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.”
