The Power of 'Organizational Culture' as a Discursive Formation in Merger Integration

This paper argues that knowledge on ‘organizational culture’ has acquired authority and constitutes a ‘truth’ on mergers, a truth imbued with both enabling and constraining power effects. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the paper theorizes ‘organizational culture’ as a discursive formation that is implicated in a regime of truth. This regime has involved a process of disciplinary normalization in merger integration with the result that ‘culture’ has become naturalized to ‘organization’. Drawing on ethnographic research into merger integration, these arguments are illustrated through two vignettes titled ‘surveillance’ and ‘sanctuary’. These represent the reproduction of, and resistance to, the truth effects of ‘organizational culture’. The implications of critically examining ‘organizational culture’ in this way are twofold: first, it opens up space for other merger discourses, and second, it enables positioning of merger accounts within cultural discourses in a way that forwards productive rather than divisive effects in theory and practice.