The first section of the paper examines the culture of the team, using the term not to apply to high art (as it often is) but rather to the commonly held beliefs and habits of a group of people. A culture in this sense is all of the attributes that allow people to understand that they are in fact part of the same group. Like a secret handshake, the rules of culture let us know where we belong and how we are supposed to act. Some of these cultural rules are clear to members of an organization: Very nearly everyone knows that the team song exists to make the players and the fans feel that they belong to each other. Other "rules " are important but may not be conscious to the organization's members, such as the idea of giving back to the local community. This is something that the team does and that the fans in general approve of, but they would probably not identify it as a unifying element of the organization nearly as readily as they would the team song or the players' uniforms.
Essendon FC, like all organizations, is subject to forces that pull it apart as well as those that keep it from falling apart, that encourage change and that try to suppress it, that emphasize the divisions between those with more power and those with less. Each culture has stories or myths that it tells about itself, some of which are true and some of which are not but still sound good.
Culture.
As noted above, the culture of an organization lets people know that they belong to it: Without this fundamental sense of belonging the entire idea of an organization makes no sense. In the broadest sense, the culture of an organization (including a team) is how it does business. Different types of organizations have different mechanisms for creating a sense of group identity and there are different vectors along which one can analyze the specifics of any culture.
The dimensions of culture (that is, the dimensions that define any culture, including the Essendon FC) that will be examined in this section and the following sections include the following:.