Description
Total word count at least 3300, at least 10 pages.
For your assignment to be considered complete, you must turn in the following:
1. Your paper
2. Your field notes and/or your interview summaries
For this paper, you will conduct a cultural analysis of some facet of the University of Oregon (USA). Perhaps you will choose to
focus on the university as a whole, defined by its academic mission. You could also choose the specific organizations within
that you are part of. For example, the sociology department, the athletics department, your sports team, the tutoring
center, the dining hall. You could choose to focus on the REC center or a student organization like the LGBTQIA3 Alliance.
You should pick something that will hold your interest and that will facilitate qualitative data collection of some sort
(interviews, observations, document analysis).
If you have another idea for your paper that is not focused on UO, please let me know and we can work through it. If you
can somehow incorporate class concepts into your honors or masters thesis, a research proposal, or some other project
that will help advance you in your program, I am open to the idea of substituting that work for this paper. Please stop by
my office hours to discuss your ideas with me.
**You will hand in a paragraph stating your proposed topic on 1/26. These are not going to be graded, but failure to
turn in a paragraph will result in a 5 point deduction from your final paper.
Your paper should contain the following sections. I recommend that you use these same headings (i.e., Introduction,
Methodology, etc.) in organizing your paper. Be sure to staple your paper (including reference page), and staple your
fieldnotes as well, and then paper clip your fieldnotes to your paper. Be sure your name is on both your paper as well as
your fieldnotes or interview summaries.
Introduction:
In this opening paragraph or two, your goals are two-fold: introduce your organization and clearly state the analysis
main objective (thesis statement). Keep in mind, you might not be able to clearly state your research objectives until
after you have conducted your research. For example, you might start out to try to pinpoint and understand basic
cultural elements, and then find out that the organization has recently undergone specific changes related to its
functioning. Focusing your analysis on this change would be wholly appropriate and make for a great paper. Thus, your
thesis statement might be something like, This study is offered as a tool for understanding the recent changes that
Organization X has undergone, and its impact on daily activities within the organization. Your introduction should also
include reference to either the specific cultural elements that your study employs, or the themes that you discovered
through your analysis.
This section should end with a roadmap of the rest of your paper. What should the reader expect?
Organizational Overview
This section should provide a fairly detailed description of your organization. Included in this might be its historical
development (Who founded it? When? Where? How?) and its general purpose or mission. Provide all relevant details
(but keep in mind that you dont need an overly-detailed historical analysis if it doesnt bear much significance to your
overall project). Here, you should quote from formal mission statements if these are available.
In this section, you should also include a discussion of the institutional structure. If it is an academic department, how
many people does it employ? If it is your athletic team, how many players are on the team (and how is it situated within
the larger league context)? What is the organizations hierarchy, and who is in charge? Is the power structure
transparent, or is it more ambiguous? Do you have information on organizational membership, such as the percentages
of men and women in the organization? The description should not be limited to these questions, but this is the kind of
information that is relevant to discuss in this section.
Methods
In this section, discuss how you approached the effort to collect data on your organization. Did you do participant
observation? Interviews? Content analysis? A combination of one or more? Provide all of the details relevant to the
analysis. If you did interviews, how many did you do? With who? How did you get into contact with that person? If you
did observation, what was the role you chose as a researcher? How many hours of observation did you do? Provide as
much detail as is relevant.
You are not describing your findings here, but you are providing the context for how you approached the data collection
effort.
Identification and Description of Cultural Themes
In this section, you will identify and describe at least three elements of culture that are important to your organization.
Remember, elements of culture include (but are not limited to):
? Values (An overarching, master element)
? Symbolic Elements (Symbols, Stories)
? Role Elements (Heroes, Outlaws)
? Interactive Elements (Rituals, informal rules)
? Context Elements (History & Place)
Once you identify elements, the next step is to infer cultural themes by uncovering images or concepts that are
supported by these elements. Refer to the reading Synthesizing and Interpreting Cultural Data to guide you in this
process. Remember, cultural themes are related to an organizations pervasiveness and salience of some important
aspect of the culture.
An example of a cultural theme might be the notion that for your organization, the customer is always right. This
might be reflected in mission statements (symbols), in rituals, or be reflected in a story about an organizational hero.
You might also uncover contradictory cultural themes held by different members of your organization. A thematic
comparison would make for a compelling analysis. Your job is to provide a full description of the (to use the above
example) ritual, story, or symbol drawing upon the data you collect.
Conclusion
In this section, you will restate the primary goals of the analysis, the methods you employed to move you toward your
goals, and a general statement of your findings. It is ok to be repetitive. Further, you should discuss the strengths and
limits of your analysis. One good way to do this is to identify ways that you (or another researcher) might approach a
more nuanced, in-depth analysis of the organization in the future. Here, speculate as to what might be gained by a
larger-scale or more sustained methodological analysis. How is your analysis limited by your research design (where you
only had to interview a small number of people, or observe for several hours as opposed to many)? Do you get the sense
that your findings are representative of the organization as a whole? Why or why not?
Reference Page: Use ASA citation guidelines. A handout detailing ASA guidelines will be posted on Canvas.
I would highly suggest to write this (International student service): https://isss.uoregon.edu/