Culture and values are not abstract concepts that float free on their own. They are held by people and situated within social structures. In the examples discussed throughout this book, from Geertz's Balinese cockfighters to the voters who backed Donald Trump despite not believing his claims about the Mexican border wall, we have talked about the culture and values held by various groups of people. One particular type of social structure that is relevant when considering policy implementation is whatever organisation or organisations are doing the implementing. Organisations carry culture. As discussed in Chapter 1, every organisation has a set of unwritten rules and practices and a set of values that it implicitly or explicitly promotes. Therefore one tool available to the policy maker who wishes to take culture seriously is to build organisations that embody the culture that they want to carry through.

Many organisations are explicit about the values and culture that they intend to stand for. This can be at the level of bland corporate value statements put up on walls and computer screen-savers. But it can also be taken much more seriously, for example in the most important choice any organisation makes, namely who gets to work there. There are many examples of organisations that explicitly recruit people on the basis of their personal alignment with the values that the organisation stands for. One of the most significant examples of this in the United Kingdom is the approach now taken by Health Education England, which has a whole programme on ‘values based recruitment’ for selecting the medical staff of the future. My own current organisation, Big Society Capital, also has one part of its recruitment process that is specifically aimed at exploring a candidate's values.

Examples of building organisations

The financial services sector in the United Kingdom offers a good demonstration of the potential long-term impact of building organisations with a particular culture and values. From the late 18th century, ‘building clubs’ began to be established, which were jointly-owned co-operative groups that aimed to enable working or lower-middle class people to purchase or build their own homes (Scott and Newton, 2012).