The Cultural Frame of Reference

Organization theorists working from the cultural frame of reference think of organizations as bodies of thought, as schemas, cultures, or paradigms. Their theories are premised on the idea that humans construct their social realities through intersubjective communication (see Berger & Luckmann, 1967). As such, the cognitive and paradigmatic perspectives on organization and change are concerned with the way people construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct meaning and how this relates to the way action and interaction unfold over time in organizations. Cognitive theories emphasize the way people create and recreate their organizational realities; paradigmatic theories emphasize the way organizational realities create and recreate people. Together, these theories reflect the interactive duality of the cultural frame of reference — people creating culture and culture creating people (Pettigrew, 1979).