Communication and recovery: Structuration as an ontological approach to organizational culture

This inquiry focuses on the world's largest and most successful group of Alcoholics Anonymous. It adopts Giddens's theory of structuration as a framework for studying the deeply layered social interactions within the organization. Ethnographic data were analyzed by means of an interpretive interactionist methodology. The results indicated that the organization is a “disembedding mechanism,” in which structures from the global organization are disembedded by the founder, transformed, and recreated in the local organization. The alcoholic self is both agent and outcome as it evolves through recursive group practices and individual actions. As used in this study, the structurationist perspective on organizational culture provides a fuller understanding of the ways in which organizations are created and sustained through interaction, as well as the significance of their historicity and cultural contexts, and can help guide future research on organizational culture.