Date of Graduation

1998

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

Culture is a pervasive concept that is not easily encompassed in any one definition. Culture within an organization is both process and product. It is both a dynamic agent of influence within the temporal and spatial context of organizational life and an object of study approached from the actor's point of view and thickly described. My general interest is in the cultural context of colleges, and more specifically in the part that culture has played in the formation and transformation of the mission and role of Berea College as it has sought to educate marginalized people for nearly 150 years. Berea has sustained a strong "integrated academic culture" (Burton Clark) and a mission and role expressed often in terms of a "Cause." Berea College was founded in 1858, principally to provide interracial education in a hostile racial climate in Kentucky. By 1895 to 1900, Berea's mission was focused on the people of the southern mountains. Yet, the fact that Berea is a distinctive college with a coherent cultural orientation to this day, makes this institution of particular interest for an organizational cultural study. The leadership of two powerful and influential presidents during a time of institutional crisis, 1892-1939, has pervasively impacted the mission and role of the institution. Burton Clark's pioneer work into the historical study of institutional culture, saga development, and the impact of leadership in distinctive colleges and universities forms the broad conceptual framework of this inquiry. Edgar Schein's functionalist approach to organizational culture that focuses on artifacts, values, and most significantly underlying assumptions is grafted onto Clark's conceptual model. Lastly, Geertz's semiotic approach is a qualifier to the study of institutional culture by attempting to interpret the historical context from the actor's point of view. The synthesis of these three approaches creates an eclectic and multi-varied model of inquiry. The result of this study is the discovery of an anomaly in what otherwise appears to be a coherent and cohesive institutional cultural orientation and saga. Two historical factors are extensively examined: (1) the change from Berea's primary role and mission of interracial education to a focus on the uplift of the "atavistic Anglo Saxons" of Appalachia, and (2) the struggle to transform Berea from an educational smorgasbord into a distinct Christian liberal arts institution of higher education, with an emphasis on student labor to eliminate tuition and to maintain a spirit of equality. Examining Berea's transformative administrations of Presidents William Goddell Frost and William J. Hutchins with the present saga narrative and cultural orientation, strongly suggests that the transformation and embodiment of the college's mission and role effected major cultural change that has maintained continuity and cohesiveness over time. Burton Clark's findings are consonant with Berea's "integrated academic culture" in a small Christian liberal arts college committed to a cause. Schein's approach peers beneath the disturbed surface of two major challenges to Berea's mission, role, and educational configuration to understand how Berea's organizational character and cultural orientation maintain a comparatively high degree of coherence and cohesiveness. The cultural glue that holds the embattled institution together through the turbulent history of the twentieth century is its cause to Appalachia that was enabled by changes taking place in an external racial segregationist environment until the 1950's, and the ongoing vestiges of American paideia that so strongly undergirded Berea's core assumptions.

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