Organizational Culture in The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Organizational culture is the most fundamental element of the collective work. It includes the attitudes, beliefs, experience and values of the company or family. Hill & Jones (2001, p. 34) give the definition of organizational culture. They determine it as ‘the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. Organizational values are beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another’.

The basics of organizational culture can be found in a family of Celie. However, Celie’s stepfather is not a ‘good leader’ who organizes the family and shares the attitudes, beliefs, experience and values for its healthy existence. In ‘The Color Purple’ the reader understands that there is the tradition of woman’s humiliation and the tradition of a ‘man’ who is dominant in the family.

Summarizing, the novel ‘The Color Purple’ written by Alice Walker is a book, which discusses such themes as power, influence, decision making, and organizational culture in the life of the black women in the beginning of the 20th century. Besides, the paper gives a deep look inside the book, stressing gender roles in the early 20th century.

 ‘The Color Purple’ is the echo of the slavery time. The African-American theorist and writer Gloria Watkins points out that ‘The Color Purple’ is a parody of the tradition of the ‘slave narrative’ – stories written by male and female former slaves about their experiences under slavery. Some slave narratives were collected among former slaves in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal project in the Southern United States. This powerful literary tradition is characterized by Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave’ (1845), Linda Brent's ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’, and many others.’ (4)