The foundation, and the least read book on this shelf. Schein's three levels — visible artefacts, espoused values, and the underlying assumptions a group has stopped noticing it holds — is the model that almost everything popular since is a simplification of. Culture, in his account, is what a group learned while solving its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and it persists because it worked.
If you read one book here, read this one. It is hard going in places, and it is written for scholars rather than for a leadership offsite, but it repays the effort in a way the paperbacks don't.
It also explains, better than anything else, why culture surveys disappoint. A survey reaches the artefacts and the espoused values without much trouble — people can tell you what the posters say and what happens in meetings. The assumptions are, by definition, the things nobody thinks to mention, because they are not experienced as beliefs at all. They are experienced as reality. That is why the results so often come back plausible, unsurprising, and useless: you have measured the two visible layers and left the layer that actually determines behaviour untouched.
Which is the argument for listening as a practice rather than an instrument. You get at assumptions through conversation, contradiction and repeated attention over time — by noticing what people don't say, and what they treat as too obvious to mention.
Our own commentary on Edgar H. Schein's book. We don't summarise other people's work — if this is useful, buy the book.
Go deeper than the book
Our consulting turns these ideas into practice; our software measures whether they land.