Disney and the Symbolic Frame: Myths, Stories & Culture
This paper applies Bolman and Deal's (2013) symbolic frame to the Walt Disney Company, examining how symbols, myths, stories, rituals, and legendary heroes shape both organizational culture and global brand identity. The paper first outlines the five core assumptions of the symbolic frame—including the salience of meaning, the value of symbols during crisis, and culture as organizational glue—and then demonstrates how Disney exemplifies each component. From Walt Disney's mythologized biography to the company's deliberate co-optation of world folktales, the analysis shows how Disney uses storytelling as both product and management strategy, constructing a "mythocracy" that influences employee behavior, consumer loyalty, and public perception across generations.
- The Symbolic Frame: Bolman and Deal's five symbolic frame assumptions explained
- Framing Disney: Heroes, Stories, and Myths: Disney's heroes, storytelling, and myth-making strategies
- Ritual and Myth in Disney's Organizational Culture: Rituals, ceremonies, and mythic figures at Disney
- Conclusions About the Symbolic Frame: Synthesis of symbolic frame applied to Disney leadership
- Disney Across All Four Frames: Disney evaluated through all four organizational frames
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves efficiently from theory to application, first establishing Bolman and Deal's symbolic frame in precise terms before using Disney as an extended, layered case study.
- It draws on a diverse range of scholarly sources—including media studies, organizational behavior, and cultural analysis—lending credibility to its claims about Disney's myth-making strategies.
- Critical analysis is balanced: the paper acknowledges Disney's cultural achievements while also interrogating its authoritarian corporate culture, use of propaganda, and co-optation of global folk traditions.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied theoretical framing—taking an established organizational behavior model (Bolman and Deal's symbolic frame) and systematically mapping each of its components (heroes, storytelling, myth, ritual, ceremony) onto a single real-world organization. This technique shows how abstract frameworks can produce concrete, evidence-based insights when applied rigorously to a specific case.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thorough explanation of the symbolic frame and its five underlying assumptions. It then pivots to Disney, organizing its analysis around the frame's key mechanisms: heroic figures, storytelling, myth, and ritual. A conclusion synthesizes the findings, and a brief closing section situates the symbolic frame within Disney's broader four-frame organizational profile. This funnel structure—theory first, application second, synthesis third—is well-suited to organizational behavior essays.
The Symbolic Frame
A novel approach to organizational behavior, Bolman and Deal's (2013) model includes the structural, the human resources, the political, and the symbolic frames. The symbolic frame refers to an organization's use of signs, symbols, and stories to create a brand identity and organizational culture, as well as to justify its behaviors. Symbols create and propagate meaning, and encapsulate an organization's written codes of ethics and values.
Therefore, symbols become one of the most powerful means by which to create and control organizational culture. Bolman and Deal (2013) explain the five assumptions underlying the symbolic frame. The first involves the salience of meaning. What matters most to an organization is not what happens, but what it means on a deeper symbolic level—how actions or facts are interpreted in light of the overarching stories, myths, or symbols that guide the organization and its members.
Second, the symbolic frame allows for nuance. Especially in a large, heterogeneous company, individual members will perceive events according to their personal interpretation of the symbols. The symbols nevertheless create a sense of unity amid the diversity within the organization.
Third, symbols have an especially tangible value during times of change or crisis. Symbols can help members of the organization find guidance, resolve conflict and confusion, increase the locus of control or sense of certainty, and find meaning, hope, or value in any situation.
Fourth, organizational processes and singular events become part of an ongoing narrative or story. Rituals, ceremonies, and archetypal heroes provide members with a sense of deep meaning that motivates their engagement and performance over time.
Finally, culture is created through the effective implementation of symbols and stories. Culture becomes the all-important glue binding together the disparate members of a team, department, or corporation. Buying into shared values and beliefs enables the resolution of conflict in ways that promote organizational success.
The symbolic frame is a method of assessing organizations as if they were any other type of society—using the tools of sociology and anthropology and setting aside, for a moment, the ulterior motives of the organization's leaders. Without the underlying myths and symbols, an organization cannot hope to solicit intrinsic motivation among employees or to engender brand loyalty across multiple generations of consumers. The symbolic frame applies especially well to organizations with sweeping visions, whose leaders become legendary heroes, and whose cultures become an identity and a way of life for members—almost to the point of resembling a religion, given the emphasis on values and beliefs guiding the behavior of individuals and small groups within its umbrella.
When an organization uses storytelling, it breathes life into its policies, rules, structures, and formal regulations. Likewise, stories legitimize positions of power and the roles filled within the organization. Stories and metaphors are not only "deeply rooted in the human experience" collectively, but are also part and parcel of the structure of human consciousness and cognition (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 254). The symbolic frame shows how organizations create and implement long-range strategies for management, marketing, and more.
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