The Internationalisation of PTT Telecom: A Cultural Perspective - Free

33which control is very difficult, decision-making processes are unclear andorganisational boundaries are vague. Martin explains:Ambiguity is perceived when a lack of clarity, high complexity, or a paradoxmakes multiple (rather than single or dichotomous) explanations plausible(Martin 1992: 133).A certain level of rationality, control, clear boundaries and shared culturalelements are present in an organisation. An increase of complexity in anorganisation does not however necessarily result in an increase of ambiguity,chaos and vagueness. The complexity of an organisation is reduced when thefocus is on the behaviour of employees in their world of daily life. Employeeshave a strong capacity to absorb information, to order this information and, tocope with new situations. Employees organise chaos, new developments thatcause insecurity to a comprehensive level, in order to control their situation. Anexample is the use of the Internet, where diversity, ambiguity and chaos areconcentrated. People know how to reduce this complexity to usable proportions.Koot (1995) thus criticises post-modernist scientists who see a constant flow ofchange in organisations without noticing the institutional side of theseorganisations. He points out the paradoxical relation between integration anddifferentiation ‘what looks at first glance as chaos, seems to have logic after aclose inspection’ (Koot 1995: 23). Without integration there is no differentiationand without diversity there will be no unity.We must always relate the meaning we ascribe to certain acts and words tothe psychic framework from which they have sprung. In so doing, we can geta better grasp of certain behaviours that may seem quite ambiguous,paradoxical or even totally irrational at first glance (Chanlat 1994: 180)2.3.2 Anthropological Perspective on Organisational CultureThe discussion on the controversial aspects of organisational culture has shownthat anthropologists have already studied organisational culture for a long timebut never have been large in number nor gathered authority on organisationalculture studies. The famous William Foot Whyte hoped in 1978 that therenewed interests in organisational culture would become a major field of studyfor applied anthropologists (Trice and Beyer 1993: 25). Cultural anthropologistshowever, have shown little or no interest in the culture of workplace. It was notan anthropologist but a professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Van Maanen, who first started studying occupational cultures. And it was not ananthropologist but an economist, Hofstede, who began studies on cross-culturalmanagement. It was only toward the end of the eighties before culturalanthropologists showed any interest in organisational cultures (Bate 1997).Not surprisingly, anthropologists such as Koot (1989, 1995, 1997), Chanlat(1994) and Tennekes (1995) criticise the existing perspectives on organisationalcultures that were already developed by scholars of other scientific traditions.By then it was necessary to again review the position of the anthropologicalperspective on organisational culture. In the Netherlands, the culturalanthropologists Tennekes (1985, 1995) and Koot (1989, 1995, 1997) have done