University of Western Sydney
College of Law and Business
School of Management
Individual Essay
Assignment “Organisational Behaviour”

„Morgan’s four images of organisation
applied to the James Hardie case study“

by:
Petra Zschietzschmann

2004

Apply any two of Morgan’s (1986) four images of organisation to the James Hardie case study. How useful are the two images that you have selected for explaining action and behaviour within organisations? Are there any deficiencies in the two images that you have selected? Explain the deficiencies you identify by indicating what the two images you have selected fail to take into account or explain about organisations.

A number of aspects have to be taken into consideration to get an insight into organisations and – in the given case - to understand what was going on when James Hardie decided to relocate its headquarters to the Netherlands to obviously avoid its liabilities to compensate asbestos victims.

Gareth Morgan as a “pioneer in the use of metaphor to read, analyse and facilitate organisations to change” (Lawley 2001) created the images of organisations as machines, organisms, cultures and political systems. These metaphors are a tool to approach the James Hardie case. Viewing organisations as two of these images, one of which is organisations as cultures, the other of which is organisations as political systems, can help to explain organisations through outlining the usefulness as well as the limitations the images have.

Firstly, organisations can be seen as cultures. Every single one organisation has got its own culture, the organisational culture, which “refers to a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organisation from other organisations” (Robbins 2004, p. 499). The culture is made up of values and beliefs and the organisation can be seen as a society.

Thus, there is a strong relation between organisational and national culture: various national cultures in the world have basic concepts such as ideology, values, rituals, tradition, or symbols. The cultural metaphor contains the understanding of an organisation having evolved during its existence since its foundation. “From this perspective the key to an organisation is … its spirit or soul.” (Dunford 1992, p. 7).

Considering the James Hardie case, there are examples of an organisational culture that does not exist any more since in 2001, the company decided to move its headquarters. James Hardie has once been “Australia’s biggest manufacturer of asbestos cement products” (Peacock 2004) which seems to be a successful result of a well-working organisation, including an existent culture within it.

Meanwhile, asbestos victims claim to be compensated and although James Hardie and its employees once have been working together, a former employee now alleges: “For these people to sit there and say they can pack up their tent in the middle of the night and go offshore and just leave their liabilities in two little companies – I just find it ludicrous” (Peacock 2004). This statement reveals a huge disappointment concerning the way employees are treated. It shows that the culture which once might have been made up of communication and cooperation in order to attain shared objectives has completely disappeared.

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