In every one of my jobs throughout my career there was some form of rituals within the organization that I work for. There were always performance evaluations that reinforced the organization and company’s goals and values. The last large corporation I worked at had an annual sales conference where employees attended workshops and various sessions all day on with new product release information, team building exercises and hands-on technology classes. However, every night there was some type of party event for every one attending, your department or sales group. Another ritual one of the company’s I worked for was a type of reward to the top selling sales people called “President’s Club”. For those sales representatives, sales engineers and consultants that obtained over 100% of their quota, the company hosted an elaborate trip at a resort. This same company had another ritual that I have yet to see at any other company I worked for. The company would require every new employee to stand up in front of a large group of their peers and sing their school’s fight song. Their philosophy was that they only hired the best and with that came some pretty big egos. This form of public humiliation was to bring everyone to the same playing field. I couldn’t remember my fight song, so I sang Sweet Home Chicago, a blues song. I kind of enjoyed it.
What I found interesting about your blog was that within rituals you also addressed a few other cultural elements. You mentioned values and performances as well. It is interesting to see how the cultural elements are often so intertwined. In my own job I see that often times the rituals we perform are direct reflections of the values of the business of which we are a part of. As we perform these rituals we also use metaphoric language to describe the actions we take. Our artifacts would be things like dress our physical items we use daily in our rituals.
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