The growing economics literature on “Culture and Institutions” explores how these concepts influence each other. For example, Guiso et al. (2013) found that a contemporary Italian city’s “social capital” correlates with its experience as a “free city” in the Middle Ages. This literature largely follows Guiso et al. (2006: 23), defining culture as “customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.” Since Schein’s (1985) seminal work, the literature on organizations has recognized that slow-moving external cultures may indeed seep into organizations and yet organizational culture might be built and changed both much more quickly and much more intentionally than external culture. This talk will explore work in progress on organizational culture, emphasizing the difficulties in building shared mental models among organization members. In brief, we seek a game-theoretic understanding of Geertz’s (1973: 12) insight that “Culture is public because meaning is.”