ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the vehicles by which meaning is employed in organizations. It explores that the narrative form and content give coherence and provide order for enacting companies. The chapter also explores that the meaning defines the contingencies organizational members enact as they adapt their efforts to the performance guidelines, constraints, and rewards voiced in organizational culture. The objective is to think of organizations’ symbolic action through culture. Management is symbolic action. But so is the activity of employees and stakeholders of each company. Arguments that management is symbolic action are instructive in what they accomplish as well as what they fail to do. This preferred view of symbolic action goes beyond the notion that symbols are vehicles by which information is conveyed between people and across time. Symbolic action occurs, not because symbols refer to things, but because people enact the meaning, especially the attitudes, that are embedded in words.
