoning behind the mergers was to position the company for the purpose of delivering complete solutions to large engineering projects, which were getting increasingly higher shares of the total project market. The challenges of creating and realizing practical synergies after mergers and acquisitions are all too familiar from the literature. Since 1997 corporations have globally spent well above $5 trillion on mergers and acquisitions, yet in 83 per cent of 700 large mergers the stock price of the combined organization did not rise above those of the single entities.

SEC identified challenges with diverse organizational cultures and work practices in the different companies it had acquired for realizing its ambitions. For example, some of the com- panies comprised highly specialized, mono-disciplinary, engineers with a much sought-after expert status, and which subsequently had a wide geographical area as their field' of work. On the other hand, some companies comprised highly trans-disciplinary engineers with work practices targeted towards complex and often local projects where they had respon- sibilities for more or less the totality of the project. Thus the project was initiated with the slogan of accelerated cultural integration'. In a collaboration between key members of the company and our team of researchers we defined the work tasks implied in the slogan in terms of barriers and enablers for knowledge exchange. The project subsequently focused on methods, concepts, and approaches for accelerated cultural integration after and during the new company mergers and acquisitions....

Questions 

1. Is it possible to 'manage culture' at all, or is this a contradiction in terms? 

2. Based on your own experience, discuss possible approaches to 'managing culture'. 

3. What does culture consist of in this case?