ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AS REPRODUCTION: A Process Theory, Its Erosion Across Turnover, and a Nonreactive Method of Measurement

This working paper reframes organizational culture not as a set of declared values but as a process of reproduction: what an organization manages to remake of itself as the people who embody it are replaced. The synthesis begins from a measurement problem. The dominant tools, self-assessment surveys of espoused values, capture what an organization says rather than what its decisions reveal, and are by construction blind to erosion. In response, it proposes an operational definition, culture as what is reproduced across turnover, and an architecture of three reproduction processes: the transmission of tacit knowledge, organizational memory, and productive conflict, read through a single cross-cutting diagnostic principle, revealed behavior. Each process is examined together with the evidence of its contemporary erosion, graded honestly rather than uniformly: strong for transmission, medium for memory, indirect for conflict. Throughout, the perennial structural risk is kept distinct from the contemporary trend. The paper then develops a diagnostic method built on nonreactive measures of behavior, confronts the strongest objection to any process account, pathological success, in which a healthy process faithfully reproduces a dysfunction, through the return of enacted content, and states its own falsifiability and limitations. A final part positions generative artificial intelligence as a common accelerator of the three erosions rather than a fourth process, and weighs the economic stakes, distinguishing the measurable costs of turnover and disengagement from the latent cost of reproduction that escapes them. The document is anchored throughout to primary sources and canonical literature. It is an independent working paper, not peer reviewed, and is available in English and Italian. Fields: organization studies, organizational behavior, knowledge management, economic sociology, labor economics. Keywords: organizational culture, cultural reproduction, tacit knowledge, organizational memory, productive conflict, psychological safety, revealed behavior, pathological success, nonreactive measures, employee turnover, generative artificial intelligence, future of work.