ABSTRACT
In a superficial way, organizational culture can be described as ‘how we do things here’. Organizational culture then amounts to how the members of an organization deal with the recurrent problems of their company. Apart from the routines to solve these problems, it involves such things as the housing and layout of the organization and the common reality stemming from all that, with its blueprints for behaviour, perception, thought and feeling. Its actual forms may have come about in somewhat coincidental ways, but other possibilities have been excluded by the appearance of the first ones, simply because something can take only one form at a time.This is called ‘autopoiesis’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980), a state resulting from a self-organizing system.The result is a highly predictable way of doing things, a solid shared reality in which its members can firmly belief. Because of this unquestioned belief, they keep on enacting its forms, which makes this reality even more solid. They usually see this reality as the only possible one and as long as they act on this belief, it actually is: a typical case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
