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It’s now pretty clear where to start. Never, ever try to use technology to transform a (corporate) culture this might be called “embracing the monster” (comp. Monstermedia).

Intranet as a mirror to the organisation: “Every organisation has a unique mix of culture, business processes, history, technology and strategic directions (to name but a few factors).

I changed my Jabber (t d f) presence to thomas@burg.cx – a second time due to some server issues – please reauthorize me on your roster.

Stumbled across Dick Stenmark, from Göteborg (t d f), these days, my entry point was “How Intranet (t d f)s differ from the Web: Organisational (t d f) culture (t d f)‘s effect on technology” (PDF). This a a brief outline for a research proposal as well as a practical advice on the different world of the organization and it’s use of web-technology for internal purposes be it knowledge-management or just information-diffusion. His theoretical lense is the concept of organisational culture as the determining factor for intranet deployment, usage, and shortcomings compared to the adoption in the open web. Stenmarks grounds his concept on James Slevin, Tim Berners-Lee, and especially E. Eisenberg’s and P. Riley’s article on Organizational Culture. The first 2 pages are available via Amazon, think you need to be logged in. This concept
focuses on organization as a symbolic and linguistic place where meaning is constructed and used to make sense or experiences. (Matthew Seeger). A culture consists of symbols, narratives, documents, interactions, cognitions, actions, etc.

Cultural transmission is Slevins metaphor to understand what he terms the reorganisation of the social relations the media is facilitating. This means not only to look at the online culture but the real culture the users are situated in. And since organizational culture traditionally describes a rather rigid set of command-and-control practices information is not understood as a communicative act but a as a tool for control.