Organizational Climate and Culture: A Conceptual Analysis of the School Workplace

The concepts of organizational climate and culture have become part of the standard rhetoric in contemporary discussions of school effectiveness. Unfortunately, both terms are complex and neither is dearly defined. This article examines the intellectual traditions and conceptual underpinnings of climate and culture and then provides working definitions for each. Examples of frameworks to study school climate and school culture are presented and contrasted. The tension between research on climate using multivariate statistical analyses and studies of culture using the tools of the phenomenologist and ethnographer provides a healthy competition, one that should enhance our understanding of the school workplace if both perspectives are given an opportunity to flourish.