After working through this chapter you should be able to:

• define organizational cultures

• understand how organizational cultures become established and maintained

• identify key organizational structures and their impacts (positive and negative) on organizational members in leisure services

• identify and explain the structural characteristics of leisure service organizations giving rise to occupational communities.

If you were asked to explain the meaning of culture, your first thoughts would probably be about the characteristics of nationality (other than your own). In part, this is because observable national characteristics are often stereotyped and constantly presented naively or amusingly to us by the mass media. When seeking to illustrate your national culture there may be some difficulty because perceptions of self (or a group to which you belong) often differ from those of others.

Possibly you will then try to explain your culture by comparing and contrasting with characteristics you believe present in that of others. In any event, the outcome of the whole process is likely to contain inaccuracies and be difficult to express. In addition, by focusing exclusively on nationality you will have ignored other key pieces of the cultural jigsaw such as gender, religion, education, socioeconomic group, income and so on.

Understanding culture

Culture is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define accurately. Mullins (1996) suggests that this is partially because often we think only of:

• emergent issues (or whats ) rather than considering why certain nationalities are labelled as polite , bombastic or pragmatic for example