Culture Theory Was Born in the Age of Smokestacks. Why Are We Still Using It in the Age of Servers?
Organizational culture has an origin story. And like most origin stories, it’s a product of its environment.
The frameworks we still rely on Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture (artifacts, values, assumptions), Hofstede’s dimensions, the early group dynamics research which were all written in the 1950s and 1960s. The industrial boom years. The Cold War years. An era of command-and-control corporations, where CEOs resembled generals and workers resembled soldiers.
Back then, “success” meant scale. Factories humming. Suburbs spreading. Employees working one job for 40 years until they retired with a pension and a gold watch. Culture was about conformity: keeping everyone aligned, efficient, predictable.
But let’s not romanticize it. The Industrial Age gave us cars and refrigerators. It also gave us rivers on fire from chemical waste, smog thick enough to choke cities, and organizations that treated humans as replaceable cogs. Culture frameworks of that time weren’t designed to liberate people. They were designed to manage complexity without dismantling the machine itself.
Fast forward. We’re not in that world anymore.
We’re in the digital age. The information economy. A world where work is less about clocking in and more about logging on. Where “headcount” spans continents. Where a bad Glassdoor review spreads faster than a company press release. And yet we’re still clinging to culture frameworks designed for a world of smokestacks.
The Mismatch No One Wants to Admit
Today’s organizations are networked, not hierarchical. They thrive on innovation, not repetition. They need people to bring their whole selves to work, not suppress them in the name of conformity.
And yet leaders still ask questions that sound suspiciously like they came out of a 1960s management manual:
“How do we get employees to buy in?”
“How do we ensure compliance?”
“How do we engineer culture change?”
Buy-in. Compliance. Engineering. All relics of the industrial worldview.
But culture today is less like an assembly line and more like an ecosystem. Which forces us to ask harder questions:
What happens when your culture is global and digital, spanning Slack, Discord, and Teams?
What does accountability look like when the line between “employee” and “contractor” blurs into the gig economy?
Can belonging exist when workers cycle through three companies in five years, or even five companies in three?
How do you sustain trust when every interaction is mediated by a screen?
The Environmental Parallel We Keep Missing
Here’s the metaphor we rarely name: culture is the workplace environment. And environments can be toxic. The Industrial Age polluted the air and water. The Digital Age is polluting our attention and well-being.
The World Health Organization recently named burnout an “occupational phenomenon,” tied directly to chronic workplace stress.
Gallup found that 44% of employees experience “a lot of daily stress” at work—an all-time high.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that fear-driven environments cost innovation, learning, and trust. Yet fear is still the default fuel in too many organizations.
If we learned anything from environmental history, it’s this: unchecked growth destroys ecosystems. And yet, most companies still equate “growth at all costs” with success, while culture becomes the cleanup crew.
So What Does Success Look Like Now?
This is the hardest question. In the industrial era, “good culture” meant stable production, low turnover, predictable behavior. It meant nobody rocking the boat.
But stability is a mirage now. Everything shifts too quickly: markets, tech, expectations. So maybe success isn’t stability. Maybe it’s:
Resilience: the ability to metabolize change without breaking people
Connection: sustaining trust and belonging across distance and difference
Energy sustainability: cultures that fuel people instead of depleting them
Transparency: because secrecy collapses under the weight of a single leaked email
Adam Grant puts it simply: “The hallmark of an open culture is not consensus—it’s dissent.” In other words, success in the digital age looks less like harmony and more like the ability to hold productive tension without imploding.
The Call No One Wants to Hear
Schein gave us the language. But languages evolve. We don’t speak in rotary phones and typewriters anymore. We don’t need culture frameworks built for a world of factories and pensions. We need ones designed for a world of remote teams, fractured trust, and information overload.
If the industrial revolution gave us culture theory, then the digital revolution demands culture renewal.
Because if culture really is the air we breathe at work, then leaders have a choice: keep pumping out smog… or start planting something that helps us all breathe again.
