Purpose – This paper aims to develop a system view of the organizational culture, given entropy of theoretical and methodological outlooks on the phenomenon alongside simultaneous growth of number of research reports. Design/methodology/approach – Sequential structural and ontological analysis of the Schein’s (2004) point of view on organization culture enabled to form a way of system comprehension of the respective object field on conscious and unconscious levels. Findings – Structural ontology of organizational culture represented by the mythopoetic concept of organization, which is a composition of unconscious motives reflecting standard and management peculiarities of functioning characteristic of a certain group. Research limitations/implications – The proposed methodological discourse actualizes a hypothesis on organizational unconscious as a specific factor of organizational culture and begets a respective direction of the further researches. Originality/value – This is the first methodological concept, that provides a system comprehension of the object field of organizational culture. The concept has important implications for methodological designs of further researches and systematization of already obtained data within the domain.

Introduction

Quantitative criterion of research actuality of organizational culture is vividly represented by the growth of relative publications. Qualitative part of importance and perspective of the given research is manifested through entropy of theoretical and methodological outlooks on the problem alongside simultaneous growth of number of research reports. In particular, the issue of setting boundaries for the object field of organizational culture still remains to be open. On the one hand, this situation could be considered as a favorable prerequisite for further generation and verification of separate hypotheses about nature, peculiarities and regularities of organizational culture. On the other hand, without unifying systematization of the obtained knowledge the further research progress risks becoming inapplicable for theoretic generalization of permanently replenishing knowledge and counterproductive for prospects of its practical use. One of the methods of integration of “the scattered stones” into a single scientific-practical paradigm is connected with methodology competence. Here we speak neither about sterilization of methods and procedures of empirical facts fixation, nor about one-type theoretical denominator for obtained data interpretation. Such a methodological “conservatism” would be just as counterproductive opposition in respect to mentioned-above knowledge entropy. In this regard, the research process should remain maximally democratic to avoid different kinds of one-sidedness and tendentiousness, which unavoidably lead beyond the frames of scientific cognition into the sphere of dogmatic beliefs. However, the necessary integration of scattered pieces of knowledge might be achieved due to consolidation of scientific researches around a single viewpoint or at least around consistent opinions on the research object. At this, with a view to the broad and non-homogenous ontology of organizational culture as well as its evident multifactorial nature, it would be more correct to speak not so much of an object but of an interdisciplinary object field. We suggest using system approach for methodological localization of such a field.