British Airways: culture and structure

Nearly twenty years after the publication of the (in)famous In Search of Excellence, the notion of ‘cultural change’ within organisations continues to excite attention. This continuing attraction is readily understood, since cultural interventions offer practitioners the hope of a universal panacea to organisational ills and academics an explanatory framework that enjoys the virtues of being both partially true and gloriously simple. Such a combination is apparent in the way that many attempts to shape organisational culture are presented to the public: as simple stories with happy endings (see among others, Peters and Waterman, 1982; Peters and Austin, 1985; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Pfeffer 1994, 1998).