Cultural Reflection in Management. Lukasz Sulkowski

of the key sources of development of the theory of culture was the increase in the importance of intercultural relationships that came with the development of communication technologies, as well as the ongoing process of globalisation. Many organisations, working on an international scale, were facing specific issues of intercultural management. The huge cultural challenges facing them in the second half of the twentieth century included decolonisation and globalisation. Therefore, even as far back as the 1930s, cross-cultural comparative studies were beginning to quickly develop for pragmatic purposes, namely ←19 | 20→to reduce communication problems and conflicts in social communication. G.P. Murdock was the pioneer of cross-cultural research, carrying out the first comparative statistical study of cultural behaviour²³, while E.T. Hall was a key figure in the development of the pragmatic approach to cross-cultural studies, achieving his competencies while doing consulting work for the U.S. government²⁴. The concepts of cultural dimensions and distances²⁵ became the subject of further study, leading to the fundamental projects in cultural trends in management directed by G. Hofstede and other researchers, who took the cross-cultural perspective into account²⁶.

Sensu stricto, the birth of the theory of organisational culture took place after World War II. E. Jacques used the term with reference primarily to analysis of atmosphere in the workplace (‘organisational climate’)²⁷. In the 1950s and ’60s, research on culture in management was far and few between, and constituted a rather marginal problem. Mainstream research relates to the relationship between a culture and the changes in organisational development, leadership and human resources management²⁸. For example, while analysing this organisational change, A. Bavelas also relates it to ‘culture-specific organisations’, distinguished by other rituals that affect the process of adaptation of new employees²⁹. For two decades, the cultural issue in management has thus developed in two separate ways. On the one hand, it has tended towards a functionalist, narrow understanding of culture as an organisational climate³⁰, and on the other, the comparative studies ←20 | 21→of cultures have developed³¹. Even at this stage, the epistemological afterthought on management emerges, which leads to the conclusion that there is a plurality and inconsistency in the theory of culture and organisation³².

The development of comparative cross-cultural studies, which most significantly relate to management issues, began at the start of the 1970s. In particular, there was a rapid increase in the number of publications after 1980, which was the year the first book on the results of comparative studies of cultures by G. Hofstede was published. These results were then widely deployed in management practise³³. There are a number of cross-cultural comparative studies projects that investigate various aspects of organisations, from the connection of culture with efficiency, through leadership, to change management. Started by E.T. Hall, the pragmatic approach to cross-cultural management results in a number of methods improving competences and training programmes³⁴. In addition to research papers, there is an increase in the number of business guides which take cross-cultural issues into account³⁵. All comparative studies are based on functionalist assumptions and use standardised and representative survey methods. Even today, this is a very important trend in cultural studies, both in management and other social sciences. The most important researchers in this area are G. Hofstede, A. Trompenaars, Ch. Hampden-Turner, R. House, and R. Inglehart. Currently, the key issues for cross-cultural comparative studies are globalisation and multiculturalism.

The beginning of the 1980s also saw a significant increase in the role of the concept of organisational culture. This was likely due to many reasons related both to the logic of the development of cultural discourse in management ←21 | 22→itself, and to external factors. The rapid growth of interest in cross-cultural comparative studies drew the attention of many management researchers and practitioners to the growing role of cross-cultural communication. Globalisation and the opening up of many national economies which so far had autarchic tendencies contributed to a great interest in cultural issues faced by managers. G. Hofstede recognises the confrontation of the American and Japanese models of conducting business – with all their cross-cultural consequences – as one of the causes of the huge expansion of interest in the issue of organisational culture³⁶. An important experience for American business came in the shock caused by the competitiveness of Japanese products on the US market. Even though the Japanese had radically different management models, which were based on collectivism as opposite to the American individualism, they achieved spectacular success in business. Thus, the American myth of management understood as one best way collapsed, and was gradually replaced with the awareness that an organisation is culturally conditioned. Another reason for the interest in organisational culture was the growing popularity of cultural studies in the social sciences and humanities, which embraced new, sometimes radically different views on understanding the culture (e.g. post-modernism and sociobiology). The systemic view of organisation and management was slowly running out of options, as originally it did not include culture as a subsystem. Initially, many management specialists thought that culture would become a remedy for the issues of the theory and practice of management. Research and publications which assumed a broad functionalist understanding of organisational culture became very popular among both theorists and practitioners. Among the large number of authors taking this approach to organisational culture as an internal variable, one can name E. Schein, Ch. Handy, T. Deal, A. Kennedy, P. Bate and A. Pettigrey³⁷, with G. Hofstede as the key representative of the comparative cross-cultural studies approach. Some of the concepts of organisational culture, such as the ‘iceberg model’³⁸ or G. Hofstede’s ‘onion model’, became so popular ←22 | 23→that they even permeated the general public via guides and textbooks³⁹. T. Peters and P. Waterman’s bestseller, which put the value of the organisation at the centre of the proposed 7S model, reached the heights of popularity⁴⁰. The dominant functionalist perspective towards culture assumed that it could be radically changed by means of organising techniques, and in practice, this optimistic approach to cultural change was indeed verified. But many culture transformation programmes of the time gave unpredictable results. With time, even in the opinion of some of the functionalism researchers, culture had become too amorphous and too poorly understood to provide a basis for a theory of management understood in the neopositivist sense.

The development of the interpretative-symbolic view expressed the growing scepticism with regard to the functionalist approach to culture. Researchers such as G. Morgan, G. Burrell and L. Smircich offered a look at organisations through the lens of interpretively understood culture⁴¹. This approach made use of the achievements of the symbolic interactionism paradigm in sociology, cultural anthropology and other social sciences, to describe the phenomenon of organisational culture. It meant that the focus was on anthropologically understood, individual, non-generalised case studies, the aim of which was to capture the meaning of ‘organisation’.