An Analysis of Pixar's Culture

Organizational is comprised of core values, beliefs and basic assumptions within organizational life which helps guide and coordinate member behavior. Edgar Schein, a preeminent scholar of organizational culture research, argues that people can come to know organizational culture based on three levels of awareness known as: artifacts, values and beliefs, and basic underlying assumptions.

Culture is an observable, powerful force in any organization. “Made up of its members’ shared values, beliefs, symbols, and behaviors, culture guides individual decisions and actions at the unconscious level. As a result, it can have a potent effect on a company’s well-being and success” (One Page, n.d.).

“Culture consists of the symbols, rituals, language, and social dramas that highlight organizational life, including myths, stories, and jargon. It includes the shared meanings associated with the symbols, rituals, and language. Culture combines the philosophy of the firm with beliefs, expectations, and values shared by members. It contains the stories and myths about the company's founder and its current leading figures. Organizational culture consists of a set of shared meanings and values held by a set of members in an organization that distinguish the organization from other organizations. An organization's culture determines how it perceives and reacts to the larger environment (Becker, 1982; Schein, 1996). Culture determines the nature

The third and deepest level of organizational culture posited by Edgar Schein is basic assumptions. Basic or underlying assumptions are the unconscious and intangible mechanisms that become ingrained and provide a sense of security. Often taken for granted, these assumptions are communicated through behavior and non-verbal cues reflecting the enacted values within the organization which may or may not correspond with espoused values expressed by leadership (Nelson & Quick, 2011).

How Marxist theory is presented in Disney/Pixar films, with a focus on Toy Story 3 and Wall-E.

Inside Out in a World Turned Upside-Down: The Cultural Work of Pixar’s Latest Motion Picture

While developing characters and captivating story lines, as expected Disney and Pixar both address parts the life cycle such as death due to its everyday occurrence. Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary defines death as the permanent end of something that is no longer alive : the ruin or destruction of something. The life cycle is defined by dictionary.com as a series of stages, as childhood and middle age, that characterize the course of existence of an individual, group, or culture. As evident within this definition the life cycle contains many parts which include birth, growth from childhood to old age, and then death. The life cycle is the driving force of life but is often misunderstood much like its smaller part, death. The human race

Pixar is a company that has ties to other major corporations in our American culture. Pixar Animation Studios started as a part of the Lucas film computer group, which is owned by George Lucas the creator of Star Wars. However, after receiving funding from Steve Jobs the division became its own corporation in 1986. After that Disney purchased Pixar, which allowed Steve Jobs to become a shareholder in Disney also. With these changes due to the ownership of the corporation an analysis of managerial economics is overdue. What follows is an evaluate how Pixar attains balance between culture, rewards, and boundaries, what is Pixar’s organizational structure and why they have the structure they have, how Pixar’s leadership helps to create an ethical organization, how Pixar’s innovation helps the organization to accomplish its goals, how emotional intelligence helps the leadership guide the company, and how Pixar has overcome barriers to change. Pixar’s history has presented the firm with challenges and the firm has managed to overcome those challenges, anyone who plans to one day own their own business should look at the company and understand how the firm accomplished their tasks despite the presented challenges. The merger with Disney resulted in some problems for Pixar, but the merger was pursued for a reason. By merging, both firm have the potential to save time and money; there is also the potential to learn from each other.

The Hofstede Centre (n.d.) defines culture as the “collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another.” Chipulu, Ojiako, Gardiner, Williams, Mota, Maguire, Shou, Stamai, and Marshall (2014), note that “culture can be at once tangible and observable; latent and unobservable; or even an abstraction altogether” (p. 367). Culture therefore has many dimensions. Some aspects of culture can be observed by analyzing symbols, ceremonies, dress, and other aspects. On the other hand, some aspects are not observable from the outside, but have to be experienced. Looking only from the outside gives us only a glimpse into the culture values. A large part of culture is the unwritten rules of how things are done. This part of culture is not necessarily observable to an outsider. To fully understand the cultural values of an organization, you need to be inside the organization with access to those with years of work experiences.

In this paper, we will explore the magical experience of Walt Disney Company through the structure and symbolic frames based on the Bolman and Deal?s individual lens. The structural frame focuses on the architecture of an organization and other features like: rules, regulations, goals, policies, roles, tasks, job designs, job descriptions, technology, chain of command, vertical and horizontal coordinating mechanisms, assessment and reward systems, and many more (Bolman, L., & Deal, T. 2013). The symbolic frame focuses on the culture, meaning, metaphor, ritual, ceremony, stories, heroes and inspiration of the organization (Bolman, L., & Deal, T. 2013). On this analysis I will also explain the organization?s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that impact the leadership, partners, employees and community internally and externally.

Organisation culture at Quinlan’s Organisation culture can be defined as the set of key values, beliefs, understandings and

The demographics of the population that like animation encompasses baby boomers, adults and large numbers of children alike, leads to an improvement in the revenue and exposure for the animation industry (See Exhibit 1 for Percentage of total births). Therefore the social factors are also favorable.

Pixar Animation Studios was founded in 1979, initially specializing in producing state of the art computer hardware (Carlson, 2003). In 1990, due to poor product sales the company diversified from its core business and began producing computer animated commercials for outside companies. Success came for Pixar after the production of its first computer animated film ‘Toy story’ in 1995 (Hutton and Baute, 2007). Since then, Pixar has made many innovative animated feature films, with well known ones including - A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille and WALL-E, six of which are in the top grossing animated

Edgar Schein, a famous theorists dealing with organizational culture, provides the following definition for the term: "A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems that has worked well enough to be considered valid and is passed on to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (organizationalculture101) However, organizational culture is more than sharing assumptions used by a group to solve problems; it is the combination of the points of view, ineffectual processes, education, backgrounds of all the staff which are part of an organization way of doing things. Corporation culture should uncover from the board of the directors to the rest of

Founded on February 3, 1986, Pixar was best known for its animated films created with Photo Realistic Rendermen. It initially began as a graphics group under Lucasfilm’s Computer Division. However, it was later purchased by Steve Jobs for $10 million dollars and renamed to Pixar. It continued to grow its success with the release of many movies, including their Toy Story series, one of their highest