Org Culture the Scholarly Website on Organizational

Org Culture

The scholarly website on organizational culture that is being reviewed is the Harvard Business Review, which produces content on a variety of business issues, among them organizational culture and mentoring. Within this website there are a number of articles, some of which were written for publication in the Harvard Business Review itself, and others of which were produced for the HBR.org blog network. The blogs are produced by experts from both industry and academia in order to inform readers and stimulate discussion on these business topics.

An example of how the site works is found in a blog post by Watkins (2013). This post discusses the author's attempts to spark a discussion about the subject on LinkedIn, and the responses that this discussion generated. This is an interesting post because it gathers a wide variety of opinions about organizational culture and uses quotes from different site users as prompts to cover off a variety of issues with respect to the subject.

The HBR site has a number of pieces on organizational culture, highlighting different scholarship and approaches to discussion about this issue. Another piece (Coleman, 2013) highlights the different elements of a corporate culture. There are a number of different approaches to understanding the idea of organizational culture because the concept is fairly vague and ill-defined, but yet is relevant to many organizations. Thus, it takes a lot of thinking to understand and define the nature of organizational culture. Using evidence from companies is definitely helpful, and is an approach taken by HBR authors and blog post writers.

The HBR website can positively affect organizational function, because it provides a high quality level of discourse on the subject. There is a tremendous body of knowledge about organizational culture -- and mentoring as well -- and this knowledge can help practitioners to understand both what other companies are doing and also what academics are determining from their studies of culture. One of the great strengths of HBR.org is the way that the scholars mix in a lot of practice in with their theory. They derive theory from practice, and in that way they describe the current state of practice. This informs practitioners about best practices, and the way that leading companies apply these theories about organizational culture. The explanations are among the most cogent on the Internet, and allow for readers to understand these concepts quickly and easily, and see how the concepts apply to their own business.

Organizations often are flying in the dark with respect to issues like culture. They lack the tools to effectively understand their own organizational culture, let alone how to influence their culture and get it to a place where it is truly helping the organization. In that way, a site like HBR.org is an invaluable resource, because it provides high level discourse on the subject, and it does this in plain English, and it has a lot of information. For an organization looking to benchmark against the best in the world, HBR.org is a resource that can provide information about what the best companies in the world are doing.