Culture

Most organizations view culture as an underlying set of values that determines how firms perceive and react to their environments. Under this perspective, culture cannot be measured or controlled. The article, Organizational Culture as a Knowledge Resource, offers an alternative perspective of culture, diverging from the element of control involving culture. Culture can be effectively managed if viewed as a competitive resource. Cultivated knowledge culture can create competitive advantage in knowledge creation, storage, transfer, and application.

The part of this article that I found most interesting was the specific criteria that they used to describe cultures. The trade off between stability and control versus flexibility and change. Different cultures will excel in different criteria, and thus create competitive advantage in knowledge creation, storage, transfer, or application. The article also offers a number of unconfirmed hypothesis about the impact of organizational culture and the competitive advantage created.