Organizational Readiness: Culturally Mediated Learning Through Disney Animation

We develop the notion of organizational readiness, a construct that describes the anticipatory expectations about future organizational life that children develop as they absorb the cultural influences to which they are exposed. We conduct our analyses through an exploration of the depictions of work in Disney’s 56 “Classic” feature-length animations (from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937] to Moana [2016]). We can, of course, make no direct cause and effect claims about the effects of the animations. However, we argue that Disney animations are likely to significantly shape children’s learning about organizations. This is because the Disney animated canon regularly provides children with consistent and vivid impressions of the nature of working life—impressions that will have important implications for them and the staff who teach them, when they eventually enter business schools as undergraduates.