Abstract
We wish to thank James Baron, Mary Douglas, Elisabeth Hansot, Meryl Louis, James March, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Edgar Schein, Art Stinchcombe, and Eugene Webb fortheir helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Organizational cultures, and in particular stories, carry a claim to uniqueness-that an institution is unlike any other. This paper argues that a culture's claim to uniqueness is, paradoxically, expressed through cultural manifestations, such as stories, that are not in fact unique. We present seven types of stories that make a tacit claim to uniqueness. We show that these seven stories occur, in virtually identical form, in a wide variety of organizations. We then suggest why these stories have proliferated while others have not.
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