- Some researchable questions that the Watkins read: What is organizational culture and why should we care? personally evoked for me are mostly related to the time and data pool in which he conducted his research. When I first started reading this article I realized that it was very outdated, since it occurred in May of 2013, more than eight years ago. This makes me wonder how different the responses would be if Watkins repeated this research more recently. Another aspect of his research that made me a bit skeptical is that the only people invited into the survey were from LinkedIn. So therefore that only people who heard about the survey had to already be a part of the organization, which largely narrowed down the data pool. I also noted that out of the nine perspectives, only one was from a female. It just made me wonder if the data in his research was slightly skewed and not completely accurate to current times and a wide range of people/genders.
3) One aspect from the article Why diversity matters that sparked a big interest in me, was when the authors started to discuss the disparities between different countries and how diverse the executive teams are for each of them. It is very discouraging to see that 97 percent of the United States fails to represent the racial demographic composition of the country’s population. Even the United Kingdom, which does much better than the United States, still falls short of racial diversity with only 22 percent of companies that are racially diverse. I think that this practice of not being diverse in companies goes back to the idea of organizational culture. The first perspective in Watkins’ article quotes Aristotle, “we are what we repeatedly do”. For much of America’s history, the only people allowed to hold a place in power were white men. This practice is unfortunately still carried out often, evident in the very low statistics regarding racial and gender diversity. The article titled Why diversity matters was written in 2015, so there is hope that the statistics have improved over the last 6 years, but no matter the improvement, there is still much to do to become truly diverse in the work field.
Hi Caitlin
I did not realize how outdated the article was until I read Sherri’s response. I would also be interested to see what has changed since 2013. I also questioned the accuracy and representativeness of this survey since it was conducted on LinkedIn and over eight years ago. However, I did not notice the lack of gender diversity in the survey until I read your response. Even though the respondent’s gender diversity may have lacked, I enjoyed that we were still able to read nine different perspectives about “what is organizational culture”.
Good work, all, in noting the limitations of this text–it’s outdated, narrow, and not genuinely representative. That’s precisely the sort of critical reading we need to apply to all of the texts we look at, both course readings and in our individual research. We need to be prepared to acknowledge the limitations of a given text, think about how we can complement that text with others that address those gaps, and consider what unique value each might have to offer.