It’s More Than Complicated! Using Organizational Memetics to Capture the Complexity of Organizational Culture

While organizational and business researchers have fruitfully applied evolutionary theory at various levels of analysis, few utilize organizational memetics to capture the complexity of organizational culture. This article contributes to bridging the gap between theorizing and empirical research on organizational memetics by raising and addressing the question if and how the diversity and interdependence of organizational memes can be captured. To tackle this exploratory question, the authors present a comprehensive literature review on organizational memetics and demonstrate how meme mapping can be used to highlight interdependencies among organizational memes based on the case of a German consulting firm. Besides revealing the most prominent memes in the complex memetic system of the organization, the meme map illustrates connections of varying strength among the organizational memes, thereby supporting the argument that organizational memetics can help to expose attractive memes that are important for both the stability and change of organizational cultures.