The subject of the fifth chapter is an analysis of cultural processes in management from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. This is the paradigm that has gathered the greatest number of works in the world over the last thirty years among non-functionalist approaches and within the cultural discourse in management science. The chapter starts with a description of the symbolic-interpretative paradigm, oriented towards the presentation of an outline of different interactionist concepts in management. Then, there is an analysis of extensive applications of symbolic interactionism with regard to cultural research into management. The last issue discussed in this chapter is the concept of organisational identity, which is set within the interpretative paradigm and is a proposal for a new perspective on cultural issues in management.
The sixth chapter contains an analysis of culture from the perspective of a radical structuralism paradigm, which in our discipline took the institutional form of Critical Management Studies. The analysis starts with theoretical deliberations on the basic cognitive and methodological assumptions which underlie the critical current, and which lead to radical criticism of the previous, mostly functionalist, concepts of organisational culture and culture in management. Another issue is the deriving of the emancipation concept of organisational culture from criticism, which is based on the negation of the dominant paradigm. The position taken by the critical current is controversial, and so the subject of the last subchapter is a distanced view on Critical Management Studies and the interpretation of culture that they propose.
The last chapter focuses on a dynamic perspective on organisational culture, analysing the relationships between culture and changes in management. Here, organisational changes are understood both as spontaneous transformations of an organisation and planned changes, which, by definition, should be controlled. At the beginning of the chapter, an attempt was made to organise the relationships between culture and organisational changes with the use of the paradigm matrix of social sciences used throughout the work. After that, based on this pattern, functionalist, interpretative and emancipation concepts and methods of managing cultural changes were analysed. The last subchapter is a proposal for the application of a metaphorical approach to the analysis of organisational culture dynamics.
The summary of the work emphasises the need for a multi-paradigm perspective on organisational culture and the prospects for the development of reflection on culture in the social sciences. The postmodernist approach and its cognitive relativism occupy only a marginal position in my analyses of culture ←13 | 14→in management. I believe that practising science with extreme assumptions of epistemological relativism is actually impossible, and so despite its output in the cultural discourse, postmodernism should not be treated as a paradigm or a scientific approach sensu stricto, but as a source of inspiration, ideas and metaphors. I think that at least the radical version of postmodernism belongs to art, literature and essay writing, rather than science. It seems, too, that postmodern inspirations have been successfully used by representatives of other non-fundamentalist paradigms.
I hope that the concepts presented in this book will contribute to the broadening of our knowledge of cultural processes in organisations, and particularly that it will be used for the better understanding and further exploration of concepts, such as interpretative and critical perspectives on culture (e.g. sensemaking) and the neoevolutionary approach. Finally, the proposed matrix of culture paradigms, drawn from G. Burrell and G. Morgan, is supposed to serve as a reference, but, of course, does not reflect the full complexity of reality. The book is based on Polish publications of Lukasz Sulkowski.*
* L. Sulkowski, Kulturowe procesy zarządzania, Difin, Warszawa 2012. L. Sulkowski, Czy warto zajmować się kulturą organizacyjną, Zarządzanie Zasobami Ludzkimi, 2008, 6, 9–25. L. Sulkowski, Społeczeństwo informacyjne a kultura konsumpcyjna, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2006, 221–227. L. Sulkowski, Czy kultury organizacyjne zmierzają do unifikacji? Zarządzanie zasobami ludzkimi, 2002, (3-4), 9–20. L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna-próba oceny znaczenia nurtu kulturowego w zarządzaniu, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2002, 157–161. L. Sulkowski, Czy jest możliwe kształtowanie kultury organizacyjnej? Organizacja i Kierowanie, 2001, (4), 99–110. L. Sulkowski, Organizacja w poszukiwaniu tożsamości, Przegląd Organizacji, 2005, (3), 7–10. L. Sulkowski, Wieloznaczność kultury organizacyjnej, Przedsiębiorczość i Zarządzanie, 2012, 13(12). L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna od podstaw, Wydawnictwo Społecznej Akademii Nauk, Łódź 2020. L. Sulkowski, O związkach między kulturą organizacyjną a organizacją uczącą się, Przegląd Organizacji, 2003, (4), 9–11. L. Sulkowski, Funkcjonalistyczna wizja kultury organizacyjnej w zarządzaniu–dominujący paradygmat i jego krytyka, Problemy Zarządzania, 2013, 20–32.
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1 Cultural trend in management
1.1 The development of the cultural trend in management
When undertaking analysis of the development of the cultural trend in organisations and in management discourse, one has to make a few assumptions. First and foremost, the picture presented will be simplified, and thus will only include the dominant themes of the afterthought and ideas quickly gaining popularity in the management environment. For reasons of clarity, the less-known concepts which complicate the chronological sequence of successive stages in management of cultural afterthought will be omitted. This simplification results in the narrowness of the views of many researchers, who are known more for their most important works than for evolving any contemporary views. For example, E. Schein is usually associated with the birth and development of the concept of organisational culture, as based on functionalism, although his later views would evolve in the direction of the interpretative approach1. Furthermore, one has to bear in mind that the development of the cultural concepts of the organisation and management are a part of broader thinking on the study of culture in the social sciences and humanities. There are a lot of very complex interdependencies between management and other disciplines examining the culture. Research into organisations draws from the achievements of sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, history, development economics, as well as behavioural economics, cultural expertise, linguistics and many other disciplines. At the same time, representatives of other disciplines use the ideas and research which fall within the remit of cultural discourse in management. The picture is further complicated by the division into theoretical and practical topics of cultural afterthought. Theoreticians tend towards research on the complex primary issues of culture in management, such as paradigms and research methodology, while practitioners look for simple solutions which can be translated into managerial actions and organisational techniques. One of the proposed solutions to these issues is a simplified analysis of the development of the cultural trend in management, which can be linked to the development of cultural thought in general. On one hand, the historical background which is the subject of this subchapter will serve the purpose. On the other hand, the placement of the concept of culture in ←15 | 16→management in the broad scheme of social sciences paradigms is simultaneously developed in this monograph.
The