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.
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.
Few organizations could possibly prove to be a better example of the symbolic frame than the Walt Disney Company. All major organizations demonstrate the power of storytelling and symbols through their branding, but for Disney, symbols and stories actually are the products and services the company provides. In fact, the mission of the Walt Disney Company is "to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling" ("About the Walt Disney Company," 2020). Storytelling and symbols are woven into the fabric of organizational culture, into its products, and into its mission, vision, and values. Moreover, Disney self-consciously promotes and capitalizes on the social, political, and psychological power of storytelling. Storytelling is the company's medium and its message. Essentially, Disney uses symbols and stories to sell symbols and stories, reinventing those symbols and rewriting those stories to keep the brand relevant to people from disparate times, cultures, and places. The Walt Disney Company therefore provides a complex and layered example of the power of the symbolic frame.
The symbolic frame includes several core components, among them the creation of legendary heroes who become mythic figures, transcending their human faults and failings. Of course, the founder of the eponymous company has become its most meaningful mythological hero. Walt Disney established a brand name by becoming a self-made hero—a sort of postmodern god-king whose name became synonymous with storytelling itself. The legend of Walt Disney became an indelible part of the Disney Company story. Much of what became part of Walt Disney's biography was apocryphal rather than factual, embedded especially in the notion that "Walt Disney was a creative genius who was responsible for the company's success" (Wasko, 2001, p. 237). Of course, the founder did contribute greatly during the company's early years, but whitewashing his character and life story parallels the many ways the Disney Company rewrote the heroes borrowed from the world's folktales and legends so that they could be used as instruments of corporate control. Disney has been charged with creating a "mythocracy" based on totalitarian methods (Boguszewicz-Kreft, Kreft & Zurek, 2019, p. 1). A type of near-dictatorial leadership permeated the culture of the Disney Company long after its founder died, with subsequent CEOs like Michael Eisner being called an "almost glorified, face of corporate waste and self-awareness, if not aggrandisement" (Forbes & Watson, n.d., p. 1). From the start, Disney created a normative culture within which authoritarian and mythical leadership styles were expected. Transmuting negative traits into positive ones also became a skillful tactic of the symbolic frame for Disney.
Another aspect of the symbolic frame is storytelling, which involves narratives and the creation of special heroes who embody organizational values and visions. Storytelling is, of course, the business of Disney. Disney sells new versions of old stories. Di Giovanni (2014) points out that "cultures which are distant in time and space are depicted in a selection of Disney animated films" (p. 207). Stories went from being culturally specific—bound to particular places, peoples, and times—to being globally commercial in value through the Disney enterprise. Furthermore, the use of storytelling allowed Disney to engage in the co-creation of the story of America via the "projection of western stereotypes and American values" onto co-opted folktales and fairytales (Di Giovanni, 2014, p. 207). For the Walt Disney Company, storytelling becomes a form of "propaganda" used in both internal communications and in marketing, which "contributes to corporate hegemony" (Boguszewicz-Kreft, Kreft & Zurek, 2019, p. 1). Storytelling is what Disney sells, what the company does best, and it also uses storytelling throughout its organizational culture to ensure employee engagement.
The use of myths is also tremendously important to the symbolic frame, and especially so for Disney. Myths and legends can be many times more valuable than facts because they are transcendent and possess universal appeal. Much has been written about the unique method by which Disney creates myths to perpetuate its corporate culture and values. Disney practically claims mythic status in society and in the global market economy, in part by disseminating the myth that "the Disney company is somehow special and unique, not like other corporations" (Wasko, 2001, p. 237). Another myth promoted by Disney is that "everyone adores" the company and its products, which are wholesome, "harmless, safe, and unbiased" (Wasko, 2001, p. 237). These myths are substantiated not by fact, but by the art of storytelling itself. As Bohas (2014) puts it, the Disney method of myth-making represents "intertwined material and ideational universes" and "multilayered knowledge structuring" (p. 23). Disney creates narratives and meta-narratives to support them.
"Rituals, ceremonies, and mythic figures at Disney"
"Synthesis of symbolic frame applied to Disney leadership"
"Disney evaluated through all four organizational frames"
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